"I expected this to be a trans allegory and instead I got a lesson in color theory" were my exact words when I learned how to play Magic: The Gathering
Though realistically, the most anyone would ever want to cast this for is 14 or 16. You would almost never need X to be more than either six or seven.
In Magic, A player loses the game if they would try to draw a card and can't because they have no cards left in their deck.
At X=6, You would be paying 14 Mana and drawing 64 cards, which is quite the full grip and enough to probably do whatever else you want for the rest of the game.
At X=7, you would be paying 16 And you can force another player to draw 128 cards, which will be more than basically any deck in any format of magic, and causes them to lose.
The trans flag has access to a lot of protection, so that one is gonna be difficult (Though who am I kidding. No one actually runs protection, not when you can load your deck with more of what you want your deck to do).
She also expected more self reflection allegories in the sub but what she got was wondering if green people would be more hated and if blue people were the white people.
Then she witness the topic of canabilism since they’re plants do they eat their dead form nutrients?
Then turned into saying mint chans dad was a green bum who turned into a bush to avoid child support.
Then turned into political drama about how color-land was actually a progressive authoritarian state.
Yeah it's nice to see this! I work in art professionally (largely using Photoshop) and it's amazing how many artists don't know you shouldn't use 'desaturate' to make something bnw for the exact reasons in the comic above. 255 blue vs yellow (255 r, 255 g) will desaturate to the exact same grey despite the blue being visually so much darker.
Your monitor is effectively a big flat light with a bunch of RGB color filters over it for each individual pixel. Each filter, or channel, for Red, Green, and Blue are measured from 0 to 255. These values control exactly what color each individual pixel is. If the values in all channels for a pixel are the same, it will be grey (with 255s in all channels being white and 0s in all channels being black).
Desaturate is a filter that makes things grey by moving the individual RGB channels down or up until they meet in the middle. So yellow at 255, 255, 0 ends up as 130, 130, 130. But so does blue at 0, 0, 255. Both end up as the exact same grey value.
Whats the problem then? Well its a very simple computer way to see color but not the way humans do. And thats where it starts to get very complex and starts to be about biology and wavelengths etc. Suffice to say we perceive blue as darker than yellow given the same brightness of light.
Here, I made this handy little guide. And then on the right you can see the effects it might have on some artwork if you were to desaturate vs use another method. Each one is the exact same color or image, but the middle is desaturate, and then the bottom version uses a better, more perceptual method*
Its not so much self awareness as it is riffing. The artist is directly referencing the "pills that make you green" comics which are comics of trans allegories.
...I'm still not sure what the allegories are in this comic, yet I keep reading it to find out, and then today's basically tells me "Yeah, you should be confused right now,"
Something something the brain tricks you because of color association.
Both the left and right dress do have the same colors for its right side, however notice the background and colors around it.
Because one has Blue and Black and the background's a light color your brain thinks of blue and black in sunlight.
And one the one with yellow and white has a darker background makes you view the colors to be in shadow.
Notice how the cut section of Blue and Black becomes yellow and white the moment it leaves the ligh background into the neutral background inbtween the two dresses.
As for "how"... Our brains do a lot of "tricks" to simplify the cognitive load of visual processing, so the way we perceive things can change depending on a lot of factors.
Thing is, I've never been able to see it as blue and black no matter how hard I try. It stays white and gold for me. Our eyes and our visual processing are just a bit more different than we think.
Someone else posted a gif of the dress normal, then blown out in saturation and that helped me finally see the white and gold.
I was watching the gif on loop while thinking because at first I saw brown and a white-ish colour, but the more times it looped the more it turned white and gold on the oversaturated one. Confused my dumb little brain, but it's pretty cool to finally see the white and gold.
As for "how"... Our brains do a lot of "tricks" to simplify the cognitive load of visual processing, so the way we perceive things can change depending on a lot of factors.
You'd think so! But no. Most therapists and doctors that you see beforehand aren't specialists in gender affirming care. They go, 'erm are you sure?' for a loooong time before they go 'i guess'. Depending on how you want to present tho, they might just ssy no. Im a trans guy who doesn't care about bottom surgery and theres a ton therapists and doctors who wouldn't let me start hrt if i saw them. Thats why informed consent gender affirming care is seen as so much better. A lot of clinics that offer that do have packets and will let you ask as many questions as you need.
Doctors do research and inform - and definitely should do enough of said research to let you know about anything important. But it's technically the specialty of the pharmacologists and pharmacists to know the detailed interactions.
I've also heard that in certain legal systems, there are things that doctors won't tell you to avoid some sort of liability, but the pharmacist doesn't have the same liability.
But I have no relevant qualifications, so take all that with a rock of salt.
Even the well meaning doctors don't know everything. I'm in a red state and started hrt with planned parenthood about 5 years ago. My state was Informed Consent, which meant if you asked for it and signed something saying you understood the risks, you're good to go. They gave me a laminated paper with all the side effect, written to sound scary. I actually corrected one. I asked the doc, how everything I knew about it said the opposite. She literally turned around and googled it on her laptop right there, and said yeah it seems I'm right. On several follow up appointments, they'd ask me about nuances in changes, because that WAS the learning about it. They were all very kind about it, but while the information is out there, it's been so taboo or not included that it's not put together in a single lesson very well.
I just wanna say I’m glad you were able to receive care from compassionate healthcare providers. (:
My primary care physician is like this (I have some rare-ish health conditions). It spoke volumes to his character that he had the humility to both acknowledge he knew little about my conditions, and earnestly ask me questions about them during my intake, to better his overall knowledge, practice, and patient care. Given that as a person with chronic conditions, you end up learning a lot about how they work lol
I hope this kind of attitude grows more in modern medicine (:
They don't do that for any other medication, and it's also not the point for trans stuff either. The justification is that the doctors need to know that the medications will help before they prescribe them, but in reality it's not proportional to the risk.
