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@storytellersnek
Did I tell y'all that while I was waiting outside in line before we could go inside the venue I saw a guy wearing a Taylor Swift battle vest... I'm not kidding. It was completely covered in Taylor Swift patches and stuff. Not exactly something you'd expect to see at a Ghost ritual.
i think i just got hit over the head with hammers
That nonsexual intimacy of just being in each other's spaces, of gravitating towards each other, always subconsciously reaching out to each other. Finding comfort and satisfaction in being close to each other, breathing each other in, existing together.
It is so annoying when people respond to "the queer community has an anti-masc problem" with "well society loves and praises masculinity!" Okay... yes... but that's not what we're talking about 😭 The queer community ≠ society as a whole. Also? The society that praises masculinity does NOT praise queer masculinity. Cishet society does not praise butches, masculine trans people, or anyone who is masc in a queer way. And unfortunately, many queer people have this same problem.
#also a lot of people in the community will label anyone with like. a beard 'masc'#which is So Incorrect
Hey get back here! You're not hiding that in the tags!!!
Transcript of the stitch:, because I think y'all need to see this:
“So I have a degree in African American studies, and I… don’t think people understand the vast amount of money produced by American slavery. By 1860 the four million enslaved people in the United States were worth about four billion dollars. And that’s not adjusted for today’s money, that’s FOUR BILLION DOLLARS in 1860! And that’s just the value of the people. That’s not the value of what they produced- tobacco cotton sugar cane. The U.S. South was producing sixty percent of the world’s cotton by the late 1800s.
The amount of millionaire families, the start of BILLION dollar industries- with a B. Besos money. There are whole families, whole towns, that are still rich hundreds of years later. Still. Y’all have no idea.”
A lot of my writing posts that are intended to be reassuring/motivating tend to get comments like “Okay but mine is actually just an exception and everything I make sucks haha”
And I just
No
I absolutely refuse to accept that you’ve never done anything even remotely passable in your life ever. You’re not shit. You’re not incapable of creating anything good. You’re a typical average hobbyist with self-deprecation issues and imposter syndrome. Chill the F out
If you genuinely, honestly believe that you’ve never made anything of acceptable quality in your entire life, explore that. Why do you feel that way? What’s something that you feel lowers the quality of your work? What standard are you not meeting? Turn it into something actionable and go through some trial and error. Maybe it’s not about your work at all, and you need to work on yourself first. Do that
You would never talk about any other aspiring writer the way you did about yourself. Why are you any different? Why do you uniquely deserve horrible things being said about you online? That’s not something we should be tolerating, even from ourselves. The only times we want to hear those things about ourselves is when we’re talking through our feelings in order to express ourselves and make headway in bettering ourselves. Not as some shitty punchline. Not as some self-hate soapbox. This is not a healthy or appropriate way to talk about anyone, and you’re anyone, so be a bit goddamn nicer to yourself while you’re at it
my craziest take is you can be cis in a trans way if you feel like it. Like its literally no big deal. if you wanna be completely cisgender but still feel as if you're alienated from your agab then you can be cis in a trans way
you can be cis and give yourself other pronouns too. you can be a woman who's he/him and entirely femme. who cares. Literally who cares
THERE IS OVERLAP AND COMMUNITY IN EVERYTHING
so i guess today i disrupted the UN "ai for good" summit and got arrested with a friend
our statement that was published shortly after explains more of the specific motivations (we have since been released and are both exhausted on our way home)
(i can't add a second video to a post so a twitter link is the best i can do)
statement transcript:
Hi, we are maia arson crimew and freya. If you are seeing this video, we have most likely been arrested protesting the UN AI for Good summit in Geneva, the birthplace of the Geneva Conventions.
With this event hosted by Switzerland and the UN, Big Tech and AI companies — such as Google, Amazon, Palantir and Microsoft — are invited to whitewash their complicity in the AI-powered genocide in Palestine.
While the US and Europe provide the financial backing, Big Tech infrastructure actively enables the surveillance, the targeting and strategic erasure of the Palestinian people. This would not be possible without their assistance.
