I Start To Think I’m Seriously Aromantic Because Why Are All My Friends Are Either, In Relationships,

mike and el wouldnt have been endgame even if mike wasnt queer but yall arent ready for this conversation

So Finn's new st playlist (for s5) is really interesting.. Mike is gay, "it's a passing phase" "give it a hundred years, it won't go away' "I don't want to be the one whose coming out first" Mike wants Will to come out first and to confess first, the songs are really gay btw and "angst in my pants" is about being gay and.. frustrated

Will is what Mike needs, they need each other

Mike tried to lie to himself and pretend that he could love El but he can't (because he's gay and in love with Will), these lyrics are about a failed relationship with a girl

Mike and El are gonna break up

Mike is down bad for Will

this is why Finn put this song in his Mike playlist (STurn), it's Mike's pov of Byler, Mike wants to feel needed and Will needs him, they love each other in the way they want to be loved

Caleb confirmed STurn is about Mike Wheeler

welcome back troy and gabriella!

*pats Zuko's head* This bad boy can fit so many near-death experiences.

.

Read For the Spirits Chapter VIII here!

Thank you to u/elpinko on r/baldursgate3

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

I give Luo Binghe a lot of shit for being a crybaby but tbh if you think about it, it makes him really desirable. He's a hot guy with high enough emotional intelligence to know what he wants and the desperation and confidence to beg for it. That rarely happens. He doesn't let toxic masculinity tenets of emotional suppression and idealistic images of bland aloof men get in the way of his goals of passionately wooing the love of his life. He's just a poor little woof woof asking for pats and praises.

Made an IWTV shipping chart to better understand what I'm dealing with here.

Ok, we love our short king

but wouldn't it be extremely funny if union man Chilchuck had a quiet quitting daughter?

Edit: artist is kakaocho.tumblr.com

"cool" but how I see it

the o.g.

(this is my masterpiece wow truly.. something)