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Joined 12 days ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2025

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  • UI should have one menu for global actions and where applicable, one menu or set of buttons or whatever for context specific actions that activate when you select an item(s) to take action on. And that’s it.

    As for forms in general, paper or electronic, I agree they often are not specific enough about context to understand what they’re looking for. This is a failing of instructions, either in context or a separate page of them should exist for every single form. There are some where the title is self explanatory in context like “first name” in a selection labeled “patient demographics” is documentation enough, but otherwise there should usually be at least a few words explaining each field or set of fields. Paper and ink is cheap, screen space is cheap, put a few words.

    As for tax forms, I think for US taxes it’s fine until you get to business income and expenses which are purposely vague and complex to allow for essentially fraud that’s harder to detect, whereas personal stuff is more specific to make sure they get every cent from people not wealthy enough to write off living and luxury expenses as business expenses. But it’s too complex for the average person without basic logic skills. Like temporarily renting out a property until I could sell it after I had to move was ridiculously complex to figure out what I could and couldn’t deduct. The forms are very generalized and the details are obfuscated by filling in your own descriptions on worksheets that often are not actually filed, only retained for audit, whereas in personal expenses almost every single detail has a place to put it on a form that is actually filed.




  • Yeah I will say the hormones are easier here. I had thought the clinics also helped them coordinate surgery, but I don’t really know well, just going off of something I read and it’s possible that it was just one clinic that happened to offer that service, too.

    For hormones here the hardest part is finding a therapist and/or psychiatrist to write the letters and in some places, finding a doctor willing to prescribe and monitor and fill out a support letter and all the paperwork to get prior authorization for the off-label-use dosage since you need more than a cis-woman which is often all that’s covered by default and often isn’t covered at all by default if your birth gender marker is M. When my plan changed this year I had to start getting the prior auth every 6 months because I exceed the max covered dosage by 3x.

    I was lucky to have a primary care doctor that was experienced, though she moved on now. And I found a list of therapists willing to write the support (gate-keeping) letters with only a single, virtual appointment, though I had to pay cash and needed 2 of them (one at least PhD level and one at least MA level) for the surgery. For me the hormones only required one and could be MA level, though. I was on waiting lists for both therapists and psychiatrists at the time, so that list saved me. There’s a shortage of mental health providers around here, too.

    And the letters technically are supposed to require the mental health providers to know you well, but a lot of providers know that’s just gate-keeping. And, some insurance still requires the even older WPATH recommendations that you get one that does and one that doesn’t know you. My insurance is only one version behind, though, using version 7, but some use 6 or even 5 still.


  • It’s not much better in the US and there isn’t a unified “gender clinic” to coordinate things. And travel for surgery and recovery is expensive, especially when most insurance doesn’t pay for that and things are so spread out in the US, so most have no option or if near a major city are stuck with the one or two overbooked options close enough to them that they can get a ride to.

    I had to travel to another major city to even get on a waiting list for my first surgery since in the major city where I live, the one clinic that has a surgeon was totally unresponsive on how long their waiting list was after taking my doctor’s referral.

    And I had to pay around $4,000 for a month at an AirBnB plus flights, food, and necessities we couldn’t fit in the now strict 50lb weight limits on luggage for me and a care person. I couldn’t bring a carry-on since I wouldn’t be able to carry it on the way home and you can’t put the heavier liquids in there anyway like soaps, shampoos, hair products, lotions, etc. And paid several thousand out of pocket to cover deductibles and coinsurance despite having the most expensive health plan my company offers which costs about $400 every other week from each paycheck despite the fact I work for said insurance company. And that was only one surgery.

    Next surgery is a 1 year wait for a consult and no clue how many years before surgery and another one is at least a 3 year wait for consult and at least 4 year wait for surgery after the consult. I can’t afford to travel again for those. Had to take out a home equity loan for the first one. And I still have to pay for the mental heath visits for the gatekeeping WPATH letters each time both for the consult and again for the surgery since they each expire after a year. I really wish there was someone to help coordinate it all. For example, if I end up with the waiting lists ending too close to each other I’ll have to go back on the beginning of the list assuming the surgeon is still scheduling new surgeries because you can’t get too many too close to each other and they’re totally separate offices.

    And traveling internationally is too dangerous right now with my passport being forced to be my birth gender and my genitals not matching for the x-ray, so unless things improve it is likely I’ll be too old to get most of the surgeries by the time I get through the lists. I’m already starting later in life due to lack of care. Plus I need other small surgeries for some unrelated issues which I can’t find providers for in my insurance network taking new patients and can’t afford to schedule too far out, just in case I get to the top of the gender care surgery wait lists.


  • Probably just to try to make Garmin’s product less useful in the short term while the case drags out. Or as a way to get Garmin to acquire them. Strava basically seems to have bought up some competitors that were failing and they have been on the way downhill. So at this stage usually these companies start cost cutting and using any means necessary to increase their perceived value for sale. This gives Garmin an incentive to buy them as that would end the lawsuit and they’d then acquire some additional defensive patents.



