Okay so I just got off the phone with them. I talked to a trans girl named Aurora & she was super helpful! She gave me a few doctors to talk to & encouraged me to seek therapy instead of just rushing to get my pills. She literally found a trans friendly therapist in my town & I would definitely recommend giving them a call!
Check out their website for monetary help here! People can apply for ID assistance in the form of microgrants, which I previously had no idea about! Also trans folks can train to be a hotline operator, how awesome is that??
It’s time for another Installment of Family Lore from my wierd-ass childhood!
Story contains: poor childhood decisions, profanity, extremely poor animal handling practices, and a semi-graphic description of an injury. Mind the content warnings, your health comes first. As usual, all names have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy. rest of the story under the cut to avoid a five-mile post.
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This is the story of the first time I said the word “Fuck” In front of my mother.
When I was a kid, my parents would drive to Ohio from California every other summer of so to visit my Mom’s family, who never figured out that they can escape. Four days is a long ass time to be a small child in the back of an unairconditioned van with a bunch of rotting bananas but it was worth it for being able to more or less run wild through the Ohio woods.
My mother’s family consisted of my grandparents Polly and Bobby, and her younger brother, Bobby. Bobby has a saint of a wife named Stephanie, and three children. My sister was very fond of cousins Samantha and Amanda.
Due to a combination of Ye Olde Misogyny and post-delivery drugs, for about five generations there, the men had been naming all the children, so literally every AMAB person born into the family was named “Robert” and immediately shortened to “Bobby”. Uncle Bobby very nearly did this to his firstborn, wich would have brought the total number of Bobbies to 8 between the miscellaneous cousins and uncles, when Stephanie put her foot down and named him Jonathan Jackson the second she found out what sex he was.
Cousin JonJack is still my favorite cousin- he has a heart big enough to house every creeping and crawling thing on this planet, and a quiet determination to make things right with the world, even if that means doing something completely batshit insane.
We were camping at a place near West Branch State Park, at what is advertised as a “Luxury Campground next to a Private Lake” but is really an RV collection next to a glorified sump. It has the extremely redeeming feature of being smack in the middle of Northeast Ohio’s dense hardwood forest, and since we had parents that grew up in the area and had passed a reasonable amount of scouting knowledge onto us, we were turned lose after breakfast and told to return by dark or if anyone got hurt. This was splendid, as the woods were full of interesting things like nests of day-old rabbits, their hearts visible as they beat against their delicate rib cages, shimmering black rat snakes longer than we were tall, hives of wild bees, intricate in their geometric structure and remarkably patient as long as you didn’t poke them.
The Sump was even better- it had dozens of baby snapping turtles for the catch-and-releasing, catfish twice the size of any cat, a plethora of bugs and worms and crawdads and families of duck and best of all, Arthur, The Swan.
The
Trump Justice Department has approved a $69 billion merger between CVS, the nation’s largest drugstore chain, and insurance giant Aetna. It’s the largest health insurance
deal in history.
Executives say the combination will make their
companies more efficient, allowing them to gain economies of scale and squeeze
waste out of the system.
Rubbish. This is what
big companies always say when they merge.
The real purpose is
to give Aetna and CVS more bargaining power over their consumers and employees, as well as pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers (which
have also been consolidating).
The result: Higher prices. Americans already
spend far
more on healthcare and medications per person than do citizens in any other
developed country – and our health is among the worst.
America used to
have antitrust laws that permanently stopped corporations from monopolizing
markets, and often broke up the biggest culprits.
But now, especially with Trump as president and lobbyists and CEOs running much of the government, giant corporations like Aetna and CVS are
busily weakening antitrust enforcement and taking over the economy.
They’re also keeping down wages. Workers with less choice of whom to work for have a
harder time getting a raise. So when local labor markets are dominated by one
major drug chain like CVS or one big box retailer like Walmart,
these firms
essentially set wage rates for the area.
These massive
corporations also have a lot of political clout – another reason they’re
consolidating.
We see the same pattern across the economy. Wall Street’s five largest banks now account for 44
percent of America’s banking assets – up from about 10 percent thirty years ago. That means higher interest rates on loans, higher
late fees, and a greater risk of another “too-big-to-fail” bailout.
But politicians
don’t dare bust them up because Wall Street pays part of their campaign
expenses.
Oh, and why does
the United States have the highest broadband prices among advanced nations and
the slowest speeds?
Because
more than 80 percent of Americans have no choice but to rely on their local
cable company for high capacity wired data connections to the Internet –
usually Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon. And these corporations are
among the most politically powerful in America.
(In a rare exception to Trump’s corporate sycophancy, the Justice Department is appealing a district court’s approval of AT&T’s merger with Time Warner.)
Have you wondered
why your airline ticket prices have remained so high even though the cost of jet
fuel has plummeted?
Because U.S.
airlines have consolidated into a handful of giant carriers that divide up routes
and collude on fares. As recently as 2005 the U.S. had nine major airlines. Now
we have just four.
And all are politically well-connected.
Why does food
cost so much? Because the four largest food companies control 82
percent of beef packing, 85
percent of soybean processing,
63 percent of pork packing, and 53
percent of chicken processing.
Monsanto alone
owns the key genetic traits to more than 90
percent of the soybeans planted by farmers in the United States, and 80
percent of the corn. Big Agribusiness wants to keep it this way.
Google’s search
engine is so dominant “google” has become a verb. A few years ago the staff of
the Federal Trade Commission recommended
suing Google for “conduct [that] has resulted – and will result – in real harm
to consumers and to innovation.”
But the commissioners
decided against the lawsuit, perhaps because Google is also the biggest
lobbyist in Washington.
The list goes on,
industry after industry, across the economy. Antitrust has
been ambushed by the giant companies it was designed to contain.
Under Trump and the Republicans, Congress has
further squeezed the budgets of the antitrust division of the Justice Department and
the Bureau of Competition of the Federal Trade Commission. Politically-powerful
interests have squelched major investigations and lawsuits. Right-wing judges
have stopped or shrunk the few cases that get through.
Trump and his
Republican enablers rhapsodize about the “free market,” yet have no qualms about allowing big corporations to rig it to
boost profits at the expense of average people.
We’re now in a
new Gilded Age of wealth and power similar to the first Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century when the nation’s
antitrust laws were enacted. But unlike then, today’s biggest corporations have
enough political clout to neuter antitrust.
Unless government
un-rigs the market through bold antitrust action to restore competition, the hidden upward
distributions from consumers and workers to corporate chieftains and major investors will grow even larger.
If Democrats ever
get back in power, one of the first things they need to do is revive antitrust.
DarkestElemental616 