zeldary

[zeldary]

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.

[zeldary]

Ganon: SQUEEE OMG POWER IS SO COOL and I HATE that annoying popular Zelda!!

Majora: Ok Skull Kid now hit the second clock tower

Zant:

[zeldary]

source

From the state of Arizona

Kelly (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of California

Padilla (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Colorado

Bennet (Democrat) votes Yea

Hickenlooper (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Connecticut

Blumenthal (Democrat) votes Yea

Murphy (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Delaware

Carper (Democrat) votes Yea

Coons (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Georgia

Ossoff (Democrat) votes Yea

Warnock (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Hawaii

Hirono (Democrat) votes Yea

Schatz (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Illinois

Duckworth (Democrat) votes Yea

Durbin (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Maryland

Cardin (Democrat) votes Yea

Van Hollen (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Michigan

Peters (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Minnesota

Klobuchar (Democrat) votes Yea

Smith (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Montana

Tester (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Nevada

Cortez Masto (Democrat) votes Yea

Rosen (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of New Hampshire

Hassan (Democrat) votes Yea

Shaheen (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of New Mexico

Heinrich (Democrat) votes Yea

Luján (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of New York

Gillibrand (Democrat) votes Yea

Schumer (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Ohio

Brown (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Pennsylvania

Casey (Democrat) votes Yea

Fetterman (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Rhode Island

Reed (Democrat) votes Yea

Whitehouse (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Virginia

Kaine (Democrat) votes Yea

Warner (Democrat) votes Yea

From the state of Washington

Cantwell (Democrat) votes Yea

Murray (Democrat) votes Yea

[zeldary]

easy. lmao

[zeldary]

let's recap what we've learned about the United States in the last few days.

things that are terrorism:

allegedly shooting a healthcare CEO whose company generated more pure profit (not revenue, profit) in a year than the GDP of 94 countries, exclusively by denying coverage to people who pay for it

a 42-year-old mother of 2 using the wrong combination of 7 words during a heated conversation with a call center employee at a health insurance company who was in the process of denying her health coverage.

things that are not terrorism:

mass shooting in a Black church to incite a race war

going to a BLM protest specifically to kill protestors

a neo-nazi running over a crowd of people, killing a woman

targeting and killing 23 latinos in an el paso, texas walmart

killing 12 people in a theatre, shooting 58 others, rigging your apartment with explosives

a QAnon groyper killing 7 and shooting ~50 at a 4th of July parade

killing 3 people and shooting several others at a Planned Parenthood in defense of the unborn

stalking someone relentlessly and then killing them and their child despite months of the victim making police reports

any one of the 1,200 murders committed by US police yearly, the vast majority being minorities

tightening your border while ~100 immigrants (including children) drown every year in the Rio Grande

United Healthcare killing an unnknowable number of elderly people by using faulty AI to deny medically necessary coverage

Aetna killing a woman by refusing to cover her cancer care

Blue Cross killing a 6-year-old by denying her appendicitis surgery

Cigna killing a 17-year-old child by denying her liver transplant

the pharmaceutical industry killing half a million people with opioids in the name of producing revenues in 2023 that rivaled the GDPs of countries like Spain, Mexico, and Australia.

the United States killing 45,000 people a year because they can't access health coverage

make sure you keep this guide handy the next time you find yourself interacting with your insurance company or any other millionaire, billionaire, or an individual who is part of a protected class such as a CEO or president of a corporation.

[zeldary]

Reblog daily for health and prosperity

[zeldary]

[zeldary]

[zeldary]

Oh my god how are they making a shitty movie about Iraq and no one told me

[zeldary]

grinding for gaza while trying to keep my sanity intact. i'm just here on tumblr writing post after post, asking, begging for donations, for help. i craft these words carefully hoping someone somewhere might care enough to hit that reblog button or send a few dollars. then i go hunting for the tagging list hoping someone with a bigger reach than me will help amplify my voice because seriously what else can i do? message after message, waiting for a reply, a reblog, anything. the silence is deafening. i wait for the donation notification to pop up like it’s some kind of life raft. maybe just maybe it’ll float my family out of this hell. but mostly i’m sitting here clicking, praying, hoping while my phone keeps buzzing with more bad news. sighs deeply. well back to the grind i guess. shuffle away quietly. maybe trip on a rock this time. who knows.

