#i'm not doubting my country

[wonder-worker]

people really do not know what they're talking about when it comes to Elizabeth Woodville's social status, huh?

[wastehound-voof]

Oh. So the guy who wrote a book bashing his life and family in Appalachia and putting down and denigrating the good people of Appalachia is now the vice presidential nominee. Well.

[hopeinthebox]

tagged by my beloveds @cordiallyfuturedwight and @aprylynn for the july list <33 i'm terribly afraid the glen powell of it all got to me this july and thus..

you can find this country music for beginners playlist here and check out lizzy's guide to the delicate art of making a playlist for a breakdown from yours truly if you feel so inclined <33

tagging my musical favs if they haven't already: @thvinyl @kimtaegis @jihopesjoint @visionsofgideontheninth @hoseeok @eoieopda @monismochi <333 and your lovely self reading this also

[blackmetalsnake]

Me, burned out from mental and physical illnesses and now living only on the power of testosterone in my body:

(^ I will definitely survive)

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

So, Canada has decided to stop sending arms to Israel after an NDP motion. The Liberals made major amendments to it so as to firmly condemn Hamas as well. It's kind of a mixed bag. Honestly, it's naive of me but I didn't expect there would still be so much outrage, even if the motion did call for an acknowledgement of Palestine as a state. All the Conservatives voted against it - to be fair, some of them wanted to wait for the motion to be passed because the amendments were super last minute and the Bloc Quebecois were annoyed that because of this there wasn't a French translation.

I guess it's a step in the right direction. I think it's still weak but you can read more on it here.

Source 1, Source 2, Source 3

[thegraveyardwitch]

.

[im-captain-basch]

Something that's only hitting me now is that while I love making the joke that Cranky's had his fourth wall-breaking ability since he was a little kid, it's also possible it's something that showed up in the aftermath of Donkey Kong Arcade.

Most people I've seen who have that particular area of their DK world thought of at least in part metaphorically agree he sustained a major injury after being defeated by Jumpman (usually him breaking his back, which is something I also agree on). It is rather logical, seeing as there is graphics showing him falling from the scaffolds that are what we can assume are 100 meters (~328 feet, or 30 stories/floors) tall but consider this: the graphics show him landing on his head.

Sure, that could just be a side-effect of the era and the limited ways they could show what happens on-screen. Surviving major head injuries can result in some wild neurological shit happening, usually things like seizures if not outright severe disability, so it wouldn't be too farfetched to assume that this ability his something gained from it.

I am almost DEFINITELY overthinking it, but that's what I do.

[iskra-ac1d-v0]

If trump wins im gonna kms

[marciliedonato]

T*ylor s*ift incident renders entire country's social media unusable and news unwatchable more at 9....

[eddis-not-eeddis]

.

[miserye]

bought myself a little gift like i really needed another little gift for myself

[valeriefauxnom]

Chapter 14 of Scaling the Walls of a Mystery is up!

In which Euden finally starts to dig too deep and his well of lucky coincidences that allowed him to escape for the moment starts to dry up.

Exert from update (~10k/~170k total words written so far!):

“Yeah, I can only imagine how weird this has to be for you. I mean, this is something right out of a faerie tale, a lost prince raised outside the castle being rediscovered… I’m just glad you’re doing okay and that the royal family accepted you so quickly. All the stories I know always have the lost royal having to fight their way to prove their birthright or fight their family outright, and that’s always sad.” Theo scratched his head. 

“I suppose it is, fighting family…” Euden mused, “Ah, but how’s Roland doing?”

--

I'm only on AO3 here! Feel free to ask about anything because goodness knows I'm always down to rant about this longfic that has rapidly spiraled into a complex web of royal family drama even if it is much less homicidal than the main game!

[argentoheart]

SO NO ONE WAS GONNA TELL ME THERE'S BEN 10 OMNIVERSE GRAPHIC NOVELS???

[otterandterrier]

don't know what kind of shitty cinnamon I've been getting these past few years, but I *finally* found The Cinnamon I like and oh. holy. crap. Cinnamon. finally remembered why I loved cinnamon. it's The Cinnamon.

[wild-at-mind]

Just listened to the new episode of Tortoise’s Slow Newscast about Gender GP and it’s sooooo bad. Maybe I should have known better than to bother with it, but I’ve enjoyed their non-gender related stuff. I also know at least one person who uses Gender GP, and I separately have been hearing from an FTM support group I’m in that a lot of NHS trusts are no longer willing to do shared care with Gender GP while still doing it with other similar services. I had hoped maybe it would shed some light on why that might be, because even though trans healthcare is vital it’s still important that it be done ethically and held to the same standards as other healthcare. But no, instead it was basically a referendum on whether medical transition is good/bad. Again. Fucks sake.

