so do people know that multiple trans people across the US have reported that their pharmacists have arbitrarily denied them testosterone prescriptions, either because "you need authorization" or "company policy" or, in states where its legal, because they don't feel comfortable giving it to them.
i wouldn't be surprised if its also common for this to happen with estrogen, i found one news story on a trans woman experiencing this, but looking it up there seems to be a LOT of cases of this happening with testosterone. which makes me suspect people feel empowered to do this with T in particular because of its criminalized status. regardless, i do not see this brought up much! and i think we should discuss it more, at the very least to prepare people in case they experience this, so they know how to handle the situation.
examples below the cut for length:
Walgreens says pharmacist was uncomfortable with injection method
For Tristan Martin, a 34-year-old trans man living in North Austin, that fear became a reality last week when a Walgreens pharmacist refused to fill his testosterone prescription.
Martin says his pharmacist’s explanation for not filling his prescription was that she was uncomfortable with the doctor’s instruction that the medicine be administered subcutaneously, meaning as a shallow injection under the skin. But, as Martin explained to the pharmacist, he’s taken the same meds for four years, with the same method, and never heard such an objection. Plus, Martin said that the pharmacist was only being asked to provide the testosterone itself, not the equipment necessary to administer it. He later attempted to reach Walgreens’ pharmacy department and store manager to ask about the situation but wasn’t able to reach anyone and never got any calls back.
A store employee told the Chronicle they could not address the dispute. Tristan’s wife, Hayden Martin, said she received an apology from a Walgreens regional healthcare supervisor, after the supervisor contacted her on May 23. “He said there was absolutely wrongdoing and that it’s going to get figured out,” Hayden said. “He said he was going to reach out to the higher-ups and he’s going to let me know by Friday what happens.”
Hayden Martin told us she was able to contact the pharmacist in question two days after the refusal to fill the prescription. “She would not give a reason as to why she felt the doctor was wrong,” Hayden said. “And she said, ‘I’m not comfortable filling it for ‘her.’ So automatically the assumption is that it’s just an issue of her not being comfortable with the fact that it’s testosterone for a trans man. So I, of course, asked her if this was the reason – because he’s a trans man – and she got very defensive and denied it. And then I tried asking for her name and her license number and she said, ‘Well, that’s not important information.’”
Walgreens Pharmacist Denies Gender Affirming Meds, But Other Options Exist
Recently, one of our readers, who wishes to go unnamed, sent us the following email:
On the 24th when I went to pick up my testosterone prescription at the Walgreens on Lomas & Carlisle, I was asked by the pharmacist why I took it, and when I told him it was gender affirming, he told me he wouldn’t fill it going forward… I want other trans+ folks in our neighborhood to know that this is not a safe pharmacy (I don’t regret reacting by sobbing loudly in the middle of a Walgreens, but I don’t want anyone else to have to go through that), and I want all our cis neighbors to know that this is a thing that is happening.
We reached out to the Walgreens location, and the person who answered (and who we will keep anonymous) confirmed that there is a pharmacist on staff who refuses to fill prescriptions for gender affirming medication due to their beliefs. However, they clarified that other pharmacists at the location would fill a gender affirming prescription if they were on duty, or the prescription could be filled at other Walgreens locations. Unfortunately, they were not able to provide further information as to the pharmacist’s name or when their shifts might be.
A year after KC investigation, another trans customer turned away from Costco pharmacy
The city’s Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity Department launched an investigation in October 2022 after a Star report about five transgender and nonbinary people who said they were denied their prescribed testosterone at the pharmacy. Costco denied the allegations. [...]
Dave, whose name has been changed in this story to protect his identity as a transgender man, was grocery shopping at the Linwood Boulevard Costco on Monday when he decided to pick up some syringes.
Dave has used insulin syringes for years to take his prescribed testosterone — their thin needles make his regular injections less painful.
These small syringes don’t require a prescription, making them easy to obtain — and Costco offers a bulk pack of 100 at a nice discount compared to other pharmacies.
At first, the transaction was painless: Dave asked for a pack of syringes and an employee asked him his preferred size and gauge. But when he mentioned that he uses them to inject testosterone, the tone of the conversation shifted abruptly.
