Oh yeah, one more thing.
I'm not walking away from SGW, but it sure as fuck ain't a priority to me right now.
I just had someone ask me if I could ask @twipped to surrender the GDB to someone else after all she's been through and like
Jesus fucking christ, I'm kind of in awe at the entitlement.
And in combination with everything else, it's left me reassessing what place SGW ought to have, and what I should and should not put into it. I built it as a gift of thanks to the community that welcomed and healed me, and a shocking number of people have taken its existence as entitlement to me, and that I have personal obligations to them because it exists.
I've tried to be understanding. People are in weird and hard spots because of the realities of hatching and transition. I get that.
But seriously?
Some people need to learn what a parasocial relationship is.
I'm happy to try and build a friendship with damn near anyone, but if and when people I do not know, or barely know expect and demand we do deeply personal, difficult, or risky shit for them?
What the actual fuck?
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I've had a rough couple of days on social media.
I commented some comfort for a trans gal on tiktok recovering from top surgery, and she took the opportunity to blast what I'd said about my boobs all over her feed. I've been getting cis men asking for pics ever since. She's done nothing to moderate the comments.
I asked for help musing about writing yesterday, and on Bluesky I got torn asunder by some random trans people who basically made shit up about what I'd said, insulted me personally, and harassed me until I took it down.
I posted a reminder for folks that the carrier oil in injectable hormones goes bad, and that using it outside of the safety window can be dangerous. I'd missed that the carrier oils varied so much by happenstance--I've been on e cyp, just not the appropriate brand of e cyp to learn this--and someone took it on themselves to hound me even after I pulled the thread down as I put in a shitload of work to try and get information, both from her and through other venues, to verify what she was saying in between the insults.
And for clarity: don't fucking go looking for any of these people or I'll block your ass in an instant. Who they are is not relevant. They could've just been having bad days.
But this is by way of saying:
I'm taking a social media break. I don't know how long it's gonna last. I'm feeling real fucking sore right now.
And regardless of whether it's a bad day thing or it's legit maliciousness, members of this fucking community need to think twice about how they treat each other, because it's been ✨years✨ since a transphobe treated me as badly as I was treated by trans people this week.
And fucking Trump got inaugurated on Monday.
So like
Reflect on that.
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A small, friendly reminder:
Injectable hormones are suspended in castor oil. Castor oil is really good at keeping those hormones dissolved.
But castor oil goes rancid in 1-2 years. Faster if you don't keep it in a dark place. And rancid castor oil doesn't work properly, and can even hurt you.
So, please keep an eye on the expiration date of any vial of hormones you have or get, and discard anything more than two years past it's date of manufacture.
Because you can't tell if castor oil has gone rancid by sight. Only smell or texture.
And you can't smell or feel it in a sealed vial.
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Aaaaaaaa, my mini came in for my new D&D game and she's SO COOL!
Now to paint her!
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I might try and get some more Facets (guest writers) articles up in this time, if they're with people I know, trust, and who have something to say, but in the end, I'd rather the site be quiet for a while than to fill space.
Anyway, I hope this update helps set some expectations!
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After the election, I announced Stained Glass Woman was going on hiatus, but I've been publishing a few articles since, now and again. I figure folks are wondering what the plan is.
Articles are going to be sporadic for a while. I'll try and publish, but I won't be on a regular schedule until at least the end of the summer. Here's why:
I've had to put the book first before. This shouldn't be surprising.
Stained Glass Woman is really important to me. Really important.
But my contractual obligations and directly supporting people in immediate need is just plain more important.
And I'm not gonna toss off articles in the moments between other things just to maintain a social media presence. goes into researching and writing each article that goes up.
I might try and get some more Facets (guest writers) articles up in this time, if they're with people I know, trust, and who have something to say, but in the end, I'd rather the site be quiet for a while than to fill space. I'm not, and have never been, doing this work for the attention (honestly, that's the worst part of it). And it's really important to me that what I put up on SGW is of the highest quality, and backed by the best research I can find.
I can't do that casually, to be absolutely frank. A lot of work goes into researching and writing each article that goes up.
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Hey, did you know I once published a peer-reviewed article on Portal and Portal 2? I did! You can go read it if you want.
Anyway, this clip has been on my mind for the last couple of days.
Apropos of nothing.
youtu.be/ulzFrZNAKq0
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So, if you're a researcher who works with the trans community, it's time to call up your late-career and retired colleagues and buy them lunch while you take notes on their strategies to scrape up money for HIV/AIDS research when there was simply none to be had.
We can do this. We did it before. We can do it again.
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So, grants:
Where that last little seemingly-throwaway line in the EO will almost certainly catch traction is in the funding of grants for medical research, and there's been A LOT of work on trans realities in the last decade.
