rivkat

[rivkat]

Please tell me that y'all won't go back to tiktok once Trump gets whatever nefarious concessions he wants from the company and "saves" it. Like, you all NEED to stay gone. Stay on Xiaohongshu or move to other platforms or create a new one or whatever, but don't go back to whatever Trump-appeasement monstrosity TikTok is about to become. Don't do it.

[rivkat]

Rings my fucking bell, like a perennial fucking plague maiden:

Center harm, not disgust!

When in doubt (and when not in doubt, just swept by problems bigger than you and assured by someone that they know the answer, so don't think right now, just Do!), center harm.

Focus on what specific harm you're reducing with your actions. Make sure it's tangible and concrete. If your actions are minimizing hypothetical harm at the cost of real, tangible harm on others, 9 out 10 times you're on the wrong fucking side, being weaponized by propaganda.

If a conversation revolves around disgust as a driver for action, you're being radicalized. If a call to action depends on your emotional response, you're being manipulated. I'm sorry, this isn't the 90s anymore, social media has eroded the web of respectability of the pre internet society. The primary axis for misinformation to spread in this day and age is emotional response: half the things you believe are true and share as such are not based on fact, expert opinion or personal research. Social media has conditioned us (all of us! You and me and most dangerously of all, the idiots we put in power) that if something feels true, it probably is.

But do you know for sure it is? Do you think it's true because you have first hand experience or actual time spent on reputable sources learning it to be fact? Or just because it aligns with your worldview and it would be nice for you if it were true?

Are you taking action because you're angry and a group of fellow angry folk invited you to join them? Do you have a plan or is this just catharsis? Are you aware of the consequences of your actions or are you drunk on rage and focused only on the immediate future?

Center harm. Center specific actions and their consequences.

Discomfort is not harm. Disgust is not harm. Hypothetical paranoia is not harm.

The reactionary pipeline is real and your self-image as a progressive is not actually enough to save you from falling down the hole. Radicalization is not hinged on politics alone. Saying you're a leftist is worthless if your thought process and actions themselves are indistinguishable from qanon losers. Conspiratorial thought has literally no politics inherently, and your insistence it does is pure lack of critical thought on display.

Center harm, not feelings, not politics, not group think.

Center harm, and remember that individual actions cannot dismantle systemic structures on their own, so anyone who calls for individual action at the cost of community structures is not actually trying to change anything, and instead actively suppressing efforts to make anything better in any way.

[rivkat]

"The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I'm not a trannie or a fag so I don't care, just give 'em the medicine they need."

"This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility."

One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.

[rivkat]

It’s so hilarious to me that people spent all this time the past year and a half boycotting and protesting Israeli goods, and now they’re flocking to RedNote in the wake of TikTok being possibly banned.

China has literally one of the worst industrialized oppression of Muslims on the planet. Like actual internment camps, forced labor, apartheid, and forced sterilization. Like r u serious.

[rivkat]

The idea that all we hear about life in China being Sinophobic propaganda is genuinely so insulting - most of all to Chinese people, who are living under an authoritarian regime, who's traditional culture was forcibly suppressed, and who are unable to speak freely.

I've spoken to people, personally, who have been DEEPLY harmed by the CCP. Stop spreading authoritarian propaganda. Seriously.

You know what Sinophobia looks like? Ignoring the human rights abuses Chinese people face just to dunk on Americans. Being more than comfortable with censorship preventing honest discussion about the occupation of Tibet, the domineering attitude towards Taiwan (which didn't suppress traditional Chinese culture, by the way), or the active extermination of the Uigher people.

Anyways Free Tibet. And Hong Kong. Uighers deserve to live and practice their culture. Taiwan deserves independence. Forced abortion is wrong. Protesters shouldn't be hosed into the gutter. Privacy is a right. And Chinese people deserve better then China is giving them.

Stop eating up the propaganda.

[rivkat]

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.

[rivkat]

mercy seems like a long shot here, so my prayer for inauguration day 2025: may they be incompetent. may they just be really bad at implementation. may their egos choke their effectiveness. may they drown themselves week by week with infighting and selfish posturing. may they be easily distracted. may the very governors and senators and agencies and religious leaders that the new administration expects to be friendly force endless stalemates to preserve their own power. may every delay turn into a three ring blame circus so chaotic that no one remembers what they were doing. may the good and necessary parts of government be too boring to draw attention and keep running quietly in the background. may the next four years be full of sound and fury and signify nothing.

