jadeserpentcladinashenglories

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Hello,

I hope you’re doing well! My name is Jaber, and I’m reaching out to ask for your support in helping me evacuate my wife, Menna, and our 2-year-old son, Hashem, from Gaza. They are currently stuck in an extremely difficult situation due to the war, and I am desperate to find a way to save them and ensure their safety so we can be together again.

I also lost the small business I built with my brother due to the bombings, so I am trying to rebuild our lives from scratch. If you could take a moment to check out our campaign, perhaps share it or donate, it would mean the world to us. Our previous campaign was closed, and the funds were returned to you because of internet outages and not responding to the inquiry email 😔.

Thank you so much for your support 💖

(Verified campaign – please check the details at the end of the story).

I wasn't remotely expecting to get reached out to myself (this blog is tiny), but... Here we are. Can't help directly, unfortunately, but I can at least get it in front of the few people following me?

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

I just accidentally made un-tea?????

I made green tea, but I forgot there was an old bag of chai in the kettle, so I mixed chai water with decaf green tea, then I mixed in like a half table spoon or something of that honey from the dollar store that they aren't legally allowed to call honey because there's too much corn syrup in it and some almond milk and a single drop of coffee creamer because we ran out and???? It tastes like??? Nothing????

It has LESS flavor than my tap water! HOW do you EVEN-

I think I made a flavor that's only perceptible to shrimp, that's the only explanation

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

UK ADULTS IT IS TIME AGAIN TO SHOUT AT YOUR MP.

It is about that Wes Streeting plans to make the ban on puberty blockers for specifically trans children and not cis children undergoing precocious puberty permanent.

Advice on what to put in your letter, with sources, is available here:

You can and should personalise it as much as possible, but there's nothing wrong with C&Ping most of the text from the doc and adding a couple of sentences on your own experience/views.

Mine, below the cut:

I am writing to you to ask you to oppose the permanent ban on puberty blockers, for the following reasons:

The ban was implemented by the previous and current Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in an apparent response to the Cass Review, which itself did not directly call for such a ban;

The review however marked all observational studies as poor and itself only conducted a systematic review, which under the GRADE II methodology is classed as very poor, as has been noted by a Yale study on the metholody of the review;

According to NHS figures, a typical waiting time for a child to be seen by a gender specialist is 6 years. If they turn 18 before being seen, they then progress to adult services, where they face another 6+ year long waiting list (this information was obtained via a freedom of information request to the NHS https://docs.google.com/document/d/1neOdLdAPHD6wTikLi9s7Y1AFxrOR9FZQjoMvxKIyJGk/edit?tab=t.0).

The inability to access timely treatment, even for serious cases, leads many to obtain puberty blockers via private healthcare, an avenue of access that has now been removed by the ban.

The ban therefore currently leaves transgender children with no medical treatment options for gender dysphoria within the UK, forcing those who can afford it, to take their children overseas for treatment, and leaving those who can’t with no medical pathway.

As a transgender adult, I am well aware of the acute, often suicidal distress suffered by transgender children undergoing a puberty which does not align with their experience of their own gender. It is not inconceivable that blocking transgender children from accessing this healthcare will increase suicide rates in this group.

A preprint paper by Goldsmiths lecturer Dr Natacha Kennedy (Kennedy, 2024) examines the effects of the ban, using a survey for the parents of young transgender people after the ban was implemented. The parents responding to the survey commented that the ruling seemed to have emboldened transphobes, particularly transphobic politicians and media, by making transphobia more respectable:

“She feels as though the government and media hates her. It’s disgusting that our country is doing this to children.”

As part of this, there has been an increase in delegitimizing language, such as referring to transgender children as ‘gender questioning’:

“It seems since the ban following the Cass Review that it has given politicians, the government, the press and public endorsement to try to further reduce trans youths’ rights and even the word ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’ is being removed from the narrative and there seems to be an erasure of using the word ‘trans’ for youth and it has been replaced with Gender Questioning Children. My child is not gender questioning, they are transgender and have been out for over 9 years and living as themselves. They know who they are and it hurts terribly when people doubt that or don’t accept it.”

The results of the survey show the lack of treatment options has already had a horrifying effect on children and young people’s mental health. Parents noted:

“I have a child who has been suicidal, self-harming and has been unable to leave the house.”

“My child was suicidal and has self-harmed many times as a way to express her emotional distress at the change in her access to gender affirming care.”

