Hasta La Gadget!

Food and fashion go hand in hand, at least for the editors here at HuffPost Style. So when we stumbled upon the Instagram account of Sunday Supper chef Laila Gohar, our hearts skipped a few beats.

The Egyptian cook’s flavorful food creations look just as awesome as her outfits. From her matte red lips (MAC Ruby Woo lipstick, of course) to her adorable turbans (she cuts African fabrics into head scarves to maintain her “erratic” hair), Gohar is one fabulous lady in the kitchen. It didn’t surprise us one bit that one of the chef’s best recipes has to do with beauty.

“I make a spritz of water and orange blossom flower and use it on my face as a toner, or just spray it all over as body spray. I even spray it on my plants! It’s such an amazing natural perfume. Traditionally, it’s used for Middle Eastern desserts like baklava,” she said.

Well, that’s all the inspiration we need to mix things up with our beauty routine!

1. “Hey, you! Have you had ‘the surgery’?”

This is kind of like someone coming up to you and asking about your vagina or penis. No, wait, it’s exactly like that. While there are some trans folks who are eager to start blabbering away about their nether regions, most of us consider our private parts, you know, private. Go figure.

2. “Do you love RuPaul? How about that Rocky Horror Picture Show?!”

It’s important to understand the difference between drag culture and trans reality. The former can be about performance, exaggeration, and entertainment; the latter is about people’s actual lives. Plenty of transgender people have begun their journeys in the drag community, and you will find many trans folks who adore all of the subversive, transgressive energy that drag can bring. But many of are uneasy when our lives are mistaken for “performance,” and it’s disrespectful to trans people to conflate the two.

As for Rocky Horror, here’s another delightful piece of subversive drag culture, made more enjoyably depraved over the years by the legendary participation of its audiences at the film’s midnight screenings. All of that is great. But remember that, while Frank N. Furter sings that he’s a “transsexual transvestite from Transylvania,” he’s surely not an actual trans woman any more than Al Jolson in blackface is actually Thurgood Marshall.

3. “So you must love that Judith Butler!”

OK, so plenty of transgender people love Butler’s groundbreaking work, which has to be respected for the way it brought the term “gender binary” (as in, “reject the gender binary”) into the vernacular (among other good reasons). But there are plenty of us who kind of sigh when we encounter a sentence like “If there is a sexual domain that is excluded from the Symbolic and can potentially expose the Symbolic as hegemonic rather than totalizing in its reach, it must be possible to locate this excluded domain either within or outside that economy and to strategize its intervention in terms of the placement.”

It’s worth remembering that for many trans people, our lives are not a clever academic theory but a daily struggle against violence and a difficult search for dignity and respect. If you’re talking to a trans person, make sure that you are thinking of them as an individual whose fight for identity is real, not as a person whose identity is some kind of scholarly abstraction.

4. “Can you can have an orgasm?”

Again, getting kind of personal with this one, aren’t you? Most trans people, post-surgery, are perfectly capable of orgasm, but perhaps it’s understandable if this isn’t the first thing folks want to talk about with a stranger. Author Kate Bornstein, in answering this question, playfully observed, “The plumbing works, and so does the electricity.” So, OK, the answer turns out to be The Hell Yes. But whenever someone asks me this question, I think of the story of the guy who kept asking his parrot, “Can you talk? Can you talk?” and at last the parrot says, “Actually, yes, I can talk. Can you fly?”

5. “You know who I feel sorry for? Your children.”

This is a classic way of being judgmental while pretending to be nonjudgmental. As it turns out, most trans people’s children are exactly as screwed-up, or not, as anyone else’s children. But it isn’t having a trans parent that affects children, either for the better or the worse. What damages children is other people treating their families with disrespect.

Three Good Questions to Ask a Transgender Person:

1. “How are you?”

By which I mean approach a trans person with exactly the same respect and open-heartedness with which you’d approach anyone else. In the same way that you wouldn’t begin a conversation with a stranger by inquiring about their race, their spiritual beliefs, or their politics, you probably wouldn’t want “So you’re transgender?” to be the first words out of your mouth. Many of us would rather not talk about what makes us different, especially with strangers. Many of us would rather talk, at least at first, about the things we have in common.

2. “Do you mind if I talk to you about some gender stuff?”

If you’ve established a rapport with a trans person and feel that the conversation has reached a point where Going There would be respectful, proceed with caution and see just how willing your new friend is to have at it. Most of us are happy to talk about the issues, at least in a general way, if we think we can do so in an atmosphere that feels safe.

3. “Are there books you’d recommend I’d read?”

When I first published my memoir, She’s Not There, a dozen years ago, there were precious few books that seemed to address our issues with much subtlety, or with any literary quality; that field was reserved pretty much for Kate Bornstein and her groundbreaking Gender Outlaw. Now there are lots of good books, by authors such as Helen Boyd, Jameson Green, Leslie Feinberg, and, yes, Judith Butler. I published a memoir of being a transgender parent this spring, Stuck in the Middle With You, as well as the updated anniversary edition of She’s Not There, which includes a new epilogue by my wife Deirdre Grace. Both of those books are available from Random House and other booksellers.

Two other recent standouts include Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, the first transition memoir to also address issues of gender theory, not to mention the unique challenges faced by trans people of color like Mock. And the brand-new Trans Bodies/Trans Selves, edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth (and with an introduction by me), is a 600-plus-page resource guide from Oxford University Press, containing information on identity, love, transition, and politics, written by trans people for trans people.

Finally, your own Jenny Boylan has just published a new novella, I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (Shebooks). This novella tells the story of the Riley family, traveling from Maine to Washington, D.C., to see their young son perform “The Flight of the Bumblebee” at Ford’s Theatre. But most of the drama focuses on 16-year-old Alex, a teenager who has just gone through transition. This is the first time I’ve written a piece of fiction for adults about trans identity, and I hope readers will find Alex an inspiring character, giving life, humor, and dignity to the experience of trans men and women.

I should also mention Alex’s grandmother, Gammie, who is in the car as well. In the opening scene she looks out the window to see a group of chefs leaning against a wall. “What happened?” she yells out the window. “Somebody spoil the broth?”

For more information on Jenny Boylan’s titles, click here.

No law has done more to reform health insurance and protect consumers against the industry’s most heinous practices than the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare didn’t magically transform insurers into benevolent entities solely devoted to taking care of sick people.

Health insurance companies, even those that are not-for-profit, have to collect more money in premiums than they shell out in claims for medical care. That means they have a financial incentive not to pay for things.

And since health insurance companies can no longer shun the sick to maximize profits — either by denying coverage to people based on their medical histories or by rescinding the policies of paying customers who fall ill and rack up bills — insurers are employing other tactics to shift costs to sick people and make it harder to get health care, consumer advocates say.

“One of the things that occurred to me, even as the bill was working its way through Congress, was that once it was passed, insurers would do all they could to try to preserve profit margins,” said Wendell Potter, a former Cigna executive turned industry critic.

Here are a few of the tactics that consumers and advocates have complained about:

Refusing to pay for medical care that should be covered

Nothing in Obamacare says insurance companies have to pay any bill that comes their way. That’s fine, because doctors and patients want things all the time that are wasteful and unnecessary, and everyone shares the cost for that.

But it means the law doesn’t prevent stuff like this from happening:

“Coverage denied…doesn’t meet criteria for medical necessity”. I WOULD CALL SAVING MY HUSBAND’S LIFE A MEDICAL NECESSITY YOU FUCKERS

— Zoe Keating (@zoecello) May 28, 2014

Zoë Keating is a musician with more than 1 million followers on Twitter. Her husband, Jeffrey Rusch, had been diagnosed with cancer at the emergency room, hospitalized and given chemotherapy. The insurance company refused to cover it — until Keating told her story to a San Francisco television station, according to reports on KPIX.

While the Affordable Care Act beefed up patients’ right to appeal denials by insurance companies, people still have to fight, which is to the insurer’s advantage. “A lot of people just simply don’t understand their appeals rights and don’t appeal, or think that they just don’t have a chance of getting something overturned,” Potter said. “The insurance companies know that.” Most people don’t have a million Twitter followers, either.

