#male birth control

[fortunatelychaoticphantom]

Just to be clear, male birth control should exist because men should have as much control over their own bodies as anyone else deserves, and people in general should have as many birth control options as possible. That said, if you think for a second that as a woman, I will put my health, body, finances and future in the hands of a fucking man when I am the only one who will actually pay the price for these actions, you are absolutely fucking mistaken.

[bootleg-nessie]

Resting my laptop on my lap to slowly cook my balls as a cost effective method of male birth control

[akwolfgrl]

I know thire is a hormonal gel, that is applied to the shoulders and works by suppressing sperm production.

[debutart]

Advances in Male Birth Control by Neil Webb.

[gwydionmisha]

Meanwhile… Al Pacino’s Childhood Trauma | Male Birth Control Arriving Soon

[cherryobsession]

I wanna make slime out of Plan A Male Birth Control gel.

The future is here.

[sun-cheyne]

Whaaaaa....?

A new drug was able to quickly and temporarily immobilize sperm in male mice, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, a discovery researchers described as a “game-changer” that could pave the way for a male contraceptive pill and could ultimately allow men to share equal responsibility with women for birth control.

A single oral dose of the drug immobilized mice sperm for up to two and a half hours and was 100% effective in the first two hours, the researchers said.

Treated mice showed normal mating behavior but none impregnated a mate despite 52 different attempts to do so, the researchers said, compared to almost a third of mice impregnating mates after being treated with an inactive control substance.

The drug is fast-acting—Melanie Balbach, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine, said it worked within 30 to 60 minutes—and works by inhibiting an enzyme needed for sperm to function.

It is also temporary, with efficacy dropping to 91% at three hours and fertility returning to normal by the next day.

These properties set the drug apart from many of the other efforts to develop a male contraceptive, the researchers said, which often rely on hormones to control fertility and can take weeks or months to be effective or to wear off.

The study demonstrates proof-of-concept for “safe, non-hormonal, on-demand, male contraceptives,” the researchers said, and while it may work in theory any product will be many years and a great deal of testing in the future.

-via Forbes, 2/14/23

And there is ANOTHER breakthrough with a different method from just two months later:

A ground-breaking contraceptive pill for men could be just around the corner after a major genetic breakthrough. Scientists at Washington State University have identified a gene which temporarily renders sperm infertile after they remove it.

The research team discovered a protein encoded by this gene, found solely in the testicular tissue of most mammals, which reduced sperm counts and deformed remaining sperm to make them incapable of fertilizing an egg when altered. The potentially historic breakthrough contraceptive pill would also have no hormonal side-effects and could be additionally help control animal overpopulation — replacing castration.

Crucially, the destabilization of the infertility protein is not permanent, meaning sperm will recover once the person or animal stops taking the treatment. Scientists have hailed the discovery as potentially important for the future of the human race. In their study, researchers identified the expression of a gene called Arrdc5 in the testicular tissue of mice, pigs, cattle, and humans...

However, disrupting the functions of this protein will not require any hormonal interference, a key hurdle considering the multiple roles testosterone plays beyond sperm production in men, including the building of bone mass and muscle strength as well as red blood cell production. The team also says that designing a drug which only targets this protein would further make it easily reversible as a contraceptive.

-via Study Finds, 4/19/23

Note: Please excuse the cissexist language from the sources here, which I have not edited out for accuracy, etc. The Forbes article does respectfully discuss trans and nonbinary people and their birth control needs further down.

[researchgate]

No, because women don't suffer side effects at all! Because women's pills don't do shit to our overall health and threaten our bone density and hormonal processes!

[seventhdiscipleworldwide]

[geek-22]

Trans men and enby's,

Testosterone does not work as birth control.

Your doctor may tell you this, a nurse might, but it DOES NOT.

For the love of god, wear protection

[mental-mona]

This is kind of a "well duh!" to many/most of us, but apparently still needs discussion...

[eclecticwordblender]

russia now wants couples to have 8 children. the burden of childbirth always falls on women. be it controlling population or increasing it, the government feels entitled to women's bodies.

remember when in india, indira gandhi had forced vasectomies done? (i dont condone that ofc there were other social markers which decided who was sterilised). not one person said then that resources are limited and we need population control to save them. it was just... wrong. because it is unfair to control what people do with their bodies. YEAH BRING THAT ENERGY BACK.