“They got weird about it,” Dave said. “The pharmacist, I guess, overheard and she came out and she’s like, this won’t work for testosterone.”
Dave explained that he has used these syringes for his testosterone injections for years — and has even bought the same syringes at that Costco pharmacy before for the same purpose.
Insulin syringes are regularly used to inject low doses of testosterone. But despite being an over-the-counter product, the pharmacist insisted that Dave needed a prescription before she would sell them to him.
“She’s like, well, we won’t sell it to you unless you have your doctor call it in,” Dave recalled. He stepped aside to call his doctor’s office, but they were closed for Monday’s holiday. “I didn’t feel like arguing (with the pharmacist). So I just left.”
An assistant general manager at the Linwood Costco said Wednesday that he was not aware of the incident and couldn’t comment on it.
A pharmacy employee said that she and her coworkers are not authorized to speak to the media. A request for comment from Costco’s corporate office was not immediately answered.
Dave called the Missouri Pharmacy Board Tuesday and was told that syringes only require a prescription if they bear the label “for Rx only,” which his syringes didn’t.
Beyond that, he said he was told that the state gives pharmacists discretion over what they choose to dispense, as long as they don’t violate federal anti-discrimination laws.
On a Saturday night two years ago, Stann Fransisco was driving back home to New Mexico after visiting their parents ...
“Criminalization has made it easy for pharmacists to deny my [testosterone] prescription, which has happened to me many times,” Artemis McGettigan, a trans student in Dearborn, Michigan, told Filter. “[Pharmacists] have told me in the past that ‘It’s corporate policy, they’re not allowed to fill that type of prescription … but I knew that was false because other CVS locations, for example, were able to fill it.” A CVS media representative told Filter that its policies “do not prohibit our pharmacies from filling testosterone prescriptions.”
CVS Pharmacist refused to fill my T
I have been on T for coming up on 3 years. I’ve never had any problems with any pharmacy I’ve gone to. I recently had to switch pharmacies and for over two weeks this pharmacist at CVS has given me the run around. “I need to talk with your doctor about why you need it” (which I’ve never had happen before). And then the next day would say “I need prior auth”. It’s been so long without my T that my period came back today and I am freaking out. So I sent a very frantic message to my doctors office. They called me about an hour later telling me the pharmacist sounded fishy and said “I’m not comfortable filling this prescription.” Ok? Your job isn’t to judge my prescription your job is to give me the medication my doctor decided I needed. The doctors office was nice enough to transfer everything to a different CVS close by and even apologized for not getting the pharmacists name. We did call to get his name. My partner is very nice and called corporate to file a complaint and the corporate pharmacist on the phone said that they do have grounds to deny a prescription only if there is not enough info or it’s fake. So they reported it as discrimination. Unfortunately I can’t take legal action or I would. Sorry this is more of a rant than anything. This should be illegal and nobody should work in healthcare if they’re going to gate-keep health. I truly hope this man gets fired. I’m trying to file a report to the state board of pharmacists because he can have his license revoked for discrimination. Thanks for listening.
My pharmacy tried to deny me my testosterone
So I called in my prescription on the 2nd and they told me that it would be ready on the 5th. It’s the 8th today so I called and asked if it was ready yet and the pharmacist told me I needed prior authorization and that my insurance wouldn’t cover it. Thing is, my insurance has covered it for the past two months, which is when I first started T. The pharmacist told me to call my doctor and get the authorization so I did and my doctor said that there’s no issues on her end, no authorization needed, and that my insurance still covers my prescription so she’s not sure why he would say that. I end up calling them back and end up speaking to the lady who took my original prescription and she was like “Oh my god. I don’t know why he said that to you. I’m seeing a refill request but nothing that requires an authorization. I’m gonna send this in today and it should be ready by Friday”. I think it’s hilarious too that when I told him my name, he was like “oh you’re (my grandparent’s names) granddaughter!”
CVS for years refused to sell me the needles I need for my T injections (prescription was not required, but they lied and said one was), would say they were out of stock (not when I see the box right there), loudly asked why I need my T when other patient convos were done quietly or not at all, deliberately gave me insulin needles (I need much larger) or sometimes only 1 needle for a multi-dose prescription. (Even for 1 dose, you should have at least 2 needles -- one to draw with and one to inject.) They also "dropped" my vial a few times.
