Mads

>censors all existing data on trans healthcare

>orders a study

Hey.

Hey.

They are targeting adults.

US people:

Create a backup plan for access to HRT. Now.

Prepare in advance, stockpile what you legally (or in minecraft) can, find diy that you trust.

They are going to take your medically required medication from you. This study is expected to start in about six months, and will likely be bullshit that only takes a couple months after that. There is still time.

@stealingyourbones has made some delightful food abominations, which taught me I can replace the water in bread with almost any liquid.

So I tried Miso.

The yeast loved it and frothed up super fast. Mixing miso broth with the egg and oil smelled funky. The dough didn’t rise any fluffier than usual but the texture feels good. Then I decided to roll in some black garlic and green onion. I’d add nori crumbled up but I ran out.

This is amazing. It tastes like if miso soup was solid. The flavor is immaculate. It’s just missing the nori flavor. I can add that next time because I am 100% making this again.

Yes! I love sharing recipes! @lady-jeleania

Here’s my Gma Vesta’s hamburger bun recipe:

1 Tbsp yeast

1/2 cup warm water (miso broth)

- mix together and let it froth up

1 1/2 cup warm water (miso broth)

1/2 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 egg

1/4 cup olive oil

- mix all together, then add frothy yeast

5 1/2 - 6ish cups flour

- mix in slowly with a fork until it’s hard to stir with the fork, then stir together with hands until it stops sticking to your skin when you rub your hands together.

- knead the dough about 10min until it starts pushing back (it gets springy)

Let the dough rest for 30min.

(I make a redneck proof box by microwaving a cup of water and quickly replacing the water with the dough bowl and shutting the door to give it a warm place to nap. Do not microwave the dough itself by reflex.)

Roll out the dough and add any flavors you like. For the miso soup bread I chopped up a couple black garlics, and a handful of green onion. Roll it up like cinnamon rolls, cut into 12, and roll each into a ball shape.

Stick in a greased 9x13 casserole dish and let the dough rise to double size. (About 40min-1hr depending on how warm your kitchen is.) (the redneck proof box won’t fit my casserole dish so I stick the rolls on top of the oven while it preheats with a dish towel over it.)

Preheat the oven to 350 and when the dough looks nice and squishy bake it for 20min.

You can brush butter on top if you want. That would look pretty and help a sprinkling of furikake stick after you pull it out of the oven. If you wanna up the miso taste you can also spread a very thin layer of miso paste in before you roll it up with the other fillings. I’m gonna try that next time.

Last week I was at a meetup where I was the only transfem. I checked the groupchat when I arrived and there was a message from the organiser: "We have a newcomer called X, can you look out for him if you get there first?" I located X, introduced myself, sent a message to the chat say, "I have located X," and continued to talk to him until the organiser arrived. When the organiser arrived, she was not happy with me. It turned out my phone had autocorrected, "I have located X," to, "I had located X," which the organiser interpreted as me passive aggressively telling her that I had already done the thing she was asking about. Her conclusion: I was unreasonable and aggressive in responding to her reasonable request. My explaining what had happened didn't convince her otherwise.

A different occasion last week: in a local trans groupchat, a trans man sent a link to a drag event happening in our town. A few people said they were already going, some said they might go. Then a trans woman replied saying, "Thanks, but I don't really like drag." Her tone was immediately called into question. Her words were assumed to communicate: "I think you are a terrible person if you like drag," even though she never said that. Several non-transfems who had never even heard that drag might not be universally-beloved by everyone were upset to discover that fact. A trans woman simply saying she didn't like this thing became A Big Deal.

Meanwhile, at a different event again, a trans man told a group that he was straight and attracted to women, but he wouldn't feel comfortable bringing home an "AMAB woman" (yes he actually said that). It was quickly brushed over, and after he had left even trans women tried to defend him by saying "he probably didnt realise people would be offended" etc etc. In contrast to the examples above, he is not even aware that anyone was upset by what he said, never mind worrying about what consequences he might face.

most of the transmasc people i've had in my life so far have been openly on the more sapphic-leaning side of the spectrum. i dated my ex right before i decided to stop being out to people. he was a transmasc nonbinary person who often joked about the two of us being "lesbians" because we were both trans, and i didn't feel safe telling him that made me uncomfortable. my best friend is another transmasc nonbinary person who is sapphic, and i am especially terrified of letting him know i'm trans. the way he talks about the other trans people in his life makes me uncomfortable. he is always mentioning their AGABs and grouping all trans men in with women in a way i don't think he realises is transphobic, but i've been too afraid to mention this to him because it could lead to me outing myself to him. i'm sure he would be thrilled to know that i'm trans too, but i can't get past the horrifying sick-to-my-stomach feeling that he will never see me as a "true" man ever again if i come out to him. i'm sickened by the prospect of the people closest to me secretly viewing me as "female" and i keep having doubts about whether im strong enough to withstand the well-meaning transphobia i feel i will inevitably get from them if i tried to be open about my identity and my boundaries. i feel like lying that i'm a cis man is the only way i can get the respect i deserve, and be comfortable in my community, but i'm also sure i will never truly love myself unless i stop hiding, even if i really hate the idea of being out to people right now. i am just scared that being open necessarily means learning to be okay with my loved ones seeing me as a woman. i want to have confidence and boundaries around my identity so i can really love being a trans man, but i don't know how to get myself to that point.

