gender euphoria
@koosli@aus.social mine is mediterranean themed
it has:
lychee liqueur
vanilla vodka
elderflower liqueur st. germaine
mint
lime
mineral water
she calls it
The Breezy
my merveille freak out
day 1
16 sep
what level of out am i already at here? how much more should I cone out? silly question maybe, but how safe is it? i’ve been pretty preoccupied and stressed out the past month because i made a decision that requires me to; eventually, come out to my friends, parents and my job and i find the idea daunting
17 sep
okay soft semi-anonymous coming out time. hope this doesn’t backfire.
on the eve of my 40th i have decided that I am trans. i mean; of course i have always been trans, but the final nail in the coffin of my denial was handed to me, and so now begins the “oh fuck, i have to transition” part of my journey. which is and always has been utterly terrifying for me, not least of which because of the worry that i will never ever pass. I will just have to find a way to live with that.
i’m also bi. hi.
i have already been toying with the pronouns in my bio here, but i get the feeling nobody ever takes much notice of those.
a bit of a side note; i am a jokey sorta person so the temptation to put in joke pronouns is strong in me. but i have ultimately decided to accept that this diminishes and demans not just myself but other trans people; a conclusion from careful thought.
big deal, right? lots of trans people on fedi. why the freak out?
i don’t want to feel like i am misleading or tricking anyone here. a while back someone got the idea I was a cis woman and started behaving pretty toxically at me. creepy flirting mixed with vague transphobic undertones. fuck that. but also, conversely, i don’t want to get into the situation where someone decides to trust me under the pretence i am a cis woman and then feel betrayed when the truth comes out.
these could be argued to be problems with the world and with fedi; but i still have toe xist within it don’t I?
i could put trans in my bio, but , i don’t want this one thing to define me as a person, which it can tend to do. anyone else feel like that?
also in case this helps anyone else, the final nail in the coffin was trying to imagine who I was going to be for the rest of my life. I had always argued, within my own mind, that I could not be trans because from what I read, trans people felt so intensely about it that they would rather kill themselves than go on as the wrong gender.
i felt that wasn’t me because I didn’t feel that intensely about it. so i nust not be trans. (cont)
so what changed was realising that what I did have, was a supernatural excellence in something i now finally have a name for: disassociation.
i thought, falsely, that this was something everyone did and it was just a normal part of being human. but what it enables me to do is very effectively hypnotise myself into believing that whatever is painful in my life just simply isn’t true or doesn’t exist. and I do it so well I believe it and convince others of it. i learned this to survive my life.
but you can only ignore things for so long, and what i realised is that I am completely ineffective at pretending to be a man, which is what I have been trying to do all along. I’ve not been convincing to anyone; and when thinking about who i am inside and how I wish other people could see me, none of it fits any of the cultural stereotypes about what men should be, and learning those things holds no appeal for me. but that’s what I would need to do. and the longer i wait the worse off
so while i don’t feel strongly suicidal about it, i also can’t imagine life as a man. my mind comes up blank. i don’t know how.
maybe that’s oversharing, but i hope it’s paying it forward. it’s reading things like this that helped me to get here. i just wish i got here a lot sooner
anywya thanks everyone for the encouraging words; i hope this has not been too obnoxiously self indulgent.
Amanda @mnda@scholar.social @zens this looks A LOT like my own process, and I also came out “late” in life compared to the teens and young 20s you keep hearing about (I was 30). Best of luck!
i didn’t really have an option. i am pretty sure i realised I was trans back when I was 12 but there was nothing I could do about it back then. I didn’t have the language, resources, or supportive family
[CMDR Yojimbosan [UTC+13] @yojimbo@hackers.town](https://hackers.town/@yojimbo) @zens Sometimes you have to say these things out loud to make them more real for yourself.
0
áster a. endu @sejo @zens thank you very much for sharing all this
milo @milofultz @zens if it matters at all, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Hoping the near future for you is less stressful
Lucy @lucyd240 @zens the notion of every precious moment of life condemned to embodied reality ticking away while numbly cosplaying an alienating physical/social role resonates so strongly with me, especially as i navigate early transition. Lost seconds are distressing, as much as I try to appreciate the beautiful complexity of myself in flux. Comparison becomes such a trap too. Ahh thanks voicing this sentiment
Lizbeth @ritualdust @zens i can relate so much with that, i could persuade myself that i could live as a man in the moment and the bear future but what really broke the denial and compartmentalization for me was imagining myself getting old as a man, i couldn’t accept that and feel ok about it. And indeed dissociation often makes gender dysphoria less noticeable, and I’ve definitely felt it more when transitioning, but it also numbs you from so much more good shit too ~
smiffy
@zens I have totally got your back. I’m not going to kid either of us by saying that this is going to be plain sailing for you, but utterly there when it isn’t
And I have to confess to being quite excited about this for you. It’s like witnessing a re-birth, and has a major squee factor for me..
Also I hope you have recovered from yesterday’s CF incident.
supporters:
@jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com
@lucyd240
@milofultz
@ritualdust
@sejo
@tendigits
day 2
18 sep
sorry if i am a bit annoying today with the trans things. it’s like i have been holding my breath for a very long time and I am just lightheaded and giddy
how many months in before my disney solo number grows in, do you think?
i’ve been quietly transitioning for a while now, i did a practice coming out on here yesterday that was nice. very supportive.
today all the nerve endings in my skin rewired. i am super sensitive to touch all of a sudden. very strange and interesting experience
like one of those songs that takes on a different meaning after a life experience
day 3
sep 20th
Signs that should have been obvious that i ignored
- age 9, learning about the existence of trans men for the first time from a day time trash show, and that they just needed to take testosterone and it totally worked. wishing that worked the other way around. but (i thought) too bad it doesn’t
- seeing transwomen that pass, for the first time on another daytime talkshow. (i did not know that was possible) and seriously mulling over telling my dad (who i was watching the show with) I wanted to do that; really stressing and playing thr conversation over and over again in my head- just before i say something he says some horrifying denigrating thing about transwomen and I stopped.
i can’t even remember what it was, all I know was that it stuck with me that it didn’t matter how much I wanted this, I wouldn’t get hekp from my parents
- finding a pdf of the book “mom, I want to be a girl” and reading is straight through in the middle of the night, so my parents wouldn’t know; and reading the story of a trans girl who started transitioning at the age I was at that time- and finding out for the first time that if you start that early on hormones, you don’t even need surgery to pass.
spent the next day crying because it was so out of reach.
folks, this is kinda weird. i didn’t know I had these memories until just now. how did I ignrore these so hard?
well I guess now I know what that missing time was. 12-18: total blank
- over simplifying a lot here, for effect;
every major relationship in my life, up until my current partner, was with a lesbian who only told me they were a lesbian, and i was thier first boy, AFTER we had been ttogether for a while.
this is almost one of those bullshit conversion therapy stories about lesbians “just needing to find the right man” but with an m knight shyamalan twist
- watching gay porn to prove I wasn’t attracted to men and that I wasn’t gay. not getting the answer I expected.
- years of trying very very hard to train myself to lucid dream that I was a girl, in a girl body, since I couldn’t have that for real.
- my ex wife was 4 inches taller than me and frequently mistaken for a man.
also, she lost a bet with her friends because nobody thought she would ever ever ever be with a boy
- tried to date for a while on ok cupid after my divorce.
it was a complete disaster. women would see my pictures and profile and enthusiastically want to meet; apparently I was kind of attractive; in photos anyhow.
then they’d meet me and be mysteriously disappointed. i wasn’t catfishing anyone. something about the way I act? i asked them; to try and figure it out. most of them would try to say something polite. one was quite blunt. “i’m only into men, you know?”
(i had no clue what she meant)
- very nearly castrating myself when I was 15 but chickening out.
(oh come on. really, brain? you’re such a bitch for keeping this one from me.
- crossdressing in private at every opportunity?
jeeze i wasn’t kidding about this disassociation thing. all this and I was still convinced that I was normal, cis straight as an arrow. how?!
- not even trying anything and getting catcalled, wolf whistled and flirted with by random men. I had no idea how to respond- because i guess i was my straight cis male alter or something, jeeze. i hope i haven’t been doing something ridiculous like runnibg a fight club, or hacking evilcorp
- obsessively listening to an album (beautifull garbage) over and over again. I listened to it again recently and only now realised that the whole album is about how awesome and okay being trans is. huh. how did i.. miss that?
- heard that soy milk and lavender had phytoestrogens and were giving boys breasts. nearly gave myself liver damage from exposing myself as much as I could.
what? no brain, you gotta be making that one up, it’s too on the nose.
unfortunately that one is real. now I remember my dad catching on to it and I had to stop. in retrospect it turbs out the thing about soy milk and phytoestrogens isn’t even true; so ..
gosh i don’t really think have anything left to prove here, do I? i am sure i could absolutely keep going though, i came here to just post a couple funny anecdotes, opened the old attic and all the tribbles fell out.
just remembered my ex wife had bigger feet than me.
hehehe. cool.
toxic family experience?
well, i guess. I’ve sorta had a lifelong dysfunctional memory. it’s mysterious as hell because if I sit down and take a memory test my memory is excellent— above average even. both short term and long term. but somehow I keep forgetting things. the things I tend to forget have a suspicious pattern; they’re very important and they give me anxiety from how important they are.
these just drop straight out of my head.
hmmm
side conversation with smiffy
It’s a very significant rite of passage (been trying to think of that term for two days now) so it’s not like it’s a minor development or anything. And not being something that’s happened gradually (at least, to the rest of us,) so it’s pretty huge.
I hope you are finding relief, now that the switch has flicked (not the exact expression I wanted, but it’s too early, and I’m too tired.)
i have been taking baby steps since at least 2017. but the “nail” a few months ago (i can find the exact post where i alluded but didn’t say) and the beinf out to the handful of folks here, some irl like you; it does feel like a weight off
but in truth, thinking back, i’ve known since i was a kid. i was just, y’know, shamed by my entire family and exteded family into a deep denial about it. grr. it’s just taken me this long to finally feel safe
of course i ill have to tell tgem eventually and that’s what i dread most
my mom is.. well… kind of a terf
Fuck. But that sort of fits together, in that it’s only now that it’s coming together for you. Which is rather sad, that parents can stop you from being you for so long, even if you didn’t realise it.
and it has come to light that i have a hormonal condition that, according to wikipedia, mostly only occurs in women and trans women; and has symptoms of dissassociation and gender dysphoria. it seems my hormones have been sorta “naturally” putting me in a weird halfway point. so i dnded up reading about disassociation and- well the rest fell into place
as i said in my earlier public post i realised that i had felt that intensely about it, and my flight to australia and the way i went about it- actually holding a funeral for myself… it was all fog horn level signs that i was somehow able to block out
So you knew, but you didn’t know you knew.Our brains are strange things.