[rivkat]

This FB post by Rebecca Solnit is the thing keeping me sane this morning,so I’m sharing it here in case it helps you all, too:

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward.

A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.

People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”

[rivkat]

The tragedy of my life is that I keep acquiring and displaying fetish art and having to be corrected by my friends.

Most recently, a friend came over my house and saw my computer background and went, "Wow, um, I didn't know you were into that." To which I look at the picture of the well drawn muscular female minotaur in historically accurate Greek clothing and I start geeking out about how I love the detail the artist did with the clothing and I point out the period appropriate folds and pins, how the artist even inserted the native plant that was used to dye the clothing this particular shade in the background, and even how the belt has technology AND historically accurate weaving patterns on it.

Then I start explaining how I love the muscular choices of the minotaur, that I was so impressed with the artist's anatomically correct depiction of the muscles converging into the neck. That many people get an upright cow's neck wrong because cow's don't have collarbones, so it can be very difficult to merge the upper arms and a chest of a human with a cow's body. I draw her attention to the beautiful way they've merged the pectoralis major so smoothly while also staying true to how muscular they've depicted the rest of the body.

I finish up with my thoughts on the artist's bold choice to depict the minotaur as a female, and despite the underlying themes of a minotaur being violence, child murder, strength, and muscles. I segue into how unlike bulls, cow are perceived as mothers. That they are the major source of milk in human culture, and that idyllic depictions of them in a field usually depict calves frolicking nearby, yet the minotaur kills and eats children.

I finish and there is a long pause.

"Urban, this is fetish art." and she takes me to the artist's twitter and god dammit it's fetish art, not a bold statement on cultural perceptions of women and violence throughout history. I have been tricked again.

[rivkat]

[rivkat]

It’s so hilarious to me that people spent all this time the past year and a half boycotting and protesting Israeli goods, and now they’re flocking to RedNote in the wake of TikTok being possibly banned.

China has literally one of the worst industrialized oppression of Muslims on the planet. Like actual internment camps, forced labor, apartheid, and forced sterilization. Like r u serious.

[rivkat]

"Welcome to Watchmojo, and we're counting down the Top Ten Hottest Sam Winchester moments on the CW's Supernatural, number one-"

[rivkat]

So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that's what's on my passport. I'm pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.

I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office... and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn't be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?

They're my fucking hero.

[rivkat]

[rivkat]

Love how the generations being the most propagandized ever their whole lives think they are absolutely immune just because they assume propaganda looks like steve buscemi hello fellow kids or boomer facebook right wing stuff.

No one wants to hear it but tiktok's algorithms are ultimately controlled by one of several foreign governments who we are well aware like to spread and dial up the amount of content you see that is (hello) your own fellow kids and smart-sounding people with piercings and cool graphs saying we have to tear it all down and don't vote for shitty democrats and actually democracy itself is awful and useless and you need to destroy your own country because it's done so many bad things and what we really need is a violent revolution or just give up doing anything because man people suck so just watch an endless stream of highly-personalized entertainment or maybe the solution is becoming a sexy antivaxx tradwife who drinks raw milk? The data collection is just a lil' bonus, as a treat.

I know lots of people don't care about all the evidence we have of other governments trying to influence our elections and social media because "they're all bad and the same or maybe even way better!1!" and yes, american companies definitely have shitty intentionally biased algorithms and push propaganda and misinformation too, but maybe our aim should be for no governments directly influencing through social media and entertainment algorithms instead of defending and mainlining it without question?

[rivkat]

from the department of absolutely nitpicky bullshit, one thing that has eternally driven me up a wall about CA: TWS is that steve's handwriting is wrong wrong wrong for a man who would have learned to write in the 1920s

he would have learned the palmer method! he would not have a millennial half-cursive scrawl! come on! you don't any old people working for you who could write out a list?? you could even give him a draftsman's hand if you're afraid your viewers can't read cursive!

[rivkat]