I’m going to start a series of blog posts here, hopefully with contributors to show the extent of the problems faced for transgender people in New Zealand. It’s far from the worst place in the world to transition, but we could do so much better.

I intend to cover:

• Lack of access to medications with low risk profiles such as bio-identical progesterone.
• Refusal to consider injected oestrogen even in the face of shortage of oestrogen patches.
• Incorrect dosing of medications with high risk profiles at inappropriate doses, like prescribing 100mg of cyproterone acetate for over a year.
• Requiring people to go on extended periods with no sex hormones.
• Gatekeeping transition with mental health requirements.
• Dismissal of non-binary transition goals.
• Extended wait times for consultations.
• The lack of medical autonomy granted to transgender people.

And what ever else comes my way.

Why?

Hopefully I can get enough voices to get some attention. It’s very hard to find out who makes the policies or give them feedback, so shaking the tree a bit might get us heard. My goal is to improve access to medication options so people aren’t forced to DIY to get the transition they desire.

Contributing to this series

I can’t just tell my own story - that would be boring. I would like to hear from others in the New Zealand community about the problems they’ve faced, or if they’ve opted out of the medical system and are doing DIY hormone therapy. All contributions will be held in confidence, I don’t need your real name if you don’t want to share it.

You can contact me via Mastodon (or other activitypub platforms), @sitharus@cloudisland.nz or @blog@thea.hutchings.gen.nz, via email at transgendernz at thea.hutchings.gen.nz, or via the comment form on this blog (just between you and me, it doesn’t check the name or email fields).

After a lot of swearing, grumbling, trial and error this blog is now an activitypub publisher!

So far you can follow and get new post notifications, but replies and anything else aren’t processed (including un-follows…). Next on the list? Maybe. I also need to add an avatar.

When I get replies working I think I’ll integrate them in to the comments if the note is set as public. Non-public replies won’t be shown of course.

And I need to automate the publish runs, right now it’s all manually triggered… And switch to tokio instead of async-std.

Anyway, you can check out the source at https://github.com/sitharus/blog if you want to see how the fediverse works, though I’m sure I’m totally not spec compliant.

Yep that’s right! You can now comment and read the posts on mobile! Technology! And still no Javascript!

For those interested the code is on github. I might write some instructions on how to build it, because you need to build the migrations first since the SQL library checks the SQL at compile time.

And yes the resulting binary is 5MB on my x64 machine, but no dependencies! It still runs pretty fast as well.

Now back to writing posts about things other than the blog…

Well it looks like I finally have my new blog working! Now I just have to write on it.

Because, well, I’m me, it’s a static site generator written in Rust. The admin console runs as a CGI, because why not?

I’ll do more of a write up later I’m sure, but for now I need to make it handle image uploads. And set up backups, I need those.