Great read! Thank you

For those who are reporting this, it’s a satire piece and is the correct sub

I appreciate your warning, and would like to echo it, from a safety perspective.

I would also like to point out that we should be approaching this, as every risk, from a harm reduction standpoint. A drug with impurities that could save your life or prevent serious harm is better than no drug and death. People need to be empowered to make the best decisions they can, given the available resources and education.

Venus rhymes with a piece of anatomy often found on men. Obviously they got it backwards

Alt text: the words “white text with black outline can be read on any color” is superimposed on a rainbow gradient, demonstrating the point

Yeah I think that’s a reasonable analogy. It’s important to note that medicine and taking care of your hair are not quite analogous and the potential negative outcomes from bad health care can be orders of magnitude worse than a negative outcome at a salon… But yeah

Like most science press releases I’m not holding my breath

Game changer for smart watches if this turns out to work and scale well

Gender affirming clinics are not doing any kinds of surgery, period. A gender affirming care provider is doing care in the context of the unique health needs of a trans individual. Often this has to do with how hormones affect the body, but in many cases it’s just about being able to provide care in an affirming way. A provider with no training might suggest the patient do things which are not in alignment with their gender (such as advising them to stop or adjust hormones in response to lab values which can be managed in other ways) or use language which is offensive or harmful to the patient (misgendering and dead naming for example). Ancillary services such as speech therapy might be offered at these locations, although generally speaking they tend to be pretty primary care focused. Knowing how often you should be testing for various things, like pap smear frequency for trans men, or knowing how to treat pelvic pain in trans men and women are the kinds of care that gender affirming clinics can offer. Understanding to keep a closer watch on hemoglobin levels for trans men and advising that they donate blood or take medication if they get too high, is also something that a normal clinic might miss. Honestly there’s far too much to even mention in a single comment, which is why these places exist and why there is so much demand.

It’s quite rare for a medical device to have a warranty.

Thanks for writing and sharing this. This is a valuable perspective and brings up some excellent points around accessibility and how some environments and actions can be really draining and how other people are often unaware of how draining it can be due to their privilege on some axis. As an aside, I had never bothered to look into where the language around spoons came from, thank you for sharing the link! That’s super cool that it came from a disability writer, I’ll have to check out the essay it comes from.

I was going to reflect that it’s wild to me that only 3% take public transit, but when I lived in the suburbs, I took the bus maybe a few times per year outside of specific time-frames where it was most convenient to take the bus because I didn’t have access to other transportation. Now that I live in the city, being central to public transit was an important part of that - and this 3% is a reflection of how car-centric our country is and how little public transit we really have.

weird flex but ok

Obviously more thought should be put into whether they’re allowed to brand them in the first place, because frankly, they probably shouldn’t be able to… but also this is an excellent use case for being artistic! I bet a local artist (especially the ones with more anarchist or anti-capitalist ideals) would be thrilled to make you new plates, skins, or do art right on-top of your prosthesis and might even be willing to do it for a discount or free as a way to give back.

Our rule is to be nice. Being nice is more than just ‘not insulting or degrading anyone’.

You entered the LGBTQ+ community to pick a fight with the very population this community serves over a quite literally pedantic idea - what a specific word means in a specific context. You need to rethink your behavior. I’m going to give you a 7 day ban during which you can rethink how you interact with our instance.

Of note, since I do have an advanced degree in a biological field, I’d like to point out that you are incorrect. In biology there’s are systems of sex determination. As you’ll see in the non-exhaustive but quite extensive Wikipedia article linked, there are many ways in which sex can be classified which were invented by the field of biology. What you won’t find, however, is much of anything talking about babies themselves or who has the capacity to physically give birth. This is not particularly surprising to anyone who has a formal training in biology because mammals are rather odd in the scope of all that is biological. In fact, sex determination in humans does not actually have anything to do with the capability to bear children at all and in the field of biology is typically based on the x-y sex determination system (of note here- related biological fields such as the medical sciences do not typically use this system for determining or classifying sex).

Also of note, because you incorrectly ended up dismissing it as not an issue of pedantry, the words male and female can be used interchangeably with both sex and gender. Humans have this wonderful lexical quirk in that we invented language to serve amorphous ideas, not as a means of science, and because of such words mean different things to different people. We have definitions in order to keep some semblance of shared understanding, but even these vary from dictionary to dictionary and are really just a reflection of how the word is being used by humans at the date of printing. Dismissing any discussion about gender because you wish to focus on sex without acknowledging the fact that this language is intertwined is acting in bad faith, but perhaps more importantly it misses out on the fact that the confusion between sex and gender is a regular human action. Governments assign and record what they call sex, through a process in which chromosomes are not measured but rather genitals are observed (and in some cases, surgically changed). Even within the medical sciences where I am employed, people frequently misspeak and mislabel sex as gender and vice versa. The fact that you dismiss or ignore this is either an indication of your ignorance or an indication of coming in here with a specific goal and purposefully acting in bad faith.

It’s hard to engage with such short replies. What parts confuse you? What do you need more guidance on? Is there anything else that is unclear about my response and how we value community around here?

I think she wants you to just rack up a bunch of medical debt so she can cancel it, gotta think in loopholes like the big companies

Beehaw may not be the right space for you if you’re unable to consider context. Beehaw is explicitly a community, a safe space, and somewhere where context absolutely matters. We don’t believe it’s possible to have a healthy community where people don’t see each other as complex humans. We talk about this, quite a bit in our docs, for example in the the doc titled Beehaw is a community we talk about how community is a necessary part of this platform and in the doc titled Beehaw, Lemmy, and A Vision of the Fediverse we talk about how we want to be more like a village than we do a train station (and link to a fantastic article about this) and that’s a direct reflection of the importance of social ties and connections to running a healthy community.

I’m certainly not saying that you should leave, but I am typing all of this up because I need you to understand what our values are around here. Some of your content and your interactions have already been reported by multiple people - I mention this because I think it’s a reflection of your attitude towards your purpose here and how you are interacting with the space. I’ve advised others to hold on taking moderator actions because I know adapting to and interfacing with a community and that this process can often be bumpy- we wish to give people good faith when it is deserved, but that is predicated on a willingness to engage in good faith with the community. If that is not how you wish to interact with social media, that is your decision and we will respect it, but this is not a place where we allow that kind of behavior.

I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals

I see your pronouns on Beehaw are it/its, can you clarify whether you intend on engaging with people as individuals and if not how that shapes how you treat them?

Again, we are having this conversation in a Beehaw thread; if you don’t understand the significance of that then I don’t know what else to say.

Would love to hear your thoughts in more depth on this. What is the significance?