in reply to Sarah Brown

in reply to Llwynog

@llwynog it depends on where you're based - and possibly if you're open to moving or very very cautiously picking up some mail in another country. (I see the EU flag in your profile, that gives you options re: moving.) In Ireland it's not a controlled substance, and when I was checking the list of sellers on HRT Cafe for E patches I saw some that had injectable testosterone. Anecdotally, I pass much more easily in Ireland, I think because short and soft spoken men aren't out of the ordinary here.
in reply to Sarah Brown

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.

in reply to Katie Fenn

Oh, and also, with more and more trans people coming out when young, and with full support of their parents, the demographic has somewhat changed.

There’s a new cohort of people who were hoping to have the support of the state, who have been completely abandoned. I know the community has always had my back on this, but I can’t help but feel for those people who are now feeling absolutely lost.

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in reply to Katie Fenn

@Katie Fenn anyone wanting to know this stuff should find a trans woman who transitioned in the 2000s or 1990s and ask. We will at the very least provide signposting.

Meanwhile I’ve got a lifetime ban from r/transgenderUK for simply stating that self medication happened. Wasn’t even advocating it. Just speaking about it existing is sufficient for other trans people to want to shut me up.

Our social media used to have entire communities dedicated to it.

reshared this

in reply to Sarah Brown

@alexandria I started diy because I had no interest in socially transitioning and that wasn't an option.

Anyway when I did go to my gp she said "I assume you won't quit if I tell you to" yup. Here's a prescription, being monitored by a Dr is way more healthy than doing it yourself. I'll read up on the subject, come see me in 3 months

in reply to Sarah Brown

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.

Sarah Brown reshared this.

in reply to Irenes (many)

what we need is some form of decentralized documentation of trans knowledge, with dates to show outdated information. The only form that can take at the moment without censorship is through a strong community that shares advice well. However, I fear that there is a limit to how much information can be shared that way, without first lowering the stigma surrounding queer communities through effective protest/politics.
in reply to Irenes (many)

@ireneista our own experience has been basically... entirely contrary to everything described here?

we first discovered that transition was possible at all by meeting some people (most of whom were physical-body-age younger than us) in "the European hacker scene" who firstly gave us the concept of bodily autonomy (as something we could name) but secondly knew about... every HRT detail mentioned in OP, and also much more

in reply to R

@ireneista
when we finally did (DIY) HRT ourselves, we mostly had to do our own research anyways because the body we wanted (at the time) was contrary to what most other people seemed to want, and we did most of this by just... reading through mechanisms of action on Wikipedia while also referencing published care guidelines. sure, the community has been doing a lot of work editing the relevant wiki articles, but that's not so much "oral history"?
in reply to Sarah Brown

⚡️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.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to 🏳️‍⚧️ The Notorious Kyo 🇵🇸

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to 🏳️‍⚧️ The Notorious Kyo 🇵🇸

like, the kind of person who is smart or savy enough to out doctor trained medical professionals, wealthy enough to afford the dozens of medical appointments it took to find one who’d stick their neck out, psychologically resilient enough to keep doing this very hard thing while their entire life fell apart around them, and bold or secure enough to talk about it openly so we actually know what they knew, is a vanishingly small subset of trans people.

That’s why the % of people who transition jumped a full order of magnitude the moment this process became standardized and legit. Only 1 out of 10 trans people were able to make it that far.

in reply to 🏳️‍⚧️ The Notorious Kyo 🇵🇸

@🪭The Notorious Kyo 🦊⛓️‍💥 NB: the “wealthy” bit is very US centric. Elsewhere that is a much less significant factor. I knew people back in the day on unemployment benefits in the UK who were still able to access transition medicine even with private practitioners, because most places do not have anything close to the financial barrier to accessing healthcare, even privately, that the US has.
in reply to Sarah Brown

yeah I mean, all I know is that back in 2015 bottom surgery was $20k out of pocket, whether you stayed in the US or went to Thailand. Estrogen was always cheap, but the only cheap anti-androgen here is spiro. Doctors here won’t even prescribe Cyproterone because the FDA considered too risky, and Finasteride is really expensive.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
Unknown parent

sharkey - Link to source

Lottie

politics

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Unknown parent

sharkey - Link to source

lea

@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

Unknown parent

akkoma - Link to source

Seirdy

@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).

in reply to Irenes (many)

CW: uk pol + transphobic cass review

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Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Sarah Brown

@AntiThesisToRule a lot of this comes down to centralisation of social media moderation and systemic imposition of US puritanism. We used to be able to talk about this in spaces where we were left to moderate our own affairs.

And then we all ended up on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit, and were told by “corporate” that we can’t talk about this stuff any more.

This is why I have hope for the fediverse. It has the potential for those sort of spaces to develop again, but so far they don’t seem to have critical mass.

Cy reshared this.

in reply to Irenes (many)

CW: uk pol + transphobic cass review

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in reply to Sarah Brown

It's possible to genetically modify gonads IN ADULTS so they produce desired levels of T or O. It's not even that difficult (for trans men, it would involve a one-off tamoxifen injection directly into the ovaries). As soon as the trans community figures out how to use genetic engineering, governments will find it nearly impossible to stop us: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10…
in reply to Sarah Brown

in Ireland it's very hard to get a prescription for any HRT, public has a 10 year waitlist and will tell your GP they're at risk of losing their license if they prescribe HRT (this is a lie), so most of us were relying on UK-based GenderGP, which is now imploding. The website "HRT Cafe" and this dosing chart transfemscience.org/articles/e… have been a godsend for a newly hatched trans girl I know. I just count myself lucky that I've gotten what I needed from testosterone and my body's stock hormones are good enough for me going forward.