Thank you for your detailed response! I didn’t get into depth in the post because it wasn’t what I was looking for, but I have been actively suicidal for over a week now, and things have only gotten worse and worse. I understand it’s a place where all my privileges are lost, and honestly, that’s what I need. I already have a go bag of non-restricted items ready to go. I’m not able to work, I’m not able to take care of myself, I’m relapsing on nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis (which I was sober from since New Year’s Day 2024), and I don’t feel safe in my own home (transphobic parents who were severely abusive in my childhood), so it isn’t a place where I feel I can even recover. My medications aren’t doing shit, and I’m not able to see my psychiatrist enough to get it sorted out. I think what I do need is a place where I can fall to pieces for a week. Somewhere I’m not allowed the constant addiction of my phone which only ever triggers my spirals, but never alleviates them. A place where I can be kept safe from hurting myself, because I cannot trust myself to take that job on my own shoulders anymore.

I’ll need to work out insurance details (though my insurance currently has covered all my psychiatric care in full; not even a copay), and I trust my therapist to find the best place for me, and I’d trust her opinion on whether or not I should go. I’ve heard lots of experiences similar to yours online. Although seeing a psychiatrist can range from weekly to daily depending on facility. I’ll look more into the details of stay length, and I do know I need to ask my insurance about that because they may only cover the first X days, but I do already expect it to be expensive. But being in a state where I cannot even care for myself, let alone work, has proven to already be extremely expensive in itself.

I’m not suggesting this, only explaining what I’m currently doing. I’m doing what another commenter referred to as “weight cycling”. I started losing weight in December by starting a restrictive 500 calorie deficit (I calculated my daily expenditure at 1850 calories, so I ate 1350 a day). I stuck to a high protein diet to feel more full from my food. I lost from 150 to 125 over the course of 13 weeks (~2lbs/week) at 5’9". I started my HRT in January, about a month after I started my cut. About halfway through my cut, I started intermittent fasting, so 16 hours without eating each day, which helped me significantly. I did not have cheat days during my cut. I got to a point where I was fairly happy with my waist, but I still had nothing in my thighs, butt, or hips. I’d always planned to maintain for a couple weeks and start gaining again, and I have. Most of it is still going to my waist, so I will be cycling again (and probably will repeat for a long time until my body is consistently storing fat in the right places). I did start exercising halfway through; intense cardio (cycling) for 60+ minutes 4 days/week, and bodyweight abs and glutes exercises 1 day/week. After recalculating my daily expenditure, I bumped my calories up to 1800/day.

I can tell that fat distribution is going to be a struggle for awhile, but it’s hard to say how long. Though I will continue weight cycling throughout my gradual journey through HRT. The reason I’m not specifically suggesting this to you is that it is very difficult to maintain the kind of discipline I had to during my cut, especially with exactly 0 cheat days. Intermittent fasting helped me significantly (and there is lots of research to back up why that is), and I’ll most certainly be doing that during my future cuts. I’ve heard that having consistent daily calories eventually plateaus weight loss, and there is some method out there that helps you split it into different calorie limits for each day of the week that supposedly helps mitigate that? Haven’t tried that myself, so I can’t attest to it, though it may be useful depending on how much you’re looking to lose.

Regardless of what you end up doing, I wish you the best in your journey! I know firsthand how much of a struggle it is, but we’ll get there eventually!

EDIT: As a side note, I lost 5" around my waist from my cut! (Though some of that has come back now that I’m gaining again)

Moot point, as DoorDash driver accounts require a verified driver’s license, comprehensive background check, and a valid bank account set up to deposit payment (though after setting up a direct deposit bank account, you can add alternative cash out options). Haven’t used DoorDash in a while, but UberEats started requiring facial recognition on top of all that, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that were in the DoorDash driver app, too. Hiding IP would do quite literally nothing in this scenario, as you can’t create an account anonymously. Counterfeit IDs would not work as they are verified against state records. Oh, and yet another step, you have to provide proof of auto insurance, which is yet another connection to your identity.

Surveys like these do often have implicit bias, because only a small portion of people would be willing to take them when offered. For instance, phone surveys dramatically overrepresent Republicans because almost all the people who choose to complete them are quite old. Additionally, people with more extreme views are more likely to complete political surveys than people with moderate views, especially those who aren’t very interested in politics. These are all biases that are difficult to account for.

Honestly, yes. I definitely agree that this is the way to go.

