Diva (she/her) @ Diva @lemmy.ml

I make electronic music. (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️

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one of the more hitlerite instances

I'm holding up well in spite of everything. I lost one of my friends this week. She had moved into what I thought was going to be a safe situation several states away and something clearly went wrong. She was a really smart and inspiring person.

I also just took another friend to the airport so she could permanently relocate to Europe, and two of my other friends are leaving soon too.

It's been a rough week but I'm not planning on leaving, mostly working on organizing the trans people who stay.

I check all/comments/new, see what people are talking about and if anything catches my eye I may subscribe

It's really telling how as soon as someone critiques the way things are run on swamp island you just get defensive about 'foreigners' rather than taking the constructive criticism about your alleged healthcare system.

I'm an anarchist, I don't like any of these fucking countries, they're all capitalist shitholes, some more so than others. Fuck the wars, literally just setting money on fire and acting like the problem is minorities getting healthcare.

I’m just saying that the surgeries to the face shouldn’t be handed out no-questions asked.

The only way this happens right now pretty much everywhere is if you have money, then you can get whatever gender affirming surgery you want, cis or trans. The issue I have is that even the first step of this process like hormones and non-invasive procedures are already extremely gatekept, do you think they should be more accessible or less?

I never stopped doing organizing work since Trump 1, during the Biden regime a lot of people went back to brunch, it was harder to find volunteers. Now they're all back and ready to be mad at the government and do work.

At no point did I ever blame trans people. I don’t know how you even read that out of what I said.

here's the things that jumped out at me:

A “bias” against self report and DIY HRT is understandable as the person has likely just been hanging out in forums and Discord servers but not assessed by a professional.

based on this I can only conclude that you don't consider self report people to be trans. You're clearly shitting on them for not following the 6 year labyrinth of your health system to get hormones and a proper diagnosis.

from what I can tell your main concern is continuing austerity rather than just figuring out what care is needed and providing it.

I think it’s important for it to be assessed first to make sure that necessary care is being funded by the taxpayer and not just cosmetic surgery

I can conclude and you either missed or dismissed my point about cosmetic surgery. things like electrolysis on the face to remove facial hair may be "cosmetic" but it's also kind of a big deal for transfems who don't follow the puberty blocker track. It involves a lot of work in the system to even get to have that covered, I can assure you that nobody is getting recreational facial electrolysis.

if your concern is actually taxpayers money getting spent well maybe you lot should spend less money on weapons, cops and tax cuts? it's what I tell them here because those things are money pits.

Yeah, I'm offering you my experience with the US's horrifyingly dysfunctional healthcare system that was still able to give me a prescription within months rather than 6+ years. Maybe you should stop trying to blame trans people for your system failing so many people for so long.

I know it's not for profit, I explained how classifications are used under our for profit system to do the same things you do under your alleged healthcare system.

at 6 years to provide service you might as well not have a healthcare system

If your health system is taking 6 years to provide people with a hormone prescription it's clearly complete dog shit. Frankly sounds more like a warcrime than a health service. I don't think that making the care it provides worse for miniorities is going to fix how fucked up it is for everyone else. Maybe try fixing the system itself instead of punishing people for failing to conform to bullshit standards designed to deny care.

Classifying things which are neccessary care as "cosmetic" is how things are gatekept in our for-profit healthcare, as opposed to hand-wringing about misdiagnosis in service of cruel austerity.

Not even saying we should be more stringent. We might already be stringent enough.

If you have 6 year wait times it sounds like the issue is with the healthcare system failing to meet demand. In the video you linked they were struggling to get even hormones prescribed, citing a bias against self report and diy HRT. I can relate as while I've been able to get it prescribed I've had to pay out of pocket myself (with coupons) for injections because my insurance prioritizes oral and patches first because that's what the formulary says. It doesn't make medical sense because I can't really get to a therapeutic dose on patches, it doesn't make financial sense because patches are way more expensive than shots, but it is an arbitrary decision that makes getting care more difficult.

I think the system is already overly strict, also not the same everywhere, especially for even being able to start the transition process. For transfems facial hair is something that's going to need 'cosmetic' procedures (laser/electrolysis) to remove. The insurance pathway for that in my experience essentially requires you to be on HRT for a considerable length of time before they will even cover the procedure. That kind of wait can really compound mental stresses. I have a good connection for electrolysis and had enough income to get it done in parallel with starting HRT without insurance, but that's the exception.

Can you clarify what 'sex change operations' is intended to refer to, are you calling every step of gender affirming care 'sex change operations' or is something like hormones distinct in your mind?

The effects of going on hormones is largely reversible, surgery obviously less so.

The reality is vast majority of the people who do de-transition do so because of familial or social pressures, often social coercion. That's not to discount that there are ones who have some misdiagnosis leading them to pursue care that they didn't want. I just don't see how arbitrarily limiting care for everyone else solves this perceived issue other than via effective austerity- not allowing anyone to have care.

I do think there should be research done into seeing if there is a cure or therapies for gender dysphoria, and use sex changes as a last resort.

but right now, sex changes appear to be one of the most effective options if someone is truly experiencing dysphoria. But again, they should have everything else ruled out first

The most effective (and reversible) treatment should be a last resort, because you think that people aren't truly experiencing dysphoria, and even if they are everything else needs to be ruled out first.

the video you cite is someone who is impoverished and unwell dealing with a system that is intentionally disfunctional and has clearly been overreacting making threats that aren't even really actionable considering how poor they are. Having a mental health condition exacerbated by poverty and a disfunctional healthcare system doesn't mean your other conditions aren't real.

