• Elise
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    92 months ago

    Good question. I’m an adult from the NL and I’d say more than half of the people I know on hrt use diy.

    The first step would be overcoming your fear to visit a gp. These are tied to your postalcode and often there isn’t much choice.

    Now you have to overcome it again when seeing a psychiatrist, and pay for that because it isn’t fully covered. So you might be paying a lot just to simply be discriminated.

    I finally have a supportive gp now, which was a pain to find. The only medical professional I’ve seen that knew what she was talking about was the woman who did my laser treatment.

    I’m still waiting.

    • @xor
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      62 months ago

      a psychiatrist isn’t fully covered?
      well, thanks for answering… it all sounds a lot worse than i had imagined…

      • Elise
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        2 months ago

        Yup. Cuz I’m poor I have only the basic level of healthcare. I should add that this is essentially free and so it’s not an entirely bad system. But it’s effectively useless in many cases if you are poor.

        How can someone be poor here? Well this can happen when you don’t fit squarely in the safety net. For example a friend of mine lived with her bf, but because it was social housing they made it extra small to motivate people to get out. But that also somehow made it legally too small for two people to live there. But because she is trans and poor she was essentially forced into that situation. So people often can’t be registered in the right places, which can impact your social stipend.

        That’s why you are forced to pick the cheapest healthcare option, and that means your own risk will be about 1k euros a year. You have to pay that much for healthcare that year before you are covered 100%. It’s to demotivate overusing the system. Makes sense if you can afford it.

        But what if you are genuinely poor? It’s common. Just imagine the levels of discomfort we go through. Imagine being a woman with facial hair and it makes you uncomfortable. How are you supposed to do anything like work? And all the stress causes mental health issues. It’s common to see in my community. People get panic attacks and everything.

        And when against all odds you do go, and you pay all that somehow, you’ll likely be discriminated. There’s simply not enough training for psychologists here. From where I stand it’s absolutely reasonable that people use diy hrt, financially and emotionally. And you have to set that in perspective to the past, where that was the status quo. 😿

        • @xor
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          62 months ago

          kinda reminds me of when they outlawed cannabis in the us, they actually kept it legal but only with a special marijuana tax stamp… and they didn’t give anyone the stamp.

          so here they can say “here’s how to get hrt”, then not let you get it, and criminalize diy… essentially criminalizing an entire class of people but with a couple extra steps of fake tolerance…

          • Elise
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            42 months ago

            Yap same with the hiv story in the US until they threw ashes on the lawn of the white house iirc.

            • @xor
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              32 months ago

              there’s a good movie about that called “the dallas buyers club”

        • @xor
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          42 months ago

          although horrible and dystopian, the idea of underground hrt is at least in line with a cyberpunk dystopia…

          brb, gonna go buy some estrogen on the dark web with cryptocurrency because the fascist corporate dictatorship doesn’t allow it… kinda vibe…

          i’d also like to note the intersection between vaporwave and trans pride colour palettes…

          • Elise
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            2 months ago

            Cyberpunk is a dramatization of the world we live in.