Oh, now that’s interesting. Another nail in the coffin of the shitstains saying it’s not “natural.”
Oh, speaking of hormones, that reminds me that it’s Putting Very Large Needle In My Arse Day. Not the most comfortable form of HRT.
yes, i admit that it occured to me that this stuff could lead to me getting prescribed testosterone and that really was my breaking point
if i didn’t put my hand up now, doctors would be doing the wrong things for me
Yep. When it’s your biochemistry telling you - but with the potential to be misinterpreted.
Having a fucked pituitary I know just how easy it is to get this stuff wrong.
and yeah i have thought quite a lot about intersex conditions too. the huge variety of dozens, hubdreds of ways to be intersex; with variation examples extending across every degree, smashing the sex binary. and it occured to me; how many are they not counting because there’s no obvious external, internal or genetic signs?
To be honest, I’d say that not only is the binary concept bollocks, but I think it’s wrong to enumerate AT ALL.
Some things just shouldn’t be counted, because it doesn’t make sense to do so.
koosly says
my buddy is trans, her dad is a bikie and she grew up with him making threats about if you ever do this and that I’ll break your back etc. Now she’s his favourite kid (simplistic retelling, but you get the idea)
that must be nice
https://merveilles.town/@zens/106917756632660896
day 4
Sep 21.
little things
- it turns out that i constantly subconsciously force my voice down an octave, and the moment I allow myself to stop. feeling afraid of being read as feminine my vocal chords relax go way up in pitch to whatt is a surprisingly feminine sounding natural voice
- my hips are looser. a chronic nerve pinch has gone away; my whole centre of gravity has shifted, and every day, slowly, it feels like my body fits more. so not just my voice but all my muscles have been subconscously trying to hide me from being identified as too effeminate.
- for years and years I’ve put off transitioning out of fear that I am a fake trans, and i was just delusional to think that i could ever make it work and not be seen as mockingly pretending to be a woman.
after yesterday’s recovered memories, and how much less pretending I am doing now, it’s amazing I could have thought that.
- a somewhat rude shock is how difficult women’s shoes in my size are to find. I spy other trans women stressing out about it on here too- major cause of dysphoria; it’s like society at large telling you you’re dreaming.
whcih is why- to add context- i was amused yesterday to remember that my ex wife’s feet were bigger than mine.
women’s shoes don’t just cut transwomen out, it’s society at large telling a heap of cis women that they’re too masculine to exist too
- never ever getting sick if “Let it Go” from Disney’s Frozen had to have been a sign; surely
- i would like to be able to sing this.
i wanna be able to sing this song and not sound painful. this may be an unachievable goal.
but i got a sing training app and it helped me confirm one thing.
supposedly male voices average at 120hz; female at 200hz
my relaxed voice is averaging right in the middle. hmmmm
- so i’ve been measuring various things and comparing myself to the average for male and female. i mean, maybe it’s silly, i gotta find me, but isn’t it suspicious that I am dead set in the middle of the two averages for height, foot size, and now vocal pitch.
it’s like i am straddling the gender binary. ride’em horsey!
@syntacticsugarglider it’s definitely been interesting for me to notice little repressions in body languagespeechetc. that i’ve had to notice and release over time
my partner noticed that my voice goes even lower when I am talkung to my parents
ah interesting
izzy: i wish i had more perspective on myself in a lot of ways tbh, since i usually don’t notice things like this
sometimes i’ll catch a lot of variance in my pitch or resonance and won’t be able to attribute it to anything… i think i avoid being aware of these things since presence in my body/voice is often deeply uncomfortable and for a long time was even moreso
bri: well, yes, as you’ve probably been reading a lot of my process has been undoing the reflexive disassociation, and accidentally unlocking a whole bunch of stuff i’ve been unknowingly holding in all my life. i hate feeling like a stranger in my own body and my own life. i want to be truly present.
but yeah, like you I still cringe at the mirror
smiffy:
That is quite amazing. To have been subconsciously, well, I guess acting, for SO LONG. I had assumed that there would be a lot of self-discovery, but this is going directions I'd never have thought of.
We are REALLY good at convincing ourselves that things are other than they are.
I don’t know if it’s a survival thing, but it’s cruel.
it’s definutely been a survival thing for me. what I have posted so far sounds way worse than what I would ordinarily be willing to post about; but honestly it’s just the tip of the iceberg
just think i have needed to be on the other side of the planet for 13 years to begin to feel kinda safe
That’s pretty rough.
well; not really. i’ve had that supernaturally powerful disassociation protecting me.
it’s going to be rough as i take those walls down and the hurt stsrts pouring out
Well, we’re all here for you when it does. I don’t know if it will make it any less painful, but you won’t be alone.
frozen
smiffy re: frozen
Is that the same song as the Connor Engström one you shared with me yesterday? Engström’s voice doesn’t click with me, but I get the dynamics of the song. I am inclined to investigate other covers, if this is the case.
Sorry, Engstrom. Swedish is my second autocarrot language, so that was SwiftKey trying to be helpful, supplying the ö.
yes , same song except the original is notorious for driving parents absolutely nuts from their little girls playing it over and over. so it’s also notorious for everyone being absolutely sick of it.
and yet, somehow i just can’t get enough
it’s also a song set in the part of the movie where the main character elsa, exiled from her home, has decided to stop trying to constantly live up to her long dead parents’ expectations and finally be herself and let her powers out
it may forever be a mystery why that premise resonates so much
“conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know”
what? i’m not crying, no. that’s just ice magic
“well, now they know.
let it go, let it go,
can’t hold it back anymore
let it go let it go
turn away and slam that door”
might listen to this on loop for a while for some catharsis
(original https://
liam hogan re: voice pitches
I don’t think I believe this as a generalisation TBH—my own public speaking voice is low but singing voice (such as it is) is a good deal higher. And I know others who are the reverse. Which is to say if you can get the notes, who cares the octave
day 5
sep 22
had first dream where subconscious I’d finished transitioning.
also dreamt @futzle reccomended i summon a “klovtovitch”,
i had no idea what it was so i looked it uo in the dream; it’s some kind of ancient european demon who can speed along transitions of a certain type; with unspecified horrifying consequences.
the dream played out wifh a fleetwood mac song.
constructed an elaborate coming out fantasy as a way of diffiusing anxiety around my parent’s reaction. started to tell partner but it launched her into a full on panhc attack because she thought I really did want to put in a theater production in the near future and she didn’t know where she was going to get the costumes in lockdown and on such short notice.
oops.
i didn’t think i was possible but i think she’s about 1000x more anxious about coming out to my family than I am.
i see two possible outcomes.
- their weird hippy cult belief system is based around me as the messiah, so maybe cognitive dissonance kicks in and they rewrite their mythology around it.
- the extreme opposite of that.
i am kind of okay with either outcone.
i would have said their extreme and genuine love for me would override sll phobias, but that’s not quite what elaborate cultish belief systems are.
last time I spoke to my father he told me he was gratified that i had fulfilled the symbolic death of the father phase of the prophesy.
he was happy i moved far away and basically never talk to him; he’s reconstructed the mythology so that’s what was meant to happen all along
yeah i guess this is thd first time i’m mentioning this on here. I’m supposed to be god. of jesus. or.. something. not sure; just that god had a vision of me and commanded my parents to have me.
that was kind of.. a lot. growing up.
‘i’m christian!”
“i’m jewush. what religion do you have.”
me at 7: ..
“… me?”
annnyways: the outcome my partner envisions is they decide to blame it all on her and set about constructing elaborate plans of extreme passive aggression to attempt to destroy her.
which uhh, isn’t entirely unrealistic. but, one way this doesn’t happen is they’re just too stoned and dopey to pull off elaborate plans like this
package lords notified me that this is arriving today, and I am excited
I swear this is going to be one of the things that is going to be a constant source of self consciousness and dysphoria…
On the one hand, even when I’m pushing my voice deeper, I still sound very very girly.
but my natural/relaxed voice is not quite female passing either.
I’m going to be a perpetual inbetween.
tomorrow’s the day I talk to the doctor about this and trying very hard not to freak out about it
PROPHESIES
mood:
did they get any prophesies or just you? seems like a hard thing to get past, when a parent sets it up like that
oh god. (oh me? heh); the prophesies are a whole thing. and part of the resson i was so desperate to get out of there. i got a meeting now so; uh. i can elsborate later if you’re curious
okay- well first part to understand is that god is an emergent property of the bio-morpho-genetic field; a world wide radio network formed by billions of mitichondrions intercommunicating with each other, with their own memes and viral ideas and emergent consciousnessess. god is like the super consciousness.
so- imagine the epic level spittake i had in the theater in 1999 when qui gon jin loojed st a device and said the boy’s miduclorian levels are off the charts
the second thing to understand is that at any given time, an individual human may embody the intent of one of those emergent consciousnesses, including god’s intent.
and so prophecies worked by one of two methods: you either took s lot of lsd to connect your consciousness directly to the morohic field,
or you used a proccess they called “tendencious apreception”- that is, noting syncronocities over time and interpreting them as a narrative.
since the energent consciousnesses sorra stochasticall manipulate the behavior of many people; you xan kinda hear them talking to you as the collective coice of lots of people together
so here’s the final clincher- the logixal conclusion to all this is to get as many tv’s and radios as you can all tubed to different channels all pkaying simultaneously really loudly 24 hours a day. to listen for the aliens to talk to you.
so now you dan see why i had a nervous breakdown from dleep deprivation and had to get the fuck out off there
for a while i thought all this elsborate bullshit was worth writing down. my parents could go in some absolutely exhaustingly long lectures on all this shit. but once i saw the phantom menace; i realised sll this shit came from somewhere if geirge lucas was tslking about it too
so morphic fields, emotional pkague, and other batty stuff it turns out all come from popular hippy pseudoscience books sll released roughly between 1973 and 1977. i am sure everything my parents went on about can be found on certain book lists from that era.
thing is they decided it would be cool to do unsanctioned osychological experiments on their kid based on these theories.
basicall, i am 11 from stranger things
it is for this reason that i now have the dobbs.town instance banned now. i didn’t know what it was at first, but plenty of the people there are seinmibg in the same shit
i just saw an ibterview with a survivor from mk ultra, who said that she reentered society feeling like an alien, unable to relate to humanity.
that’s ehat wes done to me
Doctor Beans at dobbs town is a transphobic dude who did some very skeevy skin crawly flirting with me the second he got the idea i was a cis woman. when i saw he made orgone crystals- an object that was used by wilhelm reich as an excuse to perform the same unsanctioned and sexually abusive psychological experiments on many children through the 1970s…
it makes me insanely mad to see fedi lefties just casually fet interested snd exciteecabout this stuff.
ov god. the makes me a survivor of child sexusl zbuse doesn’t it?
please nooo not more suppressed memories. not like this
i’m sure it is — processing something, especially childhood trauma, across more than one gender is such a complex thing the positive news i suppose is that one can take one’s time. the thoughts and feelings are tremendously urgent in their emergence and that makes it all more potentially painfully overwhelming, i think
day 6
woke up early and can’t get back to sleep from freaking out over this doctor’s appointment. so today’s gender euphoria thread will be affirmations. Trans narratives that over the years helped me to live, and “guilty pleasures”; things that I have always loved but could never admit because boys aren’t supposed to like that stuff.
