I am short with a somewhat femme figure, sparse but obvious facial hair, a flat chest, and a voice that sounds somewhere between a very gay man, a 13 year old boy, and an older woman. I am very visibly crossing many lines that people look for when trying to figure out how to address someone. Meaning, in a time when attacks on trans people and our rights are very quickly ramping up, I am in more danger of harassment and assault than I have been in the last few years.

As far as who is looking out for me: I am, that is part of my goal, but I also have a husband and a few friends who I can ask for help. However, I am in a slightly better position in life than most trans people in this country, since I live in a blue state that is (probably) unlikely to strip me of my rights. Hence my focus on helping others. There will probably be a lot of people coming here for medical treatment, and I want to make sure I help in any way I can.

As a visibly trans person: survive, and help as many other people survive as I can.

Having two dinners this year. My mother in law came over on Christmas Day, we had a Field Roast, garlic smashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, brandied cranberry sauce, and boozy nog, with plenty of cookies for dessert. It was a nice time, though a bit bittersweet as this is the first Christmas since my father in law passed.

This Sunday we are having friends over for another dinner, and I am making veggie pot pie, fondant potatoes, green beans in garlic butter, the rest of the cranberries, and ricotta cheesecake for dessert. It won’t be a huge crowd, just doing dinner and some board games, so looking forward to that.

Thankfully it won’t, but I had to deal with more of their shenanigans.

Did you know that they refuse to transfer a prescription if they haven’t filled it at least once? I had to call the urgent care clinic back and have them transfer it instead.

Bless the retail pharmacy worker who walked me through how to get everything in order and got me discount coupons. It took them 30 minutes to fill and cost me a total of $15. So I will be okay, but in spite of Express Scripts, who gave me an ETA of the 17th, more than a week after the script was ordered.

I am sitting here, in incredible pain from a combined sinus and ear infection, waiting for the antibiotics I need to be shipped to me in 3-5 business days because my insurance will only provide prescription coverage through Express Scripts and not a retail pharmacy.

This same insurance company has also denied to cover a surgery they have prior auth for, denied coverage for routine lab work that is expressly covered, waited months to review disputed charges and gotten them sent to collections, and forced me into a lower tier of coverage twice due to premium increases.

The kicker? I work in the health insurance industry. But I’m not an exec, just a support worker.

They can try to stop the online support all they want, but they should know that the active censorship will only cause people to go elsewhere. This issue is uniting everyone who watches the evening news, and they can’t risk not covering the story because they are hoping to make an example of him.

Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.

I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s

Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.