whatifweallweresquirrels

[whatifweallweresquirrels]

I’ve been feeling lazy and uninspired with art so I just did some studies of frogs and geckos!! This was very fun, I have to remind myself to do more studies like these when I’m feeling stuck.

[whatifweallweresquirrels]

[whatifweallweresquirrels]

There is a photographer in our town that works for a local news feed just for our town (which I'm 90% sure is volunteer run) and I see him sometimes at things. He usually covers the town halls, school board meetings, he was taking photos at Juneteenth last year. Basically he's everywhere and I'm also everywhere, so we cross paths often.

But he also does a thing called 'My Final Photo,' which is just random day to day stuff happening in town that he thinks is cool enough to snap a photo of. Like... ongoing construction of the new buildings, when the crocuses come out, a bird landing on a lamppost. Stuff like that. He's a really talented photographer.

The Final Photo for yesterday was kind of awesome but I don't think he knows how much the caption contributed:

Because that is both

a. sick as hell

b. perfect encapsulation of the childhood experience.

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It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.

There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!

[whatifweallweresquirrels]

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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Romanian countryside 🌾⛰️

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this animal the wouf

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shit ton of people are repeating the thing about hayao miyazaki saying AI art is an "insult to life itself" and just as a reminder he was talking about the zombies that team made that were intended to be scary in how much they shook, but instead reminded him of his disabled friend. the insult to life itself was referring to the team trying to make scary real symptoms that people live with.

it was a quote about ableism. if he has said other things about AI type stuff, that is a different thing. but that specific quote was about ableism.

[whatifweallweresquirrels]

anyway i know we talk a lot of shit abt this site but i just wanna say that tumblr taught me to romanticize life a little. like where else am i gonna find an essay abt how hands were made to hold other hands or posts with thousands of notes abt how peeling an orange for a loved one can be the purest act of care & love? all the softest, sweetest and kindest ppl on the internet are here and i'm so grateful to be here along with y'all. i love you and please keep romanticizing the smallest things... god knows we need that now more than ever.

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i cant believe connie is a filthy homestuck

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“Do you think seahorses write fpreg” and the many other riveting things my friend texts me right before I go to work

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I love that there’s no context to this, op didn’t even bother to caption it. you know what hell yeah

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Go little guy, go!🎵

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forbidden neil the rat photos

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The Hague, Netherlands: Spanish street musician Borja Catanesi and the 68 year old dancer from The Hague mr Roland Parijs

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There is something to unpack in Rowling's coldtakes about International Asexuality Day. Specifically in how she was responding to a message that was just a cartoon of some people holding flags that gave a very basic definition of asexuality, but she made her tweet about "Fake Oppression." How she cannot stomach the idea of people outside of her narrow little definitions of the world simply existing. How she must hammer them into "categories" of people that she decides are real ("the gay category" vs. (presumably) 'the straight category'). But beyond that - to slot them into a worldview that views, (to borrow a phrase), "life is permanent warfare." Because the image she was responding to didn't so much as mention the real struggles, bigotry, and oppression ace people face. It was literally just, "ace people exist :)". But people cannot simple exist. People must either be of the populace or of the enemy. People are either oppressors or the oppressed. The populace is oppressed by the enemy. And - crucially - she believes everyone else is playing the same game she is. So ace folks can't simply exist - by identifying our own existence, we must be either identifying ourselves as part of the oppressed populace or the oppressive enemy. Since we are not identifying ourselves as separate from Rowling's conception of the populace, we must be the enemy. Since we are not identifying ourselves as oppressors, we must be identifying ourselves as oppressed. Which means, we are "Fak[ing] Oppression" by simply existing. (Because Rowling is a fascist, if I haven't made that point clearly enough.)

...And I would have a lot more energy to unpack all of this if my goverment wasn't. You know. Currently grabbing people off the street to send them to torture camps without even pretending at a charade of due process. (We are less than three months in.)