Making patients pick up a bigger share of the bill

To keep premiums as low as possible, insurance companies are pushing more of the cost of actual care on to their customers in the form of things like high deductibles and “coinsurance,” which requires patients to pay a percentage of the cost of their care, instead of making a flat copayment.

“Okay, Ashley, you’ve got diabetes, so you have to pay half the tab. Oh, and Brittany had a second glass of wine.”

And it’s virtually impossible to learn in advance how much medical care will actually cost, meaning patients are left in the dark.

“What this means for someone with cancer is that they may end up being directed away from a plan because they can’t find out whether their doctor is in the network, or whether the plan covers their drugs, on what tier and how much they have to pay out of pocket,” said Kirsten Sloan, senior director policy at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. Sending a cancer patient to a competitor would count as a win in the insurance industry.

Designing benefits to make the sickest patients pay more for drugs

Advocates for patients with serious medical conditions have been incensed by the practice of “tiered” drug lists, which have become a popular way for insurers to limit their expenses. Under this mechanism, the amount patients pay at the pharmacy is generally lower for cheap generic medicines and “preferred” brand-name drugs, higher for other brand-name drugs and higher still for the most expensive specialty medications.

The good stuff is always on a high shelf. Almost got it!

High cost-sharing and top-tier status for drugs that treat ailments like HIV and multiple sclerosis are common in insurance policies bought via the Obamacare exchanges, the consulting firm Avalere Health reported last month. That looks an awful lot like insurers discriminating against sick people, the AIDS Institute claimed in a complaint filed against four Florida insurers with the federal government in May.

“Where we’ve seen the problems is putting every single HIV drug, including generics, on the highest tier, and that with very high coinsurance, like 40 or 50 percent,” said Carl Schmid, deputy executive director of the AIDS Institute. “There’s plenty of plans in Florida that don’t do this, and charge $10, $20 a copay for the same drugs.”

Limiting access to doctors and hospitals

Health insurance plans sold via Obamacare exchanges often have “narrow networks,” or shorter lists of medical providers that accept those plans than people with job-based insurance or Medicare might expect. Insurers need to keep costs down, and tough negotiating with high-priced doctors and hospitals can do that. This ends up saving the whole health care system money, including insurance customers.

The trouble is, when those networks don’t include enough of the specialty care providers that take care of the sickest, most expensive patients — like, say, cancer centers — it has the effect of denying care to those very sick people because they can’t get appointments.

“Sorry, bro. Not on the list.”

“Insurers might try to avoid people with HIV or cancer or expensive conditions by avoiding the doctors that tend to treat those people, but otherwise their network looks robust,” said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “Whether it’s happening — no way to know yet.” The Obama administration and state regulators are poised to take action to compel insurers to beef up their networks, The New York Times reported.

Rolling out the red tape

To save money, insurance companies will be stricter about approving and paying for medical treatments, said Carmen Balber, executive director of the nonprofit organization Consumer Watchdog. “I have no doubt that claims denials or delays will be the new discriminatory tactic of the industry,” she said.

In Seattle, one doctor said she has to work harder to get treatments approved this year. “There are more hoops that the provider has to jump through,” said Grace Wang, the medical director of the International Community Health Services Holly Park Medical and Dental Clinic.

“We’ll gladly pay your claim — after you perform a death-defying escape, Houdini.”

Wang returned to the clinic after Memorial Day weekend and attempted to follow up on a request she’d made to refer a patient to a specialist. The insurance company said her request already had been rejected because she hadn’t called back quickly enough.

“Their clock started ticking on Sunday. Monday was a national holiday, and so when 48 hours went by, they denied,” said Wang. “A conspiracy theorist would wonder.”

The advent of online file sharing made it easy for anyone to copy and distribute media for free, and many feel—and fear—that 3D printing will eventually do the same for physical products. So it’s surprisingly refreshing to hear that a corporation like Hasbro has decided to embrace 3D printing, and will work with Shapeways to allow fans to design and sell their own toys based on the company’s properties.

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