elektra flowers

Story Time!

I am a woman with endometriosis and thin-variant PCOS.

Endometriosis is a condition where the endometrium, the uterine lining cells, grows outside the uterus. It can be anywhere, including the legs, lungs, and brain -- although these locations are more extreme and rare. Typically it grows on the outside of abdominal organs.

So when hormonal changes for periods signal in a woman's body, that tissue thickens and bleeds just like the tissue inside the uterus. This causes internal bleeding and adhesions -- scar tissue that ropes organs together. It's extremely painful. I had several Gynos ignore and dismiss symptoms until FINALLY one MD doubtfully went "wellll maybe you have endo" and agreed to do a lap surgery to explore and diagnose.

That surgery ended up being two hours longer than he'd originally scheduled because they found OUNCES of endometriosis and adhesion scar tissue that had to be removed. When I woke up after surgery he shrugged went "yeah so you do have it this is what we removed" and basically acted like it was NBD that he had treated me like a psycho liar he was humoring up until that point.

Thin-variant PCOS is a rarer subtype of PCOS. Normally, PCOS causes weight gain and androgenic features like facial hair due to higher than normal testosterone levels in a woman's body. In thin-variant, these symptoms, weight gain and androgenic features, aren't present. Often women with thin-variant are disbelieved by doctors, sometimes even mocked and belittled. I've had a doctor tell me "well the ultrasound showed your ovaries are full of cysts but it can't be PCOS, you would have a mustache and be over 200lbs." It took me six years to find a doctor who went "oh you have thin-variant, that happens sometimes" and it just shattered me because I'd been telling doctors my symptoms (bog-standard for PCOS) for YEARS but multiple Gynos treated me like a liar and dismissed me even with direct physical scan evidence that my ovaries contained cysts and not eggs. Once I had official diagnoses with both these conditions and had scan and surgical proof, doctors FINALLY stopped acting like I was a psychotic liar about my own lived symptoms and pain. Mostly. At that point, I was told "welllll there's not much we can do for you if progesterone-only BC (norethindrone) isn't stopping these symptoms, I mean we can put you on Lupron but that is a SUPER SUPER SUPER DANGEROUS drug and you can NEVER EVER have it in your life cumulatively for more than eight to ten months because it will absolutely destroy your body and it violates Do No Harm." Like I had multiple doctors over a course of 10 years from 2008 to 2018 tell me how SUPER ULTRA DANGEROUS Lupron was and how it causes permanent lifelong damage and how it is an absolute last resort drug that is just a stopgap measure that doesn't help long-term.

Guess what drug was the most commonly used puberty blocker for "trans" children, sometimes used for YEARS at a time, until 2022.

GUESS. Yes. That's right. Fucking Lupron.

This is one of the things that started my peaking process early 2022. I found out that this SUPER AWFUL HOLY SHIT MASSIVELY DANGEROUS DRUG that was so destructive to the human body and caused such massive lifelong damage that doctors tried to discourage women from using it to escape crippling, life-destroying endometrial pain even in the short-term... ... was being prescribed to young "trans kids" to block and delay puberty to give them "time to choose." SOMETIMES FOR YEARS.

The side effects list for Lupron reads like a horror novel:

Severe joint pain and faulty joints

Chronic body pain

Permanent vision issues

Deadly seizures

Blood disorders

Permanent endocrine disruption

Severe depression and suicidality

Mitochondria and nerve breakdown

Osteoporosis and permanently weakened bones (that can result in bone-shattering injuries and the permanent need for walking aids)

Heart problems that can lead to death

Pip-Boy

Concept art for Fallout 3

The anti-AI paranoia has created a market for scammers and snake-oil salesmen. Glaze, Nightshade, ArtShield? All basically useless for anything more than making your images look crunchy.

AI detection is no better. It's just as prone to mistakes and hallucinations as any other genAI system (it usually uses the same tech), it's dealing with a whack-a-mole situation as there are dozens if not hundreds of models per media type and every model is constantly updating. Making it fundamentally unreliable.

Maybe it works fine in July, but by October, it might be trash, and you'd have no way to know the difference.

And there will always be certain organic styles the robot mistakes for being a machine because those are the ones most strongly trained on.

Or, as in the case with text-based AI "detectors", they trigger on ESL, historical texts, technical works, and ND authors like myself that have a focus on clarity and detail over brevity. (A good vocabulary will also get you flagged, largely due to what Bill Gates did out of arrogance and hubris and what Bush II did in intentional sabotage.)

Because text-AI detection is largely using 'literacy' as a stand-in for 'made by a machine'.

People assume that because these services do something they want to do and some are free, that they're being offered up for moral or ideological reasons. After all, why would anyone put out a free product that doesn't work?

"If you're not paying for it, you are the product" still applies.

A big userbase means interest from VC and tech giants looking for acquisitions. The investor class is ruled by vibes and by the time they figure out the tech is a dud the creators will be long gone. That was a little harder with BS genAI, because those create results you can see/hear, but there were plenty of BS ai products bought by major corps despite it.

With detection, anything that's wrong can be written off as a fluke. Proving effectiveness would require actual testing on large samples, and that doesn't matter, because anyone running an image or text through a detector suspects it is AI already, and, well...