Congrats on coming out and being your true self, that was a very brave thing to do.

Your mother, like many parents, had hopes and dreams about who you would become as a person. She’s now being faced with the prospect that those hopes and dreams are dead, that the person she thought you would become is gone. She’s going to need to grieve and from what you’ve written here it seems that process has started. Shock, denial, bargaining, some level of acceptance. I expect anger and depression might show up at some point. It doesn’t necessarily happen in sequence and can cycle too. She’s going to need some time to process, but what’s positive is she’s not outright rejecting who you are, there’s room for her to grow.

My parents weren’t hostile when I came out as gay, but I heard similar things - it’s just a phase. Are you sure? Was it something we did? Where did we go wrong? What will your life become? Over time they came to accept it and told my extended family (including my very religious Pentecostal grandmother). Everyone is now very welcoming of my wife and my parents are delighted to be grandparents to our kids. I know it’s not the same, but there is hope for things to get better, just keep being authentically you.

I refuse to get a phone without a headphone jack. Mostly because I know I’m inevitably going to lose my headphones, forget to charge them, forget them in my trouser pockets that will go in the wash. The latter has happened at least a couple of times with my current headphones and they still work just fine. Try that with your Bluetooth pair and let me know how it goes.

If you’re in France there’s the Carte Bancaire.

Edit: I’ve just looked into Revolut and they’re UK based with operations throughout Europe, so they might be an alternative for online payments across borders.

Ogtha

Except XX male syndrome is a thing, where externally individuals present male but have female karyotype. So are those people female despite having functional male genitalia? And that’s only one of a myriad of situations where an individual’s chromosomes don’t reflect what their phenotype is like nor their biological reproductive function. Chromosomes are NOT an infallible indicator of biological sex.

Also the text of the law says nothing about chromosomes. It indicates from conception the cells that produce the large gamete are considered female, and cells that produce the small gamete are considered male. No one is producing gametes at conception. It also completely disregards anyone who produces no gametes at all. At best this law has declared everyone to have no biological sex whatsoever.

Was your grandma allowed to vote, and how many times did she vote? I kid ;)

I don’t hate on the developers, I hate on the companies that so severely understaff and burn out their teams that no one is doing proper testing anymore.

Oh yeah for sure. I keep telling people the best part of being an adult is doing whatever the fuck you want as long as it’s not hurting anyone else. In a way I think part of what people miss about field trips is someone else organising these kinds of trips and “paying” for them. As an adult, you have to deal with all that yourself, on top of finding the time to do it.

If you work in the right job, ‘field trips’ can be a pretty common thing. Site auditors and inspectors, procurement officers, investigative journalists, surveyors, etc

With some luck French politicians will start behaving like in any democratic nation and build a coalition over a given coaltion contract rather than blaming each other on the TV

I feel we have a better chance of winning the euromillions than that happening

It’s only expensive if you care about prisoners’ human rights

Fair, but on the off chance it does help, you might as well take that precaution.

Hey man, you do what you have to do. Good luck either way!

I’m sorry, it mega sucks and unfortunately you can only pick from the other two remaining options. If you’re not part of the targeted minorities or vocally a part of the opposition, here are some tips on assimilation:

• Keep your head down and keep a low profile
• Stay out of any media attention at all costs
• Be VERY careful with who you trust - denunciations are a common tool used by fascist governments to find targets. Avoid pissing off anyone who could throw you to the wolves.
• Button up any communications that could ever be construed as a slight against the ruling party. That means getting off social media, browsing and communicating on the internet completely anonymously, stop using devices and software that can spy on you. Wipe anything that can be interpreted as criticism of the ruling party that can be connected to you.
• Keep any documents with proof of citizenship on you at all times
• Start sounding like you’ve always supported the party and their ideas, or that you’ve suddenly “seen the way” and agree with them now.
• This one is riskier in the long term as fascists eventually start eating one another, but if you can, try to get a low level position in the party. Something inconsequential like cleaning, paperwork, etc.

Essentially, start studying what other people did to survive under similarly oppressive regimes. The change won’t happen overnight, but if this is going the way I think it’s going, your access to options will become increasingly limited so do what you can now to get ready.

Alternatively, wait until it becomes clear that you’re a political target, travel somewhere where you can get refugee status and claim asylum once you’re there. You don’t want to leave this until it’s too late, and it’ll get increasingly harder to do, but there’s no way to tell yet what the trigger could be.

Ding ding ding! This is the right answer folks. US citizens will be lucky to get fair elections (if at all) for the foreseeable future. There is no counterweight to what lies ahead, the doors to hell have been opened and no one is coming to save you. If you are in the US, you have the following choices: leave, survive (read: assimilate or hide), or fight.

Slaves. The answer is slaves. And the framework for this already exists because prison labour is legalised slavery. They have already said they want to imprison anyone they don’t agree with. Given that includes all kinds of minorities and people who don’t agree with them politically, they are pretty much spoiled for choice. If you are in the US and fall under either of those categories you should be looking at how to get out.

Here’s how I think this will pan out:

Step 1: Mass deportation

Step 2: Mass incarceration

Step 3: Work camps

After all, the US legal framework allows prisoners to be used as slaves, does it not? And the beauty of a fascist system is that enemies are so very, very easy to find.

I don’t buy the argument that he has dirt on them anymore. They believe in this shit, they don’t need convincing.

I recommend anyone living in the US in the lower end of this chart to carry your papers or at least a copy on you at all times from now on.

Fuck this noise, go vote.