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bjbj Another thing that you want to be aware of is emergency contraception. In the United
States, this is usually called Plan B or the morning after pill. It s available from pharmacies
that are staffed by a licensed pharmacist, and they are available to anybody who s over
the age of eigh-, excuse me, over the age of 17. You can be female or male or genderqueer
or whatever the case may be, it is available to everybody, and that is FDA-approved. A
lot of times you will run into pharmacy techs who will try to tell you that, oh you re male,
you can t buy this emergency contraception, and that s not true. You want to really, again,
be assertive and make sure you re getting the kind of service and good that you need.
Now, if you re under the age of 17, if you re 16 or younger, you will need a prescription
to access the emergency contraception, so that s something you want to remember whenever
you re looking for it. Now, about the emergency contraception, I really recommend, even for
trans men, not just trans women s partners but trans men themselves as well, you want
to have some emergency contraception already available to you on hand. And the reason for
that it is so much easier to just have it ready there when you re not in that situation
than it is to be in that situation where you really do need it and now you re super stressed
out because you re in that situation, and you have to go and try to fight with a pharmacy
tech or whoever it may be to try to get this product that you need. So it s good to just
have it on the front end and you don t have to worry about it later. Also, if you ever
need an abortion at any point or you choose to use that option, it s a really good idea
if you re already familiar with where you can locate trans-aware and trans-friendly
reproductive health care. It s very important for you. There are other exams you should
get that aren t directly related to *** behavior, but they do involve that some basic
kind of anatomy. Trans women should get prostate exams. Trans men who haven t had a full hysterectomy,
you need to get a cervical pap. Anybody who s engaging in *** sex needs to get an ***
pap. Trans women who haven t had an orchiectomy should regularly examine the *** or the
***, whichever you choose to call that part of your body. And everyone needs to have a
regular breast exam, including trans women who are not on HRT and trans men who are post-top
surgery. Remember that even cis men, even cis men can get breast cancer, so everyone
needs to be checking themselves regularly for any kind of unusual lumps or bumps, you
need to just be talking to your doctor about it in general. Now, there is one thing that
I want to discuss that s not strictly related to *** behavior, but I feel like there
s so much overlap, especially in the STI s themselves, that it s important to discuss
this because it s something that, you know, people might be having to deal with, and that
s the issue of what you have to do when you share or reuse your needles. Now, your needles
can be used for pretty much anything. They can be used for hormones, insulin, silicone,
tattoos and piercings, IV drugs, anything. The case though, the case in point though,
is that your sharing or reusing needles is a very risky activity and it should be avoided
at all costs. If there is a needle exchange program anywhere close to you, you should
use it. There s also to remember, what are your risks in doing this kind of behavior,
in sharing a needle? You can contract ***, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. It can also cause
abscesses, issues with your veins, and other lots of really dangerous and really serious
infections, so if we can avoid sharing or reusing the needles, you really want to do
that. However, if you have to or you must, you need to be sure that you re sterilizing
them thoroughly. You need to do this between every person if you re sharing, and even if
it s just for yourself, you need to be doing it after every single use. Now, what you re
going to do is, (let me get you to where you can see here) you re going to have three glasses
like this. Okay, you re going to have water, this is going to be bleach, and this is also
going to be water. Let s go ahead and get the bleach in here. Your bleach, you want
to make sure this is full strength. It needs to be as strong as possible so that you can
kill as much of this infectious material as absolutely possible. Now, bleach is not 100
percent effective at killing *** and it does NOT kill hepatitis C, but you want to clean
with something. Cleaning with something is better than cleaning with nothing. It s less
of a risk and that s what we re all about is harm reduction. Now, what you re going
to do is you re going to clean the needle several different times. Let s see, where
is my needle? Ah, here we go. Let s say that this is your dirty needle. This will be our
makeshift sink. This would be the drain in your house. You don t really want to, when
you re disposing of any kind of liquid here, you don t want to put it out on the ground.
It s for public health and safety, and you just want to avoid any kind of highly infectious
material like that, you don t want to put that out in the public. So, what you re going
to do is, this is going to be your dirty needle, and the reason that you have two different
glasses of water is that you don t want to cross-contaminate anything. This is dirty.
You don t want this to be in the clean water. This first glass of water is going to be for
the dirty needle so that we can rinse it out. You then want to then use your bleach to sterilize.
