#Such as: How are you aging backwards?

[anotherdescentintomadness]

Soft-Selfie Wang YiBo: A Collection

Let’s celebrate that fact that we got a new selfie from Wang YiBo…

…with this series of WYB’s soft selfies:

See Mirror-Selfie-Era Wang YiBo

[mdawgswizzleinthehizzle]

this is the same person? his range goes crazy.

[shannonsketches]

does it ever crack you up a little to think that piccolo was eight years old when he started training gohan

[this-is-chaos-magick]

Rewatching Age of Ultron.

[butchvamp]

sorry i keep telling myself im done bitching about da on here but then it keeps happening

[soft-persephone]

Hating rap music in 20024 is such clown behavior. People like you still exist? Lmao someone tell bro to get a life

[gingersnapwolves]

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.

[timcurry-imgoinghomedotmp4]

not people saying that france's elections are proof that voting works when what seems to be a huge part of why it worked is because shittier candidates fucking dropped out so those who voted wouldn't split between two candidates. all of the usa you have to vote vote voteeeeee rhetoric has this incredible failure of imagination. the only thing to do for leftism to go anywhere in this country or to defeat trump according to these people is to throw support behind a geriatric incumbent who has been conservative in everything but political party affiliation since his career as a politician began.

what france's elections actually demonstrate is not that voting is essential, it is that clarity of purpose and unity of party perspectives, and politicians sacrificing their career interests for moral and strategic purposes IN TANDEM WITH voting works.

something i also never seem to see being discussed on my slice of tumblr is that at this point Biden and Trump are only PRESUMPTIVE nominees! We didn't have primaries and this debate was the earliest we have had in recent memory and neither of the candidates officially is one yet!

why the fuck are the endless streams of vote blue people incapable of imagining anything beyond "it will be biden versus trump and the only moral lens for looking at this situation is voting between two openly genocidal candidates on the basis of who will have more favorable domestic policies. Is that not reprehensible? Aren't you fucking tired and ashamed and angry? don't you feel any desire to push for literally anything else?

[freakazoidwerebeast]

too much advice and advocacy for being friends with people older than you and nothing for being friends with people your age

[doberbutts]

So here is my problem with the "by virtue of being a man, you have to make your peace with the fact that some people will be uncomfortable with you, and thus you have to make yourself a safe person"

I've heard the same thing about being black. A lot of people have taken my very presence as hostility. I have had people escalate situations just because I am present as a black person in front of them. Before, and after transition.

You know what the problem with bending over backwards to make other people comfortable with your presence even though you haven't actually done anything to them besides breathe the same air?

It's never enough. You can be One Of The Good Ones for ages and at some point you will fail your Good One inspection and people will turn on you at the drop of a hat. People who you thought you had a good rapport with. People you thought were your friends.

I have *experienced* this, both online and in person.

The onus is on everyone to be safe people to be around. Singling someone out and blaming them for daring to share a demographic with someone else who has caused harm isn't cute when people do it to me because I'm black, and it's also not cute when they do it because I'm a man.

People are uncomfortable about my blackness all the time. I didn't magically stop experiencing racism when I started taking testosterone. So it's absolutely wild to me that people think "well, you know, with what you look like, some people won't want you around" is going to fly when I was explicitly taught *not* to tolerate that shit by every single one of my black relatives.

Someone doesn't like that I'm occupying a space? Well I'm not hurting them, so that's a them problem and not a me problem. That's how I've learned how to exist as black in white-majority spaces. Why do you think you can change the demographic and get me to agree with you?

[fozmeadows]

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

[dravidious]

You're more amazing than backflips

Made my 2nd Miitopia party! Jamie is now a Scientist and is joined by Natrin the Warrior, Fimishec the Imp, and Beacon the Chef

[thisbastardneedsafatherfigure]

My mom and I just want to know women Trans women to be exact HOW ARE YOU SO PRETTY TELL ME YOUR SECRETS WHAT MAGIC ELIXIR ARE YOU CONSUMING

[reikunrei]

No, this is having a mature, thoughtful, and non-puritanical mindset about sex and teenage sexuality behavior.

