#transgender issues

[fongus-the-ninth]

[gingersnapwolves]

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

[mohammedmtargaza]

THE WAR IS OVER BUT PEACE FEELS COLD

TWO YEARS OF HUNGER TWO YEARS OF CRIES

NOW SILENCE SINGS WHERE HOPE ONCE LIES

THE NIGHT STILL WEEPS THE EARTH STILL BLEEDS

AND BROKEN HEARTS STILL BEAR THE PAIN

CARRYING FIRE OUR SOULS AWAKEN

BUT THROUGH THE RUINS WE'LL WALK UNSHAKEN

YET FROM THE SORROW NEW LIFE PROCEEDS

My message to you from Gaza

Please help us, I am speaking to you from Gaza. We are in Gaza. The war has exhausted us and hunger has killed our children. We would like you to help us start a decent life and through your assistance we can provide everything the family needs from food, drink and clothing.

Please help. I have no choice but to help you. Give me some time to document what happened to us. Please, Consider me your little brother who seeks your help

To watch more videos, follow me on TikTok. Please

👉TikTok link

TRUTH WAS BURIED WITH THOSE WHO TRIED

Transferring the image to the world

THEIR CAMERAS CRUSHED THEIR VOICES DIED

Please be my voice to convey the image to the world, perhaps someone will want to support me even with a word.

👉 Vetted by @gazavetters ,

my number verified on the list is (#533) ✔️

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With all my love for your help

👉If you would like to help us start a new life

Donation link 🙏

👉 Family post

If you cannot do or offer anything, share this appeal with your brothers, your friends, and everyone you know who is capable. Share what you can.

[punkrock-loser]

if you talk about trans men, you have to talk about the trans part and you have to talk about the man part.

you only talk about us being men when you want to portray us as violent and misogynistic and privileged. you remove the trans to make it look like you're punching up, and that we don't actually face any oppression, that we're actually the oppressors, we don't face anything women face and why would we ever need to be in a "woman's" space?

you only talk about us being trans when you want to portray us as stupid females who shouldn't have access to HRT, as whiny theyfabs, as transtrenders or AFAB TMEs who are encroaching on your community. you remove the man when you want to say we only face the regular sorts of oppression and we should shut up in our own community because we have AFAB privilege and you don't want to talk to stupid cunts like us

[getgored]

Reasons why we need more Transgender and queer awareness in medical fields/medical training:

My physician told me i have benign tumors in my internal sex organs, she said it has to be surgically removed but that it may result in part of my organs being removed also, leading to me being infertile.

She, however, went on to say that because i was transgender it wouldn't be a big deal if i were to lose those organs.

Losing those sex organs is a RISK of surgery. Any risk, regardless of how I identify or of i was going to remove those organs anyways, should be treated as a REAL RISK.

I hope to god my surgeon won't also think like this, because I think any part of my body, even parts of my body i may or may not remove in the future, are worth saving. If my specialists arent going to put in the effort to save them just because of their assumptions of me, based on the fact that im trans, then they should not be practicing medicine on me or anyone else.

[tathrin]

Why Are Some Democrats Backing MAGA's Anti-LGBTQ+ Censorship?

From late-night host cancellations to removing LGBTQ+ history from government sites, politicians in both parties are contributing to the ove

One of the clearest and most effective write-ups I've seen on this shit so far, in case you need a good article to throw at people.

[lgbtqiatext]

[disclaimeriamaloser]

here’s my stance on some of the discourse going on right now relating to trans people.

trans women/transfemmes/nonbinary people face a unique axis and intersection of oppression, which is transmisogyny.

trans men/transmascs/nonbinary people face a unique axis and intersection of oppression, which is transandrophobia.

transmisogyny negatively affects everyone, even more so all trans people, but the main targets of transmisogyny are trans women/transfemmes/nonbinary people.

transandrophobia negatively affects everyone, even more so all trans people, but the main targets of transandrophobia are trans men/transmascs/nonbinary people.

nonbinary and intersex people are often completely left out of these conversations, which is one of the reasons I don’t think TME/TMA is a useful binary. This post does a spectacular job of explaining why it’s intersexist.

regardless, no matter if you’re trans, cis, both, neither, transmasc, transfemme, nonbinary, intersex, anything else, you NEED to fight against transmisogyny, transandrophobia, exorsexism, and intersexism.

We cannot let the few people within the trans community who perpetuate this stuff turn us against each other. In reality, very few trans women/transfemmes/nonbinary people are transandrophobic and very few trans men/transmascs/nonbinary people are transmisogynistic. We NEED to continue to uplift each other voices, continue to support each other, and fuck each and every transphobe in the entire goddamn world.