You know, in times gone by, it wasn't seen as some kind of violation of self for a trans person to decide that the best option for them was to be stealth. You are a man, a fruity/feminine gay one, and right now the people in your life correctly perceive you as such.

Your being trans can be a core part of your identity that you wish for people to view your personhood through the lens of, or it can be an aspect of your backstory and how you got to become the man that you are now. (There are other options beyond these, of course, these are just two ways of conceptualizing it that come to my mind).

You cannot control how other people will react to you once they know that you are trans, and unfortunately I think your fears are not far off the mark. There is a lot of bioessentialism, transmisogyny, and anti-effiminancy within the trans community, and in my experience a lot of trans people are eager to reduce others to their gender assignment at birth then deny that is what they are doing.

If you come out as trans to your friends, you might learn things about their latent attitudes that you wish you didn't have to carry, and you might have to struggle with them a lot to get them stop saying things that reduce you to your AGAB or lump you in with women, and even then, the changes that you might see could be only superficial and designed to not offend you, but lack a deeper reconceptualization of gender that respecting you truly requires.

I used to fight these battles with both the allies and the trans people around me everyday, and though I could train a lot of people to utter the right phrases and make some of the right jokes about me (the ones that show familiarity and that they saw me as a faggot), a lot of those same people continued carrying on in a way that reduced other trans people to their AGAB all the time, and it was reflected in their politics and how they grouped me and the allowances they gave me that they didn't give others, and especially how they treated trans feminine people. Nothing that I said made it truly sink in if they didn't want to give up the power of positioning themselves as cis woman adjacent.

Personally, it bothered me deeply when trans people continued thinking and behaving this way even when they could give me some gestures of respect. I wonder if you see things like this happening among your friends, and if so how it feels. Do you see them reducing trans women to their AGAB? Are they exclusionary? Do they talk about 'female' and 'male' socialization? Do they view gay male sexuality as more predatory than sapphic sexuality? Do they disrespect the identities of trans people who are gender non-conforming, like trans butches and trans effeminate people like you who are out?

I think that ultimately you have to decide based on their conduct what you are willing to tolerate, what you have the power to confront and to change, and where it might be beneficial to locate other trans community who are more supportive of people's identities in a less essentialist way. I think that if this kind of stuff is a problem, it will be a problem regardless of whether you come out to your friends as trans or not, because clearly you are worried about them having a bad response because you've already seen them pulling that shit in the past. It sounds like their outlook on these things *already* bothers you, it is *already* unaligned with your own gender politics, and so that is a problem regardless of what you do.

I don't think it is your responsibility to politically re-educate everyone in your circle into being more transfeminist, nor is that really possible to "do" to someone who isn't already embarking on that course for themselves, and I think you can make the choices that will cause you the minimum amount of angst. Part of me suspects that the best course of action could be some combination of remaining stealth with the friends for whom that makes it possible to continue a friendship, pushing against the bioessentialism of the trans friends who seem like they could be moved a little bit on the issue and are open to being less shitty, and then also finding yourself more trans friends outside of this circle, including probably some trans feminine people and trans women who care about these issues and, at least in my experience, are a little more likely to get it and to have experienced some of the feelings you are experiencing.

The framing here is of a binary between industrial, transgressive, nudity-free erotica and profit-oriented studio pornography; when most of the porn being made today sits entirely between those two axes. Sex workers who are making the shit studios would never do, the ones who are doing it for rent, and yeah even ones who are making lame boring shit. That's "regular porn". Those are the people who fucking lost to tumblr porn ban. Brazzers didn't lose a dime.

I think unless we are able to express our bodies without shame or censorship, you're not actually challenging anything. Videos of machine eating paint cans isn't transgressive, it's allowed. Tumblr and it's shareholders are perfectly happy for you to get off to goop because that's not what stops their advertisers from pulling out.

I don't think adding "we need regular porn" to posts is funny. it's annoying and uncreative. But more importantly I think it's completely wrong in the idea that the bizarre and sensual only develops in (or as a consequence of) an absence of other outlets. In fact I'd argue its worse. We were almost on the cusp of recognising that pornography isn't defined by big studios, I remember it! and then tumblr annihilated anything but them from their ecosystem. And look at the culture here since then, its dry, puritanical, and utterly hostile. We've been set back almost 10 years of gross, esoteric weird fucking porn. Or at the very least, it wasn't and isn't happening here.

You critters really like her, don’t you?