“Distraught. Devastated. Distressed. She had already been through the experience of having her healthcare access stopped after the Bell judgement - she had been due to start blockers that week and they were instantly stopped. This deeply affected her trust in adults responsible for her care, and had a knock on effect on relationships with teachers, club leaders, the GP etc.”

The paper also shows that parents and families have been severely impacted by the ban. They feel powerless to protect their children and abandoned to deal with the impacts alone:

“I am so worried about puberty. I think about it at least once a day. I am deeply concerned that if she struggles then we are helpless.”

“It has caused direct damage to my mental health by causing panic and confusion. I was left to support a child whose mental health changed for the worst overnight (literally). There was no support for her or parents. There was no warning. I felt confused and desperate and also totally unseen.”

“Watching my child suffer and struggle needlessly due to the decisions made by people who this has zero impact on is single-handedly the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a mother.”

One parent noted that their daughter was now frightened of being outed at school and potentially stabbed because she will go through the wrong puberty:

“I am so afraid for her. She is in stealth at school, afraid of being stabbed and now she will undoubtedly go through the wrong puberty for her.”

With the rise in hate and transphobia, this ban may well put children and young people at physical risk from their peers, which is more dangerous than any safety issues from puberty blockers.

Much as anti-immigrant rhetoric from public sources in the UK has embolded violent racism, so a government which is seen to withhold support from transgender children emboldens violent bigotry against them. We have already had one despicable, very widely-publicised murder of a transgender teenager in this country. It falls upon us all to prevent any more.

The ban is not firmly based on medical recommendations or evidence. The Cass Review remains controversial, has been criticised for its quality by various professional institutions and is still being critiqued and analysed. Banning puberty blockers is a politically motivated and scientifically unjustified response. The UK is an outlier in implementing a ban and goes against the expert opinions of many professional associations and nations worldwide. Several other countries, including Australia and France, have conducted reviews of their own finding that puberty blockers are a considerable help to transgender children.

Some instances of precocious puberty have been treated with puberty blockers for the past 50 years, with no discernible side noticed. By this point if there was a serious issue, it would be endemic. Contrary to their presentation as being a recent and experimental innovation, Puberty Blockers have been used in the treatment of cisgender children since the mid 70’s and transgender children since the late 90’s, with no discernible epidemic in side effects. We have decades of observational studies which show that for 90% of people transition is the right course of action and even for the 10% who detransition, only 3% of them detransition because they’re not trans at all. (Numbers are from the preliminary results of the world's largest review of detransition rates in the world, the North American Dare Study.) A decade-long study of 200 trans children which showed no decline in mental acuity, was ignored (Arnoldussen et al., 2022).

The Cass Review was conducted without the assistance of Gender Specialists and Endocrinologists due to a perceived bias, that in itself should be cause for concern. Imagine a review of natal services in the UK excluding specialists in that field. Yet, members of SEGM, a designated trans hate group (Southern Poverty Law Centre, n.d.), participated in the NHS Working Group on Gender Dysphoria, which helped to create the Cass Review (https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eoDownloadDocument?pubId=&eodoc=true&documentID=136692)

I therefore ask you to get in contact with Mr Streeting and to urge him to lift the ban, before more children and young people are hurt.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

My Furnace Broke :(

Hi kids, it's your favorite storytelling chicken, and my Furnace has decided to die. It also decided to take the A/C unit out with it.

This is both very expensive to fix, and also kind of urgent: the more observant of you may have noticed that it is November, and getting onto winter here in the Rockies.

Look at this little man, huddling on my feet for warmth.

I have *some* emergency funds, but not enough to cover even a temporary fix, and that's also the fund that vet, medical, and car repair bills come out of, all of which I've had too much of this year.

I'm currently pitting four HVAC companies against each other to get the best offer possible, and getting the paperwork done for state subsidies, refunds and other discounts, but I still need your help.

Thank you all, everything you can do helps.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Birders: do you ever wonder if this happens?

Original on my site | Patreon

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

...now I wanna hear your Cheese Carving Lecture

trick or treat :D

You get:

A Cautionary Warning Question!

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Remember to breathe water, everyone! (You were asking a fish, so... That's what you wanted, right? ...Right?)

if you have not drank any water yet today, this is your daily reminder that you are so cute. You're so pretty. Don't let anyone let you think you aren't beautiful. keep sparkling on, superstar

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Fizzy bath cubes are, one presumes, cubes for putting in a bath, which fizz. So, in context, fizzy man cubes...

ah yes, the two genders:

man and bath

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

The lack of agreement across brands on what “extra firm tofu” is is, in fact, very high on my list of unimportant problems.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

…wait, fox girls are rare? I'm dating four…

I never meet other fox girls! Hiiiiiii!