With this hypocritical event, the UN not only contradicts its own reports, but actively enables violations of international law. Just half a year ago, Switzerland was appointed by the UN to host a conference to uphold the Geneva Conventions on the Protection of Civilians in the occupied Palestinian territory. Because of so-called "stakeholder disagreements", the event was cancelled. By now hosting and platforming parties that are complicit in the Palestinian genocide, Switzerland is actively positioning itself contradicting its neutrality position.
We will not be silent in a genocide. You cannot be neutral in a genocide.
So I've got this friend whose nervous because she's trans and dating this guy who she hasn't told yet because they've only been on a two dates. For this story let's call the friend Jane and the guy she was dating Jason. Happy ending don't worry.
So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I'm having and she can tell him she's trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful.
She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro's reaction when she tells him she's trans, and that she understands if he doesn't want to keep dating her it's no big deal.
He's baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn't had bottom surgery yet...
"Oh you have a dick?"
"... yeah."
He look's around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says
"Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don't worry Babe! Watch this!"
And ya'll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride.
My mans saw his worried girlfriend and her support network and thought to him self "Oh they don't think I can't please my girl, but I'll show them!"
I do feel the need to add that later he excitedly tell the group that as a straight guy, he never thought that skill would be useful outside hotdog eating contests.
"Man its too bad that im straight since I've got like no gag reflex and all."
"Honey, I must tell you, i am in fact trans and I have not had bottom surgery."
"My god... everything's coming up Jason."
“Man its too bad that
im straight since I’ve got like no
gag reflex and all.”
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
To my Ghesties going to Madison Square Garden tonight ---
Sing your godforsaken lungs out and do Papa Perpetua so friggin proud. We lost the Prince Of Darkness today and you know he's gonna be feeling it.
Hell, a lot of us are feeling it.
So do yourself and your fellow Ghesties - near and far - a favor: put your arms around each other and LIVE IN THE MOMENT.
To quote our late Sister Imperator:
"WHEN THE GUITARS ARE TUNED AND THE GHOULS BEGIN THEIR INVOCATIONS, THERE IS ONLY ONE THING LEFT TO DO: SHAKE OFF YOUR SLACK SOCIAL MEDIA CHAINS - YOUR CHEAP HUNGER FOR SCANDAL AND RUMOR! WHEN THE FIRST CHORD IS STRUCK, YOU WILL TURN TO YOUR NEIGHBOR NEXT TO YOU, IN THE FLESH, PUT YOUR ARM AROUND THEM, AND TAKE BACK YOUR HUMANITY!!"
Transfems read this thread
Biological anthropologist here: TERFs are dead wrong about estrogen/testosterone not changing the skeleton. They do so much to the skeleton we had to completely reassess one of the ways we estimate the biological sex of skeletons.
So, before the advent of cross-sex hormone therapy, one of the surefire ways to ID a biologically female skeleton of a person who had borne children (this is important) was by looking for pits of parturition. These form when the estrogen surge during late pregnancy tells your pelvic ligaments to loosen up in order to fit the baby’s massive head through the birth canal. Your pelvis starts to s There’s hypothetically only one normally occurring biological reason for a body to give that signal, and since you have to be nominally XX (or some variant of that where you can still carry a pregnancy to term), it was a pretty solid shorthand for sex!
Until we started looking for these things outside of female skeletons, and surprise! “Male” skeletons can have them too! Sometimes these are chromosomal variants, sometimes they’re men with a high estrogen or estrogen-esque hormonal component, and in the modern era? Sometimes these are trans women whose skeletons have undergone hormonal changes due to taking estrogen.
And then there’s testosterone. You know what that does, right. It makes it easier to build muscle. But what THAT does is put new and interesting stresses and pressures on the bones, making them more rugged and in line with the skeletal structure we see in people who have had high testosterone their entire lives. We don’t just see this in trans men- we see this in older cis women too. Once your estrogen production tanks after menopause, we see what we call masculinization of the face, where the features get more rugged and robust as tissue production changes. These changes don’t happen overnight, and we don’t have good data (yet) but my guess is that when we start looking at the skeletal remains of trans men who took T throughout their adult lives, their skulls are gonna look pretty damn masculine.