(For non-UK people, Gender GP are a private service for transition related healthcare but they can, or have in the past, worked with the NHS to provide shared care e.g. blood tests for HRT monitoring. It is needed because it’s a very, very, very long drawn out and difficult process to access NHS transition care.) The podcast’s thesis was that the founder of Gender GP (a cis GP named Helen Webberley) is not practicing ethical healthcare because there isn’t enough assessment before providing HRT. They do treat children but the majority of their customers are adults. However you can guess which demographic was focused on. No children or adults who had undergone treatment with Gender GP were interviewed. There was a suggestion from the interviewer that maybe Helen Webberley is y’know a little bit ditzy, naive as hell of course, but also isn’t she bad for making money out of this? In this way she is juxtaposed against the NHS, which is the Good and Right way to transition, because they don’t profit off trans kids I guess. This argument stops working in any country that doesn’t have free at point of use healthcare of any kind, but never mind that. Also the podcast to its credit acknowledges several times that there are no currently practicing NHS gender clinics in the UK, and that this is a problem. But that’s about all we get in that department. There’s a waiting list, but no clinics. That list gets longer and longer. It’s so fucked up.

I would argue that the podcast is sceptical about the entire concept of being transgender, and I wonder if they even realise this about themselves. Two mothers of trans sons are interviewed, one who used Gender GP and one who accessed black market hormones. The first mother says that Gender GP ruined her child. But she was still referring to her child as her daughter and using she/her. You would think that if medical transition was the only concern, the mother would have been fine with the social and 100% reversable changes in pronouns and name. I know it’s hard for someone who has known you their whole life as one name and set of pronouns to remember at first, but this was different, she just hadn’t done anything. Without saying it out loud she was clearly waiting for it all to blow over, and not even considering that it might not. Meanwhile the child’s father (they were divorced) is helping the child access Gender GP, which can’t have helped matters. The mother sadly laments how Gender GP tore her family apart. The 2nd mother was worried about her child accessing black market hormones and using home syringes. This is a valid worry. However she also referred to her child purely as daughter, she/her and actively aschewed his new name. I don’t even know why she was interviewed as her son wasn’t using Gender GP, and this wasn’t a perspective about what Gender GP was clearly designed to be- a safer option in between black market hormones and the endless wait for the NHS. It was very clear she was even more ‘wait for it to blow over’ than the first interviewee. She spoke with apparent disgust (though to be fair was voiced by an actor who may have been hamming it up a bit) that since socially transitioning at school her child was suddenly really popular and was liked by many people he wasn’t before, and they all loved using his new name....that part felt especially weird, like she was angry that her child was being called a name he preferred by his friends. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of parents alluding to children coming out as trans at school to become popular. I read an article where a parent was relaying what their child had said, where apparently their classmate came out as trans in assembly and everybody clapped. The idea that there might be other factors involved, such as novelty that will wear off for the classmates, the classroom social standing of the child in question, or even in the case of the 2nd podcast interviewee’s son, increased confidence post coming out making him more sociable, was ignored. I do understand that this is a relatively new area of medicine without much long term data to draw on. However all types of healthcare has to start somewhere, and I wouldn’t have thought that the fear of an army of angry and betrayed detransitioners one day (which the interviewer was clearly disappointed that Webberley had never seen) should hold back progress. There are older adults who transitioned as children out in the world. On tumblr almost a decade ago I remember young trans guys in parts of the US accessing hormones through informed consent clinics, to much hand wringing from certain reactionary internet circles-see if you can contact those people. How are they doing?

There is so much more I could talk about but I have to stop there or I’ll go on all night. Edited to add: this should not be interpreted as a defence of Helen Webberley, only as a condemnation of the podcast episode’s framing of the concept of gender services that don’t require stringent assessment as very dangerous and scary and automatically malpractice. There’s a reason why I listened in the first place- because I had heard not great things about Gender GP. Sadly I didn’t get a look at its problems and its founder’s problems, I got yet another highly biased condemnation of the entire concept of transness with way too much airtime for parents who don’t believe their teenage children have their own internal selves.

Edit again: I understand now what the podcast was saying about clinics- there are currently no gender clinics in England that treat children. There are a few in the country that treat adults over 18, and the waiting lists are really long but at least you can refer to one in any region. My referral was for Nottingham even though I’m in the south as it currently has the shortest waiting list on the tracker.

[rubys-domain]

*continuation of my tag ramble in the last post cuz i didn't want to say anything negative there so here's a second post lol*