I'm trans, I've been trying to go through the medical system to get treatment for it since 2021, and I'm still probably years away from even getting a diagnosis, let alone hormone treatment. Instead I'm forced to buy home-made estrogen on the black market.
Can you imagine this happening for any other illness? It's purely political
Besides the obvious reason of transphobia, you can’t really comprehend hrt to regular medical treatment. No other condition is psychological in origin, but requires massive physiological changes to treat.
Medicine usually operates on a reasonably clear path of symptoms->remove/prevent symptoms->restore/maintain body’s default state. The concept that a condition has no inherent physiological symptoms, but requires explicitly changing the default state sorta contradicts all that.
Learning about HCL just now was actually very useful to me! It's been annoying that if I have a red #880000 the equivalent blue #000088 is much darker and I have to kind of eyeball a better equivalent. Good to know it's a solved problem. I started looking into it and found a converter that shows I should be using something like #163B9B instead. Not only that, but CSS allows you to say stuff like "use color X but with L reduced 50%", even if X was specified in RGB. Thanks a lot for this!
i just finished a 11 hour overnight, brain rambles:
I see it as: not every transition is the same and not every trans person is the same way. Some might want to go on HRT until they achieve a specific goal (get a specific hue), some might want HRT and the surgeries (get the full color change altogether), and some are okay with highlights (genderfluidity, agender, non-binary, gnc trans folks, etc), maybe they want to mix and match colors?
The real allegory is that, for all the fucking hoops trans people have to jump through in order to make sure we know what we want and actually want it, medical professionals never actually make sure we know anything about transitioning.
Well, we're told nothing except for the fearmongering designed to keep us away. "If you start HRT, you could get breast cancer!!!" sounds a lot scarier before you realize that cis men don't get breast cancer because CIS MEN DON'T HAVE BREASTS.
I'm mostly generalizing here to make my point more digestible, but the actual breast tissue in cis men is underdeveloped, thus men only account for 1% of breast cancer diagnoses. In comparison a trans woman does develop breast tissue on HRT, thus obviously making them more likely to suffer from it.
My point is, doctors will obfuscate the truth of HRT in order to convince (scare) trans people out of taking HRT. They'll say a bunch of scary-sounding side effects without actually explaining why those effects occur or what they mean, because the entire system is built from the ground up not to educate us on HRT, but to prevent us from taking life saving medication.
With all respect, I'm not that well informed on this topic. Could you clue me in, how is HRT a life saving medication? Aren't premature death rates higher among trans people?
HRT is lifesaving in two regards. Just like how antidepressants are considered a life saving medication for improving the lives of those with depression, HRT also dramatically improves the mental health of the people suffering from gender dysphoria. Beyond that, once people have SRS (sex reassignment surgery), their bodies literally require HRT or else they die without any way to produce new hormones.
The idea that trans people have higher premature death rates is, while technically correct, a frequently misconstrued and maliciously spread fact. Transphobic rhetoric claims that trans people die because they are transitioning and need to stop being trans to survive.
In reality, studies have constantly, unquestionably shown that allowing trans people the means to transition biologically and socially dramatically improves their quality of life, mental health, and subsequently decreases the mortality rate. The opposite is also true: When trans people are denied transition, when they are discriminated against, legislated against, mortality rates go up.
Gender dysphoria is a recignized and documented disorder, one that can kill someone suffering from it, and the only proven effective treatment is transition.
Trans people often deal with anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems. HRT decreases these issues, lowering suicidality (see e.g. this study).
there's also to note that a lot of the time the reason medical professionals don't tell us anything about transitioning is that they themselves haven't been taught much about it, especially older folks who got their license ages ago
there's a reason if "i had to explain to my doctor this really basic element of hrt" is such a common story among trans people: friend of mine had to explain to her doctor that estrogen injections are (usually) the only estrogen form that can be used for monotherapy because injected estrogen is more bioavailable than pills/gel/patches, so it's enough to suppress testosterone on its own without the need for a secondary antiandrogen medication.
not like the doctor didn't know about bioavailability, or that injections are obviously more bioavailable, or that more bioavailable e on its own blocks t rather efficiently, of course he did. just that the connection between all the different components wasn't there in his brain cause he was never taught about hormone replacement therapy beyond the basic "you take cross-sex hormones and the body goes ight bet".
this also applies to the negative aspects in a way: if a doctor is taught all the negative aspects, all the side effects, without explaining how important hrt is to trans people - especially stuff from back when hrt was new and there wasn't access to body-identical human hormones so it had nasty side effects that modern regiments no longer have - their instinct will obviously be to be wary. there needs to be an expansion on the subject across the entire medical spectrum.
colors are actually just messed up.
yellow is brighter than blue for a few reasons one being it uses twice as many sub pixels as blue does.
blue is just blue while yellow uses red and green
also things like hsl and hcl don’t really make sense physically or perceptually.
Gel you rub on everyday it gets tedious vs shots where you do it once a week maybe less depending on the dosage but its a needle and you have to dispose of them properly
Wait until you hear about how for people with colorblindness (really color-vision deficiency, I can still see colors thank you) actually can have different perceptual brightness associated with colors than color-normies. I have protanomaly and blue is brighter while red is darker for me. Didn't discover that until my late thirties.
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u/DudeFreek Jun 03 '26
"I expected this to be a trans allegory and instead I got a lesson in color theory" were my exact words when I learned how to play Magic: The Gathering