Now, hormone therapy isn’t going to change every aspect of your skeleton. Estrogen in particular doesn’t do too much to the cranial bones. Your skeletal height and limb length are unlikely to change. Things like the size and shape of the pelvic inlet, the sciatic notch, and other features that are used in sex estimation, are also unlikely to change. Professional anthropological sex estimation is a complex calculus where you look at many, many features of the skeleton to make the best possible estimation of what sex the person was. It has nothing to do with gender or gender presentation. It simply tells us the end result of your hormonal composition during life. So long as you’re taking hormones regularly for a while and giving your body a chance to change and grow, your skeleton WILL undergo changes based on your hormone levels.
Hey, one anth to another: I'd love to read some of this literature, do you have any reccs? Cause I always figured that hormones would change things like bone density and possibly some of the shape, but after fusing and ossification they cant change things like the sciatic notch and the bowl shape of the pelvis and whatnot. Because I know that in grad school we did learn about the pits of partirition but as like an outdated thing that isn't very useful for sex ID anymore (if anyone's wondering, these are the source of that "pregnancy leaves notches on your pelvis" post that was going around tumblr a few years back. It isn't true.). Tho I'd love to see a study on the hands thing the op mentioned. Like I know a lot about the skeleton at this point and I'd love to know how that happened. Was it remodeling? Did the hormones somehow "reactivate" the ephyphesys? Change the bone ossification? Or was it all soft tissue? Because we do know that males and females have different proportions to their fingers vs palms (that's how the handprint paintings in caves were IDd as done by women.), but is it bone or soft tissue? Idk man it's just really interesting.
Yeah! Fair warning, a lot of these papers use terms that the trans community no longer sees as appropriate. The language standards that the medical community uses are not the same as the trans community at large (I’m sure any trans person can tell you that!) so you’ll see terms like “transsexual” a lot.
The TL:DR from all of this: there is good evidence for skeletal changes during adult-initiated HRT. We know that these changes occur, but there isn’t a whole lot of literature about exactly what occurs. Many of these changes are minute and you may not see them in a living trans human, but are more discernible in a skeleton. We need to study this more.
Introductory Stuff
A nice Sapiens article proposing how to improve trans visibility within bioarchaeology/forensics: https://www.sapiens.org/biology/transgender-intersex-forensic-anthropology/
Why it’s important to be able to talk about the bodily changes trans people go through as an anthropologist: https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/1409
Studies of skeletal development in trans people taking hormones
Bone health as a part of trans healthcare: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S8756328208007722?casa_token=Q0yyPHewOLIAAAAA:f6VKhwq1uVylVHkVZtAX6c-t3WADx8aaymmIWtiUeci1dqVuYAMH9OXn2ofmm4T1thKw5dkutuw
Hormones and bone density: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2265.1998.00396.x?casa_token=o2l0Y9Nt4qoAAAAA:tO3_aIeM4RqBE0xyNpC8Ns8d7vipYNFzsdMdaX5ZcodO9JShKdEkh-Vw-66FKJAW13bDG2pCCKKUYeyc
Interesting paper on pelvic morphology changes: https://asbmr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbmr.4262
(this one’s about people who started HRT before 18, but it’s still a really interesting read even if it isn’t directly applicable to OP’s situation since they transitioned as an adult)
10 year bone health study in transgender individuals: https://asbmr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbmr.3612
Not hormones, but stuff on how FFS affects skeletal remains: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32200173/
Ok, so we’ve identified that there ARE bone changes. How does muscle affect bone structure?
Explains the bone/muscle relationship in typical cis men and typical cis women: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3189615/ (Note: by typical, we mean that their hormones are generally within the range that’s expected for their chromosomal composition.)
