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bjbj Other than practicing abstinence, there are plenty of other things that you can do
to protect yourself against many of the common STI s. You can be vaccinated against hepatitis
A and hepatitis B. Hepatitis B is mainly transmitted sexually or through shared or dirty needles
or other personal care items like toothbrushes or razors. While the risk is lower than that
for hepatitis B, it is possible to hepatitis C, for which there is no current vaccination,
also through *** activity, even though it s mostly associated with unsterile needles.
Hepatitis A and hepatitis E can be spread through fecal-oral contact, so if you re doing
*** or anything like that, you want to be sure that you re using a barrier to provide
protection for yourself and for your partner. Now, if you re like me, you re sitting here
going, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, hepatitis E what happened to D? And there
is actually hepatitis D. The reason that I m not focusing on it so much in this presentation
is because it only occurs with hepatitis B, and it s very rare outside of the Global South,
so if you re in the United States or Canada or most of Western Europe or Australia, it
s not very likely that you re often coming into contact with this condition, and it s
also most common in people who use intravenous drugs, which is outside the scope of this
presentation. You also want to be concerned about skin-to-skin contact with many STI s,
especially ***, HPV, trichomoniasis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis. What you want to
do is you want to look for any kind of abnormality in the skin, and you want to be really careful
about that. You look for open sores, chancres, lesions, bumps, warts, cuts, or rashes. The
thing is to keep in mind these won t always be visible to the naked eye, and in fact,
it is possible for infections to be spread even when there is no visible outbreaks, so
you still want to always be using barriers and still be practicing some kind of precaution.
You can also be vaccinated against HPV. This is the vaccine commonly known as Gardasil.
It the reason that you want to do that is because HPV is linked to certain genital cancers.
In fact, virtually all cervical cancers are caused by HPV. This is part of why Gardasil
has been so marketed and targeted toward young women and, increasingly, young men, but if
you have the option available to you to receive that vaccination, I would strongly recommend
that you do it. Other than vaccines and practicing abstinence, what are some other potential
ways you could protect yourself or reduce your risks? One way is through partner management.
Other than abstinence, the least risky option that you have is maintaining a sexually exclusive
relationship with either a partner or partners who are also exclusive. That is, you want
to have monogamous or polyfidelitous relationships. Now, statistically speaking, your chances
of contracting an STI increase with the number of partners that you have, but you can still
make wise decisions, you can still make good choices, and it s perfectly possible to have
sex with multiple partners and still remain on the safer side. Don t let anybody shame
you into not practicing ethical non-monogamy if that s the choice that s right for you.
It s not so much about what type of partner, or even really what type of relationship you
have, so much as it is a matter of harm reduction and of choosing safer practices. I repeat:
STI s do NOT discriminate. It s possible for a person to have only one partner and still
have an STI, or a person could have many hundreds of partners and still not have one. So again,
it s more about what you re doing rather than who you re doing or even necessarily how many
people. It is also useful to remember that nobody is perfect. Most people are not going
to use barriers consistently, correct, 100 percent, always, without fail. You know, people
are human, and that s why it s really crucial that we remember that there is a personal
responsibility to take care of ourselves and our partners health as well. You can reduce
your risk by managing the type of relationships or the type of partners that you have, but
just keep in mind again that nothing is fool-proof. So in order to understand harm reduction,
it s really important that you understand what kinds of activities constitute certain
degrees of risk, and the one that you would want to start with, most obviously, would
be either no-risk or low-risk behaviors. So, what would that be? That would be anything
where you re really not exchanging any kind of fluid. This can involve dry kissing, hugging,
massage, BDSM, wrestling, talking about fantasies. It could role playing, it could be phone sex
or cybersex, you could do dry ***, watersports, sensation play as long as it s not anything
that s actually breaking the skin. You want to avoid cutting or piercing or shaving, or
if you are going to engage in those kind of activities, you need to make sure you re taking
all the necessary precautions to sterilize those materials and that you re not coming
into contact with them or with any kind of skin that s been broken. ***, either
solo or simultaneous, is completely no-risk. There is some degree of risk in mutual ***,
where you re touching each other s genitals, because of that skin-to-skin contact. What
you can do for this, of course, is you can reduce that risk by using gloves, and it s
pretty easily taken care of. Now, there s also low risk, and I think that in this case,
it s really actually rather misleading because these aren t low risk behaviors so much as