Regardless of the tone, the opinions he is discussing and the ways that he represents his views are inherently transphobic. He and his views are a threat to us at Blahaj Lemmy, being a space for queer folks (many of us are trans). He is also the lead developer of Lemmy, and the head admin of lemmy.ml. A statement does not have to be framed as a direct insult to be hateful and harmful, and the fact that these views of his have been persistent, along with his influence, means that he as a user is dangerous. Hence why he has been banned from this instance. The question being discussed is really if his views are reflected into the community and moderation at lemmy.ml, because that is the point at which the instance is harmful enough to defederate from. If lemmy.ml is a place where transphobia is allowed to propagate, then that is immensely harmful for us. We need to protect ourselves against transphobia.

What about !linux@programming.dev or !linux@sh.itjust.works? Those seem decently active.

The former of the two (which is also the larger of them) has 13% of the userbase, although you’re correct that it does seem fairly active. I suppose that would be a decent place to migrate to if defederation were to happen, although I tend to mostly help out new users, who tend to flock to the larger community. Again, I’d figure it out if it happened, it wouldn’t actually be a problem. The latter of the two I would not consider very active by comparison.

That is a minor drawback. It would be nice if they implemented ownership transfer abilities for posts and comments, though it’ll probably be a while before we see that.

Yes, this is one of the grievances I had when migrating here from lemmy.world, as I have some very detailed and helpful comments I wish were easier for me to find. I’d love to see that as a feature in the future, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

I can see how and why this would be a problem and why this should be carefully considered, that can be a poor outcome. I guess the same can be said for any defederation including the feddit.uk one. It all depends I guess on how they handle these issues going forward and also how they handle this subject overall. If a lot of the people there are “I support trans people but I don’t think kids…” (you get the idea) it doesn’t really do much good to federate with them. At least in my opinion.

Yes, I agree here. What I suppose I’m basically trying to say is that defederation is an extreme option, so it has to be considered carefully. If the community on ml starts to reflect transphobic views, then absolutely that would warrant defederation. But if it’s a single admin, and it’s otherwise being moderated to remove transphobic content, then I do think it’s really difficult to determine without a lot more consideration. In most other situations, banning a single transphobic user may be sufficient. It all depends on how his views are reflected in the moderation and the content of the community as a whole. If it’s resulting in transphobia, then it becomes a much more clear case. I don’t have enough information to know if that is in fact the case.

Context for why they’re blocked here

lemmy.blahah.zone does not allow downvotes. And the concern is moreso that some transphobic content wouldn’t be moderated (based on nutomic’s views), hence the burden of moderation would come down to our instance’s admins, and that simply shouldn’t be their responsibility. Defederation is for situations in which the instance in question is harmful to the community in the instance defederating. And if transphobia is not properly moderated, and transphobic views are allowed to spread, then that is actively harmful to lemmy.blahaj.zone.

I mean, the two big communities for me are !linux@lemmy.ml and !mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml, though the latter of which isn’t really active anyway so I wouldn’t be sad to see it go. There isn’t a suitable replacement for the Linux community elsewhere, and that’s honestly what I’m most active on, but if we defeferate, I’d probably just cut my losses. Yes, it is easy for people to create new accounts, but the hassle is that you cannot transfer your comments or posts to a new account, so you lose that history (as I’ve had to deal with). But overall, I think most people on ml would just stop seeing posts from our instance and never think about it. It would be a small minority that would even notice, but the majority would be getting less content from diverse voices in the queer community overall. Again, it would just take a lot of consideration.

Personally, I have a very poor opinion of nutomic. And yes, he has always been/felt transphobic. He has a history of making massive oversteps to attack people that have differing opinions to his, and overall I believe him to be a threat to the trans community. As for whether we should defederate? I really have no clue. It certainly isn’t a bastion for blatant transphobia, and hosts many of the top Lemmy communities, and a very large amount of the active Lemmy userbase. I think the effects of defederation would be immense, and take a lot of time and consideration to understand if it’s overall beneficial to the community. That being said, I’m sure I could be swayed to support either side. I’d be very curious what Ada has to say about this, as I believe I’ll support her opinion on the matter.

EDIT: I think it’s valuable to point out that any individual user can block an instance in their settings. So regardless of any defederation decision (which Ada seems opposed to), anyone can choose to block the instance themselves.

I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I’m unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it’s worth looking into.

As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It’s Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.

