• 13 Posts
  • 201 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • I sympathize with you. I didn’t grow up catholic, but rather evangelical, but I can understand the realization that the people who taught you to love others have an ideology that is profoundly hateful. I remember the bewilderment and confusion that goes along with that realization. I didn’t leave the faith altogether, although at times it felt like I would, but I’m in a dramatically different place than I was a decade ago for sure.

    All that to say that I understand at least a little of what you’re going through, and I’m sorry you’re grappling with this. It helped me to realize that there are believers out there that think differently, and that the transphobes, homophobes, racists, and reactionaries don’t own the faith.



  • It’s decent for generating ideas or names for fiction. I’ve used it for tabletop stuff a couple of times to give me NPC names or lists of personality traits, and it’s good sometimes for breaking writers block when I get stuck on some detail and I can’t figure out what word I want to use or what to name something. You can usually get it to give you some sort of okay suggestions, but the volume of ideas is usually enough to spark a better idea for me. The only weird thing I’ve noticed is that GPT4 (or whatever flavor bing/copilot is currently using) REALLY likes alliteration to a degree that is downright corny. It’s kinda weird but sort of funny honestly.










  • To quote Julia Serrano’s excellent writeup on GAC for adolescents:

    The “experimental” label is most regularly levied against puberty blockers, probably because the average person isn’t familiar with them. However, they’ve been used to treat precocious puberty since the 1980s (Comite et al., 1981; Mancuso et al., 1989) and to stave off unwanted endogenous puberties in trans youth since the mid-to-late-1990s (Cohen-Kettenis & van Goozen, 1998; van der Loos et al., 2023). For anyone interested in learning more about them, I’d recommend Giordano & Holm’s 2020 accessibly written scientific review “Is puberty delaying treatment ‘experimental treatment’?” as it answers the most commonly asked questions about the method, its efficacy, potential side effects, and so on.

    Giordano & Holm’s review also addresses another common claim levied against gender-affirming care, namely, that there aren’t any “high quality studies.” In actuality, there are many high-quality studies: sound methodologies, significant sample sizes, published in well-respected journals, etcetera. When trans-skeptical people argue this, what they really mean is that there aren’t any randomized controlled studies — where neither the doctor nor patient know whether they’ve received the medicine in question or whether they’ve received a placebo. While this certainly is the “gold standard” for medical trials, it is not logistically possible in cases such as this, as both doctors and patients would quickly surmise which group they were assigned to based upon the changes (or lack thereof) in their bodies. The review also delves into ethical issues regarding withholding this treatment that make controlled studies impossible.

    The second paragraph delves into the claim that there are no quality studies on the effects of delayed puberty. We actually have a good number of high quality studies, what we don’t have are double blind, randomized controlled studies because of the practical and ethical difficulties of doing so. This, of course, gets twisted into labeling puberty blockers as having no evidence or for being “experimental”.


  • I’m sorry that happened to you, it sounds like it was a rough time. This is something I think about with my kids, who are a few years younger than you were when this happened. We don’t give them un-monitored access to social media precisely because I know that kids that age lack the impulse control to just walk away when something like this happens or something is bothering them, so it’s so easy for a teen to get pulled into a situation online where they’re being harassed or bullied and they just don’t have the tools to disconnect from the situation on their own.