dandelion

yeah, for context I'm a trans woman, this is my community - I personally know trans women who have conceived of themselves as just femboys, and I've struggled myself for decades with that kind of denial.

Regardless, I consider it a matter of harm-reduction to protect their right to HRT which does require clinicians acknowledging those people are trans. Denying they are trans and are really cis men does undermine the legitimacy of their access to HRT, since it requires a diagnosis and prescription. The way we conceptualize them can have consequences in healthcare contexts.

Furthermore I think we should be prioritizing supporting people embracing what they are and working past that denial (which clearly comes the socially oppressive conditions we find ourselves in, especially the hermeneutical injustice trans people experience and the pressure from transphobic stigma to remain closeted).

Just like the way the gay community tries to help people who are closeted without just forcing them to come-out (just like "men who have sex with men" I pointed out above), we should be clear-headed about the reality that this is closeted behavior while being polite, patient, and supportive as they work through that denial.

Meanwhile, insisting femboys on HRT can only be cis men because that's how they identify comes across to me as particularly ignorant of the reality of how we as trans people struggle to conceptualize themselves and what that process commonly looks like. There is a lot of variety in trans experience, but there are also patterns and trends that emerge, and this greentext captures a very common story of how trans women conceptualize themselves.

I appreciate that you are so sensitive that you are defending the way someone is identifying, that is definitely the right way to go. My point is not to force a perspective on someone, but to clue you into the larger trans context of the greentext which your comments made me think you were oblivious to. Maybe I should have approached that educational moment in a better way, so I apologize for being so glib.

Hope you take care as well - thank you for your response and for being so considerate, it would be nice if more people were like you.

even so, I would prefer my typo go to DuckDuckGo and then I choose among those options than be auto-corrected and directed to an irrelevant website Firefox chose (which is what happens to me). That said, I'm not usually going to a top 250 website, so - your use case might be different.

"Experimental archaeology" might be a good search term for finding resources on how to make and use an atlatl.

I think you just accidentally articulated the theory of virtue ethics. How do you know what you should do? Do what you think a good person would do. 😆

I use Firefox Focus as well, but I had to disable the "top 250 websites" recommendations when typing in the URL bar, it's like adverts to my mind.

I usually felt this way about the Christian families with lots of children who would come into the restaurant after church and treat everyone rudely and make a huge mess. They did it every Sunday, and it never changed over a period of years. I know they were probably just exhausted and miserable themselves, but lots of exhausted and miserable people out there aren't so entitled, inconsiderate, and rude to workers. Still, it didn't make me feel like not working, I just didn't want to serve those people.

Hey, I get this might be well intended but the context is a likely fictional greentext that whether by coincidence or design describes and captures a common trans experience. If that femboy was someone I was talking to or interacting with, of course I would respect his pronouns and so on, but it is important in lots of contexts to be able to read between the lines.

Taking a literal or dogmatic approach to the idea that people are only what they claim to be causes for example transmedicalists to argue that transmaxxers seeking HRT should be denied hormones - whereas I think it's much easier to see that transmaxxers are more likely to be trans people having a hard time accepting they are trans, that is denial here is clearly more likely than fraudulence.

This is the same argument transmedicalists will make about femboys on HRT, and again I think we should read between the lines and reject the gatekeeping and moral panic about cis men stealing trans healthcare and recognize that if a self-identified "man" is on estrogen for their feminizing effects, they are probably a trans woman in denial and of course should be given access to hormones. Cis men tend to become depressed and anxious when on estrogen (see: David Reimer, Alan Turing, cis men who have used estrogen to treat prostate cancer, etc.)

(The same thing happens in the gay community around "men who have sex with men" refusing to acknowledge they are gay. I don't have to disrespect those people by calling them gay to their face, but obviously we need to think of them as "gay" in some contexts.)

Of course reading between the lines shouldn't result in being rude to someone by denying their prima facie identity to their face, but that's not what I'm doing here by commenting on a greentext and pointing out the larger context for you.

She's obviously trans, a guy doesn't enjoy taking estrogen.

a lot of trans folks live in extreme denial, it's very hard to accept

awww 🥹

Oh boy.

First of all, form good "sleep hygiene" habits, read: https://health.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/data/Sleep%20Hygiene.pdf

A lot of it is obvious, like go to bed at the same time every night (set a timer to get yourself reliable at first!), and wake up at the same time every morning. Give yourself more "sleep opportunity" than the hours you want to sleep so you actually get enough sleep (e.g. if you want to sleep 8 hours, maybe give yourself 10 hours in bed with the lights out).

Don't use screens several hours before bed, don't do anything but sleep in your bed, and wind-down before bed with something like reading a book (again, in a chair in another room, not in your bed).

Now for more advanced tips I've learned from dealing with insomnia:

A problem I have sometimes had is that tasks like meditation can actually cause me to become more alert, and it turns out meditation actually does cause insomnia.

When struggling with meditation related insomnia, I got lots of practice navigating falling asleep.

What I found most helpful was rather than focusing on an object in a meditation like way, to instead allow mind-wandering and rumination and to try to cultivate a lack of metacognitive awareness about that rumination. Basically, the opposite of meditation. Meditators will hopefully know what I mean by this - but basically, don't pay too much attention to what you are thinking, just get absorbed into the mind-wandering.

Sometimes if the mind-wandering leads to thoughts or feelings that are "strong" or engaging enough it can prevent me from sleeping, like when I'm anxious or my mind is preparing or rehearsing for an important event or the next day. In that case, a little bit of meta-awareness can be helpful to alert you to the need to redirect your rumination to something actively boring or benign.

In the most extreme instances, I visualize myself working in a factory performing a repetitive motion like pulling a level to operate a press. I essentially constantly try to pay attention to that mundane task and ensure that it remains mundane / uninteresting - just keep pulling the lever and keep paying attention to that task. This is akin to the counting sheep method, but I always found counting sheep too interesting or engaging of a task.

After hours of boredom I usually lose consciousness.

Sometimes I threaten myself with getting out of bed, and often in response I feel a resistance and that makes me realize how tired I actually am, and I threaten myself with doing something boring like sitting in a chair and staring at a wall. Sometimes that is enough to kick me out of my energized thinking into a milder / more boring and repetitive mind-wandering that leads to dreams and unconsciousness.

Sometimes I actually do have to get out of bed and do something, often I will stretch and if I'm not feeling overwhelmed with sleep that way, I find it helpful to exhaust myself with forearm planks - just hold until you can't anymore (you can also use a timer for 30 seconds or 60 seconds, whatever pushes you past comfort but all the way to failure), maybe try this a couple times. You will sweat and it's miserable the whole time, and you will be tired and want to crawl back into bed. That has helped me fall asleep really well before, and sometimes I think it's because the blood also gets into my muscles and somehow this helps me relax.

Anyway, hope this helps!

You can also order online (that's what I do, my local Lush store closed and had limited inventory even when it was open).