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Joined 17 days ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2025

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  • I mean that applies yo a lot large corporations. They’ve mostly stopped innovating and started cutting costs in order to squeeze out some money from the company before it dies. And I’m sure she knows that. It’s likely that she’s there specifically to destroy the remainder of the company. After all, true information is bad for fascism. Gotta keep the people in a constant state of poverty and lack of services, and then blame all of that on some other small, vulnerable group, so their followers will stay distracted and one-issue voters will vote for things that are bad for them as long as were torturing ,murdering, and/or deporting the people they think are the cause of their problems rather than the ones they voted for.



  • 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.


  • 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.