@[email protected] has gotten a fundraiser set up!!! Before clicking off this post, please read it in its entirety.

1. She is currently in a lot of danger. You may remember from this post that she was half outed as trans. People around her are suspicious and are looking through her phone. She is terrified of police involvement if they find evidence that she is trans. On top of this, Iraq is going to be bombed again soon, this month.

2. We don't have a lot of time. Since Trudeau resigned, the new Canadian PM is likely to be Poilievre, who is running on an extremely anti-immigrant policy. She needs to be in Canada before the next election happens, which could be as early as late March. This means we need to raise as much money as we can ASAP.

3. We're shooting to raise $15,000 by the end of January. She needs this money to make the flight and to pay living expenses once she reaches Canada. Please, please donate if you are at all able. If you cannot donate, please share this fundraiser with people you know who can donate. Share it with your friends, family, on social media, on discord, anywhere.

4. If you live in Canada, please reach out via DM. She will need additional support once she reaches Canada. We need a network of people to support her. Any help we can get, we need.

Thank you all for reading and for helping. This is incredibly urgent. We appreciate all of your support!!! 💚💚💚

(crossposted from hexbear)

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17883633

Title really says it all, warning for mentions of 'crossdressing' etc and disliking labels.

Cross posted from r/MtF

Transgender Unity Coalition is a US-based transgender advocacy non-profit looking to expand! Hi, I'm Bree, the founder and executive director of TUC. We have been around for just a few months now, but we have gotten a lot done in this short amount of time! From lobbying (successfully) for protection-based laws, to holding multi-hundred attendee irl community events, and more. We have so many services and offerings to the public that I can't squeeze them all into one post.

But I bet you haven't heard of us before, and that's because we are super new. We only have one state chapter in Michigan right now, a true purple state, and we are looking to expand into red states that need our help the most. Our mission is this: empower the transgender community across America. It always has been, even before Trump won the recent election. We will not stop fighting, but we need your help and we need it right now.

We are 100% volunteer-driven from the top down. We have a team of over 40 right now, but we need at least 2,000 strong, or about what we have now in every U.S. state. It sounds ambitious, but keep in mind that with over 2.2 million Americans (minimum) alone belong to our community, 2,000 to represent that number isn't anywhere close, so in any small way, even just occassionally, we can absolutely use your help.

I will also throw in there that our team embraces a work-from-home model, and our behind-the-scenes planning primarily operates through Discord, which has given us a strong sense of culture and community through this digital platform. Our model has proven successful through pass coordination efforts of ours, and we hope to implement it as we continue.

tl;dr Join our team. Please give us a chance, because we are all in this together. You can reach out via email at [email protected] with any questions, or if you want to meet me personally to learn more and see that this is real, schedule something at https://calendly.com/bree-at-tuc and I'll give you that time. It is of my own personal opinion that the time is right now to make a stand and solidify who we are into human history.

I'm a bit perplexed at the amount of men I've matched with who are hardcore, Trump-voting Republicans. These guys are fully open to the idea of being in a relationship (not just a hookup) with a trans person, but staunchly support Trump. How does that logic work?

The Socialists, led by Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, included plans to limit participation in female sports to “people with a female biological sex” in a policy document decided on at the party’s congress over the weekend.

The decision to also remove Q+ from a plan to protect sexual and gender minorities from the impact of social inequality sparked fury from LGBTQ+ activists and politicians from Left-wing partners of Mr Sánchez’s minority government.

The passing of a transgender rights reform in 2023, allowing anyone to change their official sex simply by stating their wish to switch, caused a bitter rift within Spain’s ruling Left-wing forces.

Carmen Calvo, the former Socialist deputy prime minister, said at the time the reform would “destroy the powerful battery of equality legislation in our country”.

Pathetic display from so-called socialists

Khanna responded to Greer’s criticism. “I deeply respect Evan Greer’s activism and courageous advocacy for trans rights. During my exchange with Rep. Mace, I stood up for Rep. McBride and reaffirmed that everyone should be treated with respect," Khanna told The Advocate in an email. "I am open to dialogue about how we ensure the Kids Online Safety Act protects both LGBTQ rights and kids’ safety.”

Mace’s actions are part of a larger Republican strategy to use trans rights as a wedge issue, particularly ahead of the incoming Trump administration. LGBTQ+ advocates argue that these attacks perpetuate harmful stereotypes while distracting from pressing issues like housing and healthcare.

I am a cisgender man with dual citizenship between the USA and the UK. My husband is a transgender man who does not have UK citizenship.

