more people have been to russia than i have

Hey! One of my partners wrote a really good blog about fighting with Cigna.

My insurance plan covers laser facial hair removal as a gender-affirming procedure for transgender people. My partner, a trans woman who is on my insurance, got this procedure done, and getting it reimbursed was like pulling teeth.

This is why I had to contact HR in order to get any meaningful progress on my claim. When the employer is the customer, the employer must be involved in any claims process complicated enough to require human judgment. This means the patient must disclose private medical information to their employer, which can expose them to discrimination. I was lucky in this case, because I'm already out at work and the procedure wasn't for me, but I still had to pass personal medical information through a member of my employer's HR team. If I were a trans woman getting my own laser reimbursed, this process would have forced me to out myself to my employer.* Ideally, there would be no such thing as employer-sponsored health insurance at all.

Early morning at the lake.

Holland said this allowed him to “lay down the law” on the “Spider-Man” set “and say, ‘We are not going to come to set and figure it out. We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s ‘Spider-Man 4’ and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer. Why are we making this movie?’ And Destin was super instrumental in that, but it was just really great to constantly be calling up the studio and [producers] Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O’Connor], who I love, and be like, ‘Well, Chris is doing it this way. This is how I think we should be doing it.’ ”

Apparently Sony allowed Holland to postpone Spider-Man production due to how reliable Christopher Nolan is to actually wrapping up on time. Holland said this ended up beneficial because it allowed them to hire Destin Daniel Cretton (director of Shang-Chi) and give him a proper six months for further script development.

everything is birds

everyone is 5’11

only teor is teor

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.