For young/newly out trans people worrying about the worsening social climate and fearing they'll never feel safe again, I recommend taking up illegalism. It won't necessarily make you feel safer but it'll change your relationship to danger.
Tangential but one thing I've noticed with a lot of younger transfolks is a like... terrified reticence to self-med when the legal avenues fail or turn against them.
It feels like something as simple as self-medding that was well known to be common SOP and knowledge amongst trans people a decade ago is now seen as risky and dangerous by the kids coming in now who've never had to do it. Transpeople as a community are largely the ones who helped figure out how to safely administer HRT to ourselves and monitor ourselves and we TAUGHT most of the medical establishment this until they caught up.
Those resources still exists and you can still access them, people in the UK and other countries have to still use them a lot of the time. You can learn how to obtain and use HRT and monitor your hormone levels yourself if the system fails you, this is not some shady, risky action. This is basically down to a science. Do not let fascists prevent you from living your life. Do not let hateful and pointless rules and laws prevent you from doing what you need to do.
I'm young (early 20's) and have been on hrt for less than 3 years but it shocks how aggressive other people my age can be regarding self-med. When I was doing research in my early hrt months I found community after community that just outright prohibited any self-med talk even when people stated that there was no other way for them to get access to hormones.
I wouldn't doubt this attitude has permeated from transphobes fearmongering about HRT to actual trans people. The trans people I've met locally are afraid of self-med and really clueless about how to read lab tests even living in a country (mexico) where the comercial options are over the counter (although really expensive or literally contraceptives that are not just pure estrogen but better than nothing I guess).
I think I became radicalized in this topic with my first endo appointment which turnes to be a transphobic piece of shit who was regarded the best endo for trans people in the region.
Also I feel like part of this is cause by how fucked search is nowadays combined with people's self doubt about their research and the mystification of medical knowledge. An example is of a girl I used to work with that didn't knew 25mg of Spiro a day was too low.
I've been meaning to write a zine about all the ways to get HRT meds over here with all the local options, providers and import sites that I've found so far and links to self-med resources I want to translate into spanish. Hoping this rant motivates me to do so.
