poems-for-oldest-daughters

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

Pop art posters designed by Butcher Billy for 'The Tortured Poets Department' songs.

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

there are two competing sects on this website - one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "neurodivergent" and one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "sexual content." i do not like either of them

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

I don't wanna make ppl feel guilty for celebrating Christmas but I think how crazy it is that so many American Christians r pro israel and go on "pilgrimage" to occupied palestine and palestinian Christians living in the birth country of Christianity have refused to do celebrations in the midst of the genocide

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

‘tis the damn season - taylor swift

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

once i fix me

ho ho ho

he's gonna miss me

ho ho ho

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

I want you to know I forgave you

It doesn't look the way you wanted it to

But it feels so liberating

I know you wanted me to come home

I want you to know I am home

-Now I can go anywhere I want

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

“No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to others is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.”

— Unknown

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

okay due to popular demand i may have made another one-

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

“It is madness to hate all roses because you got scratched with one thorn.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupére

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

I know in my heart that someday you will let me go.

When the day comes, you won't even have to tell me, I'll know because I only ever knew you loved me when you were hating me.

Then, we will be just strangers with the same nose, mind, and heart.

-You have your mother's nose

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

I hope Mother forgives me She gave her blood, sweat, and tears for a baby; But she got me and I am not innocent. I hope she forgives me for it someday. I hope Father forgives me. He wanted a legacy, a net, a garden; But he got me and I'm poison. I hope he knows it's all his fault.

-The oldest daughter

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

How many times did I let you break me before you crossed the threshold between being my mother and my killer?

-15

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

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.

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

the romance of melancholy

sometimes calms a heart,

but other nights, no amount of

poetry and bled words can

disguise the talons piercing

and wounds reopening

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]

“Someday someone is going to look at you with a light in their eyes you’ve never seen, they’ll look at you like you’re everything they’ve been looking for their entire lives. wait for it”

— Unknown

[poems-for-oldest-daughters]