The Devil Is A Gentleman

Terry Pratchett

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

There is no reason to start it off comparing it to estrogen, especially since the estrogen section doesn't open up talking about how "unlike testosterone, estrogen is not a controlled substance and there isn't the same legal risk involved."

And then there's the downplaying of potential legal issues involved with DIY t. There is a difference in giving reassurance and acting like the consequences are no big deal actually, especially after mentioning how much easier to get it is than estrogen.

Why aren't we talking about how you probably shouldn't bring it on flights with you? How there are risks if you're taking it with you in your car on a trip, especially if you're a TPOC? And I know this is more niche, but how if you live with someone on probation, it getting found could have legal consequences for *them*.

Maybe a link to different states' and countries' laws about this so you can be fully informed instead of "trust me it's actually not big deal because they're not going after (cis, primarily white) gymbros."

It just feels like little snipes. Little "stop whining; you have an easier time than people going on e, actually!"

Here hey described it like this:

“One officer said, ‘It smells like you’ve been having a party in here. Is that right?’” Fransisco, a white nonbinary person in their 30s, told Filter. “He said, ‘Well, if you haven’t been having a party, you won’t mind if we check your car.’” Moving quickly, the officers violently handcuffed Fransisco, took their keys and called animal control to confiscate their dog. Then they searched the car. “One yelled, ‘Show me your track marks, you fucking junkie! We found your needles and drugs,’” Fransisco said. The cop held up their prescription bottle of testosterone. “I said, ‘Those aren’t drugs, that’s my medication. I’m trans.’”

"Legal issues might arise" this person was, again, sexually assaulted in a blatantly transphobic way, and also had their service dog taken away and had to pay to get it back, alongside having to pay $2,500 to get out of jail, something they could only do with help from friends/family. Not everyone can afford that.

And again, this is all when hey had a genuine legal prescription. If hey was traveling with illegal T, what fucking then?

And then there's also the level of how tracked testosterone is. That second article also talks about how testosterone prescriptions, because of its status, gets put in a database than clinicians and law enforcement can access. It includes an account of one trans man who was meeting a psychiatrist he had not come out to as trans, who he was outed to because she was able to see he was prescribed testosterone.

Is that not fucking dangerous? And what happens when your body is clearly androgenizing, but a doctor or cop can see you haven't been prescribed T? What happens when the trans person in question is Black or Latine or Native and there's more risk of these people deciding to treat them as a criminal?

I don't want the message from this to be "DIY T is always bad and you should never break the law!" because I don't agree with that. But my lord, the fucking dismissiveness just kills me. It feels so condescending? Like the author is writing this thinking "well I have to address this so no one can say I didn't, but I really want to emphasize that these risks are basically immaterial and as long as you aren't an idiot you'll be totally fine!"

And you know people would treat this all entirely differently if it wasn't transmascs affected. Folks are out here telling transfems to not go into certain careers because of the risk of transmisogyny, but genuinely think transmascs that they are being whiny birthday boys for literally just pointing out that there are real legal risks that should be acknowledged.

To be fully fucking honest, how the hell are we going to talk about how getting banned from tumblr will literally kill trans women, but testosterone being criminalized doesn't pose any unique or important dangers????????? Like I'm not even saying the bannings don't matter or can't genuinely deprive people of their only source of community or income. But you simply do not get to talk about how bannings are a form of social murder and also pull the "well you can just get it from gymbros and there's like noooo way anything bad will ever happen lol you are just being dramatic!"

If you get "T" at the gym you are getting TRENBOLONE, NOT TESTOSTERONE.

The people saying this shit about T being an easy to get street drug are LYING, and they are getting people KILLED with this lie.

Even if you are somehow, miraculously, able to access this highly controlled medication, you willalmost certainly be getting Aqua Testosterone not T. Propionate or T. Cypionate, which are the ones used for HRT.

Aqua Test, meanwhile, is used to dope before workouts or competitions because it only stays in the body for 4 hours. Even if you tried to transition with it by dosing 4+ times a day, you'd just end up ODing or with excessive estrogens that have other health risks in addition to slowing actual HRT transition.

But, hey! It's just those stinky transmascs getting forcibly detransitioned by these lies, so who cares, right?

The most frequently utilized androgens were testosterone enanthate (n = 1922, 80.62%), testosterone cypionate (n = 1217, 51.05%), metandione (n = 1213, 50.88%), trenbolone (n = 1199, 50.29%), oxandrolone (n = 1110, 46.56%), and nandrolone decanoate (n = 1107, 46.43%

According to this, non-testosterone androgens are common, but testosterone seems to still be very much the dominant drug. And that's a very good sample size, so I am inclined to trust these numbers. I am not a gym-anything, so maybe this is inaccurate now, or maybe it varies a lot depending on your local gymbro community & in some places trenbolone is the most common. But I'm not certain its as cut-and-dry as some people make it out to seem. I've seen this getting brought up a lot, and I worry this fact is getting spread around more because its really rhetorically effective than because its accurate, especially since i think most people on tumblr don't have the experience necessary to actually know if its true or not.

Regardless, there are still plenty of reasons that "gym bros use it!" does not mean DIY T is super easy or accessible for the average person. Most importantly in my opinion: because its not even fucking safe for gym bros (from here):

[S]ubstantial mean proportions of black-market AAS [anabolic androgenic steroids] are counterfeit and of substandard quality. These products pose a considerable individual and public health threat, and the very wide range in proportions of fake black-market AAS puts the user in a situation of unpredictable uncertainty. There is a great need for future prevention and harm-reduction programs to protect users from these substances. [...]