We're few but make up for it with veracity!

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

You spefically said sexy window washer, though. Wouldn't a bikini and/or lingerie version of the usual outfit be the standard implication here?

Sorry, all out of sexy maids. We can do you a sexy window washer, a weirdly photogenic high school janitor, or a muscular garbage truck operator in one of those fancy uniforms they give you after twenty years on the force – take 'em or leave 'em.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Hi, guys. I try to keep my personal life off of here for the most part, but my partner and I have experienced a pretty bad blow, and I don't know what else to do. On Friday a private yacht backed into our sailboat, the Nautilus, with enough force to move the concrete dock we were tied to. The main mast was snapped in half, and we're still waiting to learn how bad the damage to the hull is.

We've worked on the Nautilus for years now as her crew, and this spring we put every cent we've been able to save over the last decade into buying her. All of our time has gone into sailing and maintaining her, and running our charter business - and now she's out of commission for the foreseeable future. Insurance will hopefully help, but we don't know anything concrete yet. The best case scenario is that with 8-9 months of work, we can have Nautilus sailing again by next summer - but in the meantime we still have the vessel's loan payments, and our own living expenses, and no source of income, let alone the repairs we'll need to begin sooner rather than later if we can hope to get her seaworthy by next summer.

I know things are hard for everyone right now, and I know we are incredibly lucky no one was hurt. One way or another Crow and I will get through this, and be okay, so please don't feel guilty for passing this by. But if you are inclined to help us get through the next few months, by donating or by sharing our fundraiser, I would be more grateful than I can express. I will be posting updates, photos, etc. on our Instagram page at nautilusmaine as we learn more, if anyone would like to follow along with what is hopefully the journey to rebuild her.

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

foxgirlenerator

I'm going to give myself the second 'g' even though I strictly missed it, I'm like 90% sure I pressed it and that key's been a little unreliable tonight. Good luck to whoever tries mine! (Case in point: I definitely pressed it when starting this sentence and it still was "ood luck" at first.)

type prevs url with your eyes closed in the tags

[jadeserpentcladinashenglories]

Might I inquire as to what, precisely, a Mustain't is? (Aside from a string of letters I hesitate to Google in that order.)

In October 2014 I went on a road-trip to the Dryest Place In America.

I was having a rough year, very depressed from having dropped out of college for the third time. I decided a road trip was in order to re-set my brain and get a little distance. Being that it was October, and therefore all the campgrounds in the American Southwest were filled with people who have the good sense to camp in reasonable temperatures, I elected to take my parent's minivan so I could car-camp anywhere suitably isolated, and looked up some of the southwest's geographic extremes- the highest place I could drive to (Pikes Peak), the lowest place (Badwater Basin), and for fun, the Dryest Place in the continental US, which turned out to be the Pinacate Volcanic field just west of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It gets rain maybe twice a century and has no standing water, despite being less than 100 miles from the gulf of California.

It's a startlingly beautiful and alien place. The ground is a deep chocolate brown to black volcanic sand, and in mid October, the rabbit brush is turning bright yellow as it shifts to autumn, the organ pipe cacti are a dark green and stand, partially concealed in the brush at exactly human height. The air is alive with birds and insects and bats at night. The stargazing is like looking into the eyes of God.

You get there by driving down a little dirt road called "El Camino Del Diablo", or "The Devil's Road".

I drove out about three hours from Glendale, AZ to get there, arriving at sunset, and felt a profound sense of peace. I stargazed, listening to the bats hunt and sing, and slept peacefully for the first time in months.

I stayed out there for three days, sketching and painting the landscape, taking strolls through this almost alien landscape, and enjoying the light and sound and total absence of human intrusion besides myself.

On the fourth night, it was a new moon, and I awoke in the middle of the night. Something was amiss, and it took me a while to realize it was because I could NOT hear the bats. I was sleeping inside the van with the rear windows rolled halfway down rather than trying to set up the tent, so I when I sat up, I looked out of the van's reflective windows to discover what at first appeared to be A Horse.

It was something between pale gray and bright white in the starlight, standing maybe a dozen feet from the van, sniffing curiously. It made sense- I was in the middle of mustang country and there was quite a bit of foliage in the area for it and it did look like a truly wild horse- lumpy where the bones were jutting out, dusty about the hooves and face.