[despazito]

my idea for feminist birth control

[pinbones]

There's two types of people who use transandrophobia to decribe transmascs' and trans mens' experiences:

- Simply specificity, language used to hone in on a specific way being trans affects people who just happen to be men

- As both the above and as a springboard to discuss how societal misogyny, radical feminism, gender stereotypes, and bioessentalism affect all people who can be pecieved as men or masculine by others, and how bigotries compound in meaningful ways with stereotypes and bigotry surrounding maleness and manhood

Like. Half of you are saying "maleness is a hollow experience which is standard, and exists in opposition to gendered oppression, and transandrophobia is therefore when dudes experience misogyny and transphobia"

and half of you are saying "Being percieved and/or transitioning towards male uniquely affects how I am treated, because, for example, how people perceive my blackness or mental illness or kinkiness or femininity is compounded with my manhood in ways that don't usually happen to gender conforming cisperi women"

Which are two fundamentally different approaches to transandrophobia as a concept. One suggests that maleness is a simple downy layer of privilege that coats a person through their male life, and the other acknowledges that a man (or somebody perceived as masculine/male) can experience oppression in ways that those NOT perceived male may not.

Only one of these interpretations is intersectional. Black individuals who are policed more hashly when interpreted as masc know they are risking dangerous experiences when transitioning to male, as has been discussed before on here (to no avail). Male or percieved male people with personality disorders are treated as more dangerous than women with similar symptoms, and are sometiems diagnosed with different disorders entirely based on percieved gender differences. This affects transmascs too, especially considering the already dire state of queerness in psychiatric institutions. Being a male birthing parent is a whole shitshow of transphobia because men are not supposed to give birth, and transmascs are lucky to access related healthcare at all, let alone access it without being ceaselessly misgendered and treated as a stigmatised 'other' to deleterious affects on parent and baby. These are just a few examples, there are many more ways maleness can screw a person over. And that's not to say that female privilege is a thing instead of male privilege, but rather to emphasise that men are not supposed to be minorities. Men are not supposed to be assaulted, men are not supposed to be outliers, men are absolutely not supposed to be trans.

When a man is autistic, he's not just autistic, he's an autistic male, and that makes him more likely to be killed by cops (especially if black). When someone says "you claim you're not ableist but you're scared of the homeless x on a bus talking to xself", they always say the person is a man, because that sounds more significant (and cops think so too). Consider when a person's rape/abuse is considered to not be all that serious due to the victim being male, or when a man's attraction is considered to be more exploitative than a woman's, or when a fat man is considered more creepy/sexist than a thin man or a fat woman. Consider why so many caricatures of evil and creepiness are men with deformities. Consider the fact that men's bathrooms don't have baby changing tables, and that a man may get less support from others after their child's death than the mother might. Maleness can negatively compound with things like minority status, vulnerability, aggression, sexuality, etc. in ways that screw that person over, both in social spaces (such as queer communities that dislike/distrust maleness and masculinity, or how isolation affects men harder), and in more tangible ways, like their rates of suicide and being murdered.

There are tangible ways in which transitioning to male can negatively affect a person's life even if you remove (hypothetically, not really possible) the transphobia element, and these also constitute as worthwhile topics of discussion. If you think maleness is the lack of gendered oppression, then you're not intersectional in your feminism at all. If your life as a male is genuinely sunshine and rainbows (apart from the transphobia if trans), then good for you, genuinely that's great, but not everyone lives in a radfem fantasy world.

Being unable to tell the difference between men talking about mens issues/liberation, and right wingers talking about oppressing women more, isn't feminist. It's ignorant and antifeminist. (MRAs don't care about actual mens lib, and are actively worsening it because they are sexist and opposed to gender lib. You guys know that, right? That male and female liberation aren't oppositional or binary, but the same gender liberation that is entirely oppositional to patriarchy?)

These men and mascs talking about issues facing men aren't ignorant womanhaters who deny misogyny and want ultraprivileged men to be coddled, they are good faith members of your community with experiences just as varied and valid as yours. Treat them like it.

[haggishlyhagging]

Nearly every terrible thing about our sexual politics comes down to the fact that, in patriarchy, patriarchs understand themselves to be inessential. Conservatives defend “family” and fatherhood as if they're under violent attack. That's because, as long as women are self-determined and possessed of options, they are. The twenty-first-century war to maintain patriarchy includes not just legislative attacks on the right to abortion, but on birth control, and sex education, which allows people to successfully avoid pregnancy in the first place. The fear here, despite generations of rhetoric to the contrary, is not about “killing babies”; men have always reserved the right to kill or at least abandon babies that displease them, usually after they leave the womb. The fear is that women will be the ones making the decisions; it is not death, but life, that we want to keep out of women's hands.

-Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers