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Trans activist Jamison Green's passport photos before and after HRT. Left he's age 32 (1980) Right age 41 (1989) after being on testosterone for one year (x)

(read his autobiography here for free)

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Literally sobbing. A judge, a US judge defended us. A judge brought up intersex people, uaing the term intersex, to *defend* us by not allowing our erasure. I'm having a lot of feelings right now

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a long time ago i watched a tik tok from an older trans woman, in her 60’s or 70’s. someone had commented on another video of hers asking “why don’t we ever see trans men from your generation? why aren’t they involved in activism?” and her response was “because a lot of them died.” she told stories abt the trans men she knew who committed suicide rather than be married off and forced to live as a woman, or died from medical neglect or botched abortions. “they would be here if they could, but they can’t because the world failed them.”

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3 transphobic arguments to be aware of (so you don't go down the alt right pipeline)

source

Easily one of the most important videos I've seen since the election.

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Chappell Roan Grammys 2025 via GLAAD

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Big news: my first book, Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, is now open for pre-order! The book uncovers 30 figures who radically change everything you’ve been told about trans history. From forgotten riots preceding Stonewall by decades to trans teens accessing gender medicine in the 1930s, Before Gender breaks today’s mainstream myths about trans people being new.

This book took years of research but delivers an accessible, humorous, and joyful reading of trans life before the term gender entered popular vocabulary. These stories aren’t just about trans history: you’ll read about love triangles, murder mysteries, and record-breaking athletes in stories that have been censored and hidden for decades.

Learn more and find the pre-order links at elierlick.com/beforegender

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the world is a better place with trans men and transmasc people in it

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So I had a hysterectomy today (hooray!) and I brought along my stuffed orca, Shamu, as a comfort object. And everyone i interacted with during my pre-op was like "Oh! Who's this?" so I was telling them all about him, how he's been with me since I was 9 and gone on every single vacation and road trip, and they were telling me about their own stuffed buddies (one lady said she still has hers after 40 years!) and all of this while I was signing consent forms and providing a list of the things I'd brought with me, you know, small talk.

So then a nurse comes over and goes "Okay, I've got some stickers I'll put on your things so we know they're yours" and I'm like "OK cool" so she puts a sticker on my coat and stickers on my bags of clothes and then she turns to Shamu and I'm like "oh I guess he gets a sticker too"

But no. She pulls out a hospital bracelet that's an exact copy of mine and slaps it on his tail, like so:

And i was delighted by this, so I took a picture to send to my friends, who were equally delighted, and were cracking me up with their reactions (like so:)

Anyway, they take me back and put me under, and when I awake groggily a few hours later it takes me a minute to get my bearings, so I don't notice Shamu at first. But then I realize he's tucked up next to me in the gurney, so I grab him, and my hand touches gauze.

And I'm like "huh?" so I look at him and I realize

They gave my fucking orca a hysterectomy

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one day i will make a masterpost of all the shit T does to your junk of only to spare the dozens of young trans guys i see panicking about it the embarassment of having to ask a bunch of strangers if their dick is okay

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I saw a post a little while ago that I'll never find again, but it's still bugging me. It was written like a PSA about proper procedure for applying testosterone gel--mainly, how you're not supposed to let it get on anyone else's skin.

And that's correct. But the post went hard on it, like "please, please be aware of the risks of this medication, it can do so much damage to others if you're not careful, I just think we should be honest about the advantages and disadvantages of medications like this."

It could've been sincere, but it gave me concern-trolling vibes real bad and I can't get it out of my head. So here's my PSA:

Don't slap on your T-gel and then immediately rub your bare bicep on anyone.

Once 2 hours have passed, the remaining amount available to be absorbed is negligible. The med guide says to wash your bicep before you rub it on anyone, but even that's being extremely cautious.

Testosterone isn't poison. If you apply a full dose every day, it still takes months before anything noticeable happens. It's not going to kill someone who accidentally touches your skin for .5 milliseconds.