Any one of these could be ignorance/accidents, but these each happened multiple times from 3 locations.
If your clinic does its own dispensing, I highly recommend switching to that for your prescription. If you are worried about needles, get your provider to include the needle info on the scrip. And if you *really* have issues with the needles, buy them in bulk online.
Picking up from @verkool’s post showing George Martin in drag. From a modern perspective, it’s easy to lose sight of the way cross-dressing, for cis men, was often very straight-coded in 20th-century Britain.
There’s a long tradition of male comedians playing female roles in British Christmas pantomime shows: the pantomime dame is a huge British theatrical tradition. It feeds into British sketch comedy (just think how often the Monty Python team play women) and was a staple of mainstream British light entertainment. And that fed into non-professional comedy too. The George Martin photo shows him performing a skit his time in the Fleet Air Arm during the war, and was the kind of thing you could expect to see at any soldiers’ entertainment.
Rochelle Sherona and Clive Rowe in the Hackney Empire’s Christmas pantomime in 2021. Rowe has played Hackney’s pantomime dame for 30 years, and was nominated for a BAFTA for it. John’s Thisbe wig is clearly in the same tradition.
It varies hugely, but those performances often enforced gender definitions rather than pushing them. “Man in a dress” jokes affirm heterosexuality: look how big and butch he looks in this frilly outfit! In George Martin’s wartime skit, I’d guess that he was picked to play the ballerina because he was so tall, and therefore less girly. We know Paul was considered for Thisbe in the Shakespeare sketch, before he and John swapped roles. I suspect that’s because John made it look straight-coded, where Paul’s androgyny might have landed differently. But John is definitely ticking some of those “affirming heterosexuality” boxes: it’s why his dress is cut to show off his “manly” biceps. (I think it’s quite likely that Paul’s Hamburg pink nightie was straight-coded too. Sorry.)
In 20th-century Britain, this was assumed to be straight.
Of course, some of the men putting on dresses for entertainment were queer. The comic tradition gave them plausible deniability, as well as space to play with gender. Scottish comedian Stanley Baxter, one of the biggest names in British light entertainment in the 1970s and 80s, was celebrated for playing female roles (the queen and Marlene Dietrich were favourites). He came out in 2020, at the age of 94. He’s a good example of how drag could read as Very Much Not Queer in 20th-century Britain. Baxter presented as straight: he was married, had an understanding with his wife, and was very protective of his personal life. In the 1990s, he was offered a role in the Harry Potter movies, but turned it down because he feared that it would lead to tabloid attention and being outed. That was too big a risk, but drag was safe.
At least one of these looks was scandalous.
We know that Paul considered drag for his Gotta Dance routine, and I’ve seen tumblr framing that as “what we missed”. But by the standards of the time, the routine he did was odder and riskier, because it doesn’t fit into the man-in-a-dress framework. For comparison: a friend told me that her dad harrumphed when he first saw Marc Almond on television. Almond’s black polo neck and eyeliner read as blatantly queer - where a full drag outfit wouldn’t scandalise homophobic audiences, because it could be framed as a joke. (This suggests why the Beatle moptop, which looks pretty short to me, was scandalously gender-bending. Going slightly over the line can be more shocking than something more extreme, because it can’t be passed off as comedy.)
This didn’t necessarily travel. When Queen did the video for I Want To Break Free in 1984, they decided to do drag based on long-running British soap opera Coronation Street. In Britain, nobody batted an eyelid: that’s a standard comedy routine, nothing to see here. (If anything, the Nijinsky-inspired ballet sequences were more obviously queer, and sheltered by the drag.) But it read very differently in the US. “All around the world people laughed and they got the joke and they sort of understood it,’ May said in 2010. “I remember being on the promo tour in the Midwest of America and people’s faces turning ashen and they would say, ‘No, we can’t play this. We can’t possibly play this. You know, it looks homosexual.’”
