you guys made luigi mangione trend for days and I need to see the same energy for brianna boston. she is a 43 year old mother of three who ended a phone call with blue cross blue shield (after being denied a claim) “delay deny depose, you people are next” and is now being held under a 100,000$ bond and could face FIFTEEN years of prison if charged. she has no weapons, her record is clean, and yet she is being held behind bars. they are afraid of the public and are trying to subdue. do not let them!!!! be outraged that our freedom of speech is being threatened!!!!! deny defend depose! free brianna boston!
Good news, she is out with all charges dropped
This is apparently false (a lie, given the Polk Co Sheriff’s reporting), she has not been released without charges, she has been placed under house arrest pending trial
Do not take your eyes off her case. The announcement that she had been “released without charges” is almost certainly an effort to disrupt the immediate groundswell of public sympathy this exhausted and persecuted single mother is receiving.
oh my god god god god god my dad just tried to complain about me wearing earrings with ghosts on them because they’re “not very festive” so i said Well Actually ghosts are very appropriate for christmastime and he said tell you what if you can show me a single christmas themed thing that has ghosts in it i won’t say another word about your fashion choices this entire holiday. i Promise. so i got him to lean in realllllll close as i opened up the browser app on my phone and slowly began to type “A CHRISTMAS CAROL” while the blood rapidly drained from his face.
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.
NYT has been discouraging reporters from sharing photos of luigi mangione – not due to concerns for his safety but to dissuade sympathy – and refuses to post his alleged manifesto in full. and today, they published an opinion by bret stephens about how brian thompson is the “real working class hero” of this story.
reddit deleted luigi’s account, which was completely innocuous and consisted mostly of him giving out advice in health subreddits. they’re also deleting any post that includes his alleged manifesto and banning users for sharing it.
luigi yelled that this was “an insult to the intelligence of the american people” while he was being dragged by police and news pundits are framing it as a deranged and violent outburst. news media are picking apart details of his life to paint him as a cold-blooded and mentally ill individual. even something as innocent as playing “among us” with friends is being framed as some insidious look into an assassin’s disturbed psyche, ffs.
news media are also capitalizing on luigi’s supposed “bizarre and impossible to understand” politics as an obvious way to paint him as a scary individual when the guy is… a centrist, at most. whose views are similar to those of your average college-educated white guy.
multiple news media also keep harping on about how luigi comes from a rich family. an obvious attempt to break the class solidarity that’s been formed around this case by continuously trying to tell us “oh he’s not like you guys” while ignoring the now pretty well-documented accounts of his multiple health struggles throughout the years.
and all this, and he hasn’t even been found guilty of the crime he’s allegedly committed. luigi is, as of right now, still innocent until proven guilty. and the news are trying to tear him apart because they obviously fear the symbol he’s becoming for low and middle class america.
amhrancas 