My feeling is that the Cass report has given politicians in the “centre ground”, the ones that we knew we couldn’t trust, a cover story to move away from supporting trans people on this. The Wes Streetings who were phoning in their allyship all along.

I’d be happy to be corrected, but nobody who seriously campaigns for better trans healthcare is happy about the proposed ban, it’s the chancers who don’t stand for anything that have abandoned us.

If it helps, I went from zero to knowing about these things in the last 18 months or so (🐣). The knowledge is extremely accessible today, but perhaps because various things have got a lot easier many people are less inclined to initially go "well I better learn what a 5-alpha reductase is then" as they have not had any learning forced upon them. Given how things are going though I suspect/hope that situation will correct itself very quickly.

obligatory: Also fuck the tories.

for the record, we don't think it's been lost, but it's definitely not talked about as much

the thing to keep in mind is this is ORAL HISTORY. getting lost is the default thing that happens to oral history. the way to preserve things is to write them down!

they certainly have come together now, in this century, as like 90% of our mutuals could attest

and there were important threads earlier (Alan Turing! online dating when being gay was more illegal! all that stuff)

but also until the 80s computers were a strictly white-collar thing

⚡️because in the past a lot of people transitioning right now would not have transitioned at all because this knowledge would have been inaccessible to them.

It’s not that we were better in the past, it’s that in the past only the people able to access this kind of information were *able* to transition. I started hrt in 2011 abd I had to get lucky and encounter a few other, older trans people to even know hrt was a thing I could do successfully. I spent months scouring obscure websites and forums educating myself about it, how it worked, what was involved, what the consequences were, how to handle it legally, how to deal with medical gatekeepers. And I still didn’t know half of what I needed to.

Not to mention how many people ended up homeless or destitute or murdered or suicided who tried it and then lost all their social support.

It’s survivorship bias.

@puppygirlhornypost

I was just doing research on a particular poem and in one of the scant sources we have for it the author didn't write down anything about it because "everyone knows that one."

@ireneista @goatsarah

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@puppygirlhornypost

I think it is worth underscoring here the difference in age groups and access levels we're talking about as well

When I first looked into these questions in the US I was in my _twenties_ and to get spiro + fin required a song and a dance through multiple providers and generally a RLE test.

What's happening now is targeting a much younger population that is more aware, working in a more directly hostile environment, with much more limited resources.

@ireneista @goatsarah

yeah absolutely

sigh... the library people are pretty good about understanding the needs in our experience, it's the anarcho-capitalists who are a problem. or at least it feels that way to us personally, from what we've seen

@puppygirlhornypost

It's probably also worth noting that dutasteride and finasteride have the same challenge as a lot of other drugs in this space: not readily prescribed to people under the age of 18 due to "lack of testing" in the young age group.

Meaning you need a source for it that is willing to take significant chances for you if you are under 18, in a way that can easily be caught by a government probe.

So the knowledge is helpful, but the doors keep closing

@ireneista @goatsarah

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space my endo prescribes cypro as antiandrogen (at a safe level but as far as i know it's still bleh long term) and refused to prescribe my friend bicalutamide instead even though she's been getting depression symptoms as a side effect from cypro, refusing to acknowledge that that's indeed a known side effect.
he's widely recommended here in my local community but even he doesn't really know much about what he's doing. he also wouldn't give me progesterone until just about a month ago because "my levels aren't low enough" (it's been on a steady downward trend already but that shouldn't even be relevant either way)

i also didnt get a response when i asked him if its a bad thing that my prolactin is way above the recommended range shown on my blood test results, and im not gonna wait another 6 weeks for an appointment to ask in person

with some things i just trust myself more than medical professionals, but DIY is miles more inconvenient and expensive than getting it prescribed and almost fully covered by health insurance

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space oh yeah about the prolactin thing, in case anyone here can tell me whether this is fine or not i'd welcome some help :3

i believe i once heard someone say that anything above ~30 is bad but i wanna get a second opinion on that

@puppygirlhornypost @ireneista @awedp This is part of why I like the Common Crawl. It massively reduces the amount of compute/energy/time wasted to index the Web. It’s not just used for LLMs.

The LLM problem is better addressed by something like the W3C’s work-in-progress TDM Reservation Protocol, which is a sort of evolution of robots meta-tags and doesn’t hijack robots.txt (which is ideal for managing robot traffic load).

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