inside, out
jeez my face has changed the last four-and-a-half years. imagine if i actually took care of myself, huh.
for the benefit of your case study, the only actual medical interventions you’re looking at are:
- 5-1/2 years of hrt
- laser-zapping my whiskers every three months for two years
everything else is just introspection, curiosity, study, and practice—finding in me what felt most true and doing what lent me joy.
on the one hand… yeah, hrt is some powerful shit. on the other, all it’s really doing is flipping your body’s firmware so your brain sends your cells the exact instructions it would if your endocrine system weren’t all defective. bodies are just bodies; any difference is just a matter of degree.
the extremely divergent cultural images we receive of male and female physiognomy are largely an invention of the last 200 years, a product of 19th-20th century “race science,” that basically served to justify old white rich dudes continuing to own and control everything by asserting they were more “evolved.”
all things equal, very few cis women look like the fantasy we’re fed of what they should look like—ergo all the body-shaming and the years of practice to exaggerate or minimize the right features and behave as society expects, no matter how shitty and arbitrary and systematically dehumanizing it is.
all things equal, few cis men automatically look or behave the way society expects from them either—and the culture also likes to emotionally isolate them from each other and from their own selves, lest they start getting ideas about the conveyor belt of despair they’re to ride stolidly to the end.
we’re taught to hate ourselves for failing at filling literally impossible imaginary roles and models, then told to blame each other for failing to follow the script, for keeping us from what we’re promised if we obey—from the absurd pyramid-scheme endgame fantasy we’re led to understand we deserve.
to see yourself, befriend yourself, to work out what’s most true about you as an individual, what kind of a person you want to be, how you want to behave, move, stand, relate to yourself and others, what terms you want to live by—then to methodically teach yourself to be that person—is a revolution.
taking agency over your own body is a first step. your body is your own; nobody gets to own it, nobody else gets a say in how you tend it, and you don’t owe any part of it—or any part of your mind, self, identity, soul—to anyone. you simply are, you’re one random instance of a weird-ass template.
by all that is right and good, this body, this person, this life is your canvas. no matter its slight variation from an imaginary average thought up by old creepy racist assholes, the parts that make you are intrinsically a 100% valid expression of a person—and it will never fit this rigged game.
your only reasonable choice is not to play, not to give over everything that you are, that no one has the right to take from you—but rather to take the cards you’re dealt and make something of you that gives you your own personal kind of joy. to find in yourself the best friend you most want to know
and what do you do with a friend if not care for them, cheer for them, help them accomplish their own ideals, tend to their needs, enjoy basking in their presence, work together to build something bigger than both of you, a world for the person you actually always were to actually want to live in.
please tend to your medical needs, address any ailments keeping your brain and body from working the way that feels most healthy to you, to your own judgment. but you are not in any sense a static objective thing—and medical intervention is only a modest slice of what it means to become yourself.
the biggest part of what the straight crowd can only seem to grasp as a “transition”—though what you do isn’t change as much as to learn to be the most genuine version of you, irrespective of who-and-whatever the fascists try to force you to be—is simply years of patient unconditional introspection; of asking yourself, “why?”
i am azurelore not because of any outside model i chose to pursue. at no point have i sought someone else’s idea of what is and is not ideal or correct, of what a body should look like, of how gender is supposed to taste.
i am azurelore because i made it my ongoing life mission to listen to myself.
any good artist is going to steal bits and pieces of other people’s art and make them their own. edm could never exist without a sampler. