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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

To those with Pride parades, did your cities seem to have more secondary/tertiary “grievances” like Gaza and ICE movements? Curious. Chicago just had theirs and it seemed like they saved most of it for the end of the parade.

Posted
46 minutes ago, StassneyHorn said:

To those with Pride parades, did your cities seem to have more secondary/tertiary “grievances” like Gaza and ICE movements? Curious. Chicago just had theirs and it seemed like they saved most of it for the end of the parade.

New York's is today, but I didn't go. Had work calls closing a deal. 😢

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted
11 minutes ago, troph said:

My wife and I both teared up.  It was a really nice moment in what is otherwise really dark times.

Miss Thang, the Aztecan goddess, leading the parade was fun. Good for you, Troph. So glad y'all had a nice escape.

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted
On 6/11/2025 at 9:20 AM, Brisketexan said:

Goddamn I'm old.  Jon Tigar's dad was one of my law school profs.

To be fair, Mike was old enough to be our Dad then anyway.

That was back in my conservative era, but always had a great deal of respect for Tigar.

Posted
12 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

This is today’s entry in the “cruelty is the point.”  No matter your thoughts on the policy, all these people gave over a decade of their lives to the country under the rules that were in place. Shit like this reveals that none of this is about principals or beliefs. It’s about harming people their constituents don’t like for cheap points. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

This is today’s entry in the “cruelty is the point.”  No matter your thoughts on the policy, all these people gave over a decade of their lives to the country under the rules that were in place. Shit like this reveals that none of this is about principals or beliefs. It’s about harming people their constituents don’t like for cheap points. 

And most of their constituents won't even hear about this.

  • Like 1
  • 2 months later...
Posted

Wait wait wait you mean you don't have to throw trans people under the bus or pretend they don't exist while campaigning? You can actually advocate for them? 

What The Hell Wtf GIF by The Lonely Island

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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

‘I’m on Fire’: Testosterone Is Giving Women Back Their Sex Drive — and Then Some

Quote

Spend enough time speaking to women who are taking testosterone — specifically, in very high doses — and you start to notice that they sound messianic. They’re often talking fast and intensely; they’re amped up; they’re describing what they clearly consider a miracle drug; and they have no intention of lowering their dose, despite the unknown risks or some problems with facial hair. After all, how can they worry about facial hair when they feel so alive? It’s nothing they can’t take care of with a quick waxing, which they now have the energy to do at the end of the day — right after they prepare a high-protein dinner for their family and before they put the finishing touches on their spreadsheets, close their laptops and light a few mood candles for the sex that they know will be great, maybe even better than the sex they had last night, even though they’re a day older.

“It’s changed my marriage,” Jessica Medina, a 41-year-old marketing consultant in Orange County, Calif., told me. With four kids in the house, and sex happening six times a week (up from “How about never?” pre-testosterone), she had to put a lock on the bedroom door. She and her husband had attended a “marriage growth” group at church for years, but it took testosterone for their relationship to be, as she put it, “100 times closer.” She was a little less emotional, a little less sentimental than she used to be, but she didn’t have time for that kind of thing, anyway. “It’s more like: Get stuff done, handle business, work out,” she said. “In order to do all that and still have time for our kids and their sports, there’s no time to whine about how hard it is.”

Catherine Lin, a single mother who ran a bicoastal fashion media company, went on testosterone in her early 40s to raise her energy. She got the boost she wanted, started lifting heavier weights, decided to pursue a degree in holistic nutrition and enjoyed an unexpected side effect: She started having orgasms for the first time in years.

Both Medina and Lin are taking an amount of testosterone that’s brought their levels higher than what women produce naturally at any point in their lifetimes. The way they and many women on these high doses talk about their relationships sometimes has the ring of romantasy: fantastic tales of sexual rejuvenation and newfound intimacy. One woman in her 50s told me that after years of revulsion at so much as the thought of her husband’s breath, she now looked forward to having sex with him almost every night; even in the middle of sex, she said, she was thinking about the next time they could have sex. Another woman told me she’d had more orgasms in the past two years on testosterone than in the entirety of her previous life; a third said that after years of “wanting to rip someone’s face off” if her husband so much as touched her, she now actively pursued sex with him — if anything, she now worried, she wanted it more often than he did.

Just as estrogen is a crucial hormone for men, testosterone is an important hormone for women, instrumental in the development of bones, muscles and sexual function. Testosterone peaks in women in their late teens and early 20s, then declines over time, so that by age 60, their levels have fallen by about half. (Men start out in young adulthood with 10 times the testosterone of women, and their levels diminish much less steeply over time.) With less available testosterone, women may have fewer erotic thoughts and less motivation to pursue sexual pleasure; some of the mechanisms that make sex feel good can falter, such as the production of nitric oxide, a molecule that relaxes the muscles around the clitoris and allows for greater blood flow.

For men experiencing the effects of low testosterone — low libido, low energy, loss of muscle mass — the F.D.A. has approved more than 30 products since the 1950s; and yet, to this day, there is no F.D.A.-approved testosterone cream, patch, pill or shot for women, even though their testosterone levels fall far more precipitously than men’s as they age. That drop doesn’t necessarily predict the loss of libido, and there are many other factors that might be at play: fatigue, body image, a troubled relationship. But once other concerns have been ruled out, leading medical societies endorse the use of testosterone — in appropriate doses — for postmenopausal women complaining of low libido. High-quality research has shown that testosterone can meaningfully revive sex drive when prescribed in doses that restore women to roughly the levels they had in their late 30s — what’s often considered standard dosing.

Even so, without F.D.A. approval, many doctors won’t prescribe or don’t know how to prescribe testosterone to women, and if they do, insurance won’t cover it. That hasn’t stopped women from pursuing the hormone. Often turned away by mainstream OB-GYNs, women in their 40s and beyond have sought out nontraditional venues that are happy to sell it to them: med-spas, longevity practices, wellness centers and nutritionists, among others.

Increasingly women are being given doses much higher than what’s standard, sometimes spending upward of $1,000 a year and risking unpleasant — and possibly irreversible — side effects to pursue a dramatic high. “I see more and more of these places popping up because of all the hype around testosterone,” says Stephanie Faubion, the director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health and the medical director of the Menopause Society. “And a lot of them are giving women testosterone in doses that get them to levels that are normal in a man — but definitely not in a woman.”

Rhapsodic stories of sexual reawakening have spread on social media, where testosterone influencers share their experiences. “I went years with no sex drive,” Marcella Hill, an influencer in Utah, confides in an Instagram post from 2022. After going on a high dose of testosterone that year, she said, she rediscovered her attraction to her husband: “My body would heat up just from him walking in the room.”

This season on “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” three of the show’s stars described their testosterone regimens: Gretchen Rossi was shown baring her bottom as her doctor implanted beneath her skin a tiny but powerful pellet packed with crystalline testosterone that would be released over the course of about four months. She commented afterward that she had recently reduced her levels. “I had to take mine down because I was humping everything,” she said. Rossi’s co-star Jennifer Pedranti commiserated: “You’ll just hump and hump and hump away.”

In group chats, at kids’ soccer games, over drinks, word of testosterone’s power has spread. Carrie Simpson, a 55-year-old in Gardnerville, Nev., went on high-dose testosterone on the advice of a friend who promised it would help with her general fatigue. Right after she got her first dose, her family noticed that she was considerably more opinionated than usual and would argue her points with a fierce intensity. “My daughter told me at one point I was acting like a teenage boy,” Simpson told me. The observation made sense, since Simpson’s testosterone levels were approaching the range of a typical teenage boy’s. “It’s night and day,” she said. “You’re like: Holy cow. A lightbulb goes on. I’m on fire.”

Testosterone is the hormone most strongly linked to aggression and sex drive in males across the animal kingdom, writes Carole Hooven in her book “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us.” Male song sparrows given extra testosterone abandon their usual nest-tending ways, spending more time singing to mark their territory and attracting new mates, sometimes leaving their newborn chicks to die of starvation. Female rats that are juiced with additional testosterone are more likely to bite and attack other rats while competing for food. Testosterone is thought to spike and drop in response to certain cues. Men’s levels rise in competitive situations but fall when they become fathers; the more time they spend with their newborns, the more their testosterone declines.

How testosterone functions in women is not as well understood, but over the past several decades, a number of large trials of products — patches, creams and gels — have shown that standard-dose testosterone improved women’s desire, arousal, sexual responsiveness and even self-image. Yet when the F.D.A. had the opportunity to approve one of those products in 2004 — a patch created by Procter & Gamble that raised the number of satisfying sexual encounters women reported by an average of one per month — it declined to do so, concluding that the uptick was not enough in the absence of longer-term safety studies (something the agency had not required for men).

The finding of one a month was an average, points out Susan Davis, an endocrinologist at Monash University in Australia and a leading researcher on testosterone in women. Many women would have more. But even one additional satisfying sexual encounter for a woman who is currently having none could be world-changing, pleasure-delivering, confidence-building, couple-strengthening. Just removing the dread that so many women experience at the thought of sex with their partners might have justified approval. Several countries have come to that conclusion: Standard-dose testosterone cream for women has now been approved in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, where demand soared nearly 400 percent between 2019 and 2022.

Right now, women in the United States who want to take standard-dose testosterone — typically five milligrams per day  — first have to find a practitioner who will prescribe the hormone; then they can buy, out of pocket, tubes of testosterone cream that are intended for men. Men are instructed to use the entire tube, while women have to estimate how much about one-tenth of the tube would be. Alternatively, they can pay more for a prescription that their doctor gives to a compounding pharmacy, which provides customized medications not regulated by the F.D.A., to get dispensers that can dole out the proper amount.

Hunting down a practitioner willing to prescribe testosterone can be a frustrating experience. Kimberly Solo, a 44-year-old therapist in Massachusetts, approached her OB-GYN about taking testosterone because her libido “was just gone,” she told me. Her doctor refused, on the grounds that it wasn’t F.D.A.-approved and that she was concerned about potential side effects. Eventually, Solo found her way to Midi, a virtual care platform for middle-aged women that currently prescribes standard-dose testosterone in 12 states. “It was amazing,” Solo said. “My sex drive returned. I wouldn’t say that it has returned to its previous level, but it’s not zero, like it had been.”

Lindsey Lister, a dental hygienist from New York, had a similar experience — two doctors ruled out testosterone before Lister found one who would prescribe it through a compounding pharmacy. She, too, described the revival of her libido as a return to how she felt earlier in her life: It wasn’t an overwhelming experience, but she was more receptive to the idea of sex with her husband than she had felt in years.

Medical societies officially recommend standard-dose testosterone only for postmenopausal women because most of the research has been conducted on that population, but many practitioners will offer it to premenopausal women whom they consider to be appropriate candidates. Some of those doctors start their patients below the standard dose to be extra cautious; others are comfortable floating marginally higher than the guidelines recommend. But many women go on testosterone without ever having a real conversation with a doctor about the pros and cons; they come to it through dramatic stories they’ve heard from their friends or alluring ads they’ve seen online — and their first experience of their hormone is high-dose, high-impact and highly unpredictable.

Thuy, a 47-year-old entrepreneur and mother of four in California, was in a state of exhaustion when she saw an ad on Instagram in 2022; it promised her more oomph, more desire, the promise of feeling like her best self. That September, she drove to see the doctor featured in the post, whose clinic was in Beverly Hills. The doctor anesthetized her left buttock, made a small incision and implanted a pellet beneath her skin, which raised her testosterone level to more than three times that of an average 30-year-old woman. (Thuy asked to use her middle name to protect her family’s privacy.)

Thuy had spent most of her adult life building three financial-services businesses with her husband. Originally too broke to pay for child care, and then too accustomed to going it alone, she regularly hustled her way through 18-hour days to make her children’s schedules work alongside her own. She had to force herself out of bed each morning, and was so exhausted at the end of the day that her body ached.

Within a few weeks of the pellet’s testosterone emanating into her bloodstream, Thuy noticed a difference in how she felt. It was not subtle — it was as if she had woken up with a second heart. She felt super-oxygenated and light; desirous, energetic. She bounded out of bed in the morning, which had been her main goal, but she also realized that she’d started looking forward to sex with her husband at night. She used to buy lingerie just to speed him along; now she was buying it for herself — and found herself intrigued by racier pieces. After 20 years of rote sex (“It felt like a job”), she started regularly having orgasms during intercourse.

