Yesterday, I was helping my friends sell art in the park, when a couple of girls came up to us and asked (immediately regretting it) “is this the transfem picnic?……..” to which we got to respond “no this is the transmasc yard sale.” We then proceeded to have 15-20+ beautiful women swarm our stand of 4 creatures. Life is beautiful.
How it's going as a trans person in Florida: Planned Parenthood, 26Health, and Spektrum Health have announced they have paused all gender affirming care.
To recap, DeSantis signed several anti-trans bills into law this week. Care is banned for minors, care is all but banned for adults, Don't Say Gay has been extended, children can be kidnapped from affirming parents by non-affirming family, and there is a bathroom bill that subjects trans folks to arrest for using government owned facilities, such as those in courthouses, airports, many stadiums and parks.
The adult effective ban was felt immediately. The main elements are:
- signing at every visit an in-person informed consent form created by the state
- all care come from physicians instead of nurse practitioners
- no telemed for gender-affirming care
Currently, it is unknown if existing HRT prescriptions written by NPs will be honored by pharmacies. I personally know one person who was able to pick up testosterone yesterday, but I have also read many reports of folks being denied. I myself don't have a refill ready for another 10 days and will report back after I try my own pickup.
What's additionally dangerous is those of us, myself included, who get non-HRT prescriptions from our gender clinics now face the uncertainty of continuing of *all* of our medical care. Our health clinics are at risk of shuttering permanently as they lose major income, and many of us will lose STD meds, depression meds, heart meds, etc, etc.
When we say "this will kill us," it goes beyond suicide risk from forced detransition.
"But you can still get HRT from a physician."
So many suck or are outright hostile and the demand outstrips the supply. Before I found my NP-run clinic, one physician just decided to not call in my Rx, another was so shit at reading lab results, he thought I had hepatitis, and the third I had to threaten to kick in the teeth for trying to force too large a speculum in me.
Also, the state-required consent form has not been finalized and distributed yet, so at this point, everything has pretty much ground to a halt.
It was estimated that 80% of trans adults would lose their healthcare because of how many use providers like Planned Parenthood, but the impact seems even greater now.
"You can get your non-gender care elsewhere still."
DeSantis recently signed a bill that allows healthcare professionals to discriminate against trans people.
Sure, we can try to find care elsewhere, but it will be a slow and expensive process, with no guarantees. It took me over 20 years to get my heart condition treated because of transphobic doctors.
What can I do as a trans Floridian?
Stay in communication with your clinic - many are working on getting physicians added to the roster to prescribe HRT. Lawsuits are being filed and it's possible the changes to adult care can be rolled back.
Continue to try to pick up your meds, but begin looking for care elsewhere, though. Inside and outside the state.
Remember that while telemed for gender affirming care has been banned, you can still cross state lines for care. See Erin's map of informed consent clinics.
Many people will turn to DIY, but be sure you are aware of the risks here, especially if on testosterone, which is a controlled substance.
What should I be worried about next as a trans Floridian?
I worry about the following next steps towards genocide:
- Banning getting care out of state. This is from the anti-abortion playbook. They will likely start with kids again, but we've seen how quickly adult care gets axed.
- Being declared mentally incompetent or a risk in some way. This could be anything from being barred from gun ownership to not being allowed to work for the government.
- Being declared a de facto predator. This has already happened with the latest bathroom law (cis people can eject trans people from government owned single-gender facilities, with arrest as a penalty), so watch out for it being applied to privately-owned facilities. Watch for discussions of official lists of trans people.
- Gender presentation enforcement laws, essentially banning "cross dressing". Laws that block or rollback documentation changes.
These all have historic precedence and are huge "I'm in danger" red flags.
What can I do as a cis person?
Amplify all this news. Talk frankly about how this is genocide. And donate what you can to trans mutual aid campaigns so people can travel to get healthcare or even leave the state.
Here's some articles to get started on building awareness:
Take care, everyone, of yourself and each other.
Anonymous asked:
As a fellow trans person, do you by chance have an up to date map of "safe states" in the US? bc as someone who lives in florida and is getting Very Concerned about my health and safety, i can't seem to find any that are more recent, and i don't trust trying to google that shit rn.
