a-crawling-chaos

[a-crawling-chaos]

[a-crawling-chaos]

All my haters become aligators when I activate my gatorinator.

[a-crawling-chaos]

“they were flirting with you” and how was i supposed to know such a thing when everyone speaks in codes and puzzles

[a-crawling-chaos]

the original!!!!!!!

me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

[a-crawling-chaos]

we have no sin to atone for.

we are not Sisyphus with the stone

of the weight you have put on our backs

we are not atlas with the world

that you make us carry on our shoulders

i refuse to carry the weight

of my world crumbling around me

i refuse to let your words crawl in and out of my ears like the writhing of a thousand locusts i refuse to be the author of your book of revelations i refuse i will not let you win.

we

have

no

sin

to

atone for.

we have the right to exist. the same way that you do. the air we breathe is not more shameful than that of your son's or daughter's simply because of the bodies we were born into. the corpses that float down the river are worth just as much as that of any king or god sent ruler. we do not have an obligation to spend our lives serving the sentence of a heinous villain simply because that is the box you put us in. we do not owe you ANYTHING. we have committed no crime, we have done nothing to be less than human in our short fucking existence on this earth and yet you paint us as the villain and the maiden, the monster and the innocent, the devil and the child and yet. and yet. those are nothing more than stories. nothing more than coffins that you have built with puppeted hands and nails of shame and contempt for a concept that you can not even comprehend. just because you dug our graves does not mean we have to play the role of a willing corpse. we do not owe you to be the bodies in the water, or the scared little lamb, or the rabid predator. we are human. that is all that we are. and all that we will be. we do not have to be perfect, we do not have to prove ourselves worthy of your approval or praise or acceptance. because you will NEVER see us as human. your corneas have been painted in the ink of your hate. they will only ever display the narrative you want to see. but that does not mean ours should be as well. we do not owe you hate, we do not owe you shame. you deserve nothing. not one prayer to your mindless god, not one more offering on the altar of your greed and despicable thoughts, you do not deserve my prayer. i am a teenage boy from some random ass suburb in a state nobody's heard of. i am someone's best friend. i am someone's boyfriend. i am someone's child. and this life that i have made for myself, that i love, should not be tainted with your bloody filter of filthy shame and atonement. i do not owe you perfection. my identity is not a sin to atone for.

[a-crawling-chaos]

"You can’t separate us, not unless we’re willing to do so."

[a-crawling-chaos]

Gertrude Robinson

[a-crawling-chaos]

clicking a pen over and over again is actually fun as fuck its a shame it makes everyone in a 30 foot radius want to kill me with a rock

[a-crawling-chaos]

[a-crawling-chaos]

fun thing about herding and/or generally neurotic breeds: they are really good at following rules you have instituted, but they will also make their own Dog Rules they will follow stringently whether or not you like it

[a-crawling-chaos]

[a-crawling-chaos]

Just tried to play an ancient flute and it started filling the room with this awful miasma that wont go away

[a-crawling-chaos]

I am whatever gender has the shortest line at the bathroom

[a-crawling-chaos]

There's an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.

A "playable state" would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.

I don't think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.

Any EU citizen is eligible to sign the initiative, but only once and if you mess up that's it. You can find it here. (https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en)

Even if you're not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don't care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.

[a-crawling-chaos]

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.

[a-crawling-chaos]

“Emotional abuse works like this: You are screamed at, and then, not knowing any better, you stand up for yourself. You think this is a way of being strong. You think this is a defense tactic.But this only provokes more screaming. Going silent provokes more screaming too, but usually it keeps the threats to the minimum. It keeps it just at screaming and not: a shove down the stairs, or order to pack your stuff and get out. So you learn how to go silent. How to play dead. How to cry without making a noise. How to swallow noise. How to wipe your cheeks, get out of the car, and go about your day. You learn. And when the screaming has stopped, when the two of you are in the car or out to dinner and they’re all smiles, all asking for favors, all questions, you are still hurt and annoyed and want to ask them, how? How can you speak to me like that? How can you pretend you did not say those things? How can you have forgotten? But you’ve learned. So you listen to, “Can I borrow your key”s and “how was your day”s and you play dead. You swallow the noise. And sometimes it doesn’t matter who is speaking to you, it doesn’t matter if they’re a friend, it doesn’t matter if their criticism is constructive, it doesn’t matter. You’ve learned. Any sort of speaking, any raising of the voice, any insult and you play dead.”

— Good Girl, Lora Mathis (via lora-mathis)

[a-crawling-chaos]

positivity train!

if you see this or are tagged in it, tag a couple of your favorite mutuals/blogs and let them know you appreciate seeing them on your dash!

@h0neysugarfree @blueberrylovv @bequiteanddriveeeeeee @cherri-bomb-bomb @eg0mechan1c @fatrexicisback