I am sitting here, in incredible pain from a combined sinus and ear infection, waiting for the antibiotics I need to be shipped to me in 3-5 business days because my insurance will only provide prescription coverage through Express Scripts and not a retail pharmacy.

This same insurance company has also denied to cover a surgery they have prior auth for, denied coverage for routine lab work that is expressly covered, waited months to review disputed charges and gotten them sent to collections, and forced me into a lower tier of coverage twice due to premium increases.

The kicker? I work in the health insurance industry. But I’m not an exec, just a support worker.

They can try to stop the online support all they want, but they should know that the active censorship will only cause people to go elsewhere. This issue is uniting everyone who watches the evening news, and they can’t risk not covering the story because they are hoping to make an example of him.

This puts a lot of blame on trans men while simultaneously perpetuating the erasure we are constantly facing.

I am a trans masc enby, but I have been on full dose testosterone for a decade, have had top surgery and a full hysterectomy. I am still routinely misgendered because T did not lower my voice enough to pass and I do not have enough facial hair, so people assume I am a woman with a hormone difference. This misgendering happens in person and over the phone, and my experience in this is fairly common among trans men.

On top of that, any attempt we make to be more visible is often silenced because we are accused of taking space away from trans women. People will say ‘trans people’ and then talk about an experience that is pretty exclusive to trans women, and if we point it out, we are told to enjoy our male privilege and shut up. When we tried to put more focus on a trans man in sports who is being ostracized in a similar way (see Mack Briggs, who was forced to compete on the girls teams), then we are told that it “isn’t the same” as what trans women face, and that we should be grateful for the fact that his plight isn’t getting attention.

We face the exact same kinds of issues that trans women face, but with almost none of the support. We have to fight to even be seen in most trans friendly spaces, which usually end up being more akin to “women and femme” spaces where masculine trans people are told that we aren’t welcome because we make people uncomfortable. Then, when we try to make our own spaces, we are accused of excluding trans women and being misogynists.

All that to say: stop blaming trans men for the abuses that cis people perpetuate. We have our own struggles, and while we stand with the rest of the trans community, it is not our job to put ourself in more harm’s way to benefit others. We are here, we have always been here, and we would really appreciate people recognizing that it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows for us, and that we face just as many issues with a fraction of the support.

Thank you! We are on the opposite coast, but we are working with ministers like yourself to make sure we have plenty of options for people to choose from. Best of luck over the next years, and here’s to many more happy weddings!

My husband and I did this after the Dobbs decision came down and cited ‘future reconsiderations’ for Casey and Obergefell. Called a handful of friends and family and told them to meet us at the courthouse in two weeks.

Now, we are bracing to help people who may have to travel to our blue state to get married, just like they had to 15-ish years ago. We may not be able to leave, but we have some means to help others, so we are doing what we can.

As a NY resident, her ‘political concerns’ are getting in the way of her doing anything useful and instead have her focusing on assetting her power over normal working people.

She pushed for an end to remote work and forcing return to office in 2021, ended the eviction moratorium in 2022, she agreed to a deal to let the taxpayers foot the bill for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills in 2022, significantly delayed signing the Digital Fair Repair Act and kneecapped it by adding an amendment that allowed manufacturers to supply repair services instead of being forced to sell replacement parts, appointed a conservative (LaSalle) to the NY Court of Appeals, vetoed legislation to ban non-compete agreements, said that Israel had a right to “destroy Gaza”, deployed the National Guard to crack down on “criminals” using the NYC subway, and proposed banning facemasks on the subway in response to protests.

Cuomo needed to go, but we need someone much better than her if we want someone to actually stand up against Trump.

My parents had kicked me out for unrelated reasons (I was a nerd and my mom was a believer in borderline Satanic Panic BS) and my extended family had welcomed me back because my parents were generally assholes to everyone and had been told they were no longer welcome at family get-togethers. When I rejoined that extended family, they told me all about how they couldn’t imagine kicking anyone out a kid simply for being honest about how they want to live their life.

So when I came out to them a few years later, they realized that they couldn’t really say anything about it because it would make them the same as my parents. Most of my aunts have come around, and even my grandad was happy to call me his grandson before he passed away. The main holdouts are my uncles and the one aunt who is a strict Catholic despite being divorced herself. But if I weren’t to be invited, it would be a big issue with enough family members that they always ask.

