This is a health site

A sound mind in a sound body.

Historically, medicine men were both spiritual leaders and people treating medical ailments. There's no clear, bright line between your physical body and other aspects of you and your life, such as your mind or way of thinking or lifestyle or culture. 

I'm sixty, so not that old, and when I was a child I can remember me and siblings and cousins all going to see a doctor together. If one of us had strep throat, we probably all did.

Rather than treat one kid and let us just pass it around and pass it around, they treated all of us and STOPPED it.

Before the AIDS epidemic in the eighties when I was in high school, STDs were treated by giving a list of your intimate contacts to a social worker who called or visited all of them, informed them they had been with someone who had X infection and they should be tested.

In the US, AIDS was associated with gay men and IV drug users sharing needles. Neither group wanted to give up the names of their contacts because it's essentially asking for you to imprison or otherwise persecute all their good buddies. 

So they advocated for another approach to the problem and as best I can tell this has all been downside for everyone. 

First of all, I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that AIDS was "the gay male disease" due to "dirty practices."

People seem to justify their homophobia with assuming that anal intercourse is what gay men are all about, that anal intercourse is inherently germier than vaginal intercourse AND that it spreads HIV more easily than other forms of sexual intimacy. 

Reality: Sixty Minutes did a story years ago proving that something like the first fifty cases of AIDS in the US were in gay men because ONE asshole who was an airline pilot and HIV positive decided he had a right to have a good time before he died of AIDS and he was promiscuous and not using protection and not telling people he was infected.

At best, what you can say is that historically gay men were inclined to be promiscuous and have casual sex for two reasons:

1. Neither of them can get pregnant. 

2. Because neither of them can get pregnant,  neither of them NEEDS to act like sexual intercourse is some sacred act that needs to be only engaged in if you are in love or serious and hoping to marry and blah blah blah.

Number two isn't just about pregnancy.  It's about the fact that heternormative culture expects women to make their money primarily by marrying well, so there's a lot of social pressure to preserve your primary asset of "Sex with me is a scarce commodity and all special and you can assume I'm disease free and will be faithful and etc." so good men with big incomes will hopefully pay your god damned bills for the rest of your life and not treat you like a kleenex to wipe their dick off with and then promptly forget your name. 

Most likely, heterosexual people -- probably especially men -- were JEALOUS that gay men were seeing a lot of action and it was schadenfreude to watch them get AIDS and die "because they are gay."

The real takeaway should be that gay or straight, germs work pretty much the same, so risk of pregnancy or no risk of pregnancy, we suggest you vet your partners and be picky about whom you get jiggy with. 

Monogamy is generally valued the world over by most cultures. There have been exceptions and still are.

In some wartorn areas, where women tend to outnumber men AND there is a reasonable concern about keeping the population up, one man can have multiple wives IF he can support them financially and any resulting children. If he sleeps with only those women and they only sleep with him, this is probably not much riskier than monogamy healthwise AND all children will know who both their parents are.

Historically, Inuit shared their wives with visitors. Probably initially to treat hypothermia because putting two people skin to skin under blankets is the best and most effective means to make sure someone gets warm again and then one thing probably led to another. 

They were kind enough to include White Christians in this practice who happily partook, THEN lectured them about being bad people and ALSO introduced STDs which they supposedly didn't have before that.

Cultural practices around sex that are an exception to the general rule of monogamy is what we are shooting for typically have a compelling reason AND still account for factors like germ control and paternity within the context in question. 

It's rare for people to live in isolation and grow all their own food, build their own home, etc. No matter how relatively isolated individuals are, they almost always are part of a larger social fabric and other people are an aggravating and LARGE factor in health outcomes.

You can do everything right and some other asshole can still get you sick. Germs have no morality.

Moralizing about sex seems to mostly be rooted in ignorant attempts to control factors best controlled some other way. Being all preachy and talking about homosexuality being "a sin" is a way of hoping that if you are the right kind of people, you won't get "punished by God" with something horrible like AIDS. 

