Aces are LGBT, even grandma says so

White House analysis suggests GOP health care bill may see even more insurance losses

A new document on the effects of the GOP’s proposed health care bill has emerged from the White House, forecasting even deeper cuts in coverage than Monday’s Congressional Budget Office report.

Whereas the CBO report predicts 24 million people would lose their insurance by 2026 under the legislation, the White House analysis predicts 26 million, bringing the total of uninsured people in the United States up to 54 million by 2026. Read more (3/14/17 6:32 AM)

Bernie Sanders slams Trumpcare as a “disgusting and immoral proposal”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, was at the front of the line to criticize the Republican plan to repeal and replace the ACA Monday.

but it was boys who first started making fun of how i looked, of what mess my face was like, of the fat on my thighs. and it was girls who showed me how to apply makeup, patiently waiting with me in the bathroom mirror to show how not to cry while i applied it to the waterline. they agreed to go on diets with me even when they hated salad. they agreed to scoop buckets of ice cream into our bellies at midnight when i was upset about something minor.

it was boys who were snippy about my grades, it was a man who first said that because i was a girl i was bad at math and i’d stay that way. it was boys who started making fun of the one time i got a 34 on a math test when my mother had been in the hospital the night before. it was girls who held my hand during this, who stayed with me through hours of library studies, who explained over and over in gel pens and pretty handwriting exactly what i was missing. it was girls who taught me to color-code and to highlight and how to stay up all night, it was girls who cheered with me when i got nothing lower than a B. 

it was a boy who taught my friend that she could talk down to me like i was trash. it was a boy who started drama between us. it was a boy who wouldn’t listen or talk it out or find a solution. he’d say angry hurtful things and expect us to listen. it was girls who fixed me after this. they taught me how to make good and positive friends. how to stay away from the girls who really are toxic ones. how to be proud of others and not competitive. how to give genuine compliments, how to accept them, how to be comfortable with who i am and what has happened.

i was told all my life that there was a “type” of girl to avoid. she was probably wearing ugg boots and shorts or drinking a latte or picking out lush products or doing literally anything that girls like to do for themselves, she was catty. girls are catty. when they fight, it’s a catfight. (the majority of fights i saw were either physical or two girls sobbing while apologizing. the speaking beforehand was just the standoff because nobody was ready to take the gloves off). 

girls, i find, are defensive. we wear our hands up, waiting for the hit. girls who are sick of getting hit get “bitchy.” they are fierce, they take what they want, they’ll mess you up for saying the wrong thing about their friend. and girls, who are unwilling to simply take insults without lashing back with something: they’re catty. and when boys bully others and spread nasty gossip and start drama: well, they’re just boys. they’ll fight it out, or something. 

but it was boys who first started making fun of how i looked, of what mess my face was like, of the fat on my thighs. and it was girls who showed me how to apply makeup, patiently waiting with me in the bathroom mirror to show how not to cry while i applied it to the waterline. they agreed to go on diets with me even when they hated salad. they agreed to scoop buckets of ice cream into our bellies at midnight when i was upset about something minor.

it was boys who were snippy about my grades, it was a man who first said that because i was a girl i was bad at math and i’d stay that way. it was boys who started making fun of the one time i got a 34 on a math test when my mother had been in the hospital the night before. it was girls who held my hand during this, who stayed with me through hours of library studies, who explained over and over in gel pens and pretty handwriting exactly what i was missing. it was girls who taught me to color-code and to highlight and how to stay up all night, it was girls who cheered with me when i got nothing lower than a B. 

it was a boy who taught my friend that she could talk down to me like i was trash. it was a boy who started drama between us. it was a boy who wouldn’t listen or talk it out or find a solution. he’d say angry hurtful things and expect us to listen. it was girls who fixed me after this. they taught me how to make good and positive friends. how to stay away from the girls who really are toxic ones. how to be proud of others and not competitive. how to give genuine compliments, how to accept them, how to be comfortable with who i am and what has happened.

i was told all my life that there was a “type” of girl to avoid. she was probably wearing ugg boots and shorts or drinking a latte or picking out lush products or doing literally anything that girls like to do for themselves, she was catty. girls are catty. when they fight, it’s a catfight. (the majority of fights i saw were either physical or two girls sobbing while apologizing. the speaking beforehand was just the standoff because nobody was ready to take the gloves off). 

girls, i find, are defensive. we wear our hands up, waiting for the hit. girls who are sick of getting hit get “bitchy.” they are fierce, they take what they want, they’ll mess you up for saying the wrong thing about their friend. and girls, who are unwilling to simply take insults without lashing back with something: they’re catty. and when boys bully others and spread nasty gossip and start drama: well, they’re just boys. they’ll fight it out, or something. 