I was instantly seized by the sort of paralytic fear Sleep paralysis is made of. I couldn't move. It wasn't quite looking at me because it couldn't quite see through the windshield into the shadowy into the shadowy interior, but I had the distinct impression that if I looked away, it would know, and get me.

I already had problems with horses. My beloved Aunt Helen's Prize mare tried to kill me on two separate occasions, and the year before I had to carry my sister-in-law backwards out of a slot canyon whilst reciting the Saint Crispin's Day Speech as loudly as possible to keep a mustang from trampling us to death.

This is approximately what it should have looked like:

Instead, it was... off. like trying to draw a horse from memory.

The waist tapered in.

The legs were slightly too long or the torso slightly too short, probably both.

The ears were Triangular.

The head wasn't quite right- Too narrow and the jaw wasn't heavy enough.

The tail was too long and arced unnaturally away from the body.

The neck arched.

The nostrils were too high and close

The mouth too long.

Whatever this is, a Mustang it Ain't.

I watched it from the back seat as it sniffed around the front of the van, curious with about the side mirrors. It moved around the van, nibbling experimentally on the front door handle. It came up to the side windows, sniffing like a dog, and it's breath didn't fog up the glass.

Finally, it came up to the rear window, which was rolled halfway down to let the fall night air in. Not even half a pane of glass and two feet of air between us, and I could clearly see it's bright blue eyes.

Horses have Elongated pupils to give them a wide field of vision, and eyes that rotate sideways in their sockets so the pupil remains parallel to the ground. Rather creepy to watch, especially the ones with blue eyes.

A real horse that was curious about the interior of the van would have come up to the window more or less sideways, and looked at me with something like this:

Instead, the damn thing walked up and faced the back window head on, staring back at me with this:

I'm not sure how long we watched each other like that, eyes locked. My eyes burned. I couldn't blink. My mouth was dry. I couldn't swallow. My throat began to ache. I couldn't make a sound. My skin began to twitch, like I was severely dehydrated. I couldn't move. My lungs burned. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move.

Something was touching the side of my hand on the seat next to me. It's my water bottle.

The realization must have broken the terrible paralysis in the lower parts of my brain first, because by the time I consciously realized I could move again, I was already flinging my water bottle out the window at it.

The top was open, and splashed out the window at the Mustain't.

I've never heard such a scream out of an animal. Something halfway between the sound of unquenchable rage vibrating in someone's chest and the way rabbits cry out to God when the dogs catch them.

It jumped back, pivoting away from the van, snarling at the water bottle. I don't think you're supposed to be able to see All of a horse's teeth at once, no matter how angry it is.

I watched it run into the night for some distance, it's pale body visible against the black sand and the dark gray shadow of the ancient volcanic cone it was headed for.

When the blood stopped pounding in my ears, I could hear the bats again.

I debated leaving right then, but I didn't want to get out of the van with that thing in the area, nor litter by leaving the water bottle out there. I also had the awful idea that if I left now, it might somehow be able to follow me home. I ended up staying up three hours to watch the sunrise, shaking and trying to figure out if I'd woken up from a vivid dream, if my meds had stopped working, or if that had really happened. I didn't dare move until I actually felt the temperature rise, before stepping out of the van to grab the bottle. I had my camera ready- I was still using a DSLR back then- to take pictures of the hoofprints, to show how close it had gotten to the van.

No hoofprints.

Beetle tracks in the soft sand around the van, and the clear foot-and-wing prints of a bird that had hopped around then taken off. But no hoofprints.

I went over the entire campsite with the tent broom, to make sure I removed every scrap of evidence I had ever been there, including my footprints, grabbed my water bottle, and drove the three hours back back to Glendale, then decided to do seven more hours of driving to Moab, Utah just to put more than 500 miles, the state line and at least nine things that could be considered "running water" between me and the Mustain't.

-

I still have that water bottle. It has a dent in the bottom from hitting something, but that could have happened at any time. Strange thing though. I can't drink that bottle dry. I'll have it on me, drink whatever I've put in there- water, juice, iced coffee- and eventually feel like I've drunk the whole think and that it's empty. But I open it up and it's still at least a quarter full. I drink that. I get thirsty. I open it up again. ...and there's always a mouthful left.

Not sure what the side effects of drinking from a bottle cursed by a Mustain't to always have some left are, but it lives in the Emergency Breakdown Kit in my car now, just in case I meet another one.

---

(I'm a disabled artist and make my living telling stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or Pre-order the Family Lore book on Patreon)