French Tugboat

That is, when an official told you, a rice farmer, that you owed more taxes than you really did, it was very useful if you were good enough at math to know he was lying (and could prove it) and if you were good enough at writing to write a letter to your government defending your case.

Because most of the time, her thoughts, her feelings, her experiences... they're the same as other girls who had something which marked them as "other" to their peers. Disabled girls, racialised girls, autistic girls, girls with anxiety, girls who were fat, girls deemed ugly by their peers for whatever reason, girls who were just weird, and, of course, trans girls.

I think that trans woman understands exactly what it was like to be a young girl who was othered and outcast for not being a girl in a way that was deemed acceptable. I think she was a girl who went through exactly that. I think she knows damn well how it feels.

The idea that a trans woman lacks some intrinsic understanding of girlhood is so backwards and basically requires never having listened to a trans woman about her youth ever, or it requires having such a horribly narrow definition of girlhood that you're excluding every girl on earth who isn't white, straight, able-bodied, skinny, neurotypical, and completely normative.

Someone is complaining their child wants to cut their hair short or grow it long? Point out that it's the child's hair. Why shouldn't they have it how they want it? Why is that parent upset?

Support all kids' rights to do sports or dance or whatever - be a little judgemental, make concerned faces, if someone is pressuring their child toward an activity they don't want.

Let kids play with whatever toys they feel like.

Exclude creepy uncles or similar entirely from family gatherings.

Teach kids language to advocate for themselves. Respect their no, encourage them to express their feelings, listen when they cry. Criticise and argue with people who automatically ignore or shut children down.

Stand against beating and other forms of physical "discipline"

Every child deserves to feel ownership and autonomy over their own body, and regardless of their gender, an issue some trans ppl run into as they grow older is a sense of tension between what they want and who it feels like their body "belongs" to - their family, their future spouse, society

Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

My first conversation about PCOS with my new endocrine/OBGYN was about weight management and how that could improve my fertility when I eventually wanted kids. It wasn't asked what my goals were for my health or if I wanted kids, just assumed.

I was a hormonal, depressed mess. I hated my body. My body dysmorphia was so bad that I cloistered myself away from so much. I wore hoodies and jeans in the 90°F, 80% humidity summers. This was considered fine. I was given metformin and birth control pills and told this was all that could be done. That PCOS wouldn't affect my life until I wanted to be pregnant. I wasn't asked if I wanted to be pregnant, just assumed.

I don't know how many PCOS groups I joined on my early 20s hoping to find community and commonality for body dysmorphia and symptom management, only to be bombarded with fertility treatments and tips and 'inspirational conception' anecdotes. They never asked if I was attempting to conceive, just assumed.

On the topic of medical neglect, even for people who do want kids (not me), treatment is abhorrent. Straight out of the gate, if you want your PCOS under control and you want to see a specialist, endocrinologists may not see you at all unless you already have diabetes or endocrine diagnoses other than PCOS. Reproductive endocrinologists won't see you unless you're actively trying to get pregnant. Your GP will follow existing standards of care and prescribe contraceptive pills and metformin. These are really helpful medications for some aspects of PCOS, but it's not enough. So many people give up on metformin despite how helpful it can be because nobody even fucking explains what it's used for, why it's important, and crucially, that the first month or so titrating up means you're going to shit through the eye of a needle and it could be bad enough to disrupt your life, but that it goes away, and that adjusting titration schedules to alleviate that is worth it for the overwhelming majority of people. Even the simple shit these doctors are fucking up. Contraceptive pills can fucking suck; whether they worth the side effects or what possible alternative options there may be is not a conversation any GP wants to have because the answer is usually just a shrug. Not good enough.

So you've been taking your pills exactly as prescribed for years if you're lucky enough to get a diagnosis relatively early. You've managed not to fall down the PCOSyster pipeline. Now, you want to have kids. You start trying, knowing that even with the PCOS diagnosis you're not going to get a referral without trying for a while. You finally get a referral to the reproductive endocrinologist who berates you for your PCOS being out of control and to come back in six months if and only if your PCOS is better managed. They will not help you with that. The letter back to the GP will not suggest any courses of treatment to consider in pursuit of that goal. You go back to your GP who shrugs. You've done everything right and you even want kids, but you're still fucked! Off to the toxic online communities that were essentially bringing back phrenology long before the looksmaxxers did.

We are all being failed by PCOS treatment, even the natalists who seem to have the most focus and theoretically best chance of getting any treatment.

The infertility aspect eclipsing literally everything has some absolutely baffling side effects; the amount of people who get told they'll never ever ever ever get pregnant is insane; it's not the fucking case at all because it's so much more complicated than that. The amount of people I see whose serious response to what methods of birth control do you use? being PCOS is fucking insane. You know what people who use their PCOS as birth control are called? Mummy and daddy. Also fucking idiots.

I am not exactly hopeful that renaming it is going to change anything. I don't want to be a doomer about it. I'm going to keep fighting. It's just hard when the focus is on a name and not what that name and its problems actually represent. All of the surveys relating to community opinions on new names all included extremely gendered language to the point of absurdity, which only reinforce the aggressive tie to fertility as femininity. The preamble in some of the surveys mentioned in passing that PCOS as an intersex condition is a growing discussion but paid lip service only before using the most aggressively gendered language I've seen, even amongst gynaecology related things. The focus on affirming femininity (and fertility as femininity) and throwing everything and everyone else under the bus was still the focal point of these stupid name changing studies and surveys. What is the fucking point if the focus on fertility is only vaguely disguised? The fact that PCOS is a complicated metabolic syndrome has been, well, an uncontroversial fact, for well over a decade. That knowledge hasn't changed shit.

The new name still highlights ovaries, and while ovaries are an incredibly important part of the endocrine system, one of the most common complaints about the old name is that a huge amount of PCOS havers don't have polycystic ovaries and that it isn't mandatory to fit the diagnostic criteria for the condition, and that the misunderstanding that caused was bad. It is! The words we use are important.

The words we use are important. It is going to take more than just renaming it (even renaming it well) for meaningful changes to take place. I'm so fucking sick of people pretending that all this is some kind of revelation, or that it was just a misunderstanding or marketing problem rather than a misogyny and intersexism problem.