they are moderate- to actually high-risk. And that would involve anything like very
deep kissing, like if you re really, really going at it. This has a moderate risk of spreading
gonorrhea, hepatitis B, ***, HPV, or syphilis. Oral sex really though is what I m focusing
on here because that s normally what s considered the low risk activity, and relative to any
kind of penetrative sex, well yes, it s lower risk, but it s not really correct to say that
it s low risk in and of itself. The reason that people often put it into this category
is because oral sex is low risk for *** transmission. However, it s not for everything else. Gonorrhea,
chlamydia, syphilis, none of this stuff goes away, so even when you re practicing oral
sex, it s still important to remember that ***/AIDS is not your only concern. And also,
whether you re the receiving partner or the giving partner, there s some risk for each
person who s involved. As the giving partner, you can actually get oral *** from a partner
who has genital ***. Likewise, the receiving partner, you can get genital *** from a
partner who has oral ***, and this is something that most people often don t realize. So it
s not like you get off completely scot-free. There is still some risk in these kind of
behaviors. You also want to avoid brushing your teeth or flossing for about an hour before
you do any kind of oral sex because you don t want any kind of cuts or anything like that
in your mouth that could provide a possible route of transmission. So, this is where we
really get into the real meat, the focus of this presentation, and that s how is it that
trans people go about approaching this issue of safer sex. So the first thing, really,
that I d touch on would be the issues we have with traditional barriers, and it can feel
very degendering actually to use the traditional barriers, which is the problem that we normally
come up against in doing any kind of safer sex outreach to transgender people. Now, you
have what is called a male *** traditionally. This is designed for penises, which we normally
in this culture associate with being a male trait. Now, for trans women, it can be really
off-putting to use something like this when that s what it s commonly associated with.
For trans men, you might have the same issue of it being off-putting to use dental dams
or female condoms, which are these. Those are designed for vaginas, which we normally
in this culture associate with being a female trait, and again, this can cause a lot of
issues with dysphoria for some people. Now, I don t like to call these male and female
condoms. I never really have. And the reason for that is that anybody can use these, and
it s not even just transgender people. People who are cis, whether female or male, can also
use these for any kind of purpose, so I don t call them by any sort of gendered name.
I call them much more by what they are and what their purpose is, which is to say that
the male ***, I call this an external *** because that s really what it s for: external
genitalia. And your female ***, I call an internal *** because, well, it s pretty
obvious that s where it s going. I feel like that s much more accurate, and that way you
re not actually making any kind of assumption about the person who s wearing those sort
of materials. There s also the point to keep in mind which is that sometimes these don
t actually work for our bodies. Trans men, for example, who haven t had a phalloplasty,
you usually can t fit into these traditional external condoms, and trans women, if you
ve been on HRT for a long time especially, it can be difficult for you to stay hard enough
to actually be able to use them as well. Now, with dental dams and trans women, oftentimes
they re too small, or they can be very restricting when they re pressed against the genitals.
Some people like this sensation, but a lot of people don t and it can be kind of uncomfortable.
So then what is you what is your option? What do you do in that case? Well, there are a
few ways that you can get pretty creative as far as barriers for trans people, and this
is what I would like to show you today. Before we get into that though, let s just take what
you traditionally have, the internal and the external condoms. For oral sex, if you re
using an external ***, you want to make sure it s flavored. It s much more appetizing
than using a regular, unflavored ***, and it ll make things a lot more pleasant. Now,
for those kind of condoms, since they have sugars in them that give them that sweet kind
of taste, you don t want to use these for penetration because that can cause or aggravate
yeast infections. If it s any kind of penetrative sex, you want to make sure that they re completely
unflavored condoms. Now, for dental dams, those are fairly straightforward. For most
trans men, you can use these the way a cis woman would. They re fairly straightforward.
The issue with a dental dam is that they are often very difficult to come by when they
are pre-packaged, and the reason for that is that they are very expensive and they can
be hard to find. I don t normally buy pre-packaged dental dams unless they re free to me. I get
them through a local clinic, and if that s an option to you, that s something that s
really good to consider. However, if you re looking for something that s a cheaper alternative,
there are plenty of things that you can do. And that will be the focus of the next portion
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Casey Lanham Normal Casey Lanham Microsoft Office Word Hewlett-Packard
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