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A thing I have noticed. 2 decades ago, there was decent pharmaceutical knowledge in the trans community. We knew what GnRH agonists were and how they work. We knew that for trans girls, if you couldn’t get them, then a cocktail of spironolactone and finasteride would do a pretty good job as a replacement. We knew that cyproterone acetate worked even better than spiro, but was hepatotoxic, so be careful.
I feel like that’s all been … lost?
I suspect that until this sentence, most currently transitioning people won’t even know that GnRH agonist is the proper term for what is frequently and misleadingly called a “puberty blocker”.
How did we let all this knowledge get lost? We, as a community, used to know how to outflank attempts to stop us accessing medication.
Now the British government just go, “we’re banning prescription of puberty blockers” and everyone throws their hands up and goes, “oh well, no alternative but unopposed testosterone I guess”.
We were better than this. Why did that go away?
@goatsarah for the record, we don't think it's been lost, but it's definitely not talked about as much
the thing to keep in mind is this is ORAL HISTORY. getting lost is the default thing that happens to oral history. the way to preserve things is to write them down!
@recursive@hachyderm.io@ireneista @goatsarah One of the frustrating things about twitter-era social media is that it's added almost no durability to oral history.
@recursive @goatsarah yes, agreed. very upsetting.
@recursive @goatsarah it's also the case that when stuff is written in the form of a microblog post or even a longer post meant to go on a time-based feed (we're count facebook in that), it's quite hard to find the interesting stuff after the fact, or reconstruct the context in which it was said
@recursive @goatsarah every topic becomes spread out across thousands of small interactions across a period of months
mind, we do stay aware of this and use it consciously (good damn luck to anyone assigned to keep track of what we say for hostile purposes), but it's still a tragic loss
@goatsarah @recursive there's also a medium-is-the-message problem with social media
things said there tend to be very bound to a specific moment in time, not just in the sense of how they're navigated, but in that they rely on context from whenever they were said, which can be challenging to reconstruct
@goatsarah @recursive so the core "message" of social media is - live in the moment, don't look back, don't build larger stories out of your experiences
like yes that's an overly grandiose way to put it, and there are plenty of exceptions