- Ozma of Oz
Saving the best for first.
I cannot believe this one does not get discussed more often. This book is the direct sequel to The Wizard of Oz; and primarily concerns the adventures of a boy named Tip, who lives in Oz raised by a witch who is abusive and keeps him isolated from the rest of the world. he escapes and meets various characters. He eventually discovers that he is sctually the princess of oz, ozma, disguised as the boy tip by the witch’s curse.
- Ranma 1/2
Yeah okay this one is a bit obvious perhaps, but let’s get this out of the way. Ranma 1/2 was a rather popular anime about a high school age martial arts expert who, in the course of his training, is “cursed” by being transformed into a woman after falling into a hot spring in china.
from that point forward, being doused in cold water turns him into a girl, and taking a hot bath turns him back into a boy.
what I wouldn’t gave given for this curse he didn’t want. or for tip’s curse to be lifted from me.
Ozma of oz even cuts pretty close to home since, well, i now live in Oz? Oz is pretty rad. i even hooked up with a country farm girl like Ozma does with Dorothy.
oh yeah, I didn’t mention the L word before. Ozma snd Dorothy are in LESBIANS
- Rainbow Brite.
This was my absolutely most favouritest show when I was 4.
I can’t really tell you any more about it because 4 year olds aren’t old enough to understand and remember plots. i just remember her being AWESOME and pretty and she had a rainbow wand that could make rainbows and she had sparkly pets and sparkly friends and I wanted her life.
at the time this felt normal, but in retrospect i’m surprised i wasn’t shipped off to bootcamp then and there
i am glad i remembered this cos i seem to always see trans people say they “knew” at some absurdly young age like 3, and i always feel like a fake because I didn’t?
but what else do you call desperately wanting to be rainbow brite, strawberry shortcake, and wanting allll the my little ponies?
i had a godamned princess phase
wait am I remembering this right?
glitter
I was obsessed with glitter when I was .. about 4 or 5 i guess?
and batons and gymnastics. and rainbow tassles.
I mean. i also liked tonka trucks and playing in mud, but honestly who doesn’t?
- well this is pretty cliché but when I was 8 I was super jealous of the neighbor girl’s barbie collection and I would spend hours at her house putting on the different outfits, and doing the role play games.
my parents told me it was normal for boys to play with barbies. since then, I have discovered thet while this is true, the usual modes of play are a bit more violent and sexual than what I was doing. I was actually emotionally invested in playing barbie “properly”
conversely I could not muster this level of enthusiasm for “action figures”. I would try and play along but, while he man did have a bare cheet thing going that gave me feelings I didn’t understand; i didn’t get why he was going to a castle to do anything other than a tea party
- Pink strawberry flavored milk.
i mean, this was fine, there wasn’t a problem with this until other kids shamed me away from it. C’est l vie
0.. The call happened
0b. there will be no further comment at this time
(my gp called and I anxiously told her what was going on, and she got me a referral)
- Switch
look, i am not saying this is a good film, but there was so few transgender narratives for me in the 1980s a d 1990s I kind of needed to take what I could get.
it’s just a shame that the message of this film is, unintentionally, that you can get a female body but you have to die and be reincarnated as cosmic punishment for your hatred of women, because god is a sadist.
- All of Me
again a turrible “comedy” movie where the whole joke is “isn’t gender dysphoria hilarious?”
Lily Tomlin’s character is a billionaire heiress who has turned to exotic magicks in an effort towards inmortality. her soul is transferred to a jug of water which is accidentally dropped on Steve Martin’s character as he happens to be passing below the high rise window this ritual is being performed in.
but i gotta admit, this one had me looking into magick rituals
smiffy:
It’s an eternal mystery to me of how ANYONE can remember stuff from their childhood. Bloody neurotypicals.
But it’s great that you can recall the feeling because, deep down, that’s what counts.
I spoke to a friend about this, and he told me the trick: People who take extra long to learn to read, like myself, and him- we remember more things because we had to.
Day 7
Sep 24
another day of holding my breath. i don’t think it’s helpful at this point to post threads of things anymore so apologies to anyone who was looking forward to that.
to a day of quiet panickng !
[breaths out dramatically]
….
[entire upper body spasming with breathing]
…
[takes another deep breath]
[turns bright red]
[sitting extremely bisexually]
[breath out]
i got my validation ticket
gonna dance a little jig
i am feeling
Day 8
how long does it take for this obnoxious enthusiam to subside. 8 days later and I am still riding a wave of excitement, with a boost?
til the first shitty transphobic comment? til the first lousy side effect of HRT? til the first embarrassing bad hair day?
I think my enthusiasm was and is somewhat more tempered by self-hatred, but at least for me most of those things are sort of immaterial to my well-being
Every day is a bad hair day. I can’t think of a “side effect” that I didn’t sign up for. And people are occasionally (…) awful on the internet. But ultimately increasing presence in the self and confidence that the presented self is truthful, in those certain ways, is something of an overriding experience.
i am naturally very hirsute, and that’s like the number one thing that annoys me about the assigned. i really want it all gone, especially my face. I started to do laser a few years ago and it was quite successful—- except on my face. they told me the problem was hormones.
once i get past that hurdle I feel mostly pretty good about how I look.
but i am starting to get paranoid that an epic level emotional crash is coming
oh I mean I’m constantly frustrated by aspects of my physicality, but my point is that ultimately even the worst moments of paranoid “I will never be able to live with myself” feel more… worthwhile? than the repression I had previously… things aren’t always all perfect, they often aren’t. But I guess my point is that your sense of excitement & actualization need not be transient… I have a lot of other issues but even for me this was a huge positive shift.
also you may want to consider electrolysis if laser was unsuccessful. I don’t know what your hair color/skin tone contrast is exactly, so...
that is on the table as a last resort, but i think i’ll try the hormones thing first
like, one extremely gratifying thing has been using faceapp (though kinda dangerous for a trans person to use this one I know, ithought setting realistic expectations and rules of engagement)
and doing nothing more than run the “remove stubble” filter; and have the app suddenly recognise me as female
faceapp is like, the equivalent of any one of the forbidden texts or infohazardous magical works from any fantasy canon
i wish I had more perspective on my appearance, tbh. feel like I’ve changed a lot, and when my hormone levels aren’t messed up (which they shouldn’t be from now on) I tend to feel okay about the face I see on the mirror, but I constantly worry whether the version of myself I see when I’m most dysphoric is the Real Me in some way
also further to this, i have carefully avoided photos of myself for literally years because of - in retrospect, dysphoria,
i have decided to sorta semi regularly take selfies now again just so i can see how i change over time and reality check a bunch of the stuff i think is happening but can’t be sure about
Day 9 (disassociation)
Sep 26
if you follow me closely you might have seen me talk a lot about disassociation. finding out what this is, having a name for it, and understanding kts role in my psychology has unlocked a whole lot of puzzles for me.
thoughout my life i have been in a lot of very stressful situations/ and to survive them I used - consciously, deliberately, a visualisation technque that functioned for me essentially as self hypnosis. whatever was happening and stressful just doesn’t exist.
he trouble is, these hypnosis things don’t automatically deprogram themselves when I don’t need them anymore. instead I just completely forget they’re there and might even need to be deprogrammed. like just contjnuously launching new processes and never closing them.
and some of them have even, apparently, come into conflict with eachother . what 1984 calls “doublethink”, the holding of two conflicting beliefs whilst being incapable of seeing the conflict
i am not 100% sure about any of this, but I think this explains also why inhave such a tragic memory. i use the word “tragic” very specifically, because I have a great memory; but somehow this self hypnosis thing has become habitual and anything anxiety inducing that comes into my life just goes straight into the memory hole. this has caused me to miss a lot of bery important life ruining dates and appointments. the more important something is, the more likely I forget about it
carried to its extreme, this habitual forgetting can develop into the famous and dreaded “DID”, and I seemed to be somewhat on that path.
in accepting this one part of myself (that i am not a man), it caused the sudden collapse of a number of ahem load bearing belief systems. without the emotional need to prove my manhood, the shame of failure to do so stopped being an anxiety, and all those memories unlocked like s power outage at a prison.
you saw this happening in real time folks. i went to write throw away witty anecdote and - bunch of other memories just fell out, and skated right past the shame censor that would have normally kept it just out of the reach of my conscious awsreness.
and it became clear that there’s been a number of strange schisms in my life that look suspiciously like cordoned off multiple personalities each with self sustaining isolated belief systems.
not like in movies of course. they don’t have individual names and character sheets , they’re all me- they’re really just different sets of defense mechanisms for surviving different contexts, not much different from anyone else’s different modalities- for work, family, friends, you hsve different behavior modes.
except mine became so extreme they were hiding information from myself so i could lie more effectively; it’s not a lie if i beoieve it after all
@vortex_egg
I see this as being similar to concepts like thought-looping, negative self-talk, and neuro-linguistic programming and cognitive behavioral therapy. But rather there’s a visual, non-linguistic flavor of it which comes through via the visual imagination. I’ve experienced a lot of this in my own life, but your post about it kind of made something click for me.
izzy:
mm this sounds very similar to some experiences I’ve had, with the added note that I feel like any of my contextual personalities are made up of a bunch of modular pieces and sometimes some of those pieces will just stop working and I’ll be left with a super intense self of one tiny facet of the whole, sometimes to severely deleterious effect
inga:
(but also tbh I don’t think it was anything to be ashamed about…)
vortex_egg:
Yeah this is what I experienced as a teenager.
