Update About the Doctor’s Appointment (and Frustration With Trans Healthcare)

I posted yesterday about my frustration with the medical system relating to trans healthcare (sort of — it was a series of haiku). I went to my appointment with the doctor today and discovered that it’s not quite as bad as the people on the phone made it out to be. Apparently, I don’t actually need a letter from a therapist stating that I’m mentally competent to transition in order to have a doctor review my hormone levels and monitor my dosage (which is good because that’s just ridiculous).

Haiku Regarding Medical Appointments For Monitoring T

Med’cal gatekeepers
I don’t need regulation
So much frustration

Why require letter?
Been on T for near three months
I am “competent”

Transformative Ways of Addressing Poverty Eradication in Burkina Faso

While I was searching for organizations addressing the water crisis, I found an organization called The BARKA Foundation, which potentially seems to be transformative (and I don’t use that word lightly). It says that it is run entirely by volunteers and that since it began, no one involved has drawn a salary (which sort of makes me wonder how it can be sustainable but also is reassuring in that donations go directly to the cause, not to paying a CEO’s salary, like with some nonprofits). According to the website, “BARKA’s work can most easily be summarized in three words: PEACE, WATER & WISDOM”: 

Dirty Water Kills More People Than Violence

To be completely honest, I stumbled upon the statistics about unsanitary water in my search for a hammock. MiiR has teamed up with KAMMOK to provide a MiiR water bottle to Kickstarter backers (and $1 of the proceeds from each bottle provides a person with clean drinking water for one year). I followed a link to MiiR and discovered that one in eight people is without access to clean drinking water. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, “at least 1.8 million children under five years-old die every year from water related disease, or one every 20 seconds.”

I Want A KAMMOK

When I was little, my family had a hammock. I think it was from my aunt, uncle, and cousins in Belize — and it was amazing. It was so comfortable, and I loved it. Sometimes I’d use it for napping (okay, not really — I didn’t nap when I was younger because I didn’t want to waste the day — but I’d lay down in it and just enjoy); sometimes my friends and I would use it as a swing. It eventually went away (I think it wore out), and I miss it. But now I have just discovered the KAMMOK on Kickstarter, and I want one. 

Back When It Was Not Called “A Very Potter Musical”

I wish that Darren Chris would show up when I said his name (check out 3:20). That would be totally awesome. So, A Very Potter Musical used to be called Harry Potter: The Musical. And then it went viral, and they got worried about being sued. There’s a kind of hilarious bit around 1:00 where they bleep out anything related to Harry Potter (Azkaban, Hogwarts, Dumbledore) as they toss around titles that they can’t use. The video, by the way, is two of the A Very Potter Musical‘s writers explaining why they took all of the videos down about two years ago — and it ends with Darren Criss singing a song about not wanting to be sued. So fantastic.

Taking Up Space

A while ago (when I first started this post), Genderqueer Chicago’s topic was taking up space — “When does it feel necessary to take up space and when does it feel dangerous?” It feels, like so many GqC topics, apropos. How much space I take up, and how that makes me feel, relates to gender for me. Sometimes it feels necessary; sometimes it feels dangerous — and sometimes, it feels both at the same time.