ayoitsalexx

[ayoitsalexx]

reblog to teleport your mutuals to a massive party when jkr dies

[ayoitsalexx]

Misogyny.

[ayoitsalexx]

frequent customer

[ayoitsalexx]

LIKE TO CHARGE REBLOG TO CAST LET'S GET THIS FUCKER EXPLODEDED

[ayoitsalexx]

“I feel uncomfortable with referring to myself with the alternatives you’ve suggested for AGAB language” okay? then think of some other alternatives. because defending it as “it’s a useful shorthand to explain my body and my childhood experiences” is not going to cut it. it’s fundamentally untrue (hi I’m intersex! and also on hrt! calling myself by what I was assigned at birth tells you fuck all). you are throwing people under the bus for your own comfort. repeatedly acting as though a single moment in time (your gender assignment at birth) tells anyone anything about bodies and gender and sexed existence reinforces fundamentally transphobic and intersexist ideas about the body. get imaginative and find language for what you actually fucking mean when you refer to your “birth sex”

[ayoitsalexx]

uk people, sign and share

non uk people, share but don't sign

terfs, get in the bin and stay there

[ayoitsalexx]

Allies don't need to be rewarded for treating us like people.

if youre in a position to not be friendly or congradulative to people who do the bare minimum, you either have a lot of privilege or the ability to not care about their growth or allyship

[ayoitsalexx]

[ Devour ]

[ayoitsalexx]

[ayoitsalexx]

i must not kill myself . killing myself is the myself killer

[ayoitsalexx]

My 3025 new years resolution:

Get good at life

[ayoitsalexx]

[ayoitsalexx]

i always think about that study where they had adults hold a baby, and when they were told the baby was a girl the adults said she was cute and small, and when they were told the baby was a boy they said he was big and strong. they rated the baby’s ability to do things and tendency towards certain toys differently. they even held the baby differently. (x) or when they rated the baby’s physical ability to do various tasks such as climbing up a slope differently, (x) & when they measured how much parents told their girl children vs. their boy children to be careful and stop being so rowdy (x), & when they measured how often girls and boys were told to be quiet. (x) this was, obviously, all unconscious behavior in the adults. they’re not all like, raving sexists who outspokenly believe that women can’t do stuff or that girls really should just be quieter, be more still than boys. like its not even counting the direct, actual messages, its just literally how every single person in your entire life treats you, and if asked they would probably deny that its even because you’re a girl. how the fuck am i supposed to believe this doesn’t affect a child’s development when its literally constant throughout the entire process 

[ayoitsalexx]

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.

[ayoitsalexx]

thank you for the continued support! the due date is quickly approaching.

my gfm is at 60%

[ayoitsalexx]

for over a year i've been seeing palestinians campaigning for funds for their survival across social media. i see Palestinians in tumblr notes, twitter replies, youtube comment sections, tiktoks, instagram, etc. there's no social media i regularly use where i haven't seen multiple posts a day from Palestinians asking for help and to be heard. of course, i share and donate what i can. but what gets me is that if I am seeing posts every day then so are the millionaires and billionaires and politicians with the power to end their suffering...and they don't!!!!!

it makes me sick. according to forbes there are over 2700 billionaires in the world with a combined wealth of trillions. it would take less than even 1% of that to fill the gofundmes of Palestinians trying to rebuild their lives. yet the majority of money in these gofundmes is from ordinary folks scrounging spare change. its heartening in a way to watch so many with relatively little pool our resources to help others. but it also makes me so angry because i know there are people with more money than anyone in history seeing the same faces and gofundmes and are doing nothing.

so i'd really appreciate it if you could all help me spotllght Hani Alanqar's campaign. Hani is @haniyassersposts, is only 26, and currently sheltering in a school in Gaxa with his young siblings. He needs 25k to escape the genocide with his sick mother and father and has so far only raised 5k. His campaign is vetted #5 here. let's keep doing what we can to help until Palestine is free.

[ayoitsalexx]

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There it is!! The end of chapter 4 and maybe the moment you've all been waiting for ♥ There is one short chapter of 8 pages left. I'll make a pause next week and then we'll continue with the rest on the 9th of december <:) Thanks for all your lovely comments so far, I'm enjoying each and every one of them!!

If you want to know: This was the soundtrack in my head for this last scene. I'm not sure if the lyrics fit but I think it captures the atmosphere really well.