I think for me it was exacerbated/triggered by individuating from my twin brother with whom I had been highly codependent before hitting puberty. I don’t think I started to get a handle on this part of my cognitive health until I was in my late 30s and it’s still an ongoing struggle.
Sometimes I think that I have an ongoing trans identity crisis, but its not gender related, it’s single/plural subject related.
I was fully convinced that I was being stalked by demons, that I could see and which would take over my sensory field for hours on end.
i think the ability to self hypnotise is very strong. I even get the nagging suspicion that i hypnotised myself to be trans. but i am 100% convinced that I am! but… that’s just what a very effectively hypnotised person would think!
actually it’s resolving rhe conflicts in a subset of belief systeme that convinced me this is right. the fact that, not only has this aching physical need to have a female body been persistent since i was at lesst 12, but
reanalaysis of reactions of other people to me that don’t make sense to me and never did, until i finally looked at it under the lense of gender conformity- which i had always felt doesn’t and shouldn’t matter, and people will claim it doesn’t matter to them.. but it absolutely does. i don’t fit a mold so I am effectively a non person to them.
but for me the change of frame is to see this as freeing instead of disabling
i am highly skeptical of the whole “plural” thing, but i think I sill keep my concerns to myself; the demons could be warchibg after wll.
vortex_egg:
Yeah it’s weird but when people talk about being a “plural system” that doesn’t resonate with me AT ALL. My issue isn’t that I think I might contain multiple identities. It’s that I feel completely uncomfortable, incomplete, and unable to think completely if I’m not plugged into a group mind where I can rely on the minds of other people to complete my cognitive activity.
Which has led to ongoing codependency issues and a growing distrust and outright hatred of group think, cults, and collective beliefs.
My parents would say that my twin and I talked as if we shared a mind. The place where DID and dissociation comes into it is that I was dissociating and projecting elements of my own cognitive activity as if they were external entities in order to jump start and complete my own thinking because I literally didn’t know how to operate my own cognition by myself.
the human mind is indeed a very powerful visualisation tool
Rearead this and got more out of what you wrote this time. are you familiar with extended mind theory? i mean, it seems like you are but i’m checking
vortex_egg:
Yes absolutely what I’m getting at. Through my life I’ve been fascinated with studying things like swarm intelligence, group minds, organizational dynamics, collective beliefs, and egregores because of an overwhelming sense of the… exteriority and distributedness of my identity. My therapist says I have externalized locus of control but I think it goes way beyond that.
Regarding self-visualizations, I also spent years studying the lives of visionary mystics (like Hildegard von Bingen), and even traveled around the world looking at their holy sites. I’ve always had an intensely visual imagination and incredibly vivid and lucid dreams… which I have the unshakeable sensation that these are coming into me from the outside, or I am tapping into the visual or dream that is happening somewhere else.
i was thinking about that with relation to the hologram thing. the guy with third person vision can see the back of his head. and his back etc. how is this possible wif there’s no actual floating camera to get that info?
the mind synthrsises it from best available information.
if he’s wearing a red shirt and someone sticks a note on the back without him noticing, he will see a plain dhirt with nothing on it. show him the post it note in a mirror and it appears!
there’s a huge amount of sensory data that we are processing all the time that never gets exposed to our conscious awareness, but might be perceptible by an uncanny intuitive feeling- like with “sight blindness” where a person is legally blind, but their eyes are physically just fine. they’re just not hooked up to a working visual cortex. but you can show these people stuff and they’ll get a nagging feeling that something might be what is in front of them
like thry’ll guess correctly every time as if they could see, but they don’t have a conscious exoerience of sight
vortex_egg:
I also have what’s known as a sensory integration disorder and get cross-wired sensations or phantom sensations, or maybe its glimpses of the unconstructed raw stream.
It’s interesting… a lot of my experiences with hallucinogens actually manifest with exactly that — seeing the back of my head, or some completely remote vista, whenever I close my eyes. I was never properly trained in astral projection but I get spontaneous hallucinations while sober of just floating out of my body and zooming off into the universe (aka my imagination???).
you might have conscious control of your minds eye, which would be extremely rare
so i wss thinking if someone did have such an ability, they could do remote viewing and possibly make accurate observations. not vi anything supernatural, but if that information got into your sensory data somehow from somewhere, even without your awareness, it would be integrated into your hallucination m, including in sophisticated ways a conscious mind would kot be capable of.
Yeah my assumption has been that remote viewing and astral projection in reality consists of some combination of projecting the imagination, tapping into “extra”-sensory data, and clever intuitive analysis of collectiveextended cognitive information. Not spooky sight at a distance, but also some kind of valid phenomenon. I think I could probably trainbe trained in that direction, as well as anyone I suppose.
It’s possible! I do keep coming back to my experience of “sharing a brain” with my twin because I think that, combined with something that’s going on in my nervous system or cognitive processing, contributes to the sense of being alternately plugged into or disconnected from a collective cognitive process. I don’t really have a deep theory about it, but a lot of my dissociative experiences are related to all this.
collective consciousness / morphic fields was an integral part of my parental cult. so I basically manifested like aniken skywalker or something.
anyway morphic fields are nonsense, but there could be other ways human bodies communicate subconsciously with enough fidelity to form a network. proving it hasn’t been done, so i am guessing extremely difficult. it would have to work by some actual sensory communication; it just could possibly be subliminal channels
vortex_egg
100% with you. I spent a bunch of time looking into morphic resonance and other proposed etheric media for collective consciousness and concluded it was all bunk — our “normal” sensory fields and shared information media and cultural competence is more than good enough to act as a material substrate. “Noosphere engineering” was a whole topic area that worries me deeply…
pheromonse and other electrochemical signals are a possibility; but in this case the human level experience would be of just one pixel in the giant brain. like a vague mood, or an urge. intellegence and cognition would only emerge by collective action- like facebook’s emotional contageon study.
So yeah, pheromones! Swarm intellligence as the study of complex collective behavior in social insects looks exactly at this. Stigmergy is a sematectonic mechanism whereby trace signals left in the environment become amplifiers for individual actions into the emergence of complex collective level behavior
My theory is that instead of simple pheromone signals, humans leave complex signals in the form of all our information media and messaging. The complex behavior and collective intelligence emerges out of the feedback dynamics that occur when people encounter and incorporate the signaling from the media/messages they consume into their personal beliefs and actions.
But there are also extra-sensory signals as you suggested, but that have a similar stigmergic feedback effect. It’s very multisensory high bandwidth. But nothing spooky or mystical needed to explain it. Maybe some people are more aware of various aspects of the phenomenon in their personal sensory field, or can be trained to concentrate on perceiving it.
that was my parent’s theory too. that’s why i had to leave. multiple tvs full volume 24 hours a day, no peace, no rest, all different channels going at once listening for messages from collective consciousness entities / gods
sent me literally psychotic
have you seen sense8?
No, I guess I should check it out?
premise, 8 people from around the world wake up one day and are suddenly aware of each other and can project their consciousness into each other’s bodies to share experiences and skills. they start out with diverse skillsets so this is very handy.
created by wachowskis.
very transy
I’ll have to watch it. This is kind of where my comment about feeling trans, but in a non-gender-related way comes in. I feel like I’m part of a collective/extended cognition cut off and trapped in a singular mind. But trying to “link back up” with other people to close that loop is a codependent disaster or a potential cult brainwashing waiting to happen
What a mindblast. I’m so sorry you were made to experience that.
hoping coming out to them triggers their cognitive dissonance wnd overrides their transphobia
Good luck.
So were they trying to train you to be like a dousing rod or remote sensor for collective consciousnesses? You mentioned being like Eleven before.
to be honest i am not sure what the ultimate goal was. they kinda wanted to keep me as a pet my whole life, and find out what I would decide to do with whatever amazing powers and abilities they believe i have
they also pinned a lot on me having lots of kids.
my dad is kind of a eugenicsy person too so he was hoping i’d hook up with a particular ethnic group of woman.. which my partner happens to be. but we aren’t telling him that
Can I say “fuck your parents” on your behalf? What a piece of work.
you can but; you know I still love them, i can’t help it. they’ve seriously injured me but; they’re still part of me and I can’t change that.
I totally get it.
also they’re both schitzophrenic so to some degree they can’t help it? i mean; being a religious idol is not the worst form of abuse i have heard of
also, i didn’t come away with nothing. i have a unique way of solving problems that school educated people can’t do. and i’m also a supernaturally awesome person over all, am I not?
My uncle and his wife joined the Church Universal and Triumphant, moved their teenage daughter into the cult’s doomsday bunker, and proceeded to have three more children inside the cult. It… really messed them up. This was the same uncle who participated in Leary’s LSD experiments, turned my hometown on, and introduced his sister my father whence they decided to have “special children” — but it never went that far b/c they waited to grow out of it beforehand.
I found a bunch of their old notebooks where they wrote about some weird occult plans for their children. Thankfully they waited another 14 years before having my brother and I, and stopped a lot of their weirdness —- but in short I feel a sympathy and one-step-removed kinship to your experience.
i’d like to see those documents if only to see if it vibes with anything my parents might have had in mind. like i said i really kinda had no idea; their faith was in the mitochondrians to know better what to do than them
Yeah I don’t really know. I honestly suspect any weirdness was due to my mom’s brother’s influence when and that got disabused after he joined with CUT. I haven’t really dug into the deep history there but I’ve been meaning to ask my cousin (the teenage daughter) about her recollection.
well i guess my parents didn’t grow out of it.
oh boy i sure feel special. brb, launching age of aquarius
I don’t mean to make light of your experience. Just trying to relate.
ere you making a joke? i thought I was.
hmm maybe i need to stop avoiding it and trace their canon. or ask them - but that’s kind of like opening a bag of cats.
i knew it includes
- The Sacred Mushroom
- the works of Carlos Castaneda
- Willhelm Reich
- whoever morphic fields guy is
- Holy Blood Holy Grail
there must have been a handful of other related books released around the same time, 1973-1977
i used to think they had uniquely thouhht of all the stuff by channeling alien messages but it turns out, nope, george lucas read all the same shit
Morphic fields == Rupert Sheldrake maybe.