Thats probably about to come to a screeching halt.
83% of the annual budget of the NIH is giving out grants to medical researchers.
About 43% of all medical research done in the US is directly funded by the US government. When you cut out pharmaceutical research from those figures--which is mostly private--the proportion skyrockets.
We're talking a pot of about forty billion dollars per year.
And that just got turned off, so far as trans people are concerned. Certainly if the research supports surgical or medical transition. Research into our general well-being and such might still be able to sneak through.
Now, not all research hope is lost. States also fund a lot of research, and some universities directly fund research too. But dramatically reducing federal funding for trans research is an impact that'll echo for decades.
I'm not 100% sure that this is how the EO will be interpreted, to be clear, and it can be supplemented and fought in the courts (it definitely will be).
But I am about 90% sure this is gonna happen. Still room to be surprised and delighted, but I don't expect it.
So, what happens now, for researchers?
Well, any grant that's been awarded will continue to pay out if it's multi-year, and that'll apply to a lot of longitudinal studies. We desperately need those longitudinal studies. But if there are renewal checks, well...
Yeah. Those won't go well.
Frankly, if we want to continue to do good work with the trans community, we're gonna need to get clever and creative.
But there's damn good news: we already know how to beat this problem.
Because for decades, the feds didn't pay out for HIV/AIDS research programs, and to directly work on them was seen as a black mark against any researcher who did that work and applied for a research grant.
There were a lot of local, public-private and state-level grant funding that was taken up because of the feds' recalcitrance, but that took a lot of behind-the-scenes schmoozing and gladhanding.
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Disclaimer first:
Because vital records other than passports and social security are reserved power to the states, and because social security and passports require case-by-case court orders to change, the only effect his "two sexes" declaration has in records is making passports hard to get for people who haven't gotten that done, or maybe haven't even realized that they're trans yet.
Profoundly shitty. But states are required under the constitution to respect things like name and sex changes done by other states. It's the same problem they ran into after MA started doing gay marriages.
Similarly, the "no federal dollars for gender transition" bit at the end is mostly symbolic. It's an attempt to stop Medicaid/Medicare funding for us.
Problem is, Obamacare mandates coverage for everything medically necessary, and specifically--black letter--identifies HRT and bottom surgery as medically necessary, then delegates the determination of what is and is not medically necessary to state insurance regulators. Medicaid/Medicare is subject to Obamacare because it's sold on the insurance marketplace.
So, in and of itself, until and unless they repeal it, Obamacare pretty much stops that one dead.
And they say they want to, to be fair.
But, to also be fair, they've been saying that for 15 years now. We still have it.
They're gonna absolutely fuck trans veterans, though, and they're gonna get away with it too. 😡
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Trump signed an executive order that tries to write trans people out of existence today.
It's mostly symbolic.
It's still gonna make for a LOT of pain for the trans community--just probably not where you think it will.
It's gonna be real bad for grant funding, which means medical research.
A 🧵
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All empires fall. It's their nature. Empire is the governmental equivalent of paying your rent with a credit card. Eventually, that debt comes due.
What comes after generally isn't even bad. Just, the transition from unaffordable luxury to living within your means feels like a shock.
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It annoys me that my mental health is basically a puppy, and it gets whiny and shitty if I don't take it out for walkies often enough. 😅
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Professional opinion: there is absolutely no excuse, in this day and age, for a study on trans realities that does either of these things:
Seriously. RECORD OUR INDIVIDUAL GENDERS AND FUCKING REPORT THEM!!!
Words like transmasculine and transfeminine are very imperfect terms that let the trans community talk about categories of shared experience--for instance, what "top surgery" means in one of two general contexts, adding or removing--in a shorthand way. My experience as a binary trans woman is VASTLY different from that of any bigender, genderfluid, demigirl, or agender person out there, and researchers do their results violence to conflate those experiences.
These are easy things any researcher can do, they're backed by disciplinary best practice (asking about gender modality), and the details help us understand what makes us us.
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Ooh! New trans study!
Surprising absolutely nobody, two years after starting HRT, trans youth saw substantial improvements in every single marker of emotional well-being!
So, here's the deets:
315 participants (so, small-mid-size), about 2/3 transmasc vs 1/3 transfem, YET FUCKING AGAIN they don't bother to disambiguate binary and nonbinary identities, effectively erasing enby identities from the research literature by lumping them in with us binary folks.
Seriously, I'm gonna have kittens one of these days as researchers continue to use whatever inclusive terminology we come up with to reduce all trans people to a binary reality. 😤
The study skews toward a California, Illinois, and NY population, because those are the places the research team worked. Probably irrelevant, but worth noting.
Racial demographics look okay. About 59% white, which is good, but only 3.5% Black, which ain't. Most other demos look representativeish.