And then the third glass is going to be clean water. You don t want anything coming from
here into here. This needs to be to completely rinse out and sanitize from the bleach. Now,
what you ll do is you re going to take it and you ll draw all the way up to the top
of the barrel. When you do this, you re going to shake it around for about 30 seconds or
so. You want to make sure that it s clearly coating everything inside of that syringe,
you want to make sure you re really doing this, preferably immediately after use because
it will be much easier to do this, and it will be a lot safer if you do it that way
as opposed to if you let it sit there and the blood dries and then it s a lot harder
to clean. So, once you ve done that with the water, you dispose of it in the sink, and
you ll do this about 2 or 3 times. More is always better in this case. You want to do
it as much as possible. Again, you d shake it about 30 seconds or so and back down the
sink. And once you re done with that part of the process, then you want to move on to
your bleach. And that s where you ll do, again the same principle. Here I would shake it
around extra hard because you really, really want to thoroughly clean, and then, just as
you did with the water, it goes down the sink. Now, as we said, more is better with this.
You want to do this at least 4 or 5 times with the bleach. When you re done with the
bleach, then you go to your clean glass of water and again, you draw up and it will be
to the top of the barrel. Shake it around pretty good and hard for about 30 seconds
or so and then you will pour it down the drain. I would say do this just as often if not more
so than you did with the first glass, and the reason for that is that when you have
a needle that you ve cleaned with bleach, you really don t want to use this any time
really soon after you ve done that, and the reason for that is injecting bleach into your
skin can be very dangerous. It can make you very, very, very sick or it can be fatal if
you re not careful. So any time you re done with this process, you want to completely,
you want to take it apart and you want to let everything air dry. You want to give it
ample time to be able to do that. So, that is the basic idea of how you would clean your
needles. And the other thing to keep in mind is what are you going to do when they re dulled
because every use of a needle makes it duller, it makes it harder for it to penetrate your
skin and especially when you re considering the issue with abscesses, that can be really
dangerous. So what you want to do is you want to find some kind of very rough texture that
you re able to use it almost like a whetstone. You want to get 220 grit or finer sandpaper,
you can use an emery board, matchbook striking pad, you can use just about anything that
has that same kind of texture to be able to do that. You want to watch out for burrs,
any kind of rough edges or bumps or anything that s forming at the tip of the needle. You
want to be very careful about making sure that you remove that because if you inject
those into the skin, you can have a lot of very serious infections as a result. Now,
in terms of getting back to the safer sex aspect of things, what are some main reasons
that we often don t practice safer sex as trans people? And what you ll find is that
really they re mostly the same as they are for anybody else. We forget. We get caught
up in the moment, we get really excited, and we don t use our best judgment. We might not
have very good judgment if we are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and that can
put you in very serious conditions in terms of medical issues. Anything that s being processed
through the liver, possibly your HRT, you want to avoid anything that s going to put
extra stress on that part of your body. And also, it s just a really good idea to avoid
it in general wherever we might end up in a situation that could potentially be unpleasant.
You want to be aware as possible. We might feel happy and like we re invincible, like
we underestimate our risk factors. This isn t particularly uncommon for people who have
been assigned female at birth especially. Say, for instance, I might be a trans man
and say, well, Oh, I m a trans guy and I have sex mostly with cis female partners; I don
t have any risk of contracting an STI, when, in fact, that s not true. There s also the
flipside. We might be depressed and really feel like we don t have an incentive to take
care of our bodies or of ourselves, and that will often lead us to do things that we really
wouldn t do under normal circumstances or if the case was different. Dysphoria can make
us repress ourselves or inhibit our knowledge about our body, our sexuality, our preferences.
And even if you don t have the language for your body or for your needs, which is often
the case with trans people, it s very likely that that language isn t going to be widely
used or recognized or understood. s also very hard in general to be assertive, especially
whenever you are non-transitioning, pre-transition, when you re in that middle point of transition
where it s like you re being read correctly some of the time and incorrectly other parts
of the time and it s like a mix and match, or even really when you re post-transition
if you re still having a lot of trouble coming to terms with this and being able to really
integrate into your life and to be able to have some kind of support around this. It
s difficult to stand up for yourself, and I think that is especially the case for trans
people because so often we are seeking validation. We don t see ourselves represented very often,
either in the general culture or in safer sex materials. We don t think that we deserve
to be seen as hot and sexy, or if we do, we only think we re that way because we re a
fetish or something of that nature. We sometimes, we lack experience, and that can make us uncomfortable.
We might feel lucky whenever someone wants to sleep with us because so often we think
that nobody s ever going to want to be with us, that, like, this being trans is almost
like your scarlet A. And in general, we re just really starved for love and affection
and respect, and that will make you willing to do things that, whenever you do have love
and affection and respect, you don t normally do that kind of stuff. So those are several
reasons why we might not be doing the best that we can to protect ourselves. [Content_Types].xml
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