There’s probably a lot of overlap with this list and the stuff my parents and uncle were in to in the late 60s/early 70s. A whole extension of the psychedelic shamanism and info-psychology that came out of the Leary crowd. Maybe John C. Lilly? It sounds on the money with some of your experiences.
John C. Lilly invented the isolation tank, pioneered the use of ketamine for remote viewing in sensory deprivation, researched dolphin-dolphin and dolphin-human communication, programming and metaprogramming human cognition, and thought aliens were communicating with him through a network called ECCO.
Also Aleister Crowley’s novel Moonchild, which prompted Jack Parsons to attempt a magical experiment of creating magical child (with the assistance of one L. Ron Hubbard). Every time you mention your history this comes into my mind.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babalo
i didn’t know much about raelians but read something recently that made me think there’s overlap there too
You might also look into the Human Potential Movement ( https://
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_
Potential_Movement ) and Esalen.
Day 10
September 27th 2021
So who is Luci, and how is she different from Pope Rhesus?
- the obvious:
Luci is me, a human woman, a trans woman at the beginning of her transition. ‘Luci’ is a very slightly anonymous alias for the real me, who has a different new name that I am not sharing here for reasons.
Pope Rhesus is or was a male monkey, a character I created in around 2010 as part of my process for getting over my divorce. My ex wife used to teasingly call me “Monkey Boy”
- Whats the best thing about them?
(this might seem narcisistic, but you’ll just have to take my word for it that these are other people’s opinions.)
Luci is quiet, sweet, enthusiastic and always willing to help. She has a fascinating mind, and is a good person to talk to if you’re stuck on a problem.
Pope Rhesus has a great, if crude sense of humor. He’s confident, if a bit boastful. He’s very flexible, but when it comes to protecting his friends he is very stubborn
- What’s the worst things about them? (these are my opinions this time)
Luci will put off important tasks until the very last possible moment. Deadlines are her greatest fear. Though she’s hopeful that a recent change in her life may change this, maybe even a little.
Pope Rhesus is a trickster god, so while he’s great fun at parties, he can be a bit thoughtless, forget important dates, and he is aloof and dishonest. He moves fast and breaks things.
- What are their best talents?
Luci is a bit like a human encyclopaedia. While she’s not great at trivia, she does know a little bit about a lot of things, and probably has a relevant link for whatever it is you’re looking for that you won’t find in G*
Pope Rhesus is a painter, whose paintings seem to vibrate with energy. He relishes the mess of the paint and makes lots of splashes. Subject matter focuses on finding beauty in the damaged, decayed ugly and absurd
- What’s the most surprising thing about them?
Luci, well, I’m mostly surprised and relieved to find out I exist! and I’m out! (partially out, still have some announcements I’m holding on to for now.) I’m looking forward to see what happens next.
Pope Rhesus isn’t actually a pope. He just uses that name to give himself an air of authority, like Doctor Dre.
Pope Rhesus thinks the whole pronoun thing is ridiculous, he lists “attack helicopter” in his bio.
- Manners
Luci feels very self conscious about swearing, and will usually prefer “soccer mom”-esque exclamations like “gosh” “shucks”, “darn” and other strange americanisms. She’s not above the occasional “fuck”, she just feels it has more impact if used sparingly. Otherwise she’s a bit of a feral child, ignorant of most social rules but trying very hard to learn.
Pope Rhesus thinks etiquette is stupid and only exists to enforce class divisions. He wilfully breaks rules
- How do I know who is Luci and who is Pope Rhesus if I only just figured out I’m trans?
Luci is the parts of me that I most admire, the parts of me that feel most comfortable, Not just the perfect person I want to be, but the most lovable flaws. But she is very quiet and timid and non confrontational.
Pope Rhesus is a container for traits I had to invent to cope with situations Luci couldn’t, like evicting a bad roommate, or going to a strip club with dudebros. for e.g.
7a. In other words, Luci is who I feel I am, deep inside, so timid and polite she convinced herself she didn’t exist just to avoid upsetting other people.
and Pope Rhesus is the dirty brash adventurous rude boy the world wanted and expected me to be, and who Luci needed to protect her while she was alone in a foreign country with no friends. Someone who I could project to avoid dangerous outcomes, or to advocate on my behalf.
- what are their likes and dislikes?
this one is a little hard to figure out, since Luci mostly hasn’t been allowed to try things, and no one has cared about her opinions anyhow. which is to say a whole lot of my preferences have been shaped by the prejudices of my family and exteme fear of being rejected by my family and everyone else if I do a forbidden. this makes it hard to untangle my real preferrnces from the ones I adopted for survival
8a add to that it turns out, changing hormones changes preferences and interests. so I’ll find out later!
here’s what I know so far for sure
Luci loves dancing but doesn’t think she very good at it. Monkey Boy thinks it’s a fun thing to mock
Luci doesn’t know much about things like nail polish, hair or makeup but is excited to learn, monkey boy thinks that stuff is a stupid waste of time
Monkey Boy absolutely hates being clichéd. I thought that was me but tricky monkey!
8b. Luci loves being unique, Luci is damaged by trauma. She has baggage. But she knows that she can use that damage to do good and make beautiful things, and she loves that about herself. She loves being loved so much that when she had nobody, she invented a fictional character to love her and protect her, and to tell the world about how awesome she is with paintings and art.
We know that Luci can’t stand confrontation, yelling, bullying or violence.
- How do they handle conflict?
I was asked this in a job interview once and I gotta say, I completely bombed. I’m not even sure what I said.
I think that above all, Luci (me) has a policy of avoidance of conflict as much as humanly possible. This is something I need to fix up.
Monkey Boy’s approach to conflict is to stubbornly refuse to concede no matter what, even if it requires absurd acrobatic logic to defend his point. This is also wrong.
A few examples of Authentic* Pope Rhesus photography.
*Pope Rhesus hates authenticity
Authentic* Luci artwork
*ALL OF THE COLOURS
GIF
- do Luci and Pope Rhesus get along?
Well, I created Pope Rhesus, so of course I love him. he helped me out a lot. But, he can be kinda mean and cruel sometimes for no good reason; like any other mask it’s possible to get lost in the character and forget that it is one. To my embarrassment i played this character so long i forgot it wasn’t actually me. he’s just armour. he is still a part of me though, a part i really need to put away (for now). and learn to live without armour
DAY 11
sep 28th 2021
hormone replacement therapy has caught me off guard by suddenly changing what i like and dislike- like on a lizard brain emotional level. consider these relative to how i felt before, not absolute
i’ll try and list out what I know so far
+ like - dislike
+ spice girls
- videogame combat
+ widdle puppy faces
+ gentle skin touching
+ cake
+ compiments
+ the idea of a friend or partner being considerate of my feelings
+ dancing (i can’t seem to stop moving)
+ talking on the phone
+ waking up early (what)
- being hypercritical (i thought this was immutable)
- vi
- vim
- emacs
+ puppy faces
- using computers at all
+ tv shows with elaborate romance plots
there’s also weird stuff going on with my romantic and sexual attraction wiring that I do not fully understand
I now have some insight into why teenage girls act the way they do. good thing it’s pandemic and I don’t have to explain my bizarre behavior at work
oh! i forgot to mention.
+ clothes
like, i cared about them before, but it’s like they’ve got extra colours now and speak to me telepathically. it’s nutsDay 12
Sep 29th 2021
worked up my courage to come out to a dear old friend. He was just as loving and accepting as I hoped he would be- which is what I need most - for building up my confidence.
+ likes - dislikes
+ meetups, maybe? will find out when lockdown ends
+ not disabling my camera on video conferences. a little surprised by this.
+ catching up with friends - guilt of not doing it enough way less overwhelming today than usual
- zoning out on the internet (may be temporary)years of saved up feelings and thoughts i couldn’t say out loud because i wasn’t out- very hard to not just dump it all out at once. very hard.
anyway i loved jodie whitaker as the doctor so much and I hope against hope that they do not regenerate her into a man again. She gave me so much hope for becoming normal and accepted and so much sorrow for the negative reaction to her.
jadsia dax—- people reading her as trans really surprised me actually. i guess. Curzon dax and Jadzia Dax are such very different characters. i guess i could read that as similar to how I am shedding Pope Rhesus, but withhin the fictional universe curzon is not like, a character jadsia was putting on. he was a real guy who was not a very good person and did a metoo against jadzia, very gross, breaks the whole trans fantasy altogether.
not even getting into Captain Deadname over here. let it go, your friend is dead, and calling jadsia the name of her abuser is very not cool
in 2010 i had just gotten a divorce, lost my job, and lived alone in a foreign country in an apartment owned by my ex wife’s parents.
unless i quickly did something i was going to slowly spend through my savings, but i had enough money to do something drastic and a little crazy to unstick my mind.
so I went to paris and visited the louvre. many things happened and i saw many things, but the one image that just stuck in my mind was this statue of bacchus.
what really sticks out at me about this figure is there’s nothing in the bacchus myth that is transgender in tone and theme at all. he is not tiresias, he is not hermes/hermaphrodite. he’s a party god who rides a chariot pulled by two tigers.
but here’s a statue where he’s just beautiful, with a really exaggerated and curvey contraposto, very femme figure, and a very tiny unmasculine… well he’s not partying like that.
but he’s not insecure, not hiding, he projects power
what’s my point? goals. i had never seen something more perfectly expressing who i wanted to be — in terms of body confidence, shape, pure sexual power and charisma, everything. instead of requiring magic powers to do a perfect gender swap that passes all the scrutiny and tests; this showed me it wss possible tonbe beautiful, to project confidence, without needing to fit into a perfect binary mold.
+ Dido
I had forgotten dido existed, but this music reccomendation engine got the idea that i am into super girly pop music from the 90s
(i didn’t encourage this, not on purpose)
Dido comes on with “white flag” and, normally this would be like ignorable elevator music to me. but this tine the song is hitting a resonant frequency in my spine. if it got any more intense i am worried it would make my eyes bleed.
what happened was I love Garbage/Shirley Manson; Shirley Manson loves Fiona Apple; so rec engines suggest her. once you have Fiona Apple in your listen history it’s suggesting Tori Amos and Alanis Moresette and it’s all over.
Day 13
Sep 30th 2021
Taking first baby steps at work transitioning.
luckily my workplace has a process and a policy. so very bureaucracy and corporate ass covering but i am in a good position to be doing this in a department desperately trying to meet a diversity quota
a phd graduuate on trans issues to be my trans mentor?
gosh, spoil me !
trying hard not to infantilise myself, but the core of me is love and care about all my friends and I have been holding it in cos guys aren’t supposed to express that.
being affectionate makes people uncomfortable coming from a guy because omg maybe it’s sexual?! <3 or maybe I’m a creeper?!
maybe i’ll always creep people out. I don’t know. I just love everyone and want them to feel good. i hope my new gender makes people more comfortable, but i don’t wanna hold it in anymore.
Day 14
Oct 1 2021
listening to song , was like “yeah this is a cool song, i really like it!”
i check who it is
Miley Cyrus
whaaaat? i feel a little dirty now.
a new recovered memory.
1994 a show called The Secret World of Alex Mack comes on; starring this girl almost the same age as me; looking pretty close to how i looked at the time. the plot revolved around her moving to a new town; getting drenched in chemicals and gaining super powers that she then had to hide.
i watched it in my head imagining it was me, really identifying with this main character, moving to a new town get turned into a girl and hiding my secret.
like me just coping with the lack of media for my situation by just wildly projecting on anything that vaguely looked like it
woops, opened a memory door and a whole bunch of pain fell out. i… think i’ll be okay. gosh. just as soon as finish crying
so all the strangely suppressed memories that have fallen out the past fortnight; the ones that i have been recalling distantly, with some detached amusement.
i suddenly remembered how they felt and it was not pleasant.
Z is warning me to stop digging up trauma or i may give myself a migraine and lay myself out for a week . she may be right. all i can say is that thing I kept telling myself; that i wasn’t in enough pain to be really truly trans? incredibly wrong. i just…. found way to lock the pain away; and I just found the box i locked it in and unwisely opened it
discovered what “girl power” is.
don’t worry, I will keep this terrible secret to the grave.
Day 15 (Oct 2 2021)
- hey wouldn’t it be cool if i got my parents to pay for transition surgery? sure would be a better use of money than a new liver for my sister. I’d actually appreciate it.
- the gatekeeper was inside me, all along.
- feeling more like myself each day.
Still hate my mouth and chin looking like my dad. hoping the fat pads out to look more like me eventually
- encouraged by result of test patch on my face of IPL machine. wouldn’t it be a huge load off if it works?
Day 16 (oct 3)
- Z noted last night that when I talk to my parents on the phone, my volume goes way up, my accent becomes more american, my pitch gets deeper.
gosh i’ve been really committed to this “man” character haven’t I?
- maybe I still like crude humor, occasionally despite putting monkey boy away
- gosh wait a minute; is my life the plot of that old brendan frasier movie “Monkeybone” ?
how embarass; so cliche
the song i am listening to while writing had the lyric “like a monkey i’ve been dancing my whole life”
- the track is called “dance monkey”
god you cheeky bitch! [shakes fist at cloud]
- now get back in the boxxxx
- i use man voice when I am mansplaining
- godsamnit, i feel the loneliness of the pandemic. i was doing so well feeling numb for 18 months.
no turning back
Day 17 (oct 4)
- seems to be a down day. i need to do something more uplifting than reading about the trauma and violence i am risking by being trans in trans communities.
still feels a bit unreal to say that after so many years of denial. I am a trans woman. i definitely always have been. but i still have the little knee jerk “no” bot in my head that wants me to hide and deny. to stay safe.
- on the bright side i am enjoying how my voice sounds in my head. no idea how it sounds in real life to other people.
Z tells me she is glad i am not yelling anymore. (i never thought I was yelling, but okay)
Day 18 (oct 5)
- met with my Trans mentor; phd on transgender issues.
I never thought i’d meet someone even more scattershot in their thought process than me. I ❤️ her so much.
- just a girl with a beard. totally normal.
- last post about me not her
- Apple Photos recognising Luci as a different person
Day 19 (oct 6)
- Super angry about all the negative portrayals of trans people that stopped me from trying to transition earlier and stopped other people from seeing me for who I am
- did a possibly misguided thing of getting my female alt twitter account unsuspended. (i got super extra hellbanned from twitter in 2018 for defending someone from a racist mob, noice)
looking in my links i sent to myself on that account; i find this article that totally nails the feelings i felt.
i guess i have been sure for a long time but still just scared of losing everything.
Day 20 (oct 7)
- each person I am coming out to is different. it’s like there’s no way to learn and build on previous experiences here. just gotta dive in.
the twitter account; hinting but not saying its me, following old friends seems to be a jarring and confusing experience for one friend. maybe too passive.
so i decided to be more proactive and
- starting to feel a bit less confident today that I can do this. I don’t know what injured my confidence. but i still think i have to keep trying.
Day 22 (Oct 9)
- Goals
- Ding
- i remember thinking that trans women must be so brave- and maybe that’s true. maybe if I were braver and more honest with myself i’d be doing this sooner.
but now that it’s happening it feels inevitable, like falling.
- a memory that i am not sure is real?
me deciding when I was 7 that I was a “tomboy”.
yes I knew exactly what it meant.
- whatever it is I am trying and struggling to express; there is one immutable fact: I am trans. it won’t matter how scared, depressed or cowardly I get from this point forward; the seal is broken. It is not possible to make my brain deny this again.
- I feel pretty sure that i am on the ground now, and not stumbling around gripping the ceiling. gently gliding toward my full and true self and expressing that to the world.
i know i prefer sheher, not theythem, and not he/him; i thought i could take any for a while but noticed myself cringing when people used male pronouns for me.
I can write and say I am a trans woman, and feel warm happy and proud about this.
but i can’t quite bring myself to say “i am a woman”
- why would that be? is it a vestige of internalised transphobia?
i suppose I don’t quite know what it would feel like to “be” a woman. All I can say for sure is that I am not a man, and I prefer she/her. Maybe I will struggle just as much with trying to fit female gender norms as I would male gender norms? so I’m not going to try TOO hard, what I want to be is become my own gender norms, whatever that is.
- i am not going to grow a womb and all it entails. i won’t be able to hack in the experiences of being told i can’t do computers as a little girl, or being leered at by old creeps as a teenager, or feeling unsafe walking home at night, all the little experiences that some say are what it means to be a woman.
i don’t know how I feel about defining your gender around how shabbily society has treated you; but it is something i can never fake nor do I want to.
- I have been leered at by old creeps as a young adult though… I have been raped, as 1/4 women have. I’ve been wolf whistled and felt unsafe walking home. I have been pursued relentlessly by men
I have actually had all those experiences. just not with the frequency and intensity that i am told women experience. and with the detached numbness that comes with the denial that these things even happened
- do those experiences make me feel more like a woman?
hmmm maybe? except that’s defining woman as “victim of sexual assault” which is totally gross. let’s not do that.
- i am doing the thing I hoped I wouldn’t do: talk so much about being trans that it becomes pretty much what my public identity is about now.
hmm i’ll try a bit harder to post other things.
Day 23 (oct 10)
- I started to transition in 2017 and then stopped in 2018 because the yelling, petty jealousy snd arguments just became too hard to cope with.
she promised this time would be different but apparently she was just pretending. I don’t want to be responsible for someone being thst miserable. partners shouldn’t be in bitter competition. so… i think i broke up with her.
i hope it doesn’t take, i love her but i am not going back in the closet again. i won’t be a ghost
- i was curious how i would react to this situation on hormones. and I guess that’s it. i’ve never broken up with anyone. fear of abandonment i guess.
but i am so sick of being the only person in the relationship willing to apologize for anything, the only one willing to do any comprimise, the only one ever begging and grovelling. it makes me feel so worthless
- trying out IPL machine.
10/10; kills ingrowns dead.
- relationship update: still together, conditionally
- also I think I massively overreacted.
i wish i could blame the hormones but I am afraid I am a natural born drama queen
Day 24 (oct 11)
- some mornings i am waking up and looking in the mirror and think “oh hey, i’m a girl with a bit of stubble!”
take a photo and it’s gone. like my face is so borderline the slightest change of shadows or contrast tips the balance one way or another
Day 25 (oct 12)
- Considering the frog boiling approach to transitioning at work. slow morph into my new form bit by bit and nobody notices until i point a tthe pronouns field in my slack profile that i changed 4 months ago
- it’s kind of appealing to me, since i kinda think the big splashy announcements with the before/after pictures kind of invite the circus sideshow mindset which i find a bit gross and horrifying. (despite my own indulgence in looking at such things and wishing it could be me… uhhh way too many times)
- i mean, the audience isn’t all gonna be transwomen in denial and i literally have no clue how cis people mentally react to such announcements since i did the natural human thing of assuming it was like mine
- recovered memory:
really getting into No Doubt’s feminist anthem “Just A Girl”, identifying so hard with its central themes and feeling low key distress that i wasn’t really a girl and couldn’t legitimately claim this song as mine.
except for the line “i’m just a girl, i’d rather not be” of course. though the concept that this could possibly be a preference was intriguing
- this is the hair i wanna get as soon as I can get out of lockdown. mmm blond streaks.
- using faceapp for good instead of evil to preview hair
Day 26 (oct 13)
- booked in to get my face lasered and i am super excite about not needing to hold fingers over my face all embarrassed. sooooon
- my partner got us some amazing bamboo pyjamas we look great
- oop, forgot to increment the number for the last two
- pizza guy called me Ma’am
Day 27 (oct 14)
- not that anyone really cares that much but in light of the bounty I seem to be blessed with by genetics, having breasts has never been a huge part of my “ideal” feminine self image.
i’ll sure take ‘em if they’re on offer though!
- my partner has too much breast. we joke tbat it would be great if i could just take half
- last night i dreamt it was now, and that i was already beautiful
- i am in many respects now becoming a baby; naïve and inexperienced in the identity i am moving into; and tgat in itself is kind of frightening; being unable to make sensible choices or effectively advocate for myself. since i am not a youth i don’t get access to those support resources. but it’s slso kind of exciting
- i am going to make a lot of embarrassing mistakes, and that will happen no matter how hard i try not to.
- I watched Netflix’s “Disclosure”, a documentary about the harms media depictions of trans people do- to counteract views of a certain cough specific harmful media depiction currently popular on netflix.
it was brutal and I couldn’t make it to the end. Jen Richards started talking about her needing to find a way to accept her mother’s rejection of her and I couldn’t watch any more.
Day 28 (oct 15)
- BUT HAVE YOU SEEN PUPPIES THO?
