chunks of flommus
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aaaaaaaaa

Here’s the thing about gender transition, from your local non-binary pal who really should get on the pronoun shift already but aaaa anyway:

Standards vary state by state. Typically, one needs two letters from two separate health professionals to get just hormone replacement. Those professionals are typically mental health professionals who require you see them for anywhere between two months and two years.

And at the end of that period, they can still just refuse to write your letter. In fact, there is no reason or obligation for them to disclose at the onset that they never write letters for anyone. You can spend y e a r s of your life jumping hoops for transphobic medical professionals trying desperately to prove your ‘realness.’

Actual surgeries aren’t covered by insurance, are expensive, and also require letters. Some have loopholes, saw a thread in an afab group the other day of people with complicated feelings about getting top surgeries they wouldn’t have had access to before because of cancer. But generally, it is massively gatekept.

Kids aren’t getting surgeries. Some teenagers can’t even access hormones. One option that seems to be by professionals and trans people alike agreed on for youth is basically drugs that delay puberty, blockers.

I’m going to admit that I understand this category of transition care the least, and I can present only what I understand. They’ve been around for decades, and don’t seem to cause long term problems. It just prevents the onset of puberty, and then when it’s out of ones system, puberty starts.

Buys time to make decisions. And politicians and doctors fighting a crisis of impulse transitions that don’t fucking exist are going to take that from a generation or more of kids.

The moral of this post is AAAAAAAAA.

—melony ppenosyne

Flommist Melony Ppenosyne is a writer and weird artist type. In the last year alone, she’s traveled to Virginia as a competing poet, co-written a play on mental illness that is presently being produced, and crafted a published essay checking the privilege and scope of art galleries. Copyright © 2019 Melony Ppenosyne. Pictured: Gerda and Einar Wegener, 1924, source.