I don’t understand why you’re trying so hard to get me to change my mind when all I’ve said is I think it’s weird and it makes me uncomfortable to see discussions about child characters having graphic and detailed sex while emphasizing the image of them as children?

the more you try to justify it, the further you implicate yourself, imo

[petalsandpurity]

Totk is so overwhelming and big I only just through conversation today realised I’ve missed a whole power (but I have in fact somehow still unlocked and completed the rito, gerudo, goron and zora quests)

[sttoru]

·.⌇ 𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒. height difference + jjk men — seeing you struggling to initiate a kiss, ft. gojo, nanami, toji, choso

note. super self indulgent once again woopsies

tags. jjk men x female reader (separately). fluff, suggestive themes. size difference obviously: reader is shorter than the characters. little hint of an age gap in toji’s part (you; early 20’s, he early 30’s). reader gets referred to as ‘small, short, adorable’. nicknames used ��baby, sweetheart, princess, little girl, angel’. includes drabbles for each character.

𝐆𝐎𝐉𝐎 𝐒𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐔

“what’s the matter, baby?” satoru easily notices whenever you’re internally debating something. you’d fidget with your clothes, look around and nibble on your bottom lip.

even if you say that it’s nothing, your lover knows that you mean the exact opposite. he walks hand-in-hand with you out of the boutique where he had bought you a pretty dress. his thumb rubs your skin gently, hoping to comfort you with whatever you’re struggling to say.

“it’s uhm,” you finally speak up. satoru halts his steps and tilts his head with a curious pout on his lips. he doesn’t wish to pressure you into anything, so he keeps quiet.

his blue eyes follow your movements from behind his sunglasses. you step closer to him, your small hands travelling up to gently hold onto his jacket. you gulp before balancing your entire body on your toes—creasing your shoes a bit by doing so.

at this point, satoru knows what you’re trying to do. your actions are absolutely adorable and make the sorcerer giggle. he wants nothing more than to squish your cheeks together for being so cute. especially because you’re failing to reach his lips.

“oh, do y’need help maybe?” satoru asks with a smug grin. you frown and try to stand on the tips of your toes, though that didn’t seem enough. your lover needs to lower his head a tad more for you to kiss him.

satoru tilts his head backwards instead. he loves to see you pout and struggle to carry out such an affectionate act. he can’t help it—you’re so fun to tease, “c’mon, you can do it, baby!”

when you give up due to his constant teasing, the white-haired man gasps dramatically. you smack his bicep and turn around with a huff, “forget it.”

before you can take another step away from him—satoru’s hand reaches out to hold your wrist. he pulls you back against his chest, warm palm holding your cheek and tilting your head up so his glossy lips could meet yours.

“sorry,” satoru mutters against your mouth. his tongue sneakily swipes against yours which causes you to squirm. he gives your bottom lip a playful nibble in response, “couldn’t resist teasing you a little.”

𝐍𝐀𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐈 𝐊𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐎

“welcome home, dear!” you greet kento at the front door as per usual. he sighs in relief and smiles tiredly, appreciating your appearance before him. he seems utterly exhausted from his most recent mission.

“it’s good to see you, sweetheart,” kento shuts the door behind him. he takes off his shoes and places them where they belong before doing the same with his coat. he looks down at you as you help him tidy his belongings, “you’re looking beautiful tonight.”

to say you’re flustered is an understatement. kento always knows just how to get you shy and embarrassed from the casual way he compliments you. you’re in your pyjamas and apron—barefaced with nothing extra going on and yet your lover is completely engrossed by your looks.

