WHY THE FUCK DOES F12 CLOSE WHAT YOURE DOING AND OPEN WIKIPEDIA ON OPERA GX, NO ONE WOULD EVER USE THAT

tiny fish eating big hamborger, attacking it like how a little kid punches adults

imagine me eating a very delicious burger

can you cast mini locust swarm (about 200, being casted for about a day) on my pet duck. it's evil, tottaly

puki drought

The sickness clings to me. Like a clinging thing.

the reason its getting banned is because the law makers dont even meet any kids whove gotten it, the only thing they learn about transgender people is from transphobes, and documentaries about detransitioners

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

nice day today

I’m on my semi-balcony with my laptop outside, I got blankets, I built a shade fortress, the weather gods promised no rain, it’s sunny, I got a cable out here to have energy to my laptop, and I took a light adhd medicine dose for my add

it’s nice to be outside :), even if I’m not being social.

"40% of trans people try to commit suicide so you shouldnt be trans" ahh pseudo-science trans study

If you haven't seen the new anti-trans report that RFK and the Trump administration just put out, I recommend you don't. It's as bad or worse than you think it is. Worse than the Cass Report (which it cites 149 times in its 400+ pages).

It's fully of pseudoscience, cherry-picked half-truth, outright forgeries, discredited doctors, and cites multiple opinion pieces by some of the loudest, most vile transphobic pundits in the country - such as Jesse Singal and Abigail Schrier a total of FIVE SEPARATE TIMES EACH - in addition to liberal institutions like the Washington Post Editorial Board which were committed to "just asking questions.

The report is claims to be exclusively about trans children and says it will not deal in transition care for adults, but it does so frequently and has entire section dedicated to it. At times it baselessly claims that transitioning results in harmful or poor outcomes for trans adults as a statement of fact with no citation to back it up.

It tries to explain away any improvement in trans people's lives as us just being unable to know ourselves due to inherently deceitful nature and inability to judge our internal well-being.

It sites underemployment, increased social and familial discrimination, and higher suicide rates as a direct outcome of transition related healthcare, not as outcome of an inherently hateful and bigoted society.

They are setting up not just banning youth care, but adult care as well.

It's bad. It's very, very bad.

i love fish, as in eating them. GET OVER HERE

I love women

ok but like im so interested to hear how the republicans would check if someone was a furry, like at least with transphobes you can check someones pants and be like 80% accurate, but you cant really do that with furries

Don't let Republicans distract you with gimmicky culture war bills. Republican policies are making Americans' lives shorter and worse in every conceivable way.

well its fake oppression because when jkr oppresses someones rights, its feminism

the fact j. k. rowling called international asexuality day, "fake oppression day", is just an obvious example on why asexual, and aromantic, people are oppressed

tw: abuse. this one tweet was so fucking bad i had to put it in a place i can acctually show people

(response on a video of a mother hiting her child who was sillying around with the kickback of a cake spade being pulled back) this is a hallmark case of abuse. he isnt stopping the tantrums, hes learning the kids that they cant speak up against anything [by hurting them when they act sad], this is such a fucking toxic way to learn your kids not to do something. dont be surprised when they never tell you about anything, dont be surprised when your kids ends up sneaking out to be in clubs (and other pearl clutching places) because they cant properly communicate to you that they are stressed.

i know it seems like a lot over "just a glass of water", but to a child it will feel like anything they do will end in them getting punished, and that they are hated by their parents, and the parents would rather never talking to them

(tweet: https://x.com/4Mischief/status/1909599611389346179 sorry if the link doesnt work)

this one is to this guy: i hope every single time you try to talk about anything stressfull to anyone, you too will get water thrown at you, and be deemed as if you are having a tantrum.

my question is; why is there only a space after the -s half the time?