Kansas Sen. Steve Fitzgerald compares Planned Parenthood to Nazi death camp

On March 8, Kansas Sen. Steve Fitzgerald fired off an ungrateful missive after receiving a thank you note from Planned Parenthood Great Plains. 

One of Fitzgerald’s constituents made a donation to the health care provider in the senator’s name, a donation he did not appreciate because, in his estimation, Planned Parenthood is on par with Dachau, the first death camp established in Nazi Germany.

And then white male media pushing assholes lifted two lines out of it to quote out of context to fool folk into thinking she criticised her instead.

Scarlet Letters: Getting the History of Abortion and Contraception Right

This was a really fascinating read. Until the early 19th century, abortion was legal until “quickening,” or when the pregnant person first felt the baby kick - anywhere from 14 to 26 weeks into the pregnancy. Society only began to condemn it when people decided white, middle- to upperclass women weren’t having enough children soon enough in their lives, and when male doctors started taking over traditionally female health care fields, like midwifery.

Isabelle Vang wanted nothing more than to live her life, like any other girl; faeries make that very hard to do.

Isabelle, known to most as Izzy, is trying to settle into her life. She’s graduated high school, she’s got a part-time job in the next city over, her own apartment, and she wants nothing more than to just be herself. Things are going okay, until her godparents show up on her doorstep one night, and tell her she owes them, and they’re giving her a quest. She’s ready to write it all off as a dream, and try to be normal, until her best friend, gone for the last 5 years, shows up on her doorstep, telling her to get ready to go to The Otherworld. Can Izzy survive the machinations of a faerie world and still come out herself?

Liminal features Izzy (a bi trans WoC), her best friend Jules (an aro/ace Latina), and Robin (an intersex man!). There’s even a queer witch couple.

The story revolves around child ballads (also known as murder ballads!), faeries, and liminal places.

The author themselves is a nonbinary person! The author wishes to inform readers that despite best efforts to prove otherwise, they are not a fae creature. Maybe. Sometimes. They may be a jack'o'lantern child in disguise. It is also yet to be disproven.

Please support me, and my writing habit, by purchasing a copy here!

Kindle | Print

Many people can go through awful things without developing trauma based disorders as long as they receive compassion and support in processing those events as they happen. The most common factor in developing something like ptsd is emotional neglect. And emotional neglect on it’s own can be enough. 

Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.

I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.

“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.

This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.

So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.

I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning. Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again. But when we heard the sirens wailing somewhere far away, my whole body flooded with relief.

I didn’t know our wait was just beginning.

I buzzed the EMTs into our apartment. We answered their questions: When did the pain start? That morning. Where was it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being worst?

“Eleven,” Rachel croaked.

As we loaded into the ambulance, here’s what we didn’t know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. But it had grown, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like you’d wring out a sponge. This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.

“Ovarian torsion represents a true surgical emergency,” says an article in the medical journal Case Reports in Emergency Medicine. “High clinical suspicion is important. … Ramifications include ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death.” The best chance of salvaging a torsed ovary is surgery within eight hours of when the pain starts.

* * *

There is nothing like witnessing a loved one in deadly agony. Your muscles swell with the blood they need to fight or run. I felt like I could bend iron, tear nylon, through the 10-minute ambulance ride and as we entered the windowless basement hallways of the hospital.

And there we stopped. The intake line was long—a row of cots stretched down the darkened hall. Someone wheeled a gurney out for Rachel. Shaking, she got herself between the sheets, lay down, and officially became a patient.

We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has.

Emergency-room patients are supposed to be immediately assessed and treated according to the urgency of their condition. Most hospitals use the Emergency Severity Index, a five-level system that categorizes patients on a scale from “resuscitate” (treat immediately) to “non-urgent” (treat within two to 24 hours).

I knew which end of the spectrum we were on. Rachel was nearly crucified with pain, her arms gripping the metal rails blanched-knuckle tight. I flagged down the first nurse I could.

“My wife,” I said. “I’ve never seen her like this. Something’s wrong, you have to see her.”

“She’ll have to wait her turn,” she said. Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.

We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has. I saw only the way Rachel’s whole face twisted with the pain.