“thank you,” you murmur back with a bright smile. kento smiles as well after seeing your happy expression. that’s what he does it for.

you hold kento’s hand and feel its warmth engulf your skin. his palms are a little rough; probably from the hard work he put into those recent missions he did. you look up at the blonde man in front of you and want nothing more than to kiss him—show your gratitude for everything he does for you.

thus, you lean in and stand on your toes, balancing on one foot whilst the other floats a few centimetres above the wooden floor. it’s hard to find a balance, though your attentive partner is quick to lend a hand.

“careful,” kento whispers, his voice so husky that you feel a shiver run down your spine. his big hands settle on your waist and he doesn’t waste a single second after that.

he leans in as well, head lowered to yours and your noses lightly brushing against each other. kento’s lips find your soft ones—interlocking them in a passion filled kiss. you can feel his entire body relax even more. as if he’s waited all day to be back home. to be back to you.

to kiss and hold you close.

𝐅𝐔𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐆𝐔𝐑𝐎 𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈

“over here, princess,” toji calls you over with a subtle wave. he’s leaning against a brick wall, hands in the pockets of his black jacket. you walk over to him with an excited smile—happy to spend some quality time together with him today.

“hey, i missed you,” you comment and wrap your arms around his waist. you nuzzle your face against his chest to which toji reacts by giving you an awkward head pat.

the older man lifts your head up and away from his body by holding onto your chin. his eyes run over your face, letting out a short content hum. he’s missed you a lot too. not that he’d tell you that directly.

“how’s uni for ya?” toji asks. the pad of his thumb rubs your cheek and you lean into his touch. it brings a little smirk to his face—seeing how easily you become putty in his hands is rather amusing.

“been okay for most part,” you shrug and fail to maintain eye contact with your boyfriend. he probably doesn’t do it on purpose, but his half-lidded eyes makes your lower abdomen feel funny.

you’re still so nervous around him, though you’ve got the guts to at least kiss him first. you missed the feeling of his lips against you after all. the constant, soothing rubs of his thumb against your cheek only intensifies your desire.

you lift yourself up on the tips of your shoes. your cold hands cup toji’s face and he immediately gets what you’re trying to do. he snickers at the sight of you struggling to reach him and acts like he doesn’t know what you want.

. . until you whine about how you really want to kiss him. that man is sold the moment he hears your whiny voice.

“fuck. c’mere, little girl,” toji’s veiny hands go around your waist and move down to cup your ass, his lips crashing down onto yours with a desperation he’s never kissed you with before.

𝐊𝐀𝐌𝐎 𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐒𝐎

“do i need to add salt? she’s talking too fast,” choso ask whilst scratching his head. he’s watching a youtube video on his phone; specifically a cooking one. he’s attempting to copy a recipe in his kitchen and you’re helping him since he doesn’t know too much about phones. and cooking apparently.

you giggle and grab the phone from the counter. the lady’s words are incomprehensible due to the video being on two times the usual speed. you return the settings to normal with a light hearted chuckle, “yeah, because you’ve sped up the video, silly.”

“oh,” choso smiles sheepishly. he checks the stove and makes sure the food isn’t burning before turning towards you, “thank you. you’re a lifesaver, heh.”

you can’t help but admire the view of choso in front of you. he’s in an apron which is too small on him since it’s yours—his chiseled chest accentuated by the fabric. his black hair is up in a small ponytail and his cheeks are red. probably from embarrassment.

“you’re adorable,” you comment lovingly. choso’s cheeks turn even redder by your compliment and he sputters some words about how he ‘needs to focus on his cooking’.

you interrupt his stammers by getting closer. your lover stops and his lips are parted—giving you the perfect chance to capture them into a kiss. well, you try to at least

choso notices your silent struggles and blinks. it takes him a second to fully grasp the situation before he decides on helping you. he smiles warmly, his beefy arms effortlessly lifting you up to his height, encouraging you to wrap your legs around his waist.

one hand is on your thigh, the other holding the back of your head to deepen your shared kiss. choso pulls away and attaches his lips to your neck, settling you the counter, “want more, angel. you drive me crazy.”