Thankfully I am not entirely alone, as my one cousin got gay married last year as well, so now we joke about being the rainbow sheep of the family lol.

Because that way people have an excuse to attack trans people. They can cite ‘fear of assault’ and in many cases not even be arrested.

The concept of trans men being forced to use the ladies room isn’t a gotcha. It is a plot to enforce gender conformity. Ask any butch lesbian how they treat people who look too masculine if they enter the ladies room, and understand that they want that to happen to anyone who doesn’t conform.

The traditional way this was phrased was “bleeding heart liberal”. The implication being that they were so giving as to be gullible and not realistic.

Nowadays the preferred insults are “commie” or “woke”. I don’t hear it directed at me much, due to particular family circumstances that forced them to accept my gay-married trans ass, but boy do I hear it about Democrats every year.

(I know that Dems aren’t commie or even ‘woke’ most of the time, but to them it is a distinction without a difference. To them, those terms refer to anyone who thinks that people don’t deserve to die for the ‘crime’ of being homeless.)

Anything that was a major thing in your life, good or bad, can be missed in some way once it is gone. The trick is to remember that quite a bit of that feeling is missing the predictably of daily life, not necessarily missing the thing itself.

I was also kicked out, though it was during my college years, and there are still times I find myself missing my parents, even almost 10 years later. The feeling isn’t as strong, and it is mostly just me lamenting the fact that I will not have a lot of experiences most people consider universal, such as having family to visit for holidays, or having someone to talk to no matter what you have going on in your life.

It is a bit like grief. The parents you thought you had are gone, even if they are physically living, and you had no choice in the matter. The feeling will come and go, it will change over time. But it will get easier.

It is going to get worse, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept the full worst-case scenario.

Right now, a lot of people are hurt and scared, and the fascists know that. That is why they are making big waves right now, to try to capitalize on that feeling of dread and despair.

But they had to put in a LOT of work to suppress the will of the people. This is not the result of a single election season, this is the result of a coordinated effort spanning decades. The actions they are taking now are designed to make you think that it is hopeless, that nobody cares, and that the battle is lost.

In reality, the battle is never over. This is the moment that needs to push us to actually working together against them, instead of talking about what the right thing to do is. Talk won’t help, but local action will.

Join a mutual aid group and help safeguard your friends and neighbors from the economic hardship they are promising. Start talking your friends and family into attending boycotts, marches, and, above all, your local government and board meetings. Connect to the people around you, put up flyers, coordinate phone campaigns, and get people into these meetings to demand protections and change at the local level where it is most important.

Resistance doesn’t come from nowhere. It has to be grown, it has to be planted as a small seed and then watered and weeded and trellised and brought inside from the cold. You may even have to watch it die and then pick yourself up and start from a seed again.

But if we each dedicate ourselves, full time, to a single plant, then we will do far more good than running around frantically worrying about the forest dying. Because yes, the forest is dying, and it is up to us to determine what grows in its place.

We may not be able to save what we have now. But only we can set the stage, as best we can, for those who will come after us. And the more work we do now, the better they will be able to build off of that work, and the better things will be.

Saint Francis of Assisi did this. He renounced his family name, inheritance, and (according to legend) the clothes on his back when his dad took issue with him giving alms. He spent the rest of his life wandering with a small group of other penitents and providing comfort to the sick, especially those with leprosy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi?wprov=sfla1

While you are correct that it will likely be expensive, it is important to note that Descovy is an existing PreP pill that Gilead makes. So the cost of the new shot is yet to be determined, but the company has been criticized for the cost of their current PreP medication option.

It is also important to note that anyone with insurance in the United States will pay nothing, as the Affordable Care Act requires insurance to cover all PreP medications at no cost to patients. The pricing will only affect those who have no insurance at all, which makes this criticism all the more important to help this new medication reach those who would be the worst affected if they were to contract HIV.

Obviously this is a joke, but there used to be an important reason we kept the flags wrinkled like that: it meant that you never knew who had bought a flag at a Pride event and who brought one they owned.

This meant that people who were ‘caught’ at an event by friends or family they weren’t out to, they could say they just bought the flag to support the cause. It also meant there was no way to tell who had been there longer than others.