THEY ARE SO CUTE THeY MAKE ME WANT TO DIE FOR THEM
- mirror mirror on the wall
please shut up
once and for all
- actually mirror is fine, it’s mr. flash photography that is trying to make me cry
Day 29 (oct 16)
- now obsessing about whether to get voice training or not. Decided I should just do it, even if to do nothing else but to stop rhe obsessing.
in other news my partner Z is now having nightmares about TERFs stoning her to death for saying you shouldn’t define a person by their genitals. they also killed her puppy. sorry for the nightmares, Z :(
- I don’t know what this means
- hmmmm
- the never ending cycle of hair removal grinds on. upper legs today
Day 30 (oct 17)
- did watching Barbarella when I was 5 turn me trans?
i swear the images in that film are burned into my subconscious as core foundational memories; and my 6 year old self saw her life as my ideal adulthood
- who wouldn’t want to be caried around by a blond muscley bird man; flying around on alien planets?
- the bitey metal teeth thingies give me nightmares tho
- Z seems to be doing like 10 times more work on my transition than I am. that’s making me a bit nervous. I like all the new clothes she’s buying me tho. <3
need to think of a good anniversary gift soon.
- oh my gosh. i ticked every single one.
Day 31 (oct 18)
- Laser face
(can’t see cos mask)
- okay even if it gives me the dysphorias i am posting this for progress logging: first laser treatment after a long break
- eyebrows in dire need of help
- got “sir’d” at the coffee shop whilst wearing a mask. so i guess I am 1 to 1 now
- about to do a particularly stressful coming out. wish me luck.
- i’m still alive; they haven’t sent the death squads after me
- i wonder if eventually i’ll become one of the militant trans people who don’t take any guff.
or if i’ll just passively accept misgendering indefinitely.
like; a couple “sirs” early on while not wearing women’s clothes? fine (but my fingernailssss)
but how should i handle it later ?
“ahem you mean maam”
or amp it straight up ?
- okay maybe i overestimated my okayness about this process and i will need to seek some better help
- life hack: baby talking to my dog helps me do voice practice without feeling like an idiot.
stupid cartoon voices are normal when talking to pets
Day 32 (oct 19)
- MY TORSO IS ASSYMETRICAL aaahhrrgg
it’s all ⌡ (
and i’m all
[leans left]
[leans right]
yep.
it’s definitely thst shape.
what did I DOOO
Day 33 (oct 20)
- i think i figured it out.
i sleep on my side. mostly on the flat side
- coming out and realising I am trans really hasn’t player out the way i always thought.
i figured there’d be some test, or some final argument and it would be logically settled.
what happened instead is the self reflection mirror hit exactly the right angle and it was just there;
i didn’t “want” to be trans. i spent my whole life avoiding it and denying it. running away. on some level i still don’t want this.
but there it is plain as day. “oh shit, i gotta transition”
- my excitement about being trans hasn’t slowed down. i am super happy today. auhhhhgggggghhhhhhh. yayyyyyyyyyy i don’t wven care that i still look like a guy, i don’t have to pretend anymore. it’s sooo great. i can just do all the girly hand gestures and girly laughs and girly giggles i’ve been trying to stop myself doing. i can just like, be me. and file judgemental people into the appropriate categories
- i just had the girliest reaction ever to some cookies and i have no idea where it came from. i get real paranoid about this stuff it’s like- “is that… me doing that? or am i inadvertently mocking my subconscious idea of how women behave?”
subjectively, screaming in excitment and makinng a melty cooing noise just felt like the most natural and appropriate reaction to this cookie
- I have started to involuntarily yell “beans” at random intervals.
What the hell?
Day 34 (oct 21)
- girl hack: aprons have pockets.
(sorta why i was so hot on getting one)
- Z taught me how to properly sit.
apparently flopping down like a ragdoll is unladylike
- childhood role models:
pippi longstocking
raggedy anne
(not andy, what a hot mess)
- trying on woman jeans this morning to see if they fit.
tried to button them up and at first i am like “hmmm too tight”, pull them up 4 inches, button them up and they fit perfectly.
i have hips.
hiiiiiips.
never again will pants fall off square formless pelvis, I have an ample FLESH LATCH now.
Day 35 (oct 22)
- alternating between feeling like a cute girl going through some growing pains and feeling like i am delusional trying to make this work. thr selfie camera is not my friend.
but at least the laser hormones are finally starting to fade my face shadow. getting eyebrows done tomorrow
- “performative femininity”
- new clothes in the disasterroom
- wow i really expertly hid my chest in these photos.
not on purpose. i am only embarrassed of my face.
and behold my tiny delicate girl hands.
- there are things i worry about, as any trans woman does. but the classic “big hands?” so relieved- my hands have always been same size or smaller than any woman i have compared against. it’s uncanny. my hands are just very slightly larger than Z’s who is a hair’s width from fitting the legal definition of midget.
- my thumb is a little chonky, but i assume that is just from years of videogames
- goals
- I just remembered this was an especially agregious episode of Seinfeld where Jerry, awful awful man that he is, got super paranoid about the girl he was dating being Trans because she had “man hands”.
unforgivable.
Day 36 (oct 23)
- as Margo from the Magicians would say, today i will ovary up; i am venturing out in the world in women’s. clothes and getting my eyebrows done. there’s a certain amount of deep end here too since these yogo pants require a flawless tuck. they leave nothing to the imagination.
- i lucked out with my partner; bisexual; expert at skin care; knows a lot about makeup; was mentored by a drag queen; knows a lot about multivitamins. had rhe genius idea of me taking women’s multivitamins and additional supplements whilst transitioning because—- i’m gonna need those.
- how do I look
and after
Day 37 (oct 24)
- how did this happen so fast?
i’m over the moon.
- https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/107/156/169/501/476/492/original/2593eee9646afa81.mp3
- i feel a bit detached and numb about it but Z sees the signs in my body language: yesterday was emotionally exhausting .
i was sorta hoping the whole transition thing might help me feel things like that. maybe a work in progress .
Day 38 (oct 25)
- dreamt i had a IRL trans friend who was uh. what was she doing?
nope, it’s gone. but I looked awesome anyway.
a little surprised my dream self has adjusted so quickly, but also relieved.
i was worried that my dream sslf would stay all male and i’d have to struggle through figuring out what that means
- having a “cute girl with a bit of stubble” day. afraid to take a selfie and ruin the mirror illusion
Day 39 (oct 26)
…
Day 40 (oct 27)
- Told my mum yesterday that I was on HRT
she was confused.
i then specified that it was thyroid hormone- like the sfuff my dad is on.
she goes “oh, i guess that.. is technically HRT.”
she then went on a moral panic about marvel movies teaching young kids witchcraft.
I carefully explained that magic isn’t real.
- softening the ground
Day 41 (oct 28)
- been practicing vocal “weight” and today my voice sounds like
Cher’s “Believe”
- my hair? just gone
Day 42 (oct 29)
- too early to say for sure, but i think i might end up looking okay.
maybe even good
- starting to get sick of explaining the same things over and over again as I come out to people, and decided that I should design a pamphlet.
trouble is my notion of “gender” might not totally line up with with the transgender community considers “correct”. that is to say, i don’t want to be percieved as speaking for everyone- i can only really speak on my own experiences and thoughts.
- haha what fo you think of my “repair” job?
- so what is a gender? i thought I knew until I finally figured out which aspect of my experience was the gender part and now I don’t think I can explain or describe it at all.
easy enough to explain things like “gender expression” which is just me deciding what clothes to wear and what to do with my skin and hair. but cross dressing doesn’t make someone transgender.
there’s gender dysphoria. i don’t think that makes me trans- i think that is just a symptom.
- there’s the disassociation. I can describe that, but it’s just another effect. not the thing itself.
- i suppose the matrix does a pretty good job with the metaphor of its “residual self image”
the dysphoria is the experience of looking in a mirror and feeling like i am inhabiting a stranger’s body.
it was extremely hard for me to care about this stranger’s appearance so i looked like s dirty broken homeless guy most of the time.
but why do i feel like a woman inside? what does that even mean? if your outside and inside match; it’s invisible to you. like two transpencies
- man in skirt or girl with beard?
- oh no; my jawline is menacing. plz forgive.
- to the repliers: thanks. awww 🥰
- i should probably clean that mirror so it doesn’t look like I am covered in lewd stains in the future
- okay; sign that i have a gender experience: when watching any media; of any rating, just instinctively imagining i am the female character and not the male character.
catching myself doing it, trying to force myself not to, but basically not being able to help it.
- in my imagination; i am the girl of any scenario. the one who no one listens to or takes seriously, the one who gets stupid crushes on boys, the one who is held captive in a tower, waiting to be rescued. the one who is the most competent in the room. the one who wants to be beautiful and seen. the one who needs to navigate bitchy cliques. the one who needs a makeover; the one who is the world’s top archeologist and has adventures. the one who is a better hacker.
- i cannot identify with male characters or their decisions. none of it makes any sense to me. men are idiots
- (doesn’t stop me from fantasizing about being held by men, gosh 😊
- okay so maybe that doesn’t prove anything or really describe what a gender is.
it’s that while i may struggle to pass as female, i never fully passed as male either. i forced my body voice and body language into stess positions defensively, and grew my beard out so people would stop questioning my masculinity and none of it fully worked. i was still just a girl in a man costume. i might not have been able to easily see it but other people did.
is that gender?
- like some days i am so confident and like yes this is me, i am finally being myself and it feels free and great and i have never been happier.
but i still occasionally feel like i have snuck into the back of the movie theater without paying.
- i am lousy with metaphors
Day 43 (oct 30)
- excited about hair
- my hair is just awesome. so excite
- i wish to share wind swept look
- can I just revel in how awesome
I look?
- forgot the dangly bit! oops!
Day 44 (oct 31)
- so excited at this proof of concept. a little makeup and i come pretty close to passing. optimistic and happy
- u came to the wrong neighborhood mother fucker
- so called 3/4 κubrik stare
- why
- i think i got a breakthrough in my voice training. Z was startled and told me I sound like a chipmunk
- obviously chipmunk isn’t the goal but it means i have gained some control over throat resonance
- so i think i’ve got good resonance going here but I still have rhe heavy buzzy goose honky quality. like fran drescher
day 45 (nov 1)
- having a “man in a dress” day. mirrors are cruel beasts.
- I think i fucked up my voice by practicing too much.
- I feel like I don’t understand what gender even is.
day 46 (nov 2)
- it’s so frustrating knowing I am a trans woman- i sorted the knowing out; but i don’t know how I know well enough to explain it, or what being a trans woman even is. I just am.
- is this a glow up?
- at cafe with partner.
