Tornado funnel approaching from a storm near McCook, Nebraska, USA
By John Sirlin

Post on another site with hundreds of notes, by a person with thousands of followers, being shared by people I generally consider quite thoughtful, loudly proclaiming that gender-affirming care “isn’t plastic surgery” because it’s “real” rather than “cosmetic.” Sigh.

Plastic surgery does not mean “fake.” And for that matter cosmetic surgery does not mean “fake” either, or “unnecessary,” or “immoral,” or “unimportant,” or whatever societally-driven associations you have come to accept. Plastics is the actual medical division that deals with the manipulation of the physical body. Reconstructive surgery is plastic surgery. You will be referred to a plastic surgeon when you get the vast majority of trans-related surgeries, as will car crash survivors, mauling survivors, acid attack survivors, third degree burn survivors, gunshot wound survivors, cancer survivors… This is not an insult and it says nothing about the severity or “realness” of your condition or anything else.

We really need to kill the idea that “cosmetic surgery” is some inherently superfluous (or intrinsically ontologically evil, lmao) thing. I’m sensitive to this particular line of misinformed thought because I’ve known people who could NOT get crucial medical care covered—facial reconstruction after cancer, for instance—because their insurance deemed it “cosmetic” and thus “unnecessary.” This is an extremely common issue, and it impacts trans people too, in the cases where insurances deny trans people coverage for all or part of our procedures based on what they deem to be cosmetic. I’ve known so many trans guys (myself included!) whose insurances attempted to bill them for their nipples during top surgery because those were deemed purely cosmetic. Ditto for surgical tattooing, scar care, etc. And, in a vacuum, they’re right, right? You don’t “need” nipples to function, nor does a woman “need” breasts after surviving breast cancer. Does a survivor of an acid attack need facial reconstruction that “looks good”? Not in the sense that it’s urgently life-or-death. But we (should) as trans people understand that humans have needs and desires that are more complex than basic, sterile functionality alone, and that we deserve the right to, at minimum, access medical care that will allow us some amount of dignity, comfort, and autonomy.

To be fair, I’m sure that the people reblogging the post referenced above, if pressed, would argue that when they decry gender affirming care as “plastic” they do, also, view other forms of reconstructive plastic surgery as “real” in the same sense, and what they’re actually calling for is basically a separation of “cosmetic plastics” from “medically necessary plastics,” but, again, to that I say—Where do you draw that line? At what point can one distinctly separate the desire to look good on some level with the desire to undergo gender-affirming surgery? Like, when I had my top surgery I above all else wanted my chest masculinized; to be more specific, I wanted my breasts removed so my chest would be flat, but I also wanted enough definition retained for it to look “natural.” I wanted my nipples to be smaller. I hoped for minimal scarring both to pass safely but also, you know, because it felt good to imagine looking in a mirror and seeing less scars. But, of course, there are cisgender men with gynecomastia, with large nipples, with scars, with oddly shaped chests of all kinds. Of course I ultimately wanted a chest that, well… looked good. When researching gender-affirming care, one of the first things many trans people will do (should do, even!) is research various surgeons’ body of work to make a decision based on the outcomes they want. And again, the same can be said for so many reconstructive surgeries, even medically necessary ones! Is it wrong for a burn victim to hope a skin graft looks good? So where do we draw the line?

Where I can find common ground is that I agree that it feels pretty obviously like a way of intentionally diminishing the importance of gender-affirming surgery to call it exclusively cosmetic, but I think that inventing a hard binary between cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery will do more harm than good in the long run. I think when trans people try to call for redefining our surgeries and push this argument that we should be viewed as extra unique and special from all of the other people who undergo plastic surgery because our needs are just so radically different that they, like, magically transcend the medical field within which they exist they are both being extremely short-sighted and really lacking a sense of solidarity with other medicalized individuals who face similar struggles. Surely pushing for better recognition of the breadth of what plastic surgery encompasses and the significance of it, arguing for why it matters and demanding better access, is a better answer than appealing to a more metaphysical (and nonsensical) “our surgeries are just too important to be considered plastic” claim, at the expense of… everyone else.

Help a disabled queer pay bills

Hey, it's Pluto again. After losing out half a paycheck to illness and needing new glasses, I'm barely making ends meet. Rent wiped me out and I still need vital meds, doctor's appoitments, food, and utilities paid.

Help needed badly. Anything at all would keep me and my household safe and secure.

Update: Holy shit food and meds are so, SO expensive. Payday is a while away, and that's going to be taken by utilities and medical so I'm not sure what to do. I need to eat. Help????

John Miller Street, Ryde (Sydney), New South Wales.

ALT

something about this quote tickles me so

15-Minute Peanut Sprouts Stir-Fry 花生芽 (Vegan)

An American View - Spring 2002 RTW

sorry i missed the gala of suitors i was outside picking on the weird girl in the garden tending to weird looking plants. yeah she had a little shack with a cauldron back there it was gross. anyways she gave me something to drink and now im madly in love with her so we need to start planning a wedding or whatever

i still don't know if the famous yucky blood vomit weapon that bloody-nosed beetles (Timarcha tenebricosa) famously resort to when threatened is shared by all species in the genus - whichever one this may be - but i do know they're terrible at avoiding roads, so i'd rather not risk it and use a leaf to move them to safety if possible. the beetle itself appears to have no preference

(December 17th, 2025)

Sinantropía, 2023
photographs by Txema Salvans
from the collection of Fundación Foto Colectania, Barcelona

Synanthropy is the concept that defines the ability of some species of flora and fauna to adapt to environmental conditions created or modified as a result of human activity. As an example of this concept, we can mention storks, which we have subjected, degrading their habitats to the point of scarcity. We have forced them to colonize structures completely alien to their natural environment, displacing them near landfills and making them coexist with plastics and other waste. - Txema Salvans (abridged)

image credits: Txema Salvans / Fundación Foto Colectania

part 1 of 2

Culturally normalized fear of arthropods is so funny like

Becoming frightened at the sight of an animal 1/10000th of your size existing in your general vicinity, diverting from all other activity in order to focus on obliterating the animal from existence, all this diminishing a person’s quality of life because the fear is directed towards the most common form of animal life on the planet that exists everywhere humans do: normal.

Not doing that + expending slightly more effort to remove the animal instead of killing it: are you some kind of freak? Why are you so emotionally driven by the bug? You want to fuck the bug?