As part of our threat modeling, we are developing a shortlist of nations where we would migrate if things get rough. The UK, while being on a worrisome trend line with regards ro trans rights, made the list because it would be relatively simple for us to move and work there with my citizenship already sorted.

Could any UK trans people help us to understand the GRC? My husband has fully transitioned with respect to his US documentation. When we married, he was also a man. Since all his documents match, could he get by without a GRC, or would he be forced through the humiliation of immigrating as his birth-sex and then acquiring a GRC once we moved? Would a GRC be necessary to receive basic healthcare and/or hormones?

In relation to the recent Indiana ban for transgender youth care, some thoughts that I think have a broader outlook as rebuttals of a commonly held trope that adolescents can't give medical consent to gender treatment.

Also consider this BBC article about a judge deciding under 16s might not be able to consent to gender care in the UK AFAIK this had been later overturned on appeal . As for one of the cases explored in the dishonest Reuters article debunked by Vaush it turns out one of the cases (the trans boy one) under Ontario laws where he lives, he had medical consent since he was 15. So Why is it different for transgender care specifically?

Here are my thoughts:

Adolescents presented as "technically kids" always gets my gears grinding, since it is dishonest to equate adolescents and children on so many levels. For example they might have medical consent which should be enough. They might drive in some places, and also they can have intimate relations to another adolescent. Toddlers can't do any of that. There are grades of consent that are legally and rationally different between adolescents and kids, so "technically a kid" is a far fetch, a dishonest prevarication, and just plain wrong on so many levels.

They just don't say that when kids of essentially the same age are allowed to get married and become "technically" parents. They don't say a word for actual infant mutilation in the cases of intersex genital normalization surgeries, nor circumcision. They did not get out of the way to ban breast enhancement in teenage cis girls. They just never fucking uttered "they are technically kids" in any of these equivalent cases.

And there is another underlying problem, that most advocates fail to bring up while they are distracted by bullshit like the "technically kids" fallacy. That in contrast to strictly sexual orientation and needs that start during and after puberty, gender identity is something that manifests way earlier, typically in early childhood. This is extensively documented before the 2020s craze with transgender condemnation.

Mind you, transphobes have dealt with and exploited this fact for a long time. It is not that they do not know it. They do, but they strategically suppress it all the same. There are at least two ways they know and leverage this fact: in separating trans people into genuine and fake, like with the "homosexual transexual" pseudoscience; and in developing and popularizing concepts of social contagion of transgender ideation in adolescent. Even though implicitly, both notions require that true transexuals manifest themselves during childhood, but none of the real trans people we hear about are true trans. This is in turn the True Scotsman fallacy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/32677832

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3635039

Various thoughts:

• Around 20 people weren't properly covered by the gender categories, obviously we're trying to be as inclusive as possible and a different approach will be tried next time

• There were about 600 respondents, which gives us a accurate sampling of the active userbase. If you multiply any number by 3, you'll get a fairly accurate representation of the full userbase each week. This means there are around 800-900 people who don't identify fully as cis each week on this site.

• Nearly 300 trans/gender diverse/questioning people unanimously agree that hexbear is an inclusive space

• There was so much data on gender that I was really struggling to find a way to convey the data that wasnt a pie chart, graph, or an incomprehensible kalaeidoscope. If you have an idea on how to beautify the data, you can download the raw data here: https://pad.artemislena.eu/file/#/2/file/xzy4pck8on+oZp9yGRUIezR+/ - I further anonymized this data by removing time of response and any specific comments, I don't think it would be easy for anyone to figure out who is who.

• There were a couple of text responses that really needed further elaboration, I noted hexbear's rules next to these comments

• I'll probably be doing a demographics survey sometime in the future, including basic fairly anonymous stuff like "what region were you born in" "where do the languages you speak originate" "would you describe yourself as a POC" "what age range are you in".

• The percentage of people answering they were cisgender increased by 8% than the previous survey. This could be for a myriad of reasons, such as cis people being afraid trans people will hunt them down in the public thread and assassinate them. Anonymity may have made them feel safer to respond. Regardless, way more people responded this time, which signifies that people felt safer responding to the cryptpad or it was easier to do. The leading question was a bit more inclusive than last time, but I think I'll include both questions (are you transgender / gender diverse and are you cisgender) to see how people respond.

• We have a lot of people that aren't binary trans on this site.

• Some of the questions were pretty funky and we got a lot of fuzzy responses on them as a result. In particular "After you realized you were trans/gender diverse, how long did it take for you to begin to act on it?" and "At what age did you begin transition?" caused a lot of friction, I think I will ask more vague questions in the future that lead to a path of more specific questions to capture better data, and to save people time. Questions like "Do you feel your gender transition had a defined starting point?" and some further ones.