Broadly speaking being gender nonconforming is more likely to cause you to end up in poverty simply because your bigoted family might just cut all support from you and leave you to fend for yourself with a hostile system. having to live in poverty and not even able to get medical care then exacerbates pretty much every underlying mental health issue regardless of gender.

hey some of us are Russian bots who just happen to be trans, rather than for nefarious reasons

There's been some bad blood since when they were federated and the (old) 196 mods were particularly shitty, example: https://hexbear.net/post/363529/3762934

Since then there's been new 196 mods because the old 196 tried to force-migrate the whole comm to .world.

This reminds me of Iran for some reason.

I've read a lot and I still consider myself an anarchist, at the end of the day it reflects the organizing work that I do and the people I often work with.

To touch on the online/offline anarchist bit, I see all types frankly.

I will routinely run into people who will go on a spree of reading exclusively anarchist authors, the ones they latch on to are often ones that aren't particularly academically rigorous but are still extremely dogmatic about 'Stalinists', (Bookchin is one I see a lot). That then primes them to go into reading all the civil war/WW2 drama and get fired up about how evil the USSR was.

It really feels like the trajectory of a psyop. These days I just point out that Bookchin was both a zionist and not even an anarchist in the end of his life and move on with doing the work.

I even ran into a reading group where I brought up how Bookchin constantly citing Athenian democracy as a positive example of direct democracy always felt bizarre because it was a misogynistic slave state. The counterpoint was that we should be understanding and taking from systems the good parts which worked well and liberated people. My follow up was that's the intent then we should be doing the same to the good parts and working strategies from the USSR and China as well, rather than entirely writing them off.

Does that address the question? It’s a fair question but I feel like you’re assuming similarity that isn’t there, between my POV and the State Department’s POV.

That's fair, I could stand to be a little more charitable on that front.

I don’t have a clear position on Kosovo or Chechnya just because I don’t know that much about them, but the massive contradiction between how Russia reacted in Chechnya versus Donbas is one example of why I don’t take their narrative on anything seriously at all.

For me it helps to put some of these things in a sequence of events. First the US/EU actually supported the Russian response in Chechnya, I think it was Bill Clinton made an analogy to the US civil war, especially after all the terrorist attacks it wasn't totally out of place. The warcrimes, high civilian death toll and brutal crackdowns after didn't really cause that sympathy to last long after. I don't recall that there were even any sanctions.

Kosovo came roughly after that, and the US supporting the separatist movement is what I was referencing as that was the break from what was 'normal' for separatist regions. That's not to say that people in separatist regions shouldn't be able to express themselves, but that it wasn't the standard for how world leaders treated breakaway regions until then. Now that new standard (set by the US) has been followed by Russian in Ukraine.

I don’t think Moscow intervening in Donbas had anything at all to do with free people’s self-determination. Like I said, I get it if someone from there feels like they’re badly represented in Kyiv, but having automatic weapons flow in from outside so that they won’t have to honor the government that won their country’s election

I'm sure on some level it's more a pretext than a principled stance on separatism by Russia, but also it reflects an earnest sentiment from people in eastern Ukraine.

by their own complicity in the massacre

Absolutely wrong. This is where I think you didn’t read the report carefully enough.

I did quote the official report for them in that response, in fact I only referenced so as not to include the editorializing.

and a bunch of people on all sides died including because of failures by local authorities (which caused understandable upset which was then compounded by failures of the Ukraine government during the investigation).

This is what I meant by complicity- failing to be transparent and diligent in investigating something serious, like murders, can look like you're favoring one side. This reminds me of people in the US being mad at cops when they kill people, not because people think all cops are conspiring to kill black people (or whoever), but there's a sentiment that they will turn a blind eye and protect cops who misbehave.

Also as not a total aside as a trans russian, but to give you an analogy for the understanding that state powers will instrumentalize any struggle, national or otherwise, for geopolitical ends. Take same sex marriage-only 14% of Ukrainians support legalizing it. In Russia, it's 9%. Both places are queerphobic as fuck, to a much greater extend than even the worst red states in the US, Russia is mostly just more mask-off about it than Ukraine.

Despite that you would see Azov routinely attacked gay bars, there have been amnesty international reports about this since 2014 when the west started integrating the more fascist UA elements to their ends. That pride parades can only happen in Kiev when it is walled off from the frothing, fascist mob is in part NATO's fault. That assaults on queer people by azov are practically never persecuted, that is at least partially due to their patronage from the west. Once the war started it was full steam painting Ukraine as pro-lgbt while they were pressing trans women fleeing the fighting into service because they were "men."

That is not to excuse the ridiculous amount of anti-queer sentiment in Russia. The hunting down of queer people under Ramzan Kadyrov in the Russian province of Chechnya was probably the worst act of homophobic violence since many decades, we're talking about thousands of people getting murdered by government death squads who spied on them on dating sites. After the murders, Kadyrov joked in front of the international press why they were asking about a persecution of gay people, "there are no gay people in Chechnya."

Like that shit was appalling and largely absent from western discourse before the war.

hey they made an aid pier that got used to distribute a tiny amount of supplies before it got used to launch an Israeli massacre and then broke apart under its own weight