If you can't donate via GoFundMe, you can use PayPal instead. Please note that 100 SEK is approximately 10 USD, and 200 SEK is around 20 USD.

Donate on GoFundMe: Link

Donate on Paypal: Link

Vetted and shared by @90-ghost: Link.

Verified and shared by @el-shab-hussein: Link

Listed as number 282 in "The Vetted Gaza Evacuation Fundraiser Spreadsheet" compiled by @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi : Link

Listed on the Butterfly Effect Project, number 957: Link

Additionally, Al Jazeera News has documented apart of my family's case: Link

@anneemay @tamamita @postanagramgenerator @mxwhore @rooh-afza

@amygdalae @stuckinapril @neptunerings @sabertoothwalrus @ankle-beez

@inkskinned @akajustmerry @mxwhore @pissvortex @catgirl-kaiju

@pryexel48 @nillabean @mintaii @b0nkcreat @pitbolshevik

@balaclava-trismegistus @ripley-stark @irhabiya @gaynfl

@feluka @zsnes @bug-slappy @rikebe @comrademango

@txttletale @tpwrtrmnky @brittklein18 @lakesbian @shadowofmoth

@gauntletqueen @gauntletqueen @extremelycursedimages @evilponds @vacillator

@metamatar @joeyclaire @communist-ojou-sama @soul-hammer @omegaversereloaded

@chilewithcarnage @prokopetz @cowboy-queer @bluesturngold @sjukvarld

@danijaci

[zeldary]

I keep joking about “ooh im gonna become the joker because of XYZ” but learning that my mother isn’t coming to my wedding not because she can’t but because she just doesn’t feel like it? Yeah I think thats the last straw actually.

[zeldary]

[zeldary]

Been watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix this week. It's a fascinating show, and easy to digest as background noise while working.

Kevin Can Fuck Himself is a serious drama sendup of the classic sitcom dynamic. It's two different shows mashed into one another.

The show's front is your typical Manchild Husband sitcom about a man named Kevin McRoberts. Every episode, he has a new wacky shenanigan to drag his wife and neighbors into, which usually blows up in his face spectacularly.

But Kevin is not the show's main character. Whenever he's onscreen, the show is lit and shot in sitcom fashion, with laugh track and applause and musical cues and all that jazz. The universe revolves around him and responds as sitcoms do to his every whim.

But this show is actually about his wife Allison. And whenever she's away from Kevin, the show changes genres to a serious drama piece. It's a show about the emotional and financial abuse of being tied down to the role of the Manchild Husband's "Nagging Wife", and more broadly the effects that his Comedic Sociopathy have on the put-upon supporting cast around him as well.

It's the story of a woman's quest to finally escape from the cage that her marriage to an impulsive, inconsiderate, and entirely self-centered piece of shit has trapped her in.

[zeldary]

FMA is fascinating because there aren't many works about what it means to be an atheist and a heretic to a god that you can not only see, but who has personally snatched body parts off of your living body and made fun of you for it.

[zeldary]

All the girls are girling✨ SpeedPaint under the cut (because I finally figured out how to export it to tumblr😂)⬇️

[zeldary]

Fuck you, now you get to see it in video form, because fuck you.

[zeldary]

More than 200,000 people are trapped in the northern Gaza Strip and are facing a real famine and mass extermination. Also, more than a million and a half people are facing the same famine in the southern Gaza Strip.Speak up for them, your voice can make a difference in this unjust world.

Also save my families within these families

Save my families who are suffering from famine here 👈👈