I've seen some people recently using the term "bathtub estrogen" as a little joke about the production of DIY estradiols. This is fine by me as a joking term, I get that people are 1) trying to evoke a DIY punkish or prohibition moonshine sort of image and 2) communicating that we are having to turn to much less carefully prepared forms of medicine than cis people can access when we use DIY. However I recently saw a trans woman with a large platform make the joke and then when asked about it sort of waffle around the topic for a bit and then shruggingly say she does think that some estrogen is made in a bathtub in a way that made it pretty clear she doesn't actually know much about the production side of DIY. She also gestured to a global south DIY producer as being the one who was doing this, which I think is just clumsily labelling people overseas as a bit dumb and less clean.
I've been researching the production of DIY HRT for a few years as I think that the overseas supplies of DIY will be the next thing to be cracked down on by the government after all legally prescribed forms of HRT for trans people are shut down. My aim in researching it is to spread the relevant information to reduce harm for DIY users without making anyone's operations obvious to malicious parties. I can't entirely rule out the possiblity that someone very dumb and reckless is producing DIY in a place that is not sufficiently sterile, and this is part of the inherent risk of DIYing. I can however say that anyone who could afford to get the ingredients to produce DIY estradiols categorically has the money to use a professional-grade lab for it.
I would like to be clear here: bathtub estrogen does not exist
The cheapest way for someone to make estradiol is the individual-use case described by Lena from Kiev, mixing a single vial typically for the person who is making it. It is time consuming and inefficient but very cheap, and so people who care less about lab-level standards will likely resort to this method. This method is also the easiest to sterilise, as it's actually surprisingly easy to create a relatively dust-free and sterile environment for an operation this small. The primary risks with this method are from people being quite lazy about cleaning, skipping terminal sterlisation (heating the vial after mixing to kill bacteria) or neglecting to use a filter and introducing some dust, which may cause a granuloma and in the worst case chronic pain in the injection site.
If someone were scaling up from that model, the most effective methods for properly mixing all involve lab equipment, and if we were talking about a quantity of estrogen big enough to fit in a bathtub, the most effective thing to get it properly mixed would still involve transferring the carrier oil, powder and preserving agents into smaller containers for mixing and then using syringes to fill vials. Ideally all of that is done inside of a lamina flow hood or at least still air box setup and if it isn't then basically what is produced at the end is dangerous garbage. I haven't encountered anyone so far who is operating at that quantity who is not using at least a still air box, but realistically anyone who can afford the ingredients for a bathtub full of estrogen can afford a brand new container of a significant size that comes pre-sterilised or new unsterilised containers and the equipment necessary to sterilise them.
Even if someone were to make estrogen in a bathtub "for the bit" they would need to buy a brand new tub (which again would be inexpensive compared to the rest of the setup
Sterilisation is an ongoing struggle for DIY producers. For example anyone who isn't using a professional chemistry lab is probably not using depyrogenated equipment, which requires much higher temperature sterilisation to achieve. However this struggle is one that DIY producers are very deeply invested in and trying to overcome, because DIY hormone producers are trying very hard not to kill the people they make hormones for and suggesting otherwise is harmful to people's overall access.
I am not immune to transfem shitposting, I love the image of us in our long stripey socks cackling away stirring a big cauldron of secret witches' brew, but I would like for people with platforms to be careful not to communicate to the world that this is what is actually happening. I just want people to be a smidge better informed about this to avoid spreading misinformation in the community. All of the major suppliers of DIY that people order from online are either supplying hormones manufactured by pharma companies or has been tested by transharmreduction dot org, a great resource to check out if you want reassurance. Their tests found no contaminants in the majority of vials tested from all sources, and you can read the full breakdown on their website.