You do not have to handle T-gel like it's drain cleaner. It's not corrosive. Cis women have testosterone. It's a thing that humans have in our bodies. Avoid getting your medication onto anyone else, but holy shit nothing bad is gonna happen if you forget one time and snuggle shirtless.

T-gel is alcohol-based, so it's best to refrain from being on fire until it has dried thoroughly.

Don't put it on your dick. If you've ever accidentally or on purpose gotten IcyHot on your dick, you have an intuitive understanding of how the skin there differs from bicep skin. Also, the effects of testosterone gel don't localize like that and your dick is fine, I promise.

Don't eat it. I don't know why you'd want to, but don't.

Don't leave the bottle out around little kids on account of little kids being the way that they are, i.e., enthusiastic about potions.

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Its kind of ridiculous how difficult it is to find critical intersex literature if you don't know where to look.

That said, here are frequently cited things I've found. For the one's that are behind paywalls, I have a Google Drive folder set up to hold them for access. The only things I leave behind a paywall are books by individual authors. They are not organized at all, I'm sorry.

Intersex Variations Glossary by InterACT

Narrative Symposium: Intersex—Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics (NIB) Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 2015.— Trigger warning for intersex genital mutilation (IGM), sexual assault, and medical trauma—it's honestly a lot but incredibly important. (Drive)

A human rights investigation into the medical "normalization" of intersex people - A report of a public hearing by the Human Rights Commission of the City & County of San Francisco

Surgical Progress Is Not the Answer to Intersexuality - Cheryl Chase. - TW for IGM and images of genitalia (Drive)

The Intersex Roadshow, a blog of Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello - Costello is an intersex trans man and tries to bridge the gap between trans and intersex issues

Beyond Binary Sex and Gender Ideology - Cary Grabriel Costello - Chapter 12 of The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment (Drive)

Transgender and intersex: theoretical, practical, and artistic perspectives (book/textbook) (Drive)

Intersex: Stories and Statistics from Australia (Book) (Open Access)

Fixing sex: intersex, medical authority, and lived experience (Book)

The harms of medicalisation: intersex, loneliness and abandonment (Open Access Article)

Intersex: cultural and social perspectives (Open Access Article)

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) - Technical Note on the Human Rights of Intersex People. Basically, if you want an easy way to say that doctors are going against human rights by performing IGM.

An experimental philosophical bioethical study of how human rights are applied to clitorectomy on infants identified as female and as intersex (Open Access Article) - People were more likely to support the same surgery on infants labeled as intersex than they were on infants labeled as female.

Caught in the Gender Binary Blind Spot: Intersex Erasure in Cisgender Rhetoric by Hida Viloria - About how cisgender often doesn't accurately express the experiences intersex people have. Costello, mentioned earlier with Intersex Roadshow, coined Ipsogender for this reason.

Introduction for Intersex Activism - A guide for allies

Sex, Science, and Society: Reckonings and Responsibilities for Biologists (Open Access Article)

Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis by Georgiann Davis - TW for medical trauma

Spectacles and Scholarship: Caster Semenya, Intersex Studies, and the Problem of Race in Feminist Theory by Zine Magubane (Drive)

Owning Endosex Privilege and Supporting the Intersex Community: WPATH, Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM), and Sex Variant Bodies by Margo Schulter

The Spectrum of Sex by Hida Viloria and Dr. Maria Nieto

A long way to go for LGBTI equality from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights - Before the UK left the EU

If anyone wants to add, feel free! This was the non-medicalized stuff I had saved in Zotero, and definitely not all that's out there.

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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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true gender liberation will never happen until the queer community can see masculinity as something which can be a real expression of self and which is worth protecting and loving

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to every trans guy: when you tell other people you're trans you don' thave you say you're "unfortunately" a trans guy, or that you have bad news, or something else to that effect. you don't have to say that. you can be proud of being a trans man. you can even be neutral about it. you don't have to hate yourself for it. people want you to, but it doesn't help anyone. its not unfortunate, it's a blessing.