Jul

I don’t think there’s a real problem outside of the same groups that tend to be TERFs to call yourself lesbian if you are technically bi/pan but lean towards women as partners.

I’ve never had a lesbian complain about me calling myself lesbian despite being attracted to all genders. I have only ever experienced straight people complaining about the technicality. But I do know there is that weird way of thinking out there that bi women are really straight and just wanting to experiment. I haven’t dated a man in probably a decade, though I have made out with a couple of them. I just don’t often have romantic feelings for men. Sexuality and romantic alignment are rarely binary. It’s mostly those who are questioning their own alignment and want to deflect who like to complain about others.

Really, you eat your baked potatoes with no salt or flavoring? I put tons of stuff on mine. My favorite is usually butter, salt, sour cream, and crumbled bacon, but I’ve never eaten a baked potato plain and I’ve eaten a lot of them in my lifetime.

Generally the immune system doesn’t work that way. The immune system generally targets living organisms actively attacking the body. Immunity derives from learning how to efficiently kill the organisms, often after a single encounter, and “remembering” that for as long as possible.

The defense against toxins is a little different. I don’t have as much knowledge on that side, but generally the defense against these kinds of things is achieved when a cell is damaged, but not killed by the agent heals in such a way that it’s less susceptible to that agent. Kind of like a callus forming on a part of the skin that gets repeatedly damaged. Also, the systems of the body that are responsible for clearing out toxins become somewhat more effective at getting rid of them after repeated exposure.

So, vaccination generally relies on training the more active defense by specialized cells that are specifically “designed” to be trained and “remember” how to attack the organism, but not as much a reaction by the cells that are being attacked by the microorganism. Whereas toxin defense is more a reaction by the affected cells themselves as well as increased efficiency of the body to filter it out, but the affected cells don’t really “learn” how to protect themselves in quite the same way.

But this is all generalization. There are many types of venoms and some can be affected by the immune system, but in general it’s a very different type of response that requires repeated exposure and recovery to develop.

I mean, yeah, it was never designed to protect children. It’s designed to increase the ease of surveillance of adults. Otherwise, the corporations would have been fighting against it. They don’t make profit from protecting children, but they do from the excuse to get truly unique identifiers for people so they can track them and integrate and/or sell the more detailed data for each user.

sundresses FTW

Yeah, costume parties and shows/raves are part of what made me sure I wanted to transition more femme. All the outfits/costumes I actually enjoyed wearing were always very femme and sexy and I loved being treated more femme (by those who were respectful at least).

I generally can only handle parties if I drink though. I’m AuDHD and it helps a lot with the overstimulation for me without making me too mellow to socialize. But I also have a much lower risk of addiction partly due to the type of neurodivergence I have, heck I can’t even fo positive habits, much less negative ones, lol, so that helps. Though, I do hate hangovers that keep getting worse with age…

Yeah never give your credentials to an LLM. If you must use one to help with finances, then download your statements and give it those.

But be warned that they aren’t great at giving sound financial advice since they aren’t trained 100% with sound financial advice alone, but the near entirety of the internet including satire, scammer advice such as MLMs, and just plain risky plans and they have not been taught what information falls into which of those categories, so it’s all about luck on which of that advice it will give you.

Pretending you don’t understand the law and taking a fine is way better for them than allowing the environmental study to show how much damage they were about to cause. Sucks that governments use piddling fines as “punishment” rather than arresting the executives who knowingly ordered disobeying the laws and sanctioning the company so they can never build in their country again.

So tired of the copyright excuse for trying to break the internet. Go after the offenders, not the basic functionality of the internet as an open ecosystem. Pisses me off every time a court fucks up this badly.

Yeah, when I got it it was a little cheaper, but I also had some HRA money I needed to use before it expired, so that helped out as well. I don’t think it’s worth $400 in it’s current state. Maybe if they make some improvements.

Try a pelvic floor physical therapist. You should be able to increase width over time, unlike depth which often loss of depth is permanent. It will likely require time, patience, and some amount of pain, depending on your situation. A gynecologist might also be able to help using cortisone injections under some circumstances. The real issue is usually finding providers with experience with neovaginas.

I ended up with severe scarring and wasn’t able to get much width at all, but I just recently had some revision surgery and I’m hoping it will help, but I’m currently working on it. Mostly what helped me outside of stretching tissue, which I wasn’t able to do with the scarring, was muscle control, learning to relax them and do reverse kegels.

My biggest issue is the difference in sizes between most dilators is too much to allow for good progressive stretching. I found a device called Milli and I had some limited success with it. However it is tapered a little too much for what I hoped and it doesn’t apply equal pressure around the vagina, but has 4 pressure points from the expanding arms. It is the only medical device I could find of its kind, though. I have though about getting one of those inflatable things marketed for training for anal sex in some sex shops, but not too hopeful. My general routine right now is to dilate twice a day, once concentrating on width and another on depth, but I’m still healing from surgery so I have been avoiding too much pressure so I don’t tear any sutures and cause more scarring.

