We need to stop erasing the existence of trans men =/= blaming trans men. You're getting reactionary about something you don't need to. It's probably a trauma response, you've probably been blamed before. You're not being blamed here and you need to stop looking for enemies within the trans community because it makes it much harder to fight the external ones.

Wondering if this is gonna wind up like cigarettes where we can't actually prove they cause cancer because we'd have to create an RCT where we randomly assign nonsmokers to begin smoking to prove that it's not some other comorbidity or unrelated risk factor endemic to that population but we can't because telling people to begin smoking is wildly unethical because while we can't prove it with 100% scientific certainty we do know it. We can't put plaques in randomized control groups of people with and without plastics to see if one is worse or forms more easily or dissipates less easily.

I don't even speak German and this spoke to me (sorry to intrude). edit: have crossposted just because the visual storytelling is so damn on-point.

Turns out physical therapy is more popular when you're not throwing a ball at a beige wall in a doctors office. At face value that's intuitive, but a lot of people don't have the lived experience and perspective to have had to consider it. When you phrase it that way it's obvious though.

Transmen need to be a lot more visible.

I feel like as an enby I benefit a lot from hiding under the "tomboy" label and a lot of transmen just pass more easily because while it's harder to create a penis through surgery, testosterone makes the rest of the immediately visible changes more easily vs estrogen can't change facial bone structure or un-deepen a voice.

There's also a society wide stigma not even necessarily about women but more about femininity. It's why you also see stigma against men expressing emotion and wearing clothing and engaging in hobbies that are traditionally "feminine." Often it's not even really women we have a problem with; it's the whole concept of femininity, no matter who it's applied to.

Both of these things make trans women a lot more visible in the public eye, but that also makes it easier for TERFs to act like this is a feminism issue. That would be (a little) harder if we were putting more transmen on the cover of GQ. Equality, y'know?

If you were to ask anyone who works in mental health, (ANYONE: inpatient, outpatient, telehealth. Doctors, nurses, social workers, technicians, therapists, the people who cook the food and mop the floors) - any of them can tell you that housing is the number one driver of the mental health crisis.

From my inpatient perspective specifically, I can tell you that about 2/3 of the bed occupancy of any inpatient unit in the country is literally just homeless people. They're there for "passive suicidal ideation" or "mild psychosis" that clears up within 12 hours of admission and seems to be caused by cold weather. I've known so many people who tell me their loved one desperately needed inpatient mental health care and couldn't get it because there were no beds. Even when I was a kid and my sister was beating the shit out of me and the rest of my family, they never had enough beds to take her. I got my back broken at 16 because our mental health system is being forced to handle a problem it was never designed to and it has been for years now.

And I don't even blame the homeless patients! I would do the exact same thing; it's a matter of survival. I won't blame people for seeking literal physical safety. And even beyond that, I don't want my job to be figuring out which people are lying about their mental illnesses. I don't think I could stomach my job if I were trying to decide which person was more suicidal or in more emotional pain than another. And we would have the resources we needed to not have to bother asking those questions if we weren't bogged down by being forced to handle a problem we have no business being that involved in.

ah. I suppose I would resent having to look up something I don't want to do anyway, but I guess it's good that you've found a positive spin to apply to the situation!

Relish typically denotes a feeling of enjoyment, which is confusing in the context of the rest of your post. Did you mean "resent?"

That said, I've worn a brightly colored tie with a rib knit tank top, women's blazer, black cargo shorts, knee high socks, oxford heels, and tentacle earrings, but mostly just to punk concerts.

I actually like this more than the ones that base it purely on race, since that's such a wishy washy culturally defined thing. Idk how exactly they're planning to trace those lineages since intentional meddling in those communities often disrupted quality record-keeping, but it seems to at least try to get more to the direct point of reparations than playing the lighter or darker than a paper bag game that got us into this mess to begin with.

That's also somewhat to do with the concept of fetishism. Most people have never fucked someone without feet but it's not a fetish until you start all but ignoring the rest of the person in favor...

Mine are mostly for being a trans person the wrong way. People do nooot like my brand / combo of gender apathy but also having been surgically confirmed with some androgynizing removals. I get called transphobic a LOT just by saying I don't personally get dysphoria related to pronouns. I understand that others do. I understand that for many the whole passing one way or the other thing is a matter of safety. But I'm good being called whatever personally idc. Straight to jail. I've learned to just stay away from trans communities they're pretty much all just assholes.

Oh the Healthcare system will collapse. We have not fostered enough of a homegrown workforce to survive this. We don't have doctors for a reason I struggle to understand perfectly but that has something to do with a quota our cap the ama set years ago that they've refused to raise. But a lot of those roles get filled by foreign educated physicians.

The part I know better is that we don't have enough nurses working bedside (which is where we need them most, not as NPs or reviewing charts or even really in clinics) because we're forcing them through watching and often even creating incredible human suffering (ever seen CPR on a 90y/o?) while being exposed to violence from patients, families, and often even their own coworkers and bosses. No one in their right mind would do that at all let alone do it AND struggle to feed a family, and hospital CEOs do not buy their third yacht by paying nurses enough to fully support themselves and thrive on. And they certainly aren't paying enough to support ONE person to the nursing assistants who they and the patients completely rely on for daily feeding and not wearimg literal holes in their buttcheeks.

So they're bringing in nurses from the Philippines, Caribbean, Nigeria, and other places to work for cheap, but they're also lying to them about the jobs and often how dangerous they are, especially in psychiatry and fields that deal with a lot of it like the ER and the amount of dementia seen in medsurg and nursing homes. And then they've signed this contract that says they owe back all the money it took to bring them over plus some if they quit. It's hard to express it precisely without sounding racist but a lot of them actually even qualify as having been human trafficked. The fact that their abuse happens to exist as a mechanism to suppress my wages is just icing on the shit cake.

And the immigrant nurses who did find good positions and are making it work aren't doing it for us or to support our country (which makes sense and again, I don't hold it against them). Most of them tell me they're sending most of the money home where it will go farther or setting up their retirements outside of the country. I'm not saying this in any way that is blaming the other poor people around the world who are just trying to make their own lives work. And tbh they're some of my best coworkers. This is on the people actually steering this shit who intentionally decayed our own workforce for their own benefit.

The problem is that our economy right now is fundamentally structured in a very precarious and unsustainable way on cheap immigrant labor. We've avoided training our own people to take up critical positions in health and human safety, education, agriculture, manufacturing, etc. We've forced out the ones who were homegrown because they expected higher pay or, often in the case of nurses, they also demanded better for their patients and their bosses DO NOT want to pay for higher nurse to patient ratios even though it's proven to make the biggest difference in patient outcomes. An immigrant nurse who's been human trafficked is not going to pipe up about that.

And some of those critical jobs are going to be filled by prison labor (which is its own discussion of exploitation) but you can't do that with the health and human safety jobs without admitting that the inmates haven't actually hurt anyone. Except you kind of can by making female prisoners in California be smokejumpers jumping literally into California wildfires then just refuse them jobs in firefighting on release.

We've let them rot this country out from the inside and immigrants are all that's still propping us up, in multiple ways in multiple industries. Now they wanna kick that out from under us too.