that was a very long day, which required upwards of five hours of walking through some pretty nasty windchills and ran about 36 hours...

...but i got my prescription, in the end.

that's one of two medical issues i needed dealt with. now, i need to figure out how to get the odsp renewed for at least another year.

i have my doctor's appointment in london in a few hours and i'm incredibly nervous about it. the first time, i figured it was just a formality. this time, i'm really apprehensive...

of course, i've been thinking about it a lot. at the end of the day, regardless of the outcome, the decision i made is not reversible. denying me hormones isn't going to coerce me to change my name back. it's not going to make me more interested in living a male gender role. it's not going to change how i present myself, how i dress, how i identify or how i behave. it's just going to put me in the awkward position of needing to explain that the health system is denying me treatment when i show up to a job interview in a skirt.

so, i'm hoping it turns out well. but i've kind of put it aside. it's not the chemicals that define who i am, and not taking the chemicals isn't going to change who i am, either.

i do hope i can at least convince him to keep me on the androgen blockers. i hate masturbating, and i'm very happy that i haven't had to in well over a year. i don't want to go back to having to deal with that, it's such a waste of fucking time...

what i really aim for, i think, is total sexlessness. just the abolition of sexuality. i like the fact that the feminizing hormones make me a little prettier when i want to be, but it's really the testosterone blockers that are giving me what i really want.

i spent 25 some odd years realizing i'm not very good at being a dude, and don't have any interest in being one, either. that's not just going to change overnight…

and the reality is that i will eventually get access to hormones, even if it takes a few weeks to figure out how.

1) the landowners in the region want to maintain the flow of labour to ensure that they can continue to minimize labour costs.
2) while the reaction was always political, the reality is that the situation has gotten out of hand - it's working, and that threatens the economic model in the region.
3) the human rights situation is also atrocious, and it may be a tertiary concern.

everything else about this is political.

it's about cheap labour, stefan. people have been coming back and forth over the border for centuries. they work the farms in california for a fraction of the minimum wage, allowing what is essentially a system of slavery to continue. the real question is how much the cost of goods would go up if you forced the landowners in the region to pay a living wage - and what the political consequences of it would be, in terms of the landowners fighting back.

the crackdown was political. nobody ever intended to stop the flow of labour. so, you're right that he's glossing over that. but not in the way you're suggesting...

this was a speech that ought to be deciphered. he's very clearly standing up for a system that is worse than wage slavery, if not quite as violent as chattel slavery. but you've been blinded by your racial preconceptions and missed it for what it was.

this is kind of a comical article.

i wasted a lot of time when i was young chasing ideas that i learned were false...

it could be that there are 10,000 genes involved in intelligence. hell, why not make it 10,000,000?

or it could be that patterns are easy to find when you've got a sample set that big...whether the patterns are caused by inheritance, or not.

super smart kid chases super stupid goal? tabula rasa, baby..

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/genetics-of-iq/