It will get reduced. It was already reduced from $219 billion to $25 billion. It will get cut down or thrown out in appeal, but even if it was $25 billion, they made way more than that in profit specifically due to misleading people on privacy all these years. And this won’t stop them from doing it in the future, it’s just a cost of doing business for these companies not anything that’s enough to change behavior.

I say do it. LGBTQ+ meet ups have always been some of the most welcoming groups I’ve found. I think the fact that we’re all always so on guard around everyone for safety reasons and not having to do that in these kinds of groups makes people in the groups more open and the events more welcoming.

I actually mostly hang out with a Wiccan group, even though I’m fully atheist (as are many in the group). The ceremonies are just a lot of fun and kind of like doing improv rather than “religious”, and they keep a regular cadence of holidays throughout the year. But there’s also the deep respect for nature, including people, that makes them very welcoming to all races, genders, sexualities, neurodivergences (I’m AuDHD, too), etc.

Of course every “pagan” group is going to be different since the specifics of the traditions are partly lost to time and colonialism. And there has been a surge of people and corporations in these spaces trying to sell supplements and crystals and other nonsense that has increased the number of toxic groups claiming to be Wiccan or Pagan or whatever, but I happened to find a group that, although not perfect, is pretty good for me.

So, usually it’s been worth the effort for me. I live in a city but hate driving and public transit is not great, so I don’t go out a lot, but it’s been well worth the spoons for me. And don’t be discouraged if the first one doesn’t work. It takes time to find the right group of people.

Took me a while to get all of my doctors to switch to female levels. They complained that other tests might end up showing wrong values. So far the only issue I’ve had is the cholesterol tests show high when they are normal on the male scales. Everything else is way more accurate or isn’t gender specific really.

As for levels, 400 pg/ml for estradiol is my target level even if a lot of places say 100 or 200 still based on old breast cancer research on 60+ cis-women and/or using estrone rather than estradiol treatments. My current is pretty high at peak, but around 300-400 at trough.

My testosterone is also around 5-10ng/dL on monotherapy even before I had bottom surgery. And while anything under 50ng/DL is considered normal for women I have never gotten that high, even at troughs, but we’re all different.

I don’t get the other tests from my provider, but I may ask next round if she can add those, but likely my insurance won’t cover them, so I probably could just order them myself, I suppose. I do take progesterone, but only orally and I’ve not had much effect from it so I’m guessing it’s probably low.

But overall looks pretty good to me as a non-medical-professional but as someone like most of us who has had to become a near expert in gender specific endocrinology just to get what we need, LOL.

God I love reading these just to confirm I’m not the only one. Lol

I’m in a constant state of burnout, but I have a comfortable amount of income now so I have stable shelter and I’m not dealing with food insecurity anymore. A couple of decades of strong antianxiety and antidepressant medications helped but it made me super numb and just masked everything because it was treating the wrong things. But even then it was really difficult and I lost jobs over attendance even though my performance and productivity was way better than most even with missing extra days Figuring out I had ADHD and Autism several years back and getting made a huge difference, but it’s still a real struggle. All my PTO goes to “sick days” so I never get vacations, but I have a home and food and necessities for now. I’m sure it won’t last, but I’ll survive. If I had wealth, I could maybe own my own business and be as productive and do work without the nonsense work schedules and take some time off to keep out of the burnout stage. I doubt retirement is possible the way the current system is set up in the US, but I’ve bee trying to set aside what I can so when my age makes it impossible to push myself this hard I won’t end up on the street again. But I doubt it will last enough years. We’ll just see how it goes.

To have been born wealthy…lol…but damn it would have made everything so much easier.

The thing that has been the root cause of most of my anxiety and meltdowns has been neurotypical working condition expectations. I could have been a much more productive person if I could have been able to take breaks when needed rather than realizing neurotypical people take breaks while pretending to work, not be told to “push past my limits” and taken that literally and pushed myself to meltdowns and injuries, had the ability to get an education without also having to work full time, been able to do work that took advantage the strengths of Autism and ADHD rather than being forced to do tedious things or customer facing things that typically are easy for NTs, just boring, but extremely draining and anxiety inducing for me.

I have one from Evatek, (Taiwanese company) that was less expensive but has lasted for my home PC and work laptop dock, but it seems they are no longer making anything, not sure if they finally died off or what, but even the photo on the Amazon page of the device I have shows different branding (Greathtek) though the particular one I have is out of stock. Not sure if Greathtek, which seems to be a Chinese company, bought their KVM product business or what but seems that’s all they make and the company seems to be deeply connected with Amazon somehow. So I’m definitely not convinced the quality will have transfered over.

But racism, sexism, etc., mask the growing wealth gap, product and service enshitification, climate change, and all the other issues caused my unregulated capitalism, which is it’s real purpose, so it’s not going away.

I’m guessing she’s referring to Ghislaine Maxwell and not wanting that connection. But I never would have made that connection at all.