Soon, I started to realize—in a kind of panic—that there was no system of triage in effect. The other patients in the line slept peacefully, or stared up at the ceiling, bored, or chatted with their loved ones. It seemed that arrival order, not symptom severity, would determine when we’d be seen.

As we neared the ward’s open door, a nurse came to take Rachel’s blood pressure. By then, Rachel was writhing so uncontrollably that the nurse couldn’t get her reading.

She sighed and put down her squeezebox.

“You’ll have to sit still, or we’ll just have to start over,” she said.

Finally, we pulled her bed inside. They strapped a plastic bracelet, like half a handcuff, around Rachel’s wrist.

* * *

From an early age we’re taught to observe basic social codes: Be polite. Ask nicely.Wait your turn. But during an emergency, established codes evaporate—this is why ambulances can run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road. I found myself pleading, uselessly, for that kind of special treatment. I kept having the strange impulse to take out my phone and call 911, as if that might transport us back to an urgent, responsive world where emergencies exist.

The average emergency-room patient in the U.S. waits 28 minutes before seeing a doctor. I later learned that at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where we were, the average wait was nearly three times as long, an hour and 49 minutes. Our wait would be much, much longer.

Everyone we encountered worked to assure me this was not an emergency. “Stones,” one of the nurses had pronounced. That made sense. I could believe that. I knew that kidney stones caused agony but never death. She’d be fine, I convinced myself, if I could only get her something for the pain.

By 10 a.m., Rachel’s cot had moved into the “red zone” of the E.R., a square room with maybe 30 beds pushed up against three walls. She hardly noticed when the attending physician came and visited her bed; I almost missed him, too. He never touched her body. He asked a few quick questions, and then left. His visit was so brief it didn’t register that he was the person overseeing Rachel’s care.

Around 10:45, someone came with an inverted vial and began to strap a tourniquet around Rachel’s trembling arm. We didn’t know it, but the doctor had prescribed the standard pain-management treatment for patients with kidney stones: hydromorphone for the pain, followed by a CT scan.

The pain medicine started seeping in. Rachel fell into a kind of shadow consciousness, awake but silent, her mouth frozen in an awful, anguished scowl. But for the first time that morning, she rested.

* * *

Leslie Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” examines ways that different forms of female suffering are minimized, mocked, coaxed into silence. In an interview included in her book The Empathy Exams, she discussed the piece, saying: “Months after I wrote that essay, one of my best friends had an experience where she was in a serious amount of pain that wasn’t taken seriously at the ER.”

She was talking about Rachel.  

“Women are likely to be treated less aggressively until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.”

“That to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake,” she said. “Not just on the side of the medical establishment—where female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated—but on the side of the woman herself: My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.”

“Female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated”: We saw this from the moment we entered the hospital, as the staff downplayed Rachel’s pain, even plain ignored it. In her essay, Jamison refers back to “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” a study identifying ways gender bias tends to play out in clinical pain management. Women are  “more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they ‘prove that they are as sick as male patients,’” the study concludes—a phenomenon referred to in the medical community as “Yentl Syndrome.”

In the hospital, a lab tech made small talk, asked me how I like living in Brooklyn, while my wife struggled to hold still enough for the CT scan to take a clear shot of her abdomen.

“Lot of patients to get to, honey,” we heard, again and again, when we begged for stronger painkillers. “Don’t cry.”

I felt certain of this: The diagnosis of kidney stones—repeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physician’s prescribed course of treatment—was a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachel’s pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachel’s swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin. But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN. And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”

Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.

“My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.” Rachel does struggle with this, even now. How long is it appropriate to continue to process a traumatic event through language, through repeated retellings? Friends have heard the story, and still she finds herself searching for language to tell it again, again, as if the experience is a vast terrain that can never be fully circumscribed by words. Still, in the throes of debilitating pain, she tried to bite her lip, wait her turn, be good for the doctors.

For hours, nothing happened. Around 3 o’clock, we got the CT scan and came back to the ER. Otherwise, Rachel lay there, half-asleep, suffering and silent. Later, she’d tell me that the hydromorphone didn’t really stop the pain—just numbed it slightly. Mostly, it made her feel sedated, too tired to fight.

If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.

Eventually, the doctor—the man who’d come to Rachel’s bedside briefly, and just once—packed his briefcase and left. He’d been around the ER all day, mostly staring into a computer. We only found out later he’d been the one with the power to rescue or forget us.