And then when someone gets it via transfusion or whatever, uptight Christians try to say "That's different." rather than "I guess I was wrong." (A plot point in the movie Philadelphia where the main character proves he was fired due to homophobia, not because he had AIDS, because they didn't fire an employee with AIDS who got it via some other transmission method.)

So I'm aware if you are trans, there's no clear bright line between NEEDING hormones your body isn't adequately producing and a raft load of social CRAP. While I do write about things like gender identity on this site BECAUSE there's no clear bright line, my interest is really in learning about hormones and how they interact with health.

No, I don't always feel 100 percent confident that a particular post "belongs here." I do my best to post things that I feel are pertinent to an interest in an intersection between hormones and health topics that are mostly trans related. 

"Let your food be your medicine" only even broader than that: Let LIFE be your medicine cabinet.

The above quote is from another piece on this site explaining the weird name. I'm mostly interested in a diet and lifestyle approach to health subjects.

That's a longstanding personal bias and it doesn't mean I'm anti drug. I'm pro health and sixty years of living suggests to me diet and lifestyle should be your first concern if you actually want to be healthy and drugs should be a minor part of your efforts to deal with health issues if you want optimal results. 

I do sometimes talk about drugs I've found useful but you can find drug information all over the place.  You mostly can't find solid information on what interests me: How do you live with x issue so as to minimize need for medical stuff like drugs and surgeries so you can be healthy?

In spite of study after study after study saying "Diet and lifestyle are major factors in all deadly conditions." people will openly mock you if you want to know how to eat and live to start walking back ANY serious medical condition. 

My political views and ideas on what makes sense politically boils down to looking to treat ALL people with a certain baseline respect for bodily autonomy as a means to promote health of individuals and bigger picture health at the societal level and into the future.

I loathe politics. I don't really understand it and it's nothing I really want to tangle with.

I'm interested in social stuff generally and my medical situation has fostered a keen interest in health topics and I would like to naively believe you can be interested in social stuff and health topics and stay the hell out of politics entirely but that's just not realistic. 

Politics should end where my private choices begin about diet and lifestyle in the interest of pursuing good health but people don't want to do that.

I'm celibate for medical reasons.  If I'm not sharing germs and not at risk of pregnancy, what do you care what I do in the interest of germ control to make my life better?

Unfortunately, people are stupid and assholes and on any topic that has anything vaguely to do with sex, including gender identity,  people just can't butt the hell out and say "Not my business. It's your body and your life and you're not hurting anyone. So you do you and I shall keep my trap shut."

There's some actual legitimate reasons for that. We have the phrase rape culture because establishing social norms fosters various outcomes, so people get all up in arms about any change having to do with sex or gender because heternormative culture is the default the world over and arises from a long history of subsistence cultures.

I have come to believe that heternormative culture actually fosters subsistence culture and makes it difficult to escape a pattern where we all must run faster to stay in place no matter how much things improve in terms of agricultural productivity, medical advances etc.

Politics is apparently social stuff with an agenda. It's social stuff plus an exercise in power.

And talking about this particular health subject happens to be an exercise in power with an agenda whether I like it or not. Since I don't intend to cave, I need to be prepared to defend my turf here, too bad so sad I think you buttheads are in the wrong and I'm engaged in innocent activity. 

It's you rapey bastards defending heternormative culture and rape culture who are morally in the wrong for objecting to a woman wanting to support herself financially because my medical situation makes whoring myself out -- even to one man and politely calling it marriage -- a death sentence and it's rapey bastards hellbent on preserving stupid social norms who have a giant cow about trans anything because they desperately want to preserve something they feel "works for them" and never mind the overwhelming evidence it's really not working well for anyone, not even the rich men who generally sit at the top of this Lord of the Flies giant pile of doo doo.

TLDR: This is a health site focused on an interest in an intersection between hormones and health topics that are mostly trans related. 

That's MY interest. All this other crap is unfortunate happenstance from being an earthbound human, like it or not, and I mostly don't like it, to be honest.