It is worth communicating to users of DIY about the real risks involved, of which sterilisation is one, but another that is commonly overlooked is allergy. Pharmaceutical companies use ingredients that generally have the lowest chances of setting off an allergic reaction, and while nobody is allergic to estrogen, the carrier oil which makes up the majority of the actual finished product can sometimes be made from coconut, seed or nut based oils that some people have allergies to. Another important risk for people to look at is safe injection, which is why I and many other organisers are working to normalise trans-focused needle exchanges where information about HRT is available as well as phsyical resources to ensure people are taking their hormones safely.
Soon hopefully there will be more resources available to lots of us so that we can be maximally informed about what is out there, how it's being made and for those interested how to make it safely ourselves. For now the best we can do is avoid saying careless things that could scare people into hopelessness
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blocking tip: you don't have to wait to have a negative interaction with someone to block them. you can block them without ever interacting with them. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone being rude to someone else and preemptively blocked them
A gift for Beanie, one of my incredible discord moderators! They requested something with critters and something spaced themed, so it naturally followed that I had to draw space raccoons.
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a lot of my disillusionment with the trans "community" comes down to the fact that too many of you take "gender is different from sex" and go "ah ok, so instead of saying women are fragile and men are strong, I should say afabs are fragile and amabs are strong. to be Inclusive"
then you just treat gender like a surface level aesthetic draped over what someone "actually" is. really is indistinguishable from terf rhetoric
you all need to unpack your bioessentialism, but we also need a better theory of gender than "it's just dressup." I will pick my words carefully here, but the word "gender" itself refers to so many different phenomena that have been lumped together, and we need to un-lump them
in a feminist context, "gender" has historically referred to externally imposed categorization and the internalization and performance of said categories. in a paper I wrote on this subject, I called this sense of the word "extrinsic gender"
"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions
but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery
so, "gender" is: a social classing system, a performance, and at least two internal phenomena as well. and I really don't know if it's doing us a service to conflate all of these things!
a lot of people lately seem to be going heavy on the "performance" use of the word, ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) social classing, intrinsic gender, and subconscious sex. this seems to have led to a lot of "progressive" people treating trans women like men "amabs" who wear womanhood as a costume, and nobody understands why that's wrong because they also think gender is just a performance
This is what's so fucked up about "nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right".
The labor is already being done under capitalism. The laborers are already being underpaid under capitalism.
When you propose removing the greedy profiteers and paying the workers a reasonable wage, people call that "slavery" while they have no problem with the current system.
The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.
Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?
From the moment of his arrest, even left-of-center media has been presuming his guilt without examining anything (e.g. calling him "the killer" instead of "alleged" or "accused") and then when I say he didn't do it, the nearest person chimes in with some quip that tells me they think he did do it but should go free anyway. Don't get me wrong, I would have the same attitude if he had done it. But he didn't. It makes me feel like the only sane person in the world, even among my staunchly leftist friends.
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Hello, tumblr user. Before you is a tumblr post asking you to name a female fictional character. You have unlimited time to tag a female character, NOT a male one.
i do think that a paralyzing fear of being Problematic/associating with Problematic Things has led people with decent politics to avoid taking positions where they have huge potential to help other people, just because they might have to work within a broken system
we need people like you in healthcare and social work and mental health services and education and emergency services and on and on and on
because the alternative is healthcare professionals and social workers and therapists and educators and EMTs and paramedics (and on and on) who are operating on a very different set of values from yours
if you had a choice, what kind of person would you want taking care of you?
juniper blessing, a trans woman, was stabbed 40 times by a man in the laundry room of her off-campus apartment. she had stab wounds in her hands from trying to defend herself. she loved pokemon and meteorology and singing.
all of this happened in my city of seattle, a 'blue' and 'progressive' state. a 'safe haven' for trans people. her university, UW, was hosting a TPUSA event with a conservative detransitioner right after (TPUSA canceled the event themselves). how many more of us need to be killed? when will the bloodlust for trans people end? is the grifter money worth it?
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there desperately needs to be a separate option to report ads for hijacking your touch screen or automatically launching your browser/app store the moment you scroll past it. "malicious" is not a strong enough word. i need the "go fuck yourself and die in a pit of boiling acid x10000" option
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