When a younger woman came on duty to take his place, I flagged her down. I told her we were waiting on the results of a CT scan, and I hassled her until she agreed to see if the results had come in.

When she pulled up Rachel’s file, her eyes widened.

“What is this mess?” she said. Her pupils flicked as she scanned the page, the screen reflected in her eyes.

“Oh my god,” she murmured, as though I wasn’t standing there to hear. “He never did an exam.”

The male doctor had prescribed the standard treatment for kidney stones—Dilauded for the pain, a CT scan to confirm the presence of the stones. In all the hours Rachel spent under his care, he’d never checked back after his initial visit. He was that sure. As far as he was concerned, his job was done.

If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.

It was almost another hour before we got the CT results. But when they came, they changed everything.

“She has a large mass in her abdomen,” the female doctor said. “We don’t know what it is.”

That’s when we lost it. Not just because our minds filled then with words liketumor and cancer and malignant. Not just because Rachel had gone half crazy with the waiting and the pain. It was because we’d asked to wait our turn all through the day—longer than a standard office shift—only to find out we’d been an emergency all along.

Suddenly, the world responded with the urgency we wanted. I helped a nurse push Rachel’s cot down a long hallway, and I ran beside her in a mad dash to make the ultrasound lab before it closed. It seemed impossible, but we were told that if we didn’t catch the tech before he left, Rachel’s care would have to be delayed until morning.

“Whatever happens,” Rachel told me while the tech prepared the machine, “don’t let me stay here through the night. I won’t make it. I don’t care what they tell you—I know I won’t.”

Soon, the tech was peering inside Rachel through a gray screen. I couldn’t see what he saw, so I watched his face. His features rearranged into a disbelieving grimace.

By then, Rachel and I were grasping at straws. We thought: cancer. We thought: hysterectomy. Lying there in the dim light, Rachel almost seemed relieved.

“I can live without my uterus,” she said, with a soft, weak smile. “They can take it out, and I’ll get by.”

She’d make the tradeoff gladly, if it meant the pain would stop.

After the ultrasound, we led the gurney—slowly, this time—down the long hall to the ER, which by then was  completely crammed with beds. Trying to find a spot for Rachel’s cot was like navigating rush-hour traffic.

Then came more bad news. At 8 p.m., they had to clear the floor for rounds. Anyone who was not a nurse, or lying in a bed, had to leave the premises until visiting hours began again at 9.

When they let me back in an hour later, I found Rachel alone in a side room of the ER. So much had happened. Another doctor had told her the mass was her ovary, she said. She had something called ovarian torsion—the fallopian-tube twists, cutting off blood. There was no saving it. They’d have to take it out.

Rachel seemed confident and ready.

“He’s a good doctor,” she said. “He couldn’t believe that they left me here all day. He knows how much it hurts.”

When I met the surgery team, I saw Rachel was right. Talking with them, the words we’d used all day—excruciating, emergency, eleven—registered with real and urgent meaning. They wanted to help.

By 10:30, everything was ready. Rachel and I said goodbye outside the surgery room, 14 and a half hours from when her pain had started.

* * *

Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls “the trauma of not being seen.” She has nightmares, some nights. I wake her up when her limbs start twitching.

IT CHANGED.

I hadn’t thought about it until I read this and instantly found myself looking at all my ER experiences (and there have been more than I’d like to admit).  

As a “woman” I spent a great deal of time in the waiting room, clutching my sides or writing in chairs.  I was told for over a year (four emergency room visits and countless primary appointments) that I had kidney stones, only to later be rushed into emergency spinal surgery to prevent paralysis for something that could have been corrected with simple physical therapy.  I was threatened with not receiving pain medication if I didn’t calm down and/or accept the (incorrect) diagnosis.  My desperation in these places was so great, and so difficult, that my depressed mind, with this as a catalyst I sometimes thought death might be preferable than going to the ER and I had to physically forced to seek help.

After growing more firm in my visual representation of a man, I’ve been to the ER three times and my primary countless.  I can tell you right now several things: the staff was nicer, more sympathetic, and actually listened to me.  I went to the worst hospital in my current area just two months ago and people said they were astonished that I had decent help… No, correction, women told me they were astonished I got helped as “fast” as I did (two-three hours in the waiting room).  Doctors at all of these ER visits talked to me about what I might have, what they thought, what I thought….

I’ve received better medical help in the three years I’ve visually stood as a man than in more than twenty-five years appearing as a woman.  

