I sense your frustration and empathize. I cannot imagine how challenging it must be to manage your levels without the benefit of doctors or proper lab tests. Working from first principles and self observation takes amazing patience and discipline.

However, while transphobia and bigotry is ascendant right now, I’m not entirely sure we can use your account as evidence of widespread systemic malpractice against our people.

I have a doctor, she prescribes estradiol valerate and spiro, and tests my blood every 3 months. We work as a team to produce hormone levels that will eventually converge with those of any afab.

The thing is, everyone is different from the jump. Even with the benefit of a fully equipped treatment plan, my physiological goals are a moving target that we can, at best, only approach.

There’s no conspiracy, other than the social conventions of gender that held me prisoner for decades.

See, the problem with this is there’s no objective standard for validating whether somebody is telling the truth or not. So we can impose conventions that say you must tag something as being generated in a certain way, but that doesn’t mean that people are going to actually be forthcoming with the community.

This is a problem that we’re going to have to deal with not just when we’re talking about our self hosted builds, but almost anything that is mediated through a screen. So, if we can figure it out for here, I’d suggest that we tell everybody shortly thereafter; about it because it‘ll solve a lot of problems, in a lot of different places.

Bonus points if whatever we come up with can actually be self hosted.

Learning how to move like a girl is a challenging task.

…though my wife doesn’t seem to mind me bending over at the waist…

Apply cold water to burn

Spiro sucks, and I’m currently on a pretty massive dose. Looking forward to dialing it back after my valerate takes hold.

It’s a complicated dance. Before my egg cracked I was on T pellets and they gave me superpowers. Nothing much bothered me and I got in some epic workouts. But I felt two-dimensional. I eventually realized what I actually should do, but fully withdrawing one hormone suuuuuuucks unless it’s smoothly replaced with another one. Suppressing T by itself is not a good time.

In the states, though, solar is woke and gay, and thus doesn’t get any financial help(currently). Farmers that live hand-to-mouth in the old model, getting drip-fed agri-subsidies, don’t have a way to soften the blow of the capex needed to push through the expense barrier, even though the other side is cleaner and more profitable.

100% ^^ this right here.

Valve is one of the very few big companies I am totally fine spending money with. The value proposition is entirely focused on the products and how the customer, me, gets the most from them. No artificial scarcity, no protectionist bullshit, no outrageously exploitative EULA or obvious shafting of vendors. They focused on creating something useful and functional, and they profit from it. Bravo.

And they have been doing this for decades. The first PC I installed Steam on was a Celeron with a Voodoo2 GPU in it.

I have to do business with other companies because they have driven other competitors out of business. I get to do business with Valve.

Embrace the Suck. Own it, master it, overcome it.

You’d think a religion invented by a science fiction writer would have anticipated this vulnerability.