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AMAZON IS STRIKING LETS FUCKING GO!!!!!! LETS GO!@!

as someone who has worked in amazon warehouses for many years, this is crazy like. oh my god. DURING PEAK SEASON?? LETS GOOOO

media and companies are already trying to say "DONT LET THE UNIONS MISLEAD YOU WE PROMISE WE TREAT OUR WORKERS WELL!!!" well hey ive worked there for YEARS. they do not ! dont listen to their bullshit. it might be difficult to not get frustrated if packages are late at the most important time of the year but thats the whole point -- strikes happening when the workers are most necessary is a massive blow to showing just how essential the workers are . anyways stand with amazon workers this holiday season god fucking bless

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Joe Biden was back but he made all his money from posting ASMR skincare routine videos.

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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.

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Lines of thought that seem Normal but are actually rooted in extreme puritanism:

-Seeing the nude human body is inherently traumatic -Sex scenes in art are pointless -Wearing kink-related clothing in public is the similar to performing a sex scene in front of unwilling participants -Depicting female characters expressing sexuality is always degrading -People's sexual fantasies are always an endorsement of the behavior they want to see in real life -Sex work is more traumatic and coercive than other types of work The goal is to treat sex as just another thing people do. That is a much healthier attitude than hiding it! It's not uniquely traumatic, it's not weird to talk about it or include it in society.

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CreepCast being filmed “sans-video” between Hunter and Isaiah is a gift to the format/viewer.

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my ass will find ONE sad melancholy song from my home country aND PROCEED TO COME UP WITH THE SADDEST FUCKING STORY ON EARTH-

now ive got two oh god what am i doing

this is going to be spectacular and horrifying and relatable and tragic and i love it

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Normal Sherlock and Watson

Medical Sherlock and Watson

Horror Sherlock and Watson

Supernatural Sherlock and Watson

And last but not least, lo and behold

Biblical Sherlock and Watson

(Honorably mention to merlin and King Arthur, the medieval Sherlock and watson)

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“Chat it’s NOT lupus”

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Coconut

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there’s never been a better show than this. actually

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“house is referencing brokeback mountain OMG what did the writers MEAN by this is he actually queercoded—” I’m gonna stop you right there. i know most people in the fandom revival were barely conscious and aware of the world in 2006 but brokeback mountain was basically the butt of all jokes back then. It was an earnestly-made, well-adapted, heartbreaking movie about queerness and desire and repression in rural America but the general public’s sense of humour was still extremely homophobic, every mainstream tv show was punching down, the movie was an unexpected mainstream hit and pop culture phenomenon, and because of that it was prime target for cheap references and punch-down jokes.

“I wish I knew how to quit you” was a punchline. you did not need to watch the movie to know it was referencing The Gay Cowboy Movie (Tee Hee) because it was made into a joke by every late-night talk show host, wannabe standup comic, and meme generator website. the house md writers did not mean anything by this. the media landscape of the mid-2000’s was just that fucking toxic and openly resentful towards queerness in general back then.