Which makes me wonder about the cheerleader drag that the men of Wings wore in New Orleans in 1975. That lineup was mostly British (Paul, Denny, Jimmy McCoullough), so they’d all have grown up with this comic tradition. But they wore those outfits in America. Did they know the difference (as Brian May clearly didn’t)? What was the reaction in New Orleans? Was it what they expected? Was it what they wanted?
watching people on this post give the absolute worst advice about photos at protests is why I play avoid-the-camera so diligently and I am prepared to smash cameras at all times
part of my role is going to people and gently saying "hey please stop taking photos of people without their consent. that can be dangerous for the people in the photos and you were asked not to at the start of the rally/march" and I have had people threaten to punch me over it so........
just stop taking photos. I don't care if they're "just for you" or if you "plan to redact them" you have no idea what situation someone is in and your photos will never be secure. if you want to take a photo just ask people in it first.
and of course they're always like "well what about those people taking photos" and I explain that "those people are known to our community and know who does and doesn't want a photo. people have already consented or not consented at past events to that person's photos and they know this" or "thanks for pointing that out I will talk to them too because they also should not be taking photos." this also, of course, does not solve the conflict and they continue taking photos anyways.
I have my own tactics for stopping photos when someone refuses that don't involve smashing cameras but they tend to escalate things anyways.
my personal philosophy is that. we as a society like to pretend that the human brain is a machine for extracting truth, when in fact it is a machine for keeping a monkey alive and happy (in that order), and human behavior needs to be understood through that lens
#a human brain is first and foremost made to use as little energy as possible while keeping you alive#so it will take all shortcuts necessary and looking for the truth is often too energy consuming - important addition from @maenara
Researchers are announcing that a 53-year-old man in Germany has been cured of HIV.
Referred to as “the Dusseldorf patient” to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.
Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.
Btw, privatization is stealing from *you.* You are the public in "publicly owned." Oligarchs are coming in to take the things we all share ownership of as Americans, like Medicare, Social Security, National Parks, PBS and scrapping them for parts they find profitable.
The right is planning to rob us and quite literally want us to thank them for the privilege by calling it "government efficiency."
there’s a decent amt of neurologists who’ve called the sleep schedules we’re obligated to be on despite flagrant conflict with our natural circadian rhythms “borderline torture” and the work hours we’re expected to put in despite the fact that the average person can only maintain maximal efficiency and focus for 3 hours at a time “nearly inhumane” and i think about that a lot
Donald Trump wants people to expose diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the federal government. The idea is already flopping.
The threat was loud and clear: Report your so-called “DEI” employees or else. What exactly “DEIA or similar ideologies” means is up in the air, but the message was out there. And so was the email address of the DEIA snitching hotline.
Fake emails quickly started to roll in. ‘I don’t care, fuck these McCarthyite bastards,” one BlueSky user said, with an screenshot attached of an email to the hotline where he ironically reported Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records.”
“Anyone have a script to fire off a billion e-mails an hour??” another user asked in the replies.
“Anyone can email anything of any size even if it crashes the site,” one X user noted.
The scope and effectiveness of this latest phase of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade remains to be seen.
Don't just spam it today. Keep spamming it until they shut it down. Spam it for weeks, months, however long it takes. Queue this post to reblog periodically to remind other people. Set reminders on your phone or calendar to send Trump bullshit. Treat this like a challenge and win it
Don't let the momentum die down. Don't allow the tipline to become useable in a few weeks when this post stops spreading. Don't allow them to harm vulnerable people on your watch
it does still make me insane specifically how many queer people lovingly embrace astrology. I went to a poetry workshop yesterday that was genuinely quite good but also included an option to disclose astrology designations during introductions and so many people broke out some variation of "I'm a [x] sum but I have a [y] placement and it SHOWS" girl no it doesn't. that's meaningless correlation you completely invented the causation
I'd say that rejecting biological determinism in favor of space gas determinism isn't the slay the astrology queers think it is but if I'm being completely honest I fear that many members of our community haven't even really rejected biological determinism so much as sprinkled a layer of glitter on it
This selection of words used as terms of endearment over the past thousand years shows several items that have stood the test of time, notably darling and dear, and some recurring motifs, such as those from the semantic fields of taste and the animal kingdom. But several belong to their own time: bawcock and bully, for example, are encountered in Shakespeare.
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
blakekathryn
areudirty