“ladies”
- I guess it’s a lady with a beard day.
a small amount of face hair really. laser this friday! wooo
Day 47 (nov 3)
- kinda starting to feel narcissistic on this thread. hey brain, can you think about literally anything else for a while? no?
ok just thought i’d ask
- the thought i am stuck on today is that i decided to look up the statistics for what percentage of the population is trans.
turns out no one gas bothered to collect stats on that. but the nih through meta analysis of some procy variables estimates that it is approximately 1 in. 260 in the USA and likely to rise (increase likelihood over time)
the thought creeps in- if it’s meant to ne that rare how can i be sure that’s me?
old habit maybe. becsuse of course i am trans.
- i think i do need to stop procrastinating on that therapy, and other things.
i skipped past psychological eval. i wonder if i’ll still need that for legal change of gender
- a bunch of years ago i ran a bunch of filters on my dace and came up with this. hugely affirming to look very nearly like this after 1 month of hrt
i mean, obviously with a bit less flowery blurry nonsense goin on
Day 48 (nov 4)
- Good morning.
I am super happy to be trans.
Every day I am looking more and more like myself. I feel amazing. and I am even becoming more thoughtful and kind.
having a girl with a beard day.
- getting confused about what my “original” voice was. I don’t seem to quite be able to get it back.
Day 49 (nov 5)
- Good Morning
i am going to be extra trans gendered today.
as a treat.
as I come out to my community, everyone has been super warm loving and accepting. they love me for who i am and what I am.
🔥❤️💜🔥
- I think there should be more positive stories about trans people in the media.
the only thing i seem to hear about my people is that we are either monsters or victims of extreme violence.
I want more stories about the scrappy young girl who pulled together money from her community for her transition by fixing puppies. or babysitting her neighbor kids.
where’s the dense fantasy stories about boys who escape their misogynist step mothers and get magically affirmed?
- i want fully biased pro trans propaganda everywhere, to make up for the complete and utter vacuum of virtually nothing out here
- let’s have a movie centering a transwoman that doesn’t center her transness or treat her like a circus exhibit; but treats it as just a part, an important part, but just part of her life. Wendy Carlos could be an excellent subject. Lynn Conway?
- Shout out to Dreamer on Supergirl, she’s the best.
Star Trek Discovery representing the enbies and the trans men.
annnd.. is that it?
Stephen Universe? that’s having its 8th anniversary today. its trans themes are unfortunately deniable.
Day 50 (nov 6)
- I just remembered something-
an Indian colleague of mine once compared me to the goddess Durga
I cannot quite remember what he said or why he said it. years ago
but 1; i wasn’t out
so why is he comparing me to a goddess?
and—- what is the deal with durga being considered transgender?
- i think he was getting at me having 9 aspects? i really wish i could remember what he said
- i mean, obviously it’s really flattering and awesome to be compared to a goddess no matter what the point was. he left the fompany and now i am
wondering if i can track him down and ask
- Came out to my step son last night.
“I’m transgender, and I am transitioning. I don’t know if they teavh you anything about that in school?”
nope, not really
“what about the friend with the pronouns?”
oh they were just annoying
“welll. anyway. I’m [name] and pronouns she/her”
it was.. anti climactic. he went “hm. okay” and had no questions.
well, it’ll be exciting to find out what that means.
- step son is.. difficult. his dad imposed a rule that he is not to ahow me any affection.
he doesn’t owe me any of course; but it’s still hard putting the effort in knowing i am guaranteed nothing back.
I still do it tho. i have workarounds to these rules.
- not that one in particular. i just have a pact; he doesn’t need to hear from me at all unless he’s being a jerk to someone or someone is being a jerk to him.
seperately i just try to always be doing interesting stuff in the background and show him things. and i cooknhim breakfast. that’s pretty much it. the relationship built around that.
- the words “lesbian” and “gay” seem strange to me relative to transgender. supposedly if i am exclusively attracted to women i should call myself a lesbian, but that doesn’t seem to quite feel right to me- i am bi/pansexual anyhow soo, but i just saw a transwoman put in her bio that she was a “bisexual lesbian” which seems either just contradictory and wrong, or trying to make some political statement about the word lesbian- which makes even more uncomfortable
- not that i have a problem with political statements; just iff i don’t understand the implications of calling myself a trans bisexual lesbian i don’t wanna say it
- i don’t think it’s that minor a point either. it kind of is to me- to me it’s just semantics. but i happen to know that the word “lesbian” has a complicated history that a lot of people are heavily emptionally invested in- and i don’t wanna give them reasons to be mad at me for no good reason/ and by extension my whole “class”
- change of subject
i do feel kinda bad about dropping all of my orher projects to talk almost exclusively about gender things.
but i guess i gotta give myself a break since this is not at all a small or simple thing to undertake; just adjusting to the hormonal effects alone.
- the severe anxiety that used to drive my computer obsessions and art is kind of just mostly gone.
if i am to continue i will need to find new motivations. or i mught just end up needing to become kind of a different person.’, with a different set of interests. i am not sure yet.
- if the main thing driving your talent is pain, and you find a solution to the pain, what do you do?
Day 51 (nov 7)
- ah hah! finally someone asked the interesting question!
step son asked what the dog thinks / will he notice?
answer: yes he has noticed, and he thinks it’s awesome
- status: girl with a very embarrassing hitler mustache she is not allowed to shave. :(
- .
Day 52 (nov 8)
Day 53 (nov 9)
super sick, stupid looking facial hair, no makeup, i am still hot as hell
- there’s a line in the movie “Boys Don’t Cry” where the main character, a trans man, explains to his girlfriend that he has a condition that is “like a birth defect”
it is such a strange and uncomfortable way of describing transness but it’s been stuck in my head since the clip was used in the documentary “disclosure”.
(i have never seen the movie)
- it’s “western culture” that says anyone who is non conforming is “defective”. we are made to think of ourselves as factory products, cast in molds. if we’re weird and extra we “broke the mold”.
i prefer to think of myself as like, myu, the ultra rare pokemon. super valuable and unique.
- i seem to have spent my life collecting people who think the same way
- oops, day 52
- i guess the story of Boys Don’t Cry- some of my earliest exposure to the idea of trans men and transness in general was the news and longer form tv stories about this trans man who was killed- it was scary but also resonated with me on some level since I saw myself as a girl pretending to be a boy and not quite passing.
i guess i haven’t found out til much later these kinds of feelings are not typical for teenage boys.
because it turns out i wasn’t
- i kept excusing it as teenage awkwardness with the help of everyone else telling me that’s what it was. i kept waiting and waiting to feel comfortable in my skin and to grow into a proper man and it just never happened.
Day 54 (nov 10)
- an attempt was made
- is there chest hair showing? yes. fuck you for pointing it out.
and by you i mean me.
- today is conflicted day where i felt like i am failing at this transition thing and I don’t know if I can do it. i still feel that way but wearing makeup
- also i cannot wait for the bubbling stubbly laser face texture to be gone.
day 55 (nov 11)
- the whole bathroom thing… gosh. that’s really more about managing other people’s fears and bullshit more than it is anything to do with me, isn’t it?
i actually needed some water to drink the other day and my only option was making a bathroom gender choice. i decided to go thirsty, cos i just wasn’t ready for this challenge
- z: this one is your coffee
me: what’s the difference?
z: this other one spilled a little and i licked it
me: oh no, i’ll catch girl germs.
- gender status: sad day.
day 56 (nov 12)
- not coping today
- on the bright side my dysphoria about my face, even with the stubble is really starting to level out. maybe i’ll work up the courage to do a self portrait
- is it weird that i can feel myself becoming a very different person, and loving it? like, if you wanna think of boy me as dying, i wanna say good riddance and fuck that guy. i mean the greatest of respect to those who liked him but he…. not so great
- also i i kinda feel the loving ecstasy feeling dropping away as my body adjusts. i wanna work harder to maintain the loving caring feelings about everyone.
- okay sorry everyone for not responding to everything but i was busy coming out to my mom
day 57 (nov 13)
- okay. alcohol wore off. what have I done?
- like wgst the fuck kinda person says “i hate queers” anywhere in the viscinity of this even as a joke?
- okay, now i feel something.
devestated. i shouldn’t feel anything. i thought i had numbed myself to her.
i am not even sure what she said exactly, she seemed to ping pong back and forth between expressing guilt (for me suffering and her being the cause) and defiance, and demanded i not rush into any surgeries. (rush?)
“you did always have an affinity for thr feminine but i thoyght you were just a feminist” but also “you will always be bret to me”
- i am with kim kardashian on this: shapewear is amazingly great.
day 58 (nov 14)
- okay came out to my dad; he seemed to conflate gender with sexuality.
“i’m transgender”
“what dies that mean?”
“i’ve been a girl my whole life being very confused about everone thinking i am a boy”
“…”
“so… are you attracted to men?”
“..well. yeah! but that has nothing to do with being transgender”
i can see now why people do the sexuality coming out first. that’s both parents now where i immediately have to also come out as bi.
- “okay so you feel like a girl, why do you havevto change your body? “
so i explained gender dysphoria to him.
“but that’s how everyone feels isn’t it?”
hmm
- i feel like i am woefully unprepared to explain what being transgender even is
- i could just use the whole “woman trapped in a man’s body” thing, but that’s too cronenbergian for my taste.
i think i got somewhere with making the distinction between gender expression and gender experiences.
he still didn’t get the point of me changing my body. he kept thinking the goal was to be attractive to men.
and . hmm, ew. i like men and all but i am really not out here trying to be a “trap”
- i am changing my body so that my clothes fit me properly. hate ill fitting clothes.
no- i mean come on how do i explain “i just want to be myself” to the people who twisted me out of shape in the first place.
- good morning- today I will attempt to turn up the ambient level of transness. enjoy this gravity obeying hair photographed from a deceptive angle
- for some reason both my parents seem terrified that i will modify my body or do a surgery.
- seriously what business is it of theirs? it’s not like i am asking them to pay for it. (but that would be nice)
- oh no, i’m losing weight and taking better care of my skin. tragedy!
it’s hypocritical given that this isn’t even my original nose thanks to them.
that said we have reached an equilibrium of acceptance, and i am glad of that. another weight off my chest.
- they also both assumed I would be getting a divorce and living alone for the rest of my life.
wtf
i am not even married
- i try and put on a loud defiant personality here as an armor still. IRL i am a kitten, a crybaby and a prude. i don’t know how i manage to get through the day
- .