What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you've witnessed?

I was expelled.

I was a gymnast between the ages of four and fifteen, after which I began taking Taekwondo lessons in secret. My family moved to the town upon which Once Were Warriors was based, and the girls were constantly picking fights with me, shrieking and screaming about my clothes, the length of my skirts, and blah, blah, blah. For ten solid ass months I just deflected their blows. This frustrated them immensely. I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to hit them, but my father had me convinced that “you’ll go to prison if you hit a slut as hard as you can hit a man.” This is a disgusting thing to say, but my father did know how hard I could hit because I had hit HIM during fights. My father was a sociopath and a psychopath who had spent time in every prison in Australasia before I was born when he was thirty-six-years-old. He beat my mother like she was a man twice his size who’d insulted HIS mother, and when I was fourteen, he started on me. I made a vow to never give in to my fear of my father, and every time he started hitting me I fought back.

I wanted one normal ass year at high school, so after I completed Year 12 with the highest marks possible - Excellences in every single subject - and after winning the nationals in my division in Taekwondo, I enrolled in a co-ed school. I didn’t just have a normal ass year - I had a fucking AMAZING ass year. I made lifelong friends and met the boy who became the man who proposed to me on the summit of Mt Yasur in Vanuatu, one of the most active volcanoes, and who then married me on a beach in Greece when we eloped instead of paying for our relatives to get drunk and fight each other at our wedding. We then travelled around Europe for six months.

How can people balance religious beliefs with seeking professional mental health care?

I don’t know if I can use myself as an example, but I’m going to anyway.

Apparently self-defence was “no excuse” for hitting a girl so hard that she broke her arm. My father had been kinda right - I wasn’t given a fair hearing at all. I spent the next few weeks terrified that I was going to be arrested. But my father had been incorrect about my going to prison, and I got a job cleaning hotel rooms. I was terrible at first, but I developed such an expertise that when I tried to resign, the manager wouldn’t let me until I told her why I was resigning: I had spent the past year studying via distance learning and training in Taekwondo, Aikido and Muay Thai. I had spent three months in the summer practising one kick over and over and over again: the spinning hook kick. This kick is illegal in most fighting sports now. It’s a difficult kick to land so most people didn’t actually use it in tournaments, but when it does land it does immense damage. The spinning hook kick was used in a lot of fight scenes in movies in the 90s and at the turn of the millennium. I spent months pretending that I was fighting this girl. I wished I had a picture of her to put on my kickbag but as I did not, I just pretended that I was fighting her again. I knew that we would eventually meet on the street and she would have convinced herself that she had the right to seek revenge despite the fact that her dumb ass had simply picked a fight with the wrong person.

Cell phones existed then, but nobody in that hellhole could afford one yet. Still, by the next day, news of the fight had travelled all over the school. I later discovered that actually, the news of the fight had travelled all over the whole ass city; the girls were now universally terrified of me. I was a quarter of this bitch’s size, and she had had four girls holding me back so that the coward could lay into me, yet my tiny ass had somehow broken her arm.

I'm looking for an answer from people who consider themselves "Gender Critical", or transphobic, or TERFs, and my question is this - Why would you refuse to use the pronouns someone wants? What does it cost you? Where's the harm?

Until the day that I left school and four girls accosted me. Two of them seized me by my waist-length hair and dragged me by my hair into an adjacent parking lot. The girls held my arms and legs while a fifth girl who was roughly the size of a refrigerator waddled into the scene, screeching and screaming. “i “I fucking hate you, Karajane, you fucking slut!” She screeched repeatedly as she laid into me. Although she was

We met on the street at the end of summer. I was wearing a long chiffon skirt and a low cut top; she was shrieking and screaming about how much she hated me because I had broken her wrist. I didn’t bother trying to reason with her; there was no reasoning with her and her type. She threw a stupidly slow hook punch and I whipped under it, spinning on my left foot and kicking her right in the face with my spinning hook kick. She went down with a shattered jaw. As I said, that kick is hard to land but when it does land, the person who absorbs it usually does go down with an injury.

It’s easy to pick a fight with the wrong person. So many girls - and women and men - had assumed that my life was perfect when actually, my parents were both legitimately crazy. They also assumed that they would be able to kick the shit out of me because they hated Britney Spears so much and as I looked like Britney (“no you don’t!” Don’t try it: so many girls and women shrieked this that I uploaded a picture in which I had compared my own thirty-six-year-old face to Spears’ sixteen-year-old face. Men lined up to tell me how much more beautiful I was than Britney; women lined up to scream that I look nothing like her. That’s another example of picking a fight with the wrong person. Hahaha).

How was cancer treatment different in the US and the UK?

Weirdly, my mother kept the photos that were taken of me and my boyfriend. She framed them in beautiful silver frames and put them in the pride of place atop the family’s piano. I have them lying around somewhere now that my mother is deceased. When she learned that we had found a way to attend the ball, she wanted to know every last detail. She was back to living through me vicariously.

I had a Cinderella experience at the high school ball. My mother had agreed to sew my dress for me - she was living vicariously through me. At the time, Mum was happier than I had seen her and I bought the pattern and fabric for my dress. Then one day, Mum became enraged when I failed to clean the oven correctly. Suddenly she seized my half-sewn dress and threw it at me, screeching, “You will never go to that ball! Now get the fuck out of my house!” My boyfriend was there, and he was horrified. He had loved my mother until then. As I left the house, I realised that a group of my friends had just walked around the corned and they’d seen my mother freaking the fuck out. I went to live with my boyfriend while my best friend found a seamstress who volunteered to finish my dress for me for free when she heard the story. As bad as that town was, when they came together they really came together. I ended up getting my hair and makeup done professionally for free; we got a free stretch limousine for the night, and a local jeweller loaned me a tiara. I got ready for the ball at the home of my best friend. When I finally put my dress on, I spun around, feeling as though I were in a movie. “Cinderella, you shall go to the ball!” My friend’s father said. The limo came to the house and we got into it. I really did feel like I was Cinderella at that point.

I’ve added this story about the ball to show that there is more than one way to pick a fight with the wrong person. My mother inadvertently picked a fight with my best friend, who had thought up until then that my life was perfect, a mistake made by many people across the course of my life.

Doritos, Cheetos, M&Ms and other popular snacks will soon have warning labels in Texas - KHOU

But the girls on the street and at school were different. I forced myself not to hit them back - I only deflected their ridiculously slow attempts at hitting ME. For ten. Motherfucking. Months.

I had never seen this girl in my entire life. To this day I don’t even know what her name was; she had been brought in as a ringer because none of the other girls had been able to hit me. Apparently they felt that the last ten months had been frustrating for them as well. Their ringer was shrieking about how I looked like Britney Spears as she continued to punch me in the face, in the abdomen… at that point, I decided that enough was enough. I wriggled a leg free and kicked the bitch in the gut. She stumbled backwards, tripped over her own clumsy feet and landed awkwardly on her arm, breaking it.