My professional training for subcutaneous injection when I started them over 4 years ago was done through a phone call. It's not rocket science, it's genuinely hard to fuck them up. You aren't finding a vein, as it isn't an intravenous injection, you aren't even at risk of hitting a vein (like with intramuscular). You're just injecting into the fat layer. The injection leaves a depot of medication in the fat that is absorbed by fat cells very slowly, usually over the course of multiple weeks in oil-based suspensions.

I have never once messed up a subcutaneous injection, and I've done them while blackout drunk before. It is significantly riskier to use an EpiPen on someone, and those are commonplace (and I'm not talking about the effects of epinephrine, I'm talking purely about the safety of injection). I cannot get it across just how incredibly hard it is to fuck up a subcutaneous injection. OP is not at any risk here; you're manufacturing fear in a place that should be celebrating OP. Please stop; it does nothing to help anyone.

Lack of gender affirming care for gender dysphoria has been shown to lead to significantly increased risk of suicide. If you're unaware, suicide is deadly, so yes, it is life threatening. Over 40% of transgender adults in the US have attempted suicide in their life. Transitioning, and specifically implementing gender affirming care like hormone replacement therapy, has been shown to significantly decrease the risk of suicide. So yes, HRT is a life saving treatment.

As someone with chronic health issues that I've been hospitalized for multiple times that would also certainly qualify as "life threatening", I am in no way "insulted" by gender dysphoria being called life threatening. In fact, now that I am properly medicated for my health issues, I'd say gender dysphoria is the second most deadly thing in my life. It's only usurped by Borderline Personality Disorder (which cannot be treated with medication), which has a completed suicide rate of 10%, and up to 85% of people with BPD are estimated to attempt at some point in their life.

Please stop attempting to minimize and illegitimize our problems. The only thing "insulting" happening in these comments is your fear mongering and blatant dismissal of trans issues.

EDIT: This released a few minutes after I commented, and I found it to be incredibly topical to this comment: Hormone replacement therapy lowers suicidality by nearly 70% among transgender youth

Yeah, I started on 4mg Estradiol Cypionate as monotherapy, and I'm down to 2mg and it still may be too much. It's definitely different for everyone

That's a completely fair point, I just do some really wacky stuff on my servers that doesn't play well with immutable.

No, I just have a natural tendency to be incredibly verbose and specific, and this is a process I've been doing for years now, so I'm hyperaware of how to do it

Yeah, I have the same experience. Barring sudden changes to included softwares (like changing Discover out for Bazaar), my Bazzite installation just works without any intervention, and major version updates are applied in regular updates.

I've been self-administering medications subcutaneously for over 4 years, with a prescription. It's genuinely really hard to fuck up a subcutaneous injection,and watching a single video on how to do it (or reading a nurse's guide lime I did) is more than enough to understand it. Subcutaneous injection is an injection into the fat layer, so it does not involve hitting a vein or muscle. The most common points of administration are the abdomen and the thighs. Here are the steps, for reference:

• Wash hands thoroughly
• Gather all materials including an alcohol swap, the vial of medication, a sharps container, and a syringe (you can use a separate needle for drawing and injecting, but the insulin syringes OP has come with a needle attached, so you have to use the same one for both)
• Use alcohol swab to clean the seal of the vial and the injection site
• Uncap the needle and plunger, then pull the plunger to fill the syringe with air up to the volume of the dosage you will be administering (this is to offset the volume lost in the vial by drawing the medication)
• Hold the needle like a pencil in your hand, with the face of the bevel pointing upwards (so you can see the interior of the shaft)
• Hold the vial upright, and when the alcohol on the vial has fully evaporated, insert the tip of the needle into the core of the vial starting at a 45° angle with the tip of the bevel entering first, then smoothly turning as inserting to reach a 90° angle
• Once the needle is fully inserted, expel the air into the vial
• With one hand on the vial and one on the syringe, invert the vial so that it is upside down (so the needle is immersed in the fluid)
• Slowly draw medication past the dosage required
• Flick the syringe to loosen any bubbles so they float upwards towards the needle
• Expel the air bubble(s) at the top of the syringe so that there is no air left in the syringe (you may have to draw more medication and expel air multiple times with a thick fluid), then push the plunger until you've reached your desired dosage
• Remove the needle from the vial in a single motion; you are now ready to inject
• Grasp the needle like a pencil again, with the bevel facing upwards
• Pinch the area of the skin where you will be injecting, holding between 1-2 inches of skin
• In a single swift motion, insert the needle at a 45° angle into the skin, again with the tip of the bevel entering first (or if you aren't as lean, you can use a 90° angle)
• Release the pinch from your skin
• Slowly inject the medication, and keep the syringe in until 4 seconds after the plunger bottoms out to prevent medication from leaking out upon extraction
• In a straight motion, remove the needle from the skin, and immediately dispose in a sharps container
• Clean up your supplies and you're done!

I know that's a lot of steps, but I promise the process is really simple and intuitive after you've done it once. I went into an extreme amount of detail.

U won't break the needle by inserting it into yourself, skin and fat are far too flexible to provide ample force to snap it! Take it from a girlie who has been on E since January (and has taken medications subcutaneously for over 4 years), it's a lot less painful with a single, quick motion!

I mean, people inject insulin daily, so how is this any different? Spoiler alert: it's not. These are insulin syringes they're using, and based on the needle length, they're definitely doing it subcutaneously, just like insulin. Diabetics can't pay for a nurse to inject them every day, nor should they. Subcutaneous injections are incredibly easy to administer; you just inject the medication into the fat layer (not a vein).

I can't imagine anyone would want the former, either. We've seen how horrendously insecure vibe-coded projects are, just look at Tea as an example.

I'd agree with that take. I think that immutable distros can appeal to everyone, and after a decade of Linux use, I feel I've toned back how much I need to edit the finer details of my system. I still thoroughly customize my desktop environment, but small tweaks to the root filesystem are generally unnecessary for me. /etc isn't immutable (at least not in Bazzite), and that's where much of my customization happens, at least what's outside of my home folder. I find myself writing plenty of bash scripts that I can just keep in ~/.local/bin/ instead of /usr/local/bin/. Beyond that, KDE has so much customization built in, that the only thing I've done before that required an overlay to change was the login screen background, which was a simple conf edit with a one-liner overlay command, and has been rock solid ever since.

I think the main difference is that immutable distros just require you to think differently about how you customize your system. You can do anything you want to it with overlays, but I find that I simply don't need to do any of those things with a distro like Bazzite. It already has gaming-oriented kernel tweaks, including tweaks to the scheduler, so I'm getting what I would have done anyway, but done in a way that is tested and stable. Granted, I'm sure some of it depends on which immutable distro you use, but that's true of mutable distros as well.

I'd like to make a counter point to this. I'm an enthusiast who hosts my own servers and has been using Linux for well over a decade exclusively. I personally love having Bazzite on my main desktop, as it always works as expected. Of course, I wouldn't use immutable on my servers, but I think it's perfectly fine for a desktop OS. I always have rpm-ostree overlays if/when I need to change something immutable, though I've found myself not really needing to do so. I get by with only making changes to my home folder.

Immutable distros just have a great user experience, and don't ever break on their own. I personally recommend them to everyone for desktop use.