Bottom line:
This is a good study with good results, but not really one to lean on by itself. The skews aren't really a problem, but combined with the participant pool size, there's just enough here that it's place is in the chorus, not singing the melody, so to speak.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X24005664?dgcid=author
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People are coming for that who see absolutely zero difference between the most out-there trans person and the most perfectly-stealth trans person. They want us all dead.
Knock this high school-grade, passive-aggressive bullshit off.
We've got much, much bigger problems to deal with.
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You know what I have zero fucking patience for these days?
Friendly fire from trans people at trans people, and especially body shaming or mean girl-type shit.
It is twenty fucking twenty five. We are facing a global goddamned pogrom. We need ✨community✨ right now, to support each other.
We are fucking adults. The trans experience is vast and varied and fucking weird, and I mean that in the most wonderful possible way. What works for someone else won't work for you and that's goddamned wonderful.
So fucking act like adults, now more than you ever have.
If someone is an annoying little shit?
Swallow your irritation and fucking ✨deal with it✨.
If someone's transition makes your skin crawl?
✨Celebrate it anyway✨.
They're trying to get us all to self-exterminate. It's the Playbook from The Transsexual Empire, word for word.
Build. People. Up.
If you absolutely cannot take a single further word from a trans person?
Block them ✨and then move the fuck on✨.
Act like the fucking adult you're supposed to be.
I offered a trans gal who'd just recently had top surgery some support today. She was freaked out by how big her tits felt right then. I told her about mine, and reassured her that they'd feel normal in a bit.
And she took the opportunity to Mean Girl at me and body-shame.
And you know how I responded?
I doubled down on the support, and gave her the benefit of the fucking doubt.
Because trans people ✨need mutual support right now✨.
And don't go fucking looking for where this happened, or with who. She deserves her fucking peace and gentle support in recovery.
As. Do. We. All.
The next four years are gonna be awful. And like any group of people, some of the trans people we share space with aren't gonna live up to our personal ideals. They're gonna piss us off.
As long as they're not actively harming other trans people?
WE GO ARM IN FUCKING ARM WITH THEM. PERIOD.
And to be clear, when I say harm, I mean ✨actual physical harm✨ and/or ✨direct risk for physical harm as a result of emotional cruelty✨.
Not "they implied something mean."
Not "they're problematic."
Not "they make the rest of us look bad."
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Eventually, closing in on his deathbed and despairing that his biography would never be published, he rewrote it to include regular disavowals and smears, so that it would be published at all.
The biography did very well. He was able to write a follow-up, covering The Prophet's disciples.
But, again, only with smears.
That's the environment of the era. That's how absolutely hellbent the entire anglophone world was to exclusively print racist bullshit.
And that's why the Great Man of Literature theory of history is GARBAGE.
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OK so I've had people try to name this author or that author in a Great Men theory of "doesn't this work of literature make for SOMETHING good about the era?"
Let me tell you the story of the book, The Life of Mahomet, by Washington Irving.
Yes, the Washington Irving who wrote Sleepy Hollow.
In 1828, Irving was an accomplished author, and visited the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain. If you haven't seen it, words cannot capture this place, and Irving was absolutely inspired.
So he wrote The Tales of the Alhambra, a historiography of the place, as it had changed hands over the centuries.
It did quite well--books of the sort were quite popular at the time. So, in his continuing inspiration, Irving set to write the first ever western biography of the Prophet Mohammed (whose name was at the time misappropriated as Mahomet).
His research was exhaustive. Like, I cannot overstate how hard he worked on the biography.
And what he wrote? Well, you'd expect a racist, religious screed, right (Irving was Protestant)?
It was honest, fair, and kind, both to the Prophet and Islam. While Irving lacked access to many of the tools and knowledge later scholars would gain, the original draft of The Life of Mahomet actually stands up pretty well today as a secular biography of one of the most important religious figures to ever live.
And, again, there was a clear market for this sort of book. And, again, Irving was a tried-and-true multigenre literary darling.
Not a single publisher would touch it.
Literally. Nobody.
Not in America. Not in England. Not in Europe.
Because it didn't condemn the Prophet or Islam.
And this isn't today's publishing world, with a Big Five and agents. There were HUNDREDS, and you could just pay to have your stuff massprinted, as long as the publisher didn't feel it'd harm their reputation irreparably (and yes, Irving absolutely had the money).
Which they all did. Because Irving didn't smear the Prophet or Islam in his biography.
Irving believed in his work.
So he spent twenty years traveling the anglophone world trying to find SOMEONE who'd print it.
Nobody.
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It has come to my attention that it's been far too long since I posted a selfie with a shit load of cleavage.
My apologies. Allow me to rectify the situation.
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