#told you I would do the request

[keter-class-anomaly]

You should draw skater boy Virgil because yes

Gotta love skater Virgil :]

[ethosiab]

hiiii if you're still doing requests what about more qpr cletho.... (<not normal)

a follow up to the first scene in this post, because i like drawing people hugging and Etho desperately needs it

[this request was propaganda for tangtho in this poll!]

Etho's scared of not being what cleo needs or wants in a relationship, and he's always tried to change himself to be that person. He loves her because she loves him. He's her husband because they want to be life partners. None of this is something etho explicitly doesn't want, which is what makes it harder. He cares about cleo, he wants to grow old with her and spend the rest of his life with her. But he forces himself into these boxes, these expectations, to fulfil those wants, because that's normal right? When he finally confesses after she confronts him, their relationship is already strained. It's hard to keep the act up that long, when every romantic gesture makes him want to throw himself off the boat. He's convinced himself that she might not want him anymore.

From cleos perspective, she's mostly confused and hurt. Confused, because why didn't he say something? Hurt, because ethos hurt and he had the gall to think they would care about something as trivial as the exact nature of his attraction to her. These two have a lot of hugging and talking through feelings to do, but they get there <3 and then etho gets cursed and everyone incouding me is reminded what the actual plot of the AU is

Bonus doodle

[gummybearzone]

Christmas gift for my friend :)

[meyerlansky]

ENORMOUS pet peeve: people phrasing requests/instructions as a "do you want to x" question

i get that it's supposed to be a softening of the demand but the answer to that question is no, i DON'T want to clean my room. i DON'T want to digitize that box. i DON'T want to sit on a train for two hours to visit the hometown i fucking hate. why don't YOU be upfront about what YOU want from me instead of trying to inception me into thinking your desires were my idea or whatever

[moomeecore]

on that subject, obsessed with today when i was like "hey guys, can you two stop playing the jumping game for now because it's giving caden a headache" and my 6 yr old cousin is like "you mean 'me'. it's giving 'me' a headache, because your caden". it's like yeah man ur right. my bad . and then they stopped jumping. it was awesome

[bumblingbabooshka]

The Doctor turning into women and having romantic dalliances with men is every kind of queer...to me.

[iqmmir]

Hi im back . For some time

[anonymusbosch]

.

[head---ache]

I feel like i do have to say, btw, that I'm not actually taking requests at the moment. I say this because I've been getting a few more requests these past few days, and some people are sending them more than once after I ignored their first ask, which is really not pleasant. I'm not mad at anyone!!!! I kind of understand the confusion since I did take a rather big batch of requests the other day and I've been answering some asks with drawings, but those are isolated instances and do not give you permission to harass me trying to get me to draw whatever you want.

If you want a drawing from me then you'll just have to wait until I specifically ask for requests, and if even then I don't take your request, well that's too bad, but I don't owe you any art, sooooo yea

[jewishbuckley]

"was there a reason you didn't cancel this" honestly I thought I had so no there wasn't a reason but also if clients are going to have Your personal number and reach out to You about canceling (when they Should be reaching out via email per our cancelation policy) then You should be canceling the appt anyway imo. all the other trainers cancel their appointments AND add their appointments to the system 🤪

[rabbigfirlee]

.

[starlightswait]

i am!! annoyed but in a way that makes me want to fucking cry!

[dootznbootz]

...It's kind of wild when the terf that you got into a fight with and had to write an essay on "Why violence is wrong" back in high school now works at the pharmacy where you get your medication from...

[waugh-bao]

*

[someotherdog]

I have so many good replies to respond to and I fucking can’t get to them until tomorrow or Thursday bc they changed my schedule for this week 😭😭😭😭😭😭 just know that I’m literally foaming at the mouth to get on and reply to the good shit that’s in my activity bar!!!!!

[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.