Then around Christmas, she noticed something else: Shocking amounts of her hair were ending up on the shower floor. She realized she could see white patches on her scalp, and overall her hair had thinned. By around the three-month mark, she’d lost almost half of it.

Hair loss is one of the known side effects of high doses of testosterone. It’s the inverse of the dilemma some men face when they try to avoid balding by using a popular drug that preserves their hair by altering their testosterone levels; they may find themselves with the youthful, full head of hair they longed for, while struggling for the first time with low libido and erectile dysfunction.

Thuy discovered that there was no immediate way to stop her hair loss. Once a pellet has been implanted under the skin, it dissolves, and the procedure can’t be reversed, points out Kathleen Jordan, the chief medical officer of Midi, the telehealth provider. “So if you’re experiencing side effects, there’s nothing you can do about it until the pellet has run its course, which can typically take three to four months.” Thuy found a different doctor who put her on a lower dose once the pellet had run its course.

The side effects of high-dose testosterone can make women feel less attractive just as they are feeling more desirous: While losing the hair on their heads, women can find hair growing, darker and in greater quantities, in places they don’t desire it, such as above their lip or on their upper thighs. They can also develop acne. (A small percentage of women on standard doses also report these symptoms, but they are milder and usually reversible.)

Over a long period of time, high doses of testosterone can thicken the vocal cords, which can make women’s voices sound hoarse or deeper, and can enlarge the clitoris — a change that can be nearly imperceptible or dramatic enough to cause discomfort. One medical practice in Austin, Texas, that offers high-dose testosterone lists an enlarged clitoris as a common side effect on its website, but reassures patients that the practice also offers a surgical procedure to remedy it.

Lisa Steinbach, whose OB-GYN prescribed high-dose testosterone for fatigue and overall wellness after she had a hysterectomy, noticed no improvement in her energy or in her sex life, though that had never been an issue for her. But about a year into the treatment, she started sounding like someone who had a persistent cold. Her voice got worse over time. “It’s very raspy,” she said, “and people are always asking me, ‘Oh, are you sick?’ Or they think it’s a man’s voice.” Steinbach decided to stop taking testosterone, but the raspiness did not go away; it remains a constant source of distress for her.

Some women on high-dose testosterone experience a level of arousal so intense that they find it uncomfortable. Susan Davis, who has studied testosterone for decades, recalls one woman who came to her wanting to lower her dose; she had recently injured her back having sex with her husband in their car. (She’d instructed him to pull over to the side of the road, unable to wait for relief.)

Tammy Nelson, a sex therapist in California, also found her level of arousal to be distractingly high; the testosterone made her so irritable, so easily annoyed, so frankly disgusted by the failures of mankind, and especially her own man, her husband, that she couldn’t bring herself to have sex with him. “I wanted to have sex with my husband,” she said. “I was just too pissed off at him to do it.” It took Angie Knierim, a women’s health advocate who was taking a high dose of testosterone, several months of feeling uncontrolled rage toward her husband to realize that although her marriage was not perfect, it was the testosterone that was driving her fury.

Women should be clearly informed of these possible side effects, says Rachel Rubin, a urologist who specializes in sexual medicine. But many of them tell Rubin they don’t care — in fact, some women say they like the extra sensitivity that comes with a larger clitoris. (She points out that hormonal birth control suppresses testosterone, so many women’s clitorises are smaller than they would ordinarily be.) “Testosterone is like a religion,” she says. “People have strong feelings when it comes to testosterone.”

Little research exists on the long-term health risks for women taking such high doses for libido. “The fact is we just don’t know,” says Kathleen Jordan of Midi. Trans men take testosterone in much higher doses than even the highest-dose pellets, and are not thought to be putting their health at risk, Rubin says. But she criticized the companies that produce pellets for failing to conduct long-term, gold-standard studies on their own products. In February, the F.D.A. began requiring all approved testosterone products for men to come with a warning label about the risks of high blood pressure.