  • Yeah, software patents in the US especially, have become a way for companies to either kill competition, or make buying up ridiculous patents and suing for infringement their primary source of income.

    Primary issue is the patent office has few officers that are technical enough to understand the overlap of the specific industry and software. So, they tend to just allow anything, especially from larger companies that they’re told to assume have the expertise if they don’t since their load is too large to have time to learn new stuff and truly research if something is obvious or not.


  • YouTube did make some changes to their terms primarily for creators that get paid for content. They added some new LLM-based scanning of content to find stuff that is too repetitive or didn’t contain enough original content. Assuming the creators you looked at have mostly original content rather than remixing of content which may be misinterpreted by LLMs as not being “original enough”, they could be falling victim to overaggressive hits if they use a consistent format in their content since LLMs don’t really understand context, only patterns.

    I’d be interested to find out if the creators got any notification from YouTube on the reason for removal of the content.


  • Make sure to do a test during peak and a test during trough.

    I do that and then average them. They are always significantly different and i use patches which give a more steady dose than injections.

    Also, I’m not entirely convinced that the values most doctors who are not specialists use are correct for trans people. If you aren’t seeing an endocrinologist with at least a little specialty in sex hormones, I’d do that and see if they can recommend the right levels for your body rather than the general numbers that were always very conservative, and came from cis women’s levels rather than what trans people need since there’s usually no funding to research trans people.

    I was lucky enough to start HRT with a general practitioner with a lot of experience with trans people during her residency and most of her career. But she moved on to another specialty due to the difficulty making ends meet as a good doctor. I’m on the lookout myself for an endo with good experience to consult one of these days.



  • Same. I have had a few types of headache issues most of my life and no one believed the pain was that bad because I don’t express it the way people expect when in severe pain. So, I always thought I had a low tolerance until a doctor freaked out at some severe tibial stress fractures that I was still being asked to run on them. And it took faking a painful yell when the doctor was manipulating it in the first visit to get the bone scan ordered to get to that freak out. I just don’t uncontrollably verbalize severe pain or fully shut down or things like that like neurotypicals.



  • Yeah, I have an X on my ID so even though it’s technically valid for air travel, I brought my passport instead which has my AGAB and wore really loose fitting clothes. Fortunately I didn’t have to go through the x-ray that would give away that my body parts don’t match my passport.

    I wiped all of my devices in case I was detained, not that I have anything to hide, but I don’t want to out any of my friends as trans for them to get targeted.

    And I’ve been staying away from public bathrooms despite having a hard time holding my bladder due to some medical issues retaining salt and water. Considering getting a catheter or something for when I’m in public for more than a few hours because dehydrating myself all the time isn’t good for my health.

    It’s really scary right now even living in a fairly progressive leaning state. I won’t even think about traveling to my hometown to visit family where it’s more conservative. I’m really hoping on the flight back I’m able to slip through security again. It’s going to be a lot of paperwork to get my birth certificate changed to what isn’t actually my gender since that’s not an option, but more closely matches my body parts.

    It’s sad that just existing means you are classified as a terrorist and have to avoid interacting with society to survive.

    Stay away from the US if you can if you are trans, intersex, non-binary, or even cis if you just have some facial traits that make you look a little less like your AGAB. It’s only getting worse every day.






  • I was just chatting with some people about how I’ve discovered how bad habit and conditioning affect neurotypical people. This was in the context of visual, audio, and other gender cues that cause NT people to misgender trans and non binary people. I had recently discovered how the gender conditioning can make it difficult for NT people to change when things are automatic in their brains. They aren’t used to having to concentrate to remember words like i do, so they don’t have that easy place to inject conscious decisions.

    So yeah, there are some things we are superior at and if NT people would just accommodate our disadvantages, our advantages could benefit them. But the current political atmosphere is isolationist and individualism, so they want everything to benefit them since they can’t stand to collaborate to get the benefits we offer.


  • Again, adverse effects doesn’t mean death, the fact that the description you posed has that last sentence is the alarmist thing and only applies to certain drugs, of course.

    The difference in absorption rates between oral and rectal administration can be as much as double or triple or more in some cases. For example I remember reading a study from the 70s or 80s on methylprednisolone. The absorption rate orally was about 90%, but rectally was only around 35% likely due to bacteria in the rectum decomposing the drug before it could make it into the blood.

    So, over the long term the difference in dose could have a significant impact on health. Getting 3 times more or less of any drug, even something relatively safe, will likely mean “adverse effects”. With estradiol this could mean greatly increased side effects for overdose like nipple soreness or mood swings, or greatly decreased effect for underdose meaning testosterone takes over again and hair loss and body hair growth restart. These are “adverse effects”, but are not likely to be deadly, but still considered overdose/underdose.