In this systematic review, we were able to include 19 articles within the published literature that provided qualitative and/or quantitative analytical test results of AAS found on the black market from 9 different countries (eight in Europe; one in Latin America), with a cumulative sample size of 5,382 products being analyzed qualitatively and 1,614 being quantitatively tested. We demonstrate that substantial proportions of AAS found on the black market are fake. The overall mean estimate for counterfeit anabolic steroids found on the black market was 36% [...] and an additional 37% [...] were of substandard quality [73% in total counterfeit or substandard]. Although these proportions must be interpreted with caution due to some methodological challenges and high heterogeneity, one must acknowledge the unreliable nature of those substances acquired from the black market. [...] We demonstrate that fake AAS can be substituted, not contain any substance at all, or be adulterated. But in addition, products that contain the labeled substances can still be over-concentrated or under-concentrated. [...] Substandard and counterfeit products found in our systematic review were most likely produced by manufacturers not in line with good manufacturing practices (GMP’s). Rather, those products are produced in clandestine underground laboratories lacking the necessary knowledge or equipment to produce these compounds in adequate quantity and quality, as also described by other authors. The shift from pharmacies to deregulated underground online sites and clandestine underground laboratories occurred after the United States enacted the Anabolic Steroid Control Act in the 1990s. [...] We demonstrate that visual inspection of the package, label, and internal content to identify preliminary signs of counterfeiting of AAS have shown to be mostly ineffective. Different anabolic steroids come with compound or class-specific and unspecific adverse events. Fake products can lead to unexpected adverse events in addition to the already well-established side effects of AAS, which can include cardiovascular toxicity, cardiotoxicity and arrhythmia, cardiovascular events (stroke, coagulation), genitourinary and reproductive impairment, sexual dysfunction and testicular atrophy, gynecomastia, central nervous system abnormalities, impaired mental health and behavior including suicide, skeletal-muscular pathologies, metabolic decompensation, impaired liver functions, and even death. [...] AAS are administered in different ways, including oral, injectables (water or oil-based), transdermal (cream or gel), buccal and sublingual. The most common route of administration is per intramuscular injection and we demonstrate that proportions of counterfeit and substandard substances for injectables compared to oral formulations may be considerably higher. Different forms of formulations and administrations additionally come with specific adverse events. As an example, 17α-alkylation of steroids which is used for oral administration is described to result in increased liver toxicity compared to injectable AAS, because of first-pass metabolism and increased duration time in the liver due to slow metabolization. [...] Besides the problems with chemical quality, our systematic review provides further evidence of microbiological contamination of those substances. Products from clandestine laboratories do not go through microbiological quality control, which can lead to sterility issues and microbiological contamination of injectables. Graham and colleagues demonstrated contamination with bacterial skin commensals during microbiological analysis of their samples. This is especially concerning when those substances are injected into the muscle as it poses a risk of forming abscesses in the muscle and skin necrosis.

In that first study that found testosterone was the most popular AAS used, they also found that "[o]ver 94% of respondents reported side effects from their use." Of the side effects, 43.44% had hypertension, 27.97% had dyslipidemia ("bad cholesterol"), 12.54% had polycythemia (too many red blood cells), and 9.35% had injection site abscesses. All of those things pose an equal risk to a trans man or nonbinary person. & 61.41% of AAS users said they got their supply from the Internet.

Gym bro T is unregulated and this is not a black market born out of any genuine concern for human well-being! "Just get black market T from gym bros" is like telling someone who can't afford their medications to get them off Alibaba. It seems like the entirety of the idea that gym bro T is safe is that, because its such a popular drug, that means there are trusted resources in the community. Which, I'm sure there are to some degree, but that is true of all illegal drugs. I think it would be kind of crazy to tell someone "heroin is such a popular drug, so it's not hard to find trustworthy sources" and then not mention anything about how to actually verify that your trustworthy source is following all appropriate lab protocols and the dosage is accurate and there's only one substance in their and its the drug you actually wanted to take - nope, just "well the community trusts these!" and that's. it?

And I think it is kind of. evil? To just brush aside all these concerns with some abstract idea that trans guys can seek out these communities, get access to those trusted resources, and that those resources will never contain adulterated or over/under-concentrated testosterone or be mislabeled entirely, and that this is all so likely that its not even worth mentioning the risks of black market T in the first place.

I mean, literally, it doesn't seem there is anywhere on the testosterone page on diyhrt.info that goes into fucking any of this (not to mention that the pages are "transfem guide" and "transmasc guide" when like, how fucking hard is it to say estrogen & testosterone? sure, estrogen-based HRT involves more than just estrogen, but more than just transfems do that kind of HRT and apparently that inaccuracy doesn't matter!).

Frankly I think the fact that so many cis men will risk their health and well-being out of a sense that their bodies are inherently unloveable and ugly if they aren't literally 1950s Superman is itself a form of patriarchal violence. Not to mention how this entire black market is the product of the same War on Drugs logic that has gotten so many drug users hurt and killed by making them reliant on black markets with zero oversight. Soooo many cis men have eating disorders and body dysmorphia and a lot of those men are the ones using black market T and other drugs. My brother who I love has been friends with such men, has struggled with those issues himself, and I really hate how glibly so many people treat it.

No man, trans or cis, should be reliant on dubious and potentially harmful black market testosterone! Even if you can get something marked as testosterone cypionate from your local gym bro, that doesn't mean you or him are safe, and it definitely should not be fucking used as a cudgel to shut down trans people talking about the real legal and medical risks they face DIYing. Testosterone being criminalized has harmed so many people and its always fucked up to downplay that, especially as a result of a petty fucking grudge against transmasculine people talking about their oppression. It is not fearmongering to be honest & accurate with people about the risks they are taking with the drugs they are using. Downplaying the risks of taking black market drugs with questionable origins is NOT trans activism.

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> opens my email

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> launches a software

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.