• Around 20 people each week on this site are cis she/hers, which is very low and roughly the same as last time. I feel like if hexbear ever starts hosting other federated stuff (like a federated tiktok or something) and can hook into it natively with lemmy, we'd see a better ratio.

• I tried to be very sure any data with >2 people on it was clearly legible, I think some people might find it fun that there are others with their same fairly specific classifications per this survey lurking around on the site.

• Overall I feel like the survey was a success despite some bumps.

• You can find the other surveys/links here: https://hexbear.net/post/3016455

• I made these graphs on company time

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5865085

Love this discussion!

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5779704

Subtitle:

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The letter, which was sent to the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, attempts to use consumer protection laws to make it against the law to support puberty blockers.

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From the article:

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On Tuesday, a group of 22 Republican attorneys general, led by Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, sent a letter to the president and vice president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, accusing the organization of violating consumer protection laws by endorsing the use of puberty blockers. The letter also demands answers to 14 probing questions and extensive access to internal documents. While the letter carries no legal authority, states have increasingly used vague and broad consumer protection laws to investigate the records of gender-affirming care and abortion providers, often with little to no judicial oversight.

The letter, bearing the seal of the Idaho Attorney General's office, seeks to prohibit the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) from endorsing puberty blockers as a form of reversible gender-affirming care for transgender teenagers, using consumer protection laws as the basis. "Statements made by medical trade organizations, like the AAP, are subject to state consumer protection laws… misleading and deceptive statements of medical trade associations are connected to commerce and reach consumers," the letter states, asserting the authority of Republican-controlled states to challenge the AAP’s endorsement of puberty blockers and justify extensive investigations into the organization's documents.

The letter leans on flawed science and previous hit pieces from far-right, anti-transgender think tanks that have struggled to gain credibility in scientific and medical communities. It criticizes the organization for describing puberty blockers as “reversible,” a stance supported by several medical and scientific organizations, backed by studies, and decades of use in treating precocious puberty and other conditions. A review by the Sax Institute found that “two systematic reviews reported that puberty suppression treatment is reversible,” and that the treatment is “effective, safe, well tolerated, and reversible.”

The letter heavily references the Cass Review. On the second page, for example, it asserts that the claim puberty blockers are reversible is false, “beyond medical debate.” To support this assertion, it cites the Cass Review, which identifies several "possible" irreversible consequences, such as interference with neurocognitive development, bone density, and “blocking normal pubertal experience and experimentation.”

See this claim here:

These claims, however, are not well-supported by evidence. For instance, the assertion regarding neurocognitive development in the Cass Review is entirely speculative. In contrast, the Sax Review found that transgender youth who received gender-affirming hormone therapy demonstrated better cognitive development compared to those who did not, meaning that gender affirming care actually improved the cognitive development for many trans youth through a reduction in negative psychological symptoms. It likewise states that one study making this assertion did not control for ASD and anxiety, which have proven impacts on cognitive development. Other studies on brain development primarily focus on sheep or on youth experiencing precocious puberty.

Similarly, bone density concerns are frequently cited to justify bans on puberty blockers. However, the Sax Review notes that bone density reductions are “within one standard deviation of normal,” and that bone density is restored once puberty resumes. Additionally, most youth in the studies showing bone density reductions were deficient in vitamin D, according to the Sax Review. This is why the informed consent form for puberty blockers addresses this risk and its mitigation, stating, “It is important that patients on Lupron Depot® take other measures to protect their bones: keeping active and ensuring good calcium and Vitamin D intake.”

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Read the rest here.

Just trying to support this person. Good Substack.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/15865014

Hi, everyone! So, I'm moving toward going on estrogen in the next year. Before I do that, there are some steps I want to take to prepare. I'm using an at-home IPL machine now for hair removal, and I'd like to get some voice lessons under my belt as well. The main step I want to take next is sperm cryopreservation. My fiancee and I want kids, but I'm not certain it would be a good idea to have a kid during puberty. So, we want to freeze my sperm or our embryos, and I was wondering if ya'll have any resources you could share? I've looked into a few at-home sperm freezing kits, but it's such a big deal to place your fertility in the hands of a company like that and any advice would be much appreciated! <3

PinkNews CEO Benjamin Cohen refusing to campaign on trans issues ahead of the election, dismissing them as "incredibly contentious" and insisting they’re different to the equal marriage fight.

He doesn’t want Pinknews to be seen as "some sort of charity” for the trans community

twitter link to the audio.