Gaywallet

I appreciate your warning, and would like to echo it, from a safety perspective.

I would also like to point out that we should be approaching this, as every risk, from a harm reduction standpoint. A drug with impurities that could save your life or prevent serious harm is better than no drug and death. People need to be empowered to make the best decisions they can, given the available resources and education.

Great read. Really loved the way it was paced - while it jumped around a lot, it never felt too out of place and tied together nicely.

Venus rhymes with a piece of anatomy often found on men. Obviously they got it backwards

to make a long story short: getting our money out of the old collective and into the new one was actually much more of a mess than we thought

For anyone curious about the details, I had to step in to help ensure this actually happened because, well, tax law is complicated and none of us are experts. Ultimately our current financial host OCE had to bring on a US-based company in order to allow a transfer of tax-exempt funding. On top of that, we had to submit an application and enter an agreement with this partner company so that they could open a bank account on our behalf because having a bank account and agreement with OCE was not enough. What a headache!

Thanks for everyone who set up donations on OCE as soon as we transitioned, that was actually super helpful! For the rest of you who used to donate and were waiting for us to be fully transitioned over to OCE to restart your donations, you are free to do so now, and given our current deficit it would be most appreciated!

Been thinking about picking this one up

It’s FUCKING OBVIOUS

What is obvious to you is not always obvious to others. There are already countless examples of AI being used to do things like sort through applicants for jobs, who gets audited for child protective services, and who can get a visa for a country.

But it's also more insidious than that, because the far reaching implications of this bias often cannot be predicted. For example, excluding all gender data from training ended up making sexism worse in this real world example of financial lending assisted by AI and the same was true for apple's credit card and we even have full-blown articles showing how the removal of data can actually reinforce bias indicating that it's not just what material is used to train the model but what data is not used or explicitly removed.

This is so much more complicated than "this is obvious" and there's a lot of signs pointing towards the need for regulation around AI and ML models being used in places it really matters, such as decision making, until we understand it a lot better.

manamana

Yeah I think that's a reasonable analogy. It's important to note that medicine and taking care of your hair are not quite analogous and the potential negative outcomes from bad health care can be orders of magnitude worse than a negative outcome at a salon... But yeah

big weird flex but okay vibes except actually not okay

Like most science press releases I'm not holding my breath

Game changer for smart watches if this turns out to work and scale well

Gender affirming clinics are not doing any kinds of surgery, period. A gender affirming care provider is doing care in the context of the unique health needs of a trans individual. Often this has to do with how hormones affect the body, but in many cases it's just about being able to provide care in an affirming way. A provider with no training might suggest the patient do things which are not in alignment with their gender (such as advising them to stop or adjust hormones in response to lab values which can be managed in other ways) or use language which is offensive or harmful to the patient (misgendering and dead naming for example). Ancillary services such as speech therapy might be offered at these locations, although generally speaking they tend to be pretty primary care focused. Knowing how often you should be testing for various things, like pap smear frequency for trans men, or knowing how to treat pelvic pain in trans men and women are the kinds of care that gender affirming clinics can offer. Understanding to keep a closer watch on hemoglobin levels for trans men and advising that they donate blood or take medication if they get too high, is also something that a normal clinic might miss. Honestly there's far too much to even mention in a single comment, which is why these places exist and why there is so much demand.