Comparing trans men on long-term HRT to cis women of the same age and looking at bone mass, body composition, etc: https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/97/7/2503/2834495
Facial masculinization of the female cranium with age: https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/5250/NAPARSTEK-THESIS-2014.pdf?sequence=1
Cranial remodeling with age: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joa.12247
(The aging stuff is important because hormonal composition changes drastically with age and it’s a useful analogue, if not direct analogy.)
Some interesting reads on the relationship between sex hormones and cartilage
Estrogen and osteoarthritis (aka cartilage loss): https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/5/2767/htm
More sex hormones and osteoarthritis: https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.27.1_supplement.1053.15
Generally speaking, HRT isn’t going to do too much to the cartilage. If you think your nose looks different, it’s probably because you’re seeing it in a new context since the fat deposits on your face rearrange themselves. They’re very close to the surface, after all.
Pelvic Scarring and how it’s not strictly based in pregnancy
Oops we found it in men: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.2887
It’s also found in women who have never given birth: https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/8481/GALEA-THESIS-2018.pdf?sequence=1
Identifying transgender people within archaeology
https://miami.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/the-fallacy-of-the-transgender-skeleton (good read on how human sexual dimorphism... isn’t. The spectrum of traits overlaps too much.)
surgery piece: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073820300827?casa_token=jy_vbV7_fXkAAAAA:nz2d-xCUT-JoYACam3CDliKmto1UFkB8-ft837QzSpjLZJ0uiH5DHNSH7M_fG_b5XWsln3yZZKk
As for the mechanism, it’s a combination of remodeling and changes in bone density. The bones don’t unfuse, so you’re basically stuck with the same structure, just with different sizes and densities. This is more notable in trans men- they can lose some height from bone density loss if they’re not careful. It’s usually not a lot and isn’t as noticeable in living people as it is in skeletons, because there’s a lot more tissue to you than just bone! It’s the same mechanism that happens in cis women with osteoporosis. Fortunately, most endocrinologists take that into consideration these days.
Right now, most of the research on skeletal changes is focusing on FFS because it’s much more visible and dramatic. There’s a lot of reasons we don’t really understand everything that HRT does to the skeleton- we know a lot of it, but not everything- and how any of it shows up in the archaeological record. One of them is that HRT is relatively new and we don’t have the representation in skeletal collections. Another is that most of our standards are written based on studying white people, and while you can’t truly identify race from a skeleton, you can associate a skeleton with certain genetic groups based on suites of traits. By only including white skeletons in a study, you miss out on a TON of variation.
I know this is a little disjointed, but I think it’ll help as a starting place for people interested in doing more research on the relationship between HRT and the human skeleton and how we can see some of these changes in the archaeological or forensic context!
Amazing list of resources, and as a biologist in training imma take a dive into these.
But a friendly reminder: the key ingredient of HRT is PATIENCE. I've already read a lot of studies, and most seem inconclusive, but all agree on one thing: time on HRT (with appropriate levels) supercedes the majority of other factors involved with feminization/masculinization. Don't let someone tell you you're "done" at one year, two years, five years.... this is lifelong. Your body will adapt to the hormones it currently has at the age it is. Let it do that, and give it the time to do so.
Oh wow it was me seeing this thread all along
But uh yeah bump for visibility
i’m fucking ozzy osbourne, the prince of fucking darkness.(rest well, old man)
The six largest health insurers reported more than $1 trillion in revenue and more than $31 billion in net income last year — and are now pushing to raise Americans’ premiums by as much as 66 percent for some policies, according to recent state regulatory filings reported on by @JacobinMag. Those increases come as insurers dole out billions on stock buybacks and dividends that help drive up CEO compensation and line the pockets of investors. Meanwhile, Trump's budget bill will strip millions of Americans of their health coverage and lead to the closing of hospitals (particularly in rural areas). We do not have to keep living like this.
Ozzy Osbourne at home in his garden. 19th August 1978
“when you find the right person you’ll change your mind about having kids” WRONG 👎❌ the right person doesn’t want kids either