Our medical system was already shit.  It was back then.  It is now.  That is no excuse for women to be treated this way.  There is absolutely no reason a doctor should ever, ever dismiss a patients concerns.  The truth of it is that we are in our bodies, all people regardless of any visual traits, and we know when they’re acting up.  This is not okay.

WRONG

WRONG WRONG WRONG

purim, like chanukah, is one of the most jewish jewish holidays- it’s about a time they tried to kill us, the jews, and they didn’t succeed, because of the heroism of esther and mordechai, TWO JEWS.

if you’re invited to a purim party/seudah/celebration of any kind, by a jew, and you’re not jewish, please- go! enjoy yourself! you’re wanted there! but, though no jewish holidays are up for grabs for non-jews, this especially is not a holiday that’s appropriate for non-jews to put their greasy little paws all over.

I… I can’t… WHY MUST GOYIM DO THIS

The persecution of Jews in the Purim story—or any Jewish holiday’s origins—is not something we see as a “privilege.” We celebrate the END of that persecution, which in Purim’s case is brought about by very human, very mortal Jews.

The gender care clinic will be the first of its kind in Central Texas.

“Right now, there is no specific clinic where people who are seeking help for gender issues can feel at home,” Texas Health Action’s medical director Dr. Cynthia Brinson said. 　 Dr. Brinson is one of the doctors who will be working with the transgender patients.

She said these patients often don’t feel welcome in the average medical community and sometimes look for medical care elsewhere.

Some of the services that will be offered at the gender care clinic include STI testing and treatment, HIV testing, general wellness exams, PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis), and hormone therapy for transgender and gender non conforming patients. 

On top of medical care, the gender care clinic is looking to add more services.

“In the future, we’d also be able to offer some counseling services,” Dr. Brinson said. “This will be a wonderful opportunity to really find out how patients in Austin will seek out are care and we’ll get a better idea of how many people need this care.” 　 All of this will come at no cost to the patient. Any expenses not picked up by insurance will be covered by Texas Health Action.

Amazing amazing news for the trans/non binary community in Texas! 

like, pewdiepie makes antisemitic comments “"ironically”“, they still have an impact on jewish people (like me). men consistently make misogynistic ‘jokes’ about women, and they’ll swear up and down that they don’t really mean it and they’re just being ironic- but those comments still have an impact.

even if you don’t personally believe aphobia is oppression, you’d think you’d at least have the self awareness to recognize that claiming you hate a group of people as a ‘joke’ doesn’t magically absolve you of your actions. especially because even if you, personally, are doing it ‘ironically’, there are people calling themselves aphobes that legitimately hate ace people and think the world would be better if they didn’t exist. and much like when someone makes an antisemitic joke and actual antisemites hear it, they feel validated.

even if you don’t think aces are oppressed, you should at least recognize that ‘it’s ironic’ is historically meaningless and a shitty defense, and it’s the same defense used by bigots all over.

Police can search your BitTorrent files without a warrant, judge rules

A court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ruled on Thursday that authorities can search an individual’s files on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks without a warrant, reports Motherboard.

According to Judge John W. deGravelles, making files publicly available means a person cannot expect privacy.

The case at the United States District Court for the Middle District in Baton Rouge involves Justin Landry of Prairieville, who allegedly used BitTorrent to disperse child pornography.

Police cracked down on Landry, 36, in 2015 using Torrential Downpour — a software that is sold exclusively to law enforcement — in an undercover operation where he shared explicit images with a Plaquemines Parish detective. Read more (3/10/17 2:30 PM)

When I was younger, the last thing I was thinking was: How do I support my community who has been incarcerated?

The truth is, I wasn’t in a position to fully show up for my family and friends who were incarcerated. As an adult, however, I have realized that I grew up in a community that was constantly terrorized by the police.

We were living in a constant state of anxiety, violence, and grief, and I struggled to actively be in solidarity and perform acts of allyship for incarcerated people in my life. And I couldn’t support my friends dealing with incarceration of their families either.

To this day, I still find myself stuck sometimes. I have to remind myself that feeling guilty or awkward won’t really change much. At these times, I have to think through the different resources I have at the moment and consider different ways I can show up for my incarcerated community.

In light of such tiring times, I want you to know that you aren’t alone.

You have a right to your confusion and frustration. You have the right to be angry. You have the right to have questions, and I hope you’ll allow me to give you some initial answers.