As of May 19 2023
If I were rich here’s what I’d do with my free time okay Mermaid pranks Let me explain. So, I’d get one of those super fancy mermaid tails, like those sick as hell silicone ones that has the super long thick tail that uses like, toe pullies and stuff to make the fins move in cool and impossible ways. like this
And I would go all fucking out on this fit okay. We’re talking diving lessons until I can hold my breath for 7 minutes and go deep as fuck. Long hair, starfish, scales up to my tits, those funky contacts that make it so you can see under water, all of it- everything I could to make myself look as “thing of the deep but hot” as possible. Then, I’d go get some shiny valuable rocks. Pearls, Uncut gems, like super fuck’n nice ones like diamonds and shit, and ofc some gold coins. Then I’d dawn my mermaid fit and hit public waterways. Rivers, beys, lakes, places where people are around and might be swimming, but where I’m not gonna die via boat propeller, and not super crowded areas where a lot of people are swimming. Then I just prank people by poking my head out of the water and surprising them, then I motion them closer and reach into my hair or satchel or something and give them a fucking emerald, smiling all big the whole time then I just- swim the fuck away. What the fuck they gonna do now!? Keep it as a fun memory of that time a fuck’n mermaid larper gave them a shiny rock? Never know it’s actually valuable? Or do they take it to a jeweler and find out it’s real? How the fuck are they gonna explain that. They gonna tell the jeweler a fuck’n mermaid gave it to them?! I think the fuck not. Gonna pop up at the peir and smile at people and give gold coins to whoever stops. Kids are gonna freak. Put a little wonder back in the world. Flirt with pretty girls. Swim down rivers, pop up and surprise some old lady sitting by the water and give her an uncut diamond then swim away without a word.
Get a reputation as the weird lesbian mermaid who gives out precious gems and never speaks then suddenly stop without warning for like three years to give people time to forget me then do it all again.
If it’s a kid, and only the kid has seen you, act horrified that you’ve been found.
Beg them to keep you a secret, and give them the jewel/coin in exchange.
i swear to god ultra rich people are so fucking boring with their mansions and yachts. ThiS is what i wanna see in the world. Where are the superheroes? The masquerade balls? WHO is gonna invent real farie wings that let you fly??
Bird that only appears at dusk
Two Women Racing On Fish, illustration By Brynolf Wennerberg, 1914
Signs like these are community-changing. They reframe the whole verge.
I grow our own vegetables. Many hybrid and heirloom varieties are bred for flavor rather than for commercial appeal and travel. There are entire species on the allotment that you can’t easily buy in stores because of this - like salsify, a root vegetable that tastes of fish and shellfish. Our neighbours happily take it to make vegan latkes of alarming similarity to fishcakes. You cannot sell it in stores because - despite looking like a white parsnip - it turns brown when you pick it & if you scrape/bruise/cut the white root in any way, or damage the delicate little hairs, for some reason, it BLEEDS RED and is very upsetting to look at.
There are whole classes of foods like this. Foods that just don’t ship well or look good on supermarket shelves. Forbidden fruits. Vegetables that bleed and taste like meat. Sorry about this
Today the salsify that I left in the ground last year opened some beautiful flowers, rich and distinctive with a character surprisingly similar to a Gerbera daisy. Definitely suitable for cutting.
Salsify, like carrots, is a biennial vegetable. You harvest it in the first year, but if you don’t, it flowers the next year - that’s when and how you get the seeds.
Then our very beloved vegan latke-making neighbors arrived at the allotment, and said they were taking on their own allotment today. This perked up my whole heart. Unable to fully express my appreciation and affection, I instantly gave them a salsify flower, and a four-leaf clover from my special patch, instead.
“That stuff was really just like a fishcake,” one of them said. “Hey. We can grow it now!”
It was a nice circular ending.
1978 Dean Ellis cover art for Norman Spinrad’s ‘Agent of Chaos’
I love the wording of this. any science news, especially relating to space (and webb) automatically sound like poetry to me and then when they're also written like that... oh how beautiful.
[The researchers found chemical traces of the gigantic stars inside globular clusters — clumps of tens of thousands to millions of tightly packed stars, many of which are among the most ancient to have ever formed in our universe. Roughly 180 globular clusters dot our Milky Way galaxy and, because they are so old, serve astronomers as windows through time into the earliest years of our universe.] source
Kobayashi Noriyuki — Eyes of the Moon (mineral pigments, gold and silver leaf, on washi paper, 2021)
"Bows to the Moon (twilight)" (1890) by Georges-Marie-Julien Girardot (French, 1856-1914)
Cliff in the Moonlight, 1880, Rufin Gavrilovich Sudkovsky (1850 -1885)