This is so AAAAGHGGSGGRHHR
The only busses I take are trans trains driven by trans train cat boys.
満理奈と言う
Important
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.
this wonderful person picked up a handful of sand. little do they know that the sandos, a group a people known for their sands, want to steal that sand which they have picked up, for that wonderful person is actually the sand princess, descended from a long line of sand rulers. the sandos wish to control their latent sand princess powers. to stop the sandos, the sand princess must go on a quest to find the mythical sand-wich, which, in the prophecy, is the final step to becoming the sand queen. however the daughter of the sandos's leader, the sand witch, is also after the sand-wich. will the sand princess find the sand-wich before the sandos? will the sand witch be able to reconcile her feelings towards the sand princess and break free from the opressive sandos society? the answer will be revealed in my new book: sandcastle in the sky, coming out in may of 2068.
NEZHA 2!???!???
Ao Bing's father and aunty. His father is Ao Guang敖广, Longwang of the East Sea, and his aunty is Ao Run敖闰, Longwang of the West Sea. (lóngwang龙王 means sovereign of lóng龙)
Scholars used to use the word loong but its pronunciation is significantly different from the Chinese character "龙". Long is better but still not the same. The aunthentic pronunciation is more like [lɔ:ueng] and it's pinyin is lóng.
Translators use the word dragon merely to facilitate better understanding, but the Chinese "龙" and the Western "dragon" are vastly different, fundamentally distinct, much like two creatures that aren't in the same dimension.
The Chinese 龙lóng is a sacred mythical creature; they are considered holy beings, existing in a dimension above that of mortals. They hold the responsibility of controlling the wind, lightning, thunder, clouds and rain, regulating the weather, and blessing the abundance of crops. The copulation of 龙lóng with nine other creatures gave birth to various divine beasts, each bearing some characteristics of the 龙lóng, but the true 龙lóng is regarded as the purest and most noble of all.
In China, many people claim to have seen lóng, with plenty of folk records both before and after the founding of the People's Republic. In the internet era, there are also many videos of lóng. One of the most famous is footage taken by a college student on her dormitory balcony on a cloudy day, where a lóng appears in the thunderclouds and then turn its head to gaze the girl. Another notable incident is the CCTV live broadcast of the Gaoyou Lake lóng water spout event (interestingly, CCTV later edited the live footage, changing the scene of a real lóng spiraling and disappearing in a flash to show three ridiculous birds that didn’t follow the rules of perspective). These videos can be found on Bilibili if you want to check them out. I think the dormitory and Gaoyou Lake videos are real like they're truely lóng (the dorm one is especially striking because it looks exactly like the watery ink long on ancient Chinese paintings, with an extraordinary and otherworldly vibe, exuding an overwhelming sense of oppression). Other real videos show that lóng can fly at incredibly high speeds, like lightning. Folk culture says lóng can switch between physical and ethereal forms at will, which is why they can move so fast. There are also many fake videos to get clicks online, so one gets to use their own judgment. It’s widely believed that lóng appeared as early as the creation of the world, and they made a pact with the ancestors of Chinese people and have been protecting the 'Celestial Realm and Divine Land of Huaxia'华夏神州 ever since. In the unique Chinese twelve shengxiao生肖 culture, lóng is the only mythical creature—the other eleven are common animals. Some scholars think that when shengxiao was created, many people had actually seen lóng and accepted that they're real, which is why it became one of the twelve shengxiao.
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As requested, here’s a tutorial on how I make my gifs. Everyone’s process is a little different, and mine changes from time to time, so it’ll take some experimenting to find the settings that you like best. I’ll also link this tutorial here by Em, who is way more thorough than I’ll probably be, so check that out! The tutorial will be found in the read more below (apologies if it doesn’t work on mobile - this is a screenshot heavy piece of text).
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ウチの新しいコミックです。日本語上手じゃない、問題を話すお願いします。
I am an artist who likes gaming and anime. My favorite game series r: Splatoon, Monster Hunter, Zelda, Hollow Knight My favorite anime r: Made in Abyss, Genshiken, JoJo, Avatar, Ranma, Nichijou, Princess Jellyfish I joined tumblr because I hate other social medias. pronouns r: they/them
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