Susan's Place Transgender Resources

I've been noticing that people always put weird images on my avatar, so I kind of wanted to clarify.

This is a " あ " written with lipstick followed by a " ! ". " あ " is hiragana, a japanese "alphabet", for the sound "A".

It is not :

-A penis
-Blood
-A schematized sexual act

lol, I never thought anything like that, but now that you mention it, I think it looks like.... :p just kidding

It looked like a tap/faucet/robinet to me :). Good to know...

I never gave it much thought.  Figured it meant something to you.  Which it does.   ;D

I hadn't realized that anyone thought it was Vulgar.  It looked innocent enough to me.

wow! Who said it looked vulgar??

If anything, it looks like a standard warp core manifold latch!

Just as an aside... the mind doesn't recognise negative words such as 'not', because it first has to visualise such concepts in order to ascertain what not to see it as, and by then it's too late. ;)

If I said to you 'don't think of a giant orange elephant', what's the first thing you think of?

Quote from: A on June 23, 2011, 12:00:13 PM
It is not :

-A penis
-Blood
-A schematized sexual act

Truth be told...At first I thought it looked like a faucet drawn with a red marker or highlighter...But on a second glance I noticed it was some eastern hemisphere language character.  I thought Korean, personally, but hey, the more you know ^^

Quote from: Sephirah on June 23, 2011, 08:01:11 PM
If I said to you 'don't think of a giant orange elephant', what's the first thing you think of?

Weirdly enough, a purple elephant. Am I broken? :).

Quote from: Annah on June 23, 2011, 07:41:24 PM
wow! Who said it looked vulgar??

If anything, it looks like a standard warp core manifold latch!

:D +3 awesome points for a Star Trek reference!

i never saw it as anything other than [a]. i somehow got so used to reading japanese that i saw that avatar of yours at least 5 times before it dawned to me that this [a] was written in a "different alphabet", and therefore some people might not understand it at all

It looked to me like a nonsensical scribble with a "!". But .... it is written with crayon. xP
Now it looks like a badly crayoned あ !

I always thought it looked like an "a" in a script I couldn't recognise.

  Or maybe just a simple, "May the teeth of a thousand Lisigoths rend your bowels, and send your screams echoing through the desolate wilderness in which you tormented soul is condemned to wander for eternity!",  or similar; in Klingon!

Karen.

I don't know how someone could think it looked dirty but I guess to be fair I knew what it was. I still remember some Japanese from high school classes.

Although (how I was taught anyway) the part that looks like a 't' overlapping the 'loop' extends through the loop more and is also longer at the top.

Well, it's handwritten, so like with the alphabet, variations appear.

I ALWAYS thought it was a Japanese symbol.  I had no clue so few people could recognize the language of such a powerful country.  Then again I have trouble identifying Chinese from other mainland asian languages.... Really easy to pick out Japanese and Korean though.  Japanese= less lines usually Korean=lots of circles...

Chinese is easy too: Japanese without a single hiragana or katakana (Japanese always has some hiragana, be it the no [の] that's the most recognisable as it does not
exist at all in Chinese).

That's too bad, I'm quite the connoisseur of vulgar (lewd, tasteless and indecent rank up there too).

Quote from: Da Monkey on June 24, 2011, 09:10:16 AM
Although (how I was taught anyway) the part that looks like a 't' overlapping the 'loop' extends through the loop more and is also longer at the top.

you've obviously not seen enough bad handwriting yet.. the japanese can write their characters even more unrecognizable than a's あ

Quote from: A on June 24, 2011, 09:39:45 AM
Chinese is easy too: Japanese without a single hiragana or katakana (Japanese always has some hiragana, be it the no [の] that's the most recognisable as it does not
exist at all in Chinese).

tried distinguishing between traditional and simplified chinese? if i ever learn chinese, it'd have to be taiwanese or cantonese. simplified chinese looks so weird

Nope, never tried.

恋爱  风  语
戀愛  風  語

try guessing which is which...

The above is the simplified one, right?

yup, pretty obvious really. you'll easily see what news are from china if you know what to look for. it's so much harder to see the difference between taiwanese and cantonese since both use traditional chinese, and i don't really speak any chinese

Oh, I didn't know that.

Funny Tekla, I thought you were from California not Vulgaria!

LA is the capitol of Vulgaria.

I never thought it was anything but an 'a', although I did have the advantage of knowing exactly what it was from the beginning...

Quote from: explorer on June 24, 2011, 10:29:12 AM
you've obviously not seen enough bad handwriting yet.. the japanese can write their characters even more unrecognizable than a's あ

Reminds me of when I was there; they thought my writing was 'so cute! ^_^' despite my opinion that it was nothing exceptional. Turns out that they can write just as messily in Japanese as some English speakers write their own language. Who knew?

Fun fact: the first word in the Chinese comparison there (lianai), when translated to Japanese, uses one kanji from each script.
(恋愛 - ren'ai; first one's simplified, second's traditional.) It's shown as an option in my Chinese dictionary, too.

Quote from: Luna! on June 25, 2011, 07:53:26 PM
Fun fact: the first word in the Chinese comparison there (lianai), when translated to Japanese, uses one kanji from each script.
(恋愛 - ren'ai; first one's simplified, second's traditional.) It's shown as an option in my Chinese dictionary, too.

i thought i'd keep that a secret, but then you just had to tell it, huh? (nah, jk)
some kanji have been simplified in japanese too, but at some later point the chinese just had to simplify their script even more. actually you can (theoretically) also use the purely traditional script in japanese. a good digital dictionary will take you to the entry for 恋愛 when searching for 戀愛, but it doesn't recognize the new simplified chinese, so a search for 恋爱 won't give any results. you'll also find the traditional characters in kanji dictionaries
i somewhat wish they never simplified any characters, the traditional characters look so pretty

Quote from: Luna! on June 25, 2011, 07:53:26 PM
I never thought it was anything but an 'a'

It had never even crossed my mind that it would be anything other than A.  Then again, I've played multiplayer games which are popular in other countries, so I'm used to seeing people type in other languages.

Now that I've taken a good look at it, it does look a bit like a self-sealing stembolt.

Quote from: Padma on June 23, 2011, 12:24:25 PM
It looked like a tap/faucet/robinet to me :). Good to know...

Yea it was like pink water pouring out with the faucet turned on and then the ! was like it splashed up

I never people could be so imaginatively blind! Wonderful!