Doctors who are concerned about potential health risks sometimes find that they have a hard time persuading women to drop their levels once they’ve experienced a testosterone high. Jennifer Key, a writer in Oxford, Miss., went on high-dose testosterone about five years ago, and found it both fascinating and alluring to feel, as she put it, “like a teenage boy.” “It was interesting to be like, Oh, this is what people talk about when they talk about wanting sex and being into sex and missing sex,” she said. Her doctor insisted that she lower her dose when she saw the levels Key was reaching; but that doesn’t stop Key from trying to negotiate her way back to where she was. “I have a good magnifying mirror,” she said. “I just pluck.”

Enthusiasm for testosterone cuts across political lines. Several of the women I interviewed belong to religious communities that strongly oppose gender-affirming care, and yet were taking testosterone in amounts comparable to those taken by some trans men. Marcella Hill, one of the most popular testosterone influencers on Instagram, was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when she first started experimenting with high-dose testosterone and proselytizing about its powers. Although she has since left the church, in part because of the way she says it shames women about their sexual desire, she has many friends still there who take high doses of the hormone. “I’d never really sat with myself and thought about what I think about gender-affirming care,” Hill said. “But I think everyone should get to decide how they want to live in their body.”

President Trump’s commissioner of the F.D.A., Martin Makary, has signaled his enthusiasm for hormone therapies for middle-aged women, and the company Marius Pharmaceuticals is in conversations with the agency about clinical trials it intends to start on a standard-dose testosterone pill for women. The conversations so far suggest that “it won’t be easy by any means, but I think the new F.D.A. will be reasonable,” said Marius’s chief executive, Shalin Shah, “which represents a step in the right direction.” In the past, he said, the agency’s response to hormones for postmenopausal women has generally been “like running into a brick wall.” (The F.D.A. declined to comment on its past decisions regarding testosterone, citing the government shutdown.)

In July, Makary convened a panel on hormone therapy that included Kelly Casperson, a urologist with more than 400,000 followers on Instagram, who is a passionate advocate for making standard-dose testosterone available to women. Her support for an F.D.A.-approved product is mainstream among doctors who specialize in menopausal care, but the promises that she makes about the hormone alarm some of her colleagues.

When women go on testosterone, Casperson said on the panel, “they start businesses!” They report, she said, that their math skills improve; one woman told Casperson that she started suddenly remembering how to speak German, her first language. Although there are “signals,” Davis says, that standard-dose testosterone might benefit women’s cognition, mood and bone and muscle strength, the research is still not there. “I just don’t like women being promised things that haven’t been proven true.”

Stephanie Faubion of the Mayo Clinic says she has seen a steep increase in the number of women coming into her office asking about testosterone, many of them expecting the kinds of unrealistic results — even from standard doses — that influencers on social media promise. “It isn’t an anti-aging drug,” she said. “And it won’t make women want to have sex with their partner if there are communication issues and they no longer feel connected with their partner.”

The promises that some testosterone providers make about energy, strength and mood have an obvious appeal in the current moment: Middle-aged women on both sides of the political spectrum feel underserved by mainstream medicine, and their social media feeds are full of offerings that promise them they can “biohack” or spend their way (via GLP-1s, cosmetic procedures or supplements) to a more perfect self. Some of the women I interviewed were taking testosterone to try to save their marriages (“Gotta keep ’em happy,” as one of the Real Housewives put it); others were desperate for energy as they tried to juggle the superhuman demands on all too many working mothers. But many were just trying to reclaim their desire. Women who are on testosterone — high or low — often sound as if they are in the midst of a new phase of sexual liberation.

Thuy, the business owner from California, is now on a dose of testosterone that’s on the high end of what women in their 30s produce naturally. But she misses those megadose days when she would wake up every morning feeling as if she could take on the world, start a Ph.D. and explore her sex life. Very little of the hair that Thuy lost has grown back. Would she do it again? “Yes, yes, yes!” she said.

 

Gonna lose my fucking shit.

Posted (edited)

Read safe’s posted article to my wife. Her first question, once she had the gist of the content, was, why is this in the LBGTQ thread, don’t y’all have a women’s thread? Good point, says I, this isn’t the stupid things my wife says. Or is it?

After reading it, she  didn’t seem too intrigued by the possibilities. We’ve been together 37 years, and she still isn't repulsed by me. The heath concerns trouble her. We visit a hotel regularly, though the kids have moved out, the mother in law has moved in with us.
 

Edited by Willfully Horn


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