You gotta be fucked in the head for real if you think I would ever thank the fucking staff of this website for anything. They could wire me 1 million dollars tomorrow and I will bitch how it should have been 1.5 tonight
Just remembered that my first gender affirming clothes I literally made hiding in my closet out of scraps of clothes that made me dysphoric back when I was 15
Genuinely really proud of this, also yeah there’s something poetic about it, I’d probably still have them but I cut them up and threw them out before I went to college so my parents wouldn’t find them, I have things I bought myself now that I’m in a safe place
"pretty privilege isnt real youre basically saying its a privilege to get sexually harrassed and assaulted" people without pretty privilege also get sexually harrassed and assaulted. and its also pretty privilege that determines whether the people getting sexually harrassed and assaulted are believed or chalked up to lying for attention because "who would want to fuck you". rape is scarcely about attraction. it is about control
TRANS WOMEN: HERE'S SOME SHIT YOUR DOCTOR WONT TELL YOU ABOUT HRT
1. Progesterone: not for everyone, but for many people it may increase sex drive and WILL make your boobs bigger. Also effects mood in ways that many find positive (but some find negative). Most doctors won’t prescribe this to you unless you ask. Most trans girls I know swear by it.
2. Injectible estrogen: is more effective than pill or patch form. Get on it if you can bear needles bc you will see more effects more quickly.
3. Estradiol Cypionate: There is currently a shortage of injectible estradiol valerate. There is no shortage of estradiol cypionate. Functionally they do the same shit.
4. Bicalutamide: This is an anti-androgen that has almost none of the side-effects of spironolactone or finasteride. The girls I know who are on it are evangelical about it.
Are there HRT medications that don’t increase blood clot risk? I’m already at risk because of my blood pressure, and my doctor won’t prescribe HRT that increases clot risk while I’m on the medication - and I may never not be on the medication.
The concerns surrounding venous thromboembolic events as a side-effect of hormone replacement therapy can mostly be traced back to one particular study known as the Women’s Health Initiative. This study was an enormous undertaking which, unfortunately, demonstrated significant adverse effects of the hormone therapies studied. As a result of this the use of hormone replacement therapy in postmenopausal cis women was dramatically reduced as the medical community began to question whether or not the therapy caused more harm than good.
Naturally, trans women have been suffering from this fall-out ever since.
What physicians seem to fail to recognize is that the study examined a very specific hormone regimen which was, arguably, outmoded at the time the study was conducted: It examined the use of conjugated equine estrogen (Premarin) with or without the use of medroxyprogesterone acetate. Neither of these drugs is regularly used for the treatment of transgender women.
The estrogen most commonly used to treat transgender women nowadays is 17β-estradiol either in pill form or in the form of a sticky patch that you apply to your skin. Esters of estrogen (e.g. estradiol valerate) are also sometimes used either in a pill form or as an intramuscular injection.
Transdermal estradiol patches are the gold standard when it comes to treating women who are at high risk of a venous thromboembolic event. It simply does not increase the risk of developing a venous thromboembolism. The only thing you should keep in mind is that patches are not always well tolerated because of the lifestyle changes required to keep them from falling off and the fact that they tend to irritate the skin.
Fortunately, oral 17β-estradiol appears to be safe, regardless of the increased risk. At least one large study has shown that the use of oral estradiol in trans women is not associated with venous thromboembolic events. An individual woman’s risk would need to be substantial in order to contraindicate the use of oral estradiol.
For those who have significant risk of venous thromboembolism because they have had a previous thromboembolic event, because they are paralyzed, or because of some other factor it is good to know the relative risk between oral and transdermal estrogen. The latest research indicates that the use of transdermal estrogen lowers your risk of a thromboembolism to 80% of what your risk would be using oral estrogens.
It’s difficult to find hard numbers regarding the relative risk of venous thromboembolic events with regards to hypertension. The best I could find after an hour or so of searching was this study regarding VTE in lung cancer patients. Hypertension increased the risk by a factor of 1.8.
However, to put that into perspective being of African descent increases your relative risk for deep vein thrombosis by a factor of 1.3 when compared to Europeans. Europeans are, themselves, at increased risk when compared to Asians and Pacific Islanders by a considerable margin: a four-fold increase.
I should point out that being ‘male’ is also a risk factor for developing a thromboembolism and hormones are likely to be a contributing factor. Also, menopause is another serious risk factor. Given this information it is likely that the use of transdermal estradiol will lower your risk of thromboembolic events significantly.
As far as the anti-androgen is concerned: The primary use for spironolactone for cisgender people is as an antihypertensive.
Even if the risk of thromboembolism was truly significant with modern hormone replacement therapy it wouldn’t justify what your doctor is doing to you. The fact is that mortality in the transgender community from suicide–caused in part due to the lack of access to hormone therapy–is substantial. The quality of life lost when a trans woman is denied hormone therapy is substantial. The fact that your doctor does not appear to be taking this into consideration when they weigh the risk of thromboembolism against not receiving necessary medical care is deeply concerning.
I strongly recommend that you seek a doctor who is more sensitive to your medical needs as a transgender woman.
US county attorney is ‘confident’ her office will be able to pursue charges in cases which led to criticisms of use-of-force policies
A Minnesota state prosecutor announced an investigation on Monday that may lead to charges against federal officers, including Greg Bovino, for misconduct during an immigration enforcement crackdown.
The Hennepin county attorney, Mary Moriarty, said in a news conference that her office is already looking into 17 cases, including one in which Bovino, a border patrol official, threw a smoke canister at protesters on 21 January.
Her office is also investigating federal agents’ shooting deaths of 37-year-old US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti on 7 and 24 January, respectively. And she is “confident” they will be able to pursue charges in the cases which led to nationwide demonstrations and criticisms of federal immigration enforcement use-of-force policies.
Another case on 7 January involved federal officers making an arrest outside a high school and deploying chemical irritants while students and staff were in the area.
“Make no mistake – we are not afraid of the legal fight, and we are committed to doing this correctly,” Moriarty said. The immigration enforcement operation known as “Metro Surge caused immeasurable harm to our community”.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees immigration enforcement, responded in a statement on Monday night that such enforcement is a federal responsibility and states cannot prosecute federal officers.
Moriarty’s office has set up an online portal to which photos, videos and eyewitness accounts from any point during Operation Metro Surge can be uploaded.
The Trump administration has defended federal officers, but Moriarty is making clear that her office is “collecting evidence about all sorts of possible crimes”, said Rachel Moran, a professor of criminal law and policing at the University of St Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis.
In cases where officers unjustifiably used chemical weapons, threw people to the ground or smashed car windows, Moran said as examples, prosecutors may be investigating assault or property damage.
Though federal officers conducted immigration enforcement throughout the Twin Cities, Moriarty’s investigation will only focus on incidents in Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis and many of its suburbs.
She said on Monday that her office is prepared to sue the federal government to get the evidence she has requested for the Good and Pretti investigations if she does not hear from them by Tuesday.
Mark Osler, who served as director of the criminal division for a year under Moriarty in 2023 and 2024, said regardless of whether there are charges, he thinks the public can look forward to more clarity.
“One of the most important roles that prosecution has … is truth-telling, is to bring to the surface what actually happened at a given time,” said Osler, who is a law professor at the University of St Thomas. “We’ll all know more than just what we saw in those initial videos by the time she’s done. I’m confident of that.”
on the top of neolithic queerness; something interesting that has happened with Çatalhöyük is the evolution in our understanding from "omg stone age Fertility Goddess Birth Cult!!" to "actually a lot of the figurines aren't of humans, many of the ones that are anthropomorphic can't be gendered, and many of the "fertility goddesses" are likely more tied to the fatness associated with age rather than with pregnancy necessarily, which may have been seen as more of a liminal space between life and death than a purely life-giving act, and also these people actually seemed VERY into penises as a spiritual symbol, far moreso than the vagina"
& specifically i find it very interesting that realizing that penises were likely spiritually important did not automatically translate to gender inequality. like the assumption we tend to make is that Good Feminist Spirituality (tm) in a society where women are empowered will feature a lot of vulvas and menstruation and birth in the spirituality, whereas Bad Patriarchal Spirituality (tm) is very into the penis as a symbol of dominating conquering power and women can't access it.
but there's actually evidence that the people of Çatalhöyük viewed the penis as spiritually potent, while also not seeing that potency as exclusive to those born with penises:
On the basis of research in twentieth-century Papua New Guinea, Strathern proposes a non-Western concept of the person as “dividual” rather than individual: an entity at once more partial and more expansive than the modernist monad, and constituted through multiple heterogeneous incorporations rather than existing as a unitary essence. This notion can help us make sense of the sex of the Çatalhöyük body, especially if we concentrate on its parts.
Consider the penis. Meskell identified a number of the ceramic and stone figurines at Çatalhöyük as “phallic” – but she notes that these small objects are surprisingly ambiguous. Some are simultaneously male and female: when rotated, a penis and testicles become breasts or buttocks. This visual punning suggests an attitude that emphasizes the mutability, not the fixity, of bodily sex.
The little penises are usually pierced for wearing; they are detached body parts that can be attached to any kind of body, male or female, adult or child. Detachability of body parts and substances is key to Strathern’s theory, since it indicates a body that is partible rather than unitary. The detachable penis, like the bucrania [bovine skulls], does not inevitably serve as a metonym for a whole gendered person, for masculinity as an abstraction, or for “phallic” power. Instead, elements of maleness and femaleness may be intrinsically partible, inhering in the products of men’s and women’s labor, as well as in manufactured body parts. These detachable gendered objects and substances can be exchanged, ingested, incorporated, expelled, discarded, or temporarily held by “dividual” persons.
The idea of the body as partible is immensely helpful in understanding Çatalhöyük attitudes toward skeletons. Just as a female child might make and wear a clay penis, so too living persons at Çatalhöyük handled the bones of the dead.
(from "The Hau of the House" by Mary J. Weismantel in Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society edited by Ian Hodder)
remember gang, when people make extremely generalized statements about how "Our Ancestors" lived "back in Caveman Times" to explain modern Western gender roles through the lens of evolution, it is complete bullshit. and prehistoric & stone age humans deserve FAR more respect for their cultures and civilizations than they get.
areudirty
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