For some reason EU-Aibolit is neither listed on diyhrt.market and hrtcafe.net. hrt.coffee still lists them, but is notoriously outdated, so I would not normally recommend to look there. In any case, when I wanted to start DIY in January of this year, an acquaintance of mine recommended them to me and I decided to trust her judgement. Iâve since ordered three or four times with them and can only report positive experiences in that I got exactly what I ordered and considering that it seems to have worked, itâs also very unlikely that those things were forgeries, though I havenât gotten those things lab-tested.
One thing to be aware of is that the primary way of ordering from them is by email, specifically euaibolit@gmail.com and telling them what you need there. They are generally very responsive, but keep in mind that gmail is an asshole about declaring many mails not sent via them or microsoft as spam (very clearly this is not about spam but to further consolidate mail with them!), so be aware of that when you sent from a different address.
(They also have a website and you can find their offers there if you know exactly what you are looking for, but I found it much easier to tell them by mail that Iâm trans in which case they sent you the list with the stuff that is relevant to you, and was just a much more pleasant experience.)
With that out of the way, a short report on my last experience:
I sent them an email in late September and shortly after received a response with payment instructions. After I payed via wire-transfer in very early October I received a shipping code on the next day. Shipping took a while because it was done via Czech post who took their time to bring it to the Netherlands where it arrive 1-2 weeks afterwards at my employer. (it took a little bit longer for the package to make it from there to me, but is really not their fault.)
The one minor thing to mention is that they clearly keep the mail addresses of the people that ordered from them, because they did send an unrequested advertisement for some websites that they are now running (order by Email still works however). Keep this in mind if you consider this an unacceptable risk. (Personally I am very outspoken about having done DIY until I received my official prescription, even with my full name attached to it, so my only concern would be actual spam on the address, but so far that hasnât happened.)
In short: Aibolit still seems to be fine for within-EU orders if you want to pay by wire transfer.
Okay, there is a lot to unpack here, and I kinda wanted to buy groceries now, so I'll make it quick.
Yes, I was speaking generally about general tendencies in the simple case of binary trans people going through the typical âfullâ program. There are a lot of nuances, especially among nonbinary people, where this becomes more murky. But it's worth noting that the same holds for binary cis people, things are far from simple there either: As I wrote, sex is a bimodal distribution and if you assign people to the peak they are closer to, what I wrote will be a reasonable first approximation.
That is a fair approach, I recently understood that I have kinda always rejected the notion of social gender roles on a pretty fundamental level, making it far more about outward biological characteristics more relevant.
So: âYes, butâŠâ
Yes. you always have a grey zone, but that notably doesn't invalidate the concept of a fish, it just means that we have to be aware that not everything fits perfectly.