Adding to the pile of support for queer. It’s a reclaimed term. We’ve grown to use it so much in a positive light that we’ve stripped it of the power it previously had for hate. Everyone I know who is queer in any way is quite happy and supportive of the term, and we use it pretty often in conversation. Despite its historical use as a slur, if someone were to attention to use it in a hateful way, it would offend me no more than if they used “gay” in the same way. And I’m sure we can both agree that isn’t a slur, nor is it controversial. Of course, that’s simply my opinion on the matter. What I’ve seen anecdotally, however, is that basically no one in the community really treats it as controversial.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this if you have been prescribed oral estradiol (that is, taking the pill you are prescribed daily in a single sublingual dose). The significantly higher bioavailability of sublingual administration can cause incredibly high spikes, and the significantly shorter half life over oral necessitates taking the estradiol 3-4x daily to maintain (only semi) stable levels. This requires a dosage and schedule adjustment; it is not sufficient to simply take the same dose of oral prescription and start taking it sublingually once daily.

Additionally, the stomach does not destroy estradiol. The reason behind the low bioavailability of oral estradiol (and by extension, also oral progesterone) is that it passes through the liver before entering the bloodstream. The liver processes the estradiol before it enters the bloodstream, resulting in significantly less E2 available in the blood. This also presents an additional long term problem that has been well documented at this point: liver flooding. The high concentration of estradiol entering the liver in a short amount of time puts an incredible amount of strain on the liver, and can cause long term liver damage. This is alleviated through sublingual administration.

The sublingual route has its own pros and cons (mainly the incredibly spiky and unstable hormone levels and requirement of frequent 3-4x doses per day), and it is not advisable to recommend someone take the medication their doctor prescribed them in a manner that is not consistent with their prescription. OP’s prescription was written with the intention of it being taken orally, thus the dosage has been planned for that, not for sublingual.

I took mine sublingually for awhile, but I am now switching to injections, as I am not happy with the dosage frequency. I’ve missed doses because I also struggle with ADHD, and it’s resulted in me feeling really off when my levels get too low. I would never do oral, as it isn’t an effective way of taking estradiol. It’s incredibly inefficient and presents its own health issues. Injections are the most convenient and most stable option (although I haven’t looked too deeply into the implants, those may potentially be more stable, but estradiol cypionate allows me weekly injections that peak at ~175ng/dL and trough at ~135ng/dL, which is very stable inside my target range), as well as being quite cheap and well studied.

TL;DR: Either talk to your doctor about adjusting dosage and scheduling for sublingual administration, or do the due diligence of reading about it. I recommend the meta-analyses from Transfeminine Science. The dosage and scheduling need to be adjusted if switching to sublingual.

It’s worth looking into Lutris for non-Steam games as well. Comes preinstalled with Bazzite (heavily gaming-optimized Linux distro), though I don’t have any non-Steam games to try it on since Steam works fine for all the games I play.

Well, you could use the wrong finger. After 3 attempts, my GrapheneOS install brings up the password field, but you can go back to the lock screen and try 2 more times until it locks out of fingerprint unlock (so 5 times total). You could always hold the power button down while it’s in your pocket or bag, pretending you are searching for the phone or something, and then lock it down as soon as you lift the screen up.

Finished How We Fight For Our Lives yesterday. It’s a very powerful memoir from a black gay man that grew up in the Southern US. Very well written, very bug topics, lots of insight into his world, and the struggles he dealt with. Obviously it will deal with racism and homophobia; the book goes through his experiences understanding who he was. It was a good book! I’d recommend a read if that experience is interesting to you.

I’m gonna depart from the last 2 books for now (Stone Butch Blues got canceled bc of stock, so I’ve gotta buy it from somewhere else), as I bought a bunch of lesbian romances (I couldn’t help myself). No clue if you would be interested in any of that, but let me know if you might be and I can review those, too!

Congrats! You’ve discovered something new about yourself and had fun in the process! 🎉

Yes, it is possible, as per your linked resource, however it would be up to the server maintainers if they feel it is reasonable to do. Note that federation is not supported over Tor, so federation would go over the clearnet via the original instance. This is not an issue, because the only thing that would be useful for Tor is hiding the client connection IP address, which would be handled under this configuration.

I read Suicide Notes. It’s an extremely heavy book with about every trigger possible buried in it, just as a warning. I’m not going to say what exactly it covers from the LGBTQ+ spectrum, but it really let me see into a different world. Someone else’s world. It’s a fiction, but it’s not a fantasy; it feels like living someone’s real life. It’s incredibly moving, but it is very depressing (the name is a good indicator), so keep that in mind before deciding to read it. I learned a lot from it, including things about myself. I’d highly recommend it if you’re willing to get really sad about it; I feel it was very cathartic for me, and it’s a great portal into the queer experience.

Also, there is a sequel called Every Star That Falls. I’ll be reading that at some point, but likely not especially soon.