Every one of you that isn't a trans woman, listen for just a sec.
Have you seen The Matrix? Do you remember the film? Keanu Reeves, leather trenchcoats, bullet time, all that jazz? If you haven't or if you need a refresher, go watch it. It's 2hr16min long, I'll wait. I'll be here when you get back.
Done? Great flick, right? Enjoy your popcorn? Cool. Alright. Now hear me out.
Y'know how the Agents could turn over anyone who isn't Unplugged™️? How every faceless person in the movie could become someone intent on hunting down and killing trans women Neo and the rest of the unplugged humans? You are that person. Society will use you and your blind spots to harm trans women.
Y'know how towards the end of the movie, Cypher betrayed everyone so he could plug back in and enjoy the relative comfort of a life without knowing about the Matrix? You can do that. You always have that option. Society will always reward you for turning on trans women.
You can also just be an Agent, full stop. You can make it your life's work to ruin the lives of trans women, and Society will reward you for it.
I can't be any of these things. I can't plug back in. I can't go back in the closet. I can't unsee the way me and my sisters are treated. My only two options are live and fight, or die.
I feel like I have to treat everyone around me like one of the three things you can be. I cannot and will not feel safe around you until you prove to me that you are Unplugged™️. And to be unplugged is to fight.
You have to make your own life more uncomfortable by actively fighting transmisogyny even when there are no trans women around you. If you can't do that, you are not safe for me.
Living outisde of The Matrix is hard. It's uncomfortable. You need to be ready, willing, and able to deal with that discomfort. Otherwise, you're just an agent of the system waiting to happen.
There is no way to be passive and to be safe for trans women. You have to be a traitor to the system.
I think that as trans girls and allies of trans girls it is crucial that we keep in mind our goals, and our sisters.
Access to HRT, increasingly, to any kind of gender affirming care is being age gated. More and more, society prevents transgender children from having control over their lives.
I assume I don't have to convince you of how horrible this is. How many girls have felt the pain of unbearable wait, of being deemed too young to have control over your own body, your own puberty? How many girls have cried over the fear of being "too late"?
It's evident, to me, and I hope to you too, reader, that we must fight this movement, that would put our younger siblings in cages.
I believe that the ideology that creates this has to be fought not on the single issue of HRT. We know how easy it is to move things around, in a way that keeps structures of power enabled.
I think that if we are to fight, we must fight for the whole liberation of children. The society we live in treats them not as people, deserving of rights, of agency, but instead as property. This is the root of the evil that seeks to keep children trapped, helpless.
This evil is why the concept of parent's rights exists, why there is this belief that parents have rights over their children. Of course, society says, parents own their children.
We must not accept that. It is why children cannot choose for themselves. from the silly and small things, to the crucial, life saving ones. Children are deemed too young to know, at every turn, to make their own decisions. Forbidden to transition, of course, but also to choose their clothes, the information they can learn, or their interests. A parent controls everything about a child, and the issue of what a child can do or not is too often framed as what their parent will allow.
We must devote ourselves to destroying this system, that seeks to define children as lesser.
But this means, too, dear reader, that you must dismantle it within yourself, too. You must understand children as people first. Not as something Less. You must destroy the impulse that would have you talk down to a child, and assume they cannot understand whatever it is they ask about. You must not accept that anything a child does be chosen for them. You should not hand wave things away, act with the belief that there are certain things a child must not know until they get older. Neither should you push children away from you, keep them isolated.
You must, reader, internalize this. A child is a person, no less nor more than you. A small and young person, of course, but if anything, this must be cause to give them greater care.
Treat children as they ought to, and fight for youth liberation. For us, for them, for our sisters.
let's learn together, here's a chart of estrogen levels following a single 2mg dose of estradiol valerate taken orally in postmenopausal women
That pink line on the left graph is estradiol, also called E2. That tiny little bump from 30 pg/ml to ~45 pg/ml is the main reason I'm killing doctors.
The purple line is estrone, or E1. During first-pass metabolism, which happens when you take something orally, the liver turns E2 into E1. Roughly NINETY-FIVE PERCENT of oral estrogen gets turned into E1 during first-pass metabolism. Increased E1 levels are most of why estrogen carries an increased risk of blood clots. Injectable estrogen still carries this warning but, according to everything I've read and my endocrinologist, that's just because they err on the side of caution. That giant fucking purple mountain is the second reason I'm killing doctors.
(Estrone/E1 is not inherently evil. The research is, as always, fucking abysmal, but it's thought to be important for breast development. It's not important enough that you need 95% of your E2 converted to E1.)
Taking it sublingually (under the tongue) or buccally (tucked into your cheek) avoids first-pass metabolism by introducing it into your bloodstream directly. Patches, gel, and injections do the same, just much more effectively, both because you're not inevitably swallowing some of the dose and because they're designed for direct absorption.
Reader, I beg of you: Do not accept the 1mg dose. Your doctor is slow-walking you in the hopes that you're Not Actually Trans.
(I am not a doctor or medical professional, skate at your own risk)
This post makes me so happy. I wrote a thing to try to take care of girls and now girls are taking care of girls in the notes and that's so beautiful.
So, let's talk about sublingual estrogen and how it's different than just swallowing it (and different from injections). Before that, though, always remember: More estrogen does not mean better transition. It's more complicated than that.
This is a graph of hormone levels for someone taking 2mg of estradiol valerate 3-4x/day.
That's pretty high! Given that, on average, 200 pg/ml is enough to achieve 90% suppression of testosterone and 500 pg/ml suppresses 95%, many people would not need a T blocker with these levels. I personally had E at 207 pg/ml and T at "<15" ng/dl (the test only goes down to 15), which could be too low, with no blocker.
That being said, it's important to note that I use injectable estrogen, which (unlike sublingual) has a built-in extended release mechanism. Transfem science has this to say about sublingual estradiol:
Oral estradiol tablets can be taken sublingually instead of orally. Sublingual use of estradiol tablets has several-fold higher bioavailability relative to oral administration and hence achieves much higher overall estradiol levels in comparison. Sublingual use of oral estradiol tablets can be employed instead of oral administration to reduce doses and hence medication costs or to produce higher estradiol levels for the purpose of achieving better testosterone suppression when needed. However, sublingual estradiol is very spiky in terms of estradiol levels when compared to oral estradiol and has a short duration of highly elevated estradiol levels. As such, it may be advisable for sublingual estradiol to be used in divided doses multiple times throughout the day in order to maintain at least somewhat steadier estradiol levels. The therapeutic implications for transfeminine people of the spikiness of sublingual estradiol, for instance in terms of testosterone suppression and health risks, have been little-studied and are mostly unknown. In any case, when used as a form of high-dose estradiol monotherapy and taken multiple times per day, strong though still incomplete testosterone suppression has been observed
Here's a graph of hormone levels after a single sublingual dose of estradiol (ignore everything but the pink E2 line):
That's what "very spiky" means. The half-life of a medication works the same as radiation, it's the amount of time it takes for your body to eliminate half the dose. Sublingual estradiol has a half-life of a few hours, so it can be very tough to maintain levels sufficient for monotherapy. For comparison, here's a graph of simulated hormone levels on injected estradiol valerate:
The blue line is a single dose, the orange line is 4mg every 7 days, and the pink line is 2mg twice a week (what I take). There are longer-lasting esters than valerate (enanthate is very popular in the DIY community), but all available injectable esters have a half-life measured in days. This is a big part of why injectable monotherapy is so popular: you don't have to take pills multiple times a day and, for most people, you don't need to worry about an anti-androgen.
I'm less knowledgeable about gel/patches, but to my understanding they're between sublingual/oral and injected estrogen in terms of half-life with patches essentially being a more controlled version of gel.
Regardless, don't fall into the anxiety trap that is trying to "optimize" your medical transition. Tragically, the science just isn't there, that's why the best most helpful doctors are the ones willing to let us experiment and see what works for us. There are in fact plenty of girls who have gotten a lot of results out of doses that would horrify us if we heard about it on the internet with no context. You should still learn about this stuff to be a better advocate for yourself.
(As always I'm not an authority, I just have an internet connection and the ability to read. Trust, but verify.)
For many of years I had this tradition of drawing Wirt and the beast once a year to see how much I have improved, then depression hit in 2023 and couldn't continue, but it left so really amazing art in the process
Things you can watch/do instead of YouTube, For those who may have trouble finding things to do.
1. Internet Archive. Has plenty of videos to watch, plenty of games you can play that are emulated right on the website. You can also find entire collections of roms. For emulators, check out Emulation General Wiki to find the best emulator for the system you want to emulate.
2. r/piracy has a wiki full of safe places to read comics and manga, to watch anime and cartoons, and to watch movies.
3. Virtualbox, you can set up a Windows XP virtual box and get old PC games from Internet Archive. You can also check out CD Game World if you need a no-cd patch.
4. Saltybet. A Livestream of MUGEN with thousands of characters fighting against each other, sometimes things get hilarious. Runs 24/7.
5. The Cutting Room Floor, spend hours reading up on cut content from your favorite games.
6. Lost Media Wiki, read up on lost movie, books, animation, video games, etc.
7. Neocities, learn coding and make your own website!
8. WebDSR, explore shortband radio
9. Radio Garden, listen to radio stations from around the world
10. Every Noise At Once, explore the widest archive of music genres, with samples and Spotify playlists
11. My Retro TV, pick and era and watch popular television from that time period
I’m not sure the precise number of people I need to say this to but the answer to “reduce human suffering” is not “destroy suffering humans” much in the same way that setting your math test on fire in the exam room does not assure you 0% wrong answers and an A+ by default
Because unless you get rid of the core issue that causes the suffering, you will not eliminate suffering humans.
If you kill all people who are hungry, you are not eliminating hunger. You are only temporarily eliminating the obvious showing of hunger. But then new people will get hungry. So you have to keep killing people for something that is inherently human.
If you kill all unhoused people you will not end up with no unhoused people. You will only temporarily have a moment where all the people alive are housed. But the system that caused the unhousing in the first still is in place, so you WILL get new unhoused people.
Having an orphan-eating machine means you'll end up with dead orphans. Keeping the machine means you will have to forever keep feeding it orphans.
Keeping the system that causes a person to loose their shelter means you will only CREATE more unhoused people.
So you would have to eternally kill the unhoused.
But killing people for something they have no say in is morally and ethically and humanly wrong.
The core issue that causes suffering is life. Every human suffers. Therefore eliminating all human life would result in the elimination of all human suffering.
Does existence cause suffering? Or is there simply high comorbidity between the two?
I personally think the cause of suffering is a disparity between desire-need and possession.
When something that is desired is not attained.
Which is to say, I personally think that the only three certain ways to eliminate suffering are the elimination of desire, immediate gratification of that which is desired-needed, or destruction of consciousness entirely.
There's a lot of ways we can accomplish the first two- (again, I am against the third, as it doesn't so much answer the question as it does avoid it entirely)- but I- again, PERSONALLY- believe in limiting and controlling our own desires within reason and moderation while working towards satisfying the most immediate desires and needs of those around us.
So. I guess what l'm saying is we should practice self-discipline and be kind to each other
Ok, so. The Trump budget. It has already passed the House and now just needs 51 senators to pass it and send it to Trump for signature.
There are 53 Republican senators, 45 Democratic ones, and 2 Independents that vote with the Democrats. VP Vance is a tiebreaker vote.
So to block the bill, at least four Republican senators need to find their spines and the Democrats and Independents all need to keep their spines. This will not happen without direct action from voters.
They are only going to resist this bill if they hear from voters in their states. They do not care if some person from California calls them.
It's really fucking bad for everyone except the ultra-wealthy, surprise surprise.
At the center of the sweeping bill is trillions in tax cuts, which Republicans aim to partially offset through changes to safety net program
I'm going to go through some of the features of this budget in reblogs, but trust and believe that it's horrible for the vast, vast majority of Americans, including you.
Highlights include:
Extends the Trump tax cuts passed in 2017. This continues $3.7 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy. If this budget does not pass, these tax cuts will expire and go back up without any action.
$150 billion in additional military spending
Work requirements for Medicaid. "childless adults without disabilities would be required to work 80 hours per month to qualify for benefits.". They expect millions of people to fail to meet work requirements and lose Medicaid.
Planned Parenthood and trans care. "Bans Medicaid from providing funding to Planned Parenthood as long as the organization continued to provide abortions, and would bar Medicaid from covering gender affirming health care to any beneficiaries. "
Reduces SNAP food stamp access that 40 million people use. "mandates work requirements for able-bodied SNAP enrollees who don't have dependents.".
Clean energy "dramatically scaling back many of the tax credits for clean energy."
Border walls and ICE. "$46.5 billion toward completing Trump's border wall. It also allots $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities and more than $6 billion to hire and retain more agents and officers"
Student loans. "cut $330 billion from the student loan system by scrapping several existing repayment options, including the Biden-era SAVE program that based payments on income and household size.". Does anyone want to have student loan payments that you cannot afford?
Guts Obamacare. "Saves $100 billion, but will result in millions of Americans becoming uninsured if they fail to adhere to new paperwork requirements or can no longer afford insurance premiums."
Weakens federal courts that keep using orders that his actions are illegal and unconstitutional. It prohibits courts from enforcing contempt citations for violations of injunctions or temporary restraining orders unless the plaintiff pays a bond. Bonds can be EXTRAORDINARILY EXPENSIVE and are not currently required in these cases. The provision "would make most existing injunctions—in antitrust cases, police reform cases, school desegregation cases, and others—unenforceable," says the god of constitutional law, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
So, you folks in red states and you folks in wobbly blue states (PA, NC, etc), you need to call your senators and save us all.
Spend 5 minutes. Make 5 calls. Make your voice heard.
Call every day. Call after hours so you can leave a voicemail and not talk to anyone.
For real y'all, millions of people are going to starve, go broke, and be without medical care if this bill passes. Which is a feature, not a bug, of the Trump administration.
And it will balloon the national debt to pay for these tax cuts for the wealthy.
Here's a good post (without melodramatic misinformation) if you want a detailed rundown of what is in the budget bill. As you can see, it's absolutely bad enough without additions, and needs to be resisted on those grounds alone.
Quick bonus media literacy/reading comprehension question: what position is the New York Times coaching you to take on these cuts by putting them in green (the go/"good" color) instead of say, red, which would make more sense for budget cuts? How does this connect to the way the NYT has been repeatedly criticized for soft-pedaling its coverage of Trump in the past? What overall impression does this give you about how you're supposed to feel about this budget and whether it's a good or bad thing?
one day when I have time and energy, would anyone like to see a lil guide (not professional and rather loose) about how I draw black coded features on furries and how to make it fun while keeping their blackness in mind?
i see a lot of non black people make characters that are black and not really, know what they're doing? the character feels bland...it's not malicious and if anything it comes from lack of resources and ignorance.
not their fault, but anyway you can make black characters and incorporate features and styles in a way that feels authentic! one day I will make a lil guide. it's not professional but rather how I do it.
My infamous solarpunk shorts have always had a defect: The belt loops were too small for my belt.
Yesterday I unpicked all five belt loops and cut out seven new ones. I then realized the fabric wasn't very stable, even on the straight grain, so I backed them with my landlady's fusible interfacing. Then I used my machine's diamond stitch to cover the raw edge.
And here's the final product! Cheers to a more wearable, usable garment.
oopsie i tripped and spilled my link to archive dot org's downloadable copy of Microsoft office suite for 2007, which features no AI tools and is a powerful word processor that still holds up just fine on windows 10!
just in case anyone needs resources: you may be eligible for SNAP/EBT, food not bombs may have a location in your area, do you know where your local food bank is? did you know that churches often have food pantries, and they may also be in contact with or know of other churches that have food pantries or entire religion affiliated charities that have intricate systems in place to provide more food more reliably and also often offer other resources! ask your religious friends if their church has a food pantry or has connections with any religious charities. these resources are often most accessible in cities, suburbs, metropolitan areas and big towns, but there might be some food pantries in your small town that you don't know about too! if anyone else knows of reliable resources add them!!
even if you don't need extra resources it might save your ass or a loved one, with how unstable the political climate is these days, to familiarize yourself with the resources your community has to offer! also, it's a great idea to get to know your neighbors and see if they need any resources! our country is going to shit and we need to look out for our neighbors, we need to come together. none of your neighbors are expendable. they are people. don't let a single one fall victim to this administration, raise hell if they do!
This is the time of year to go to food banks and pickups if you need to!!! There's usually an overstock of fresh produce that you can can or freeze for winter prep. Last year I needed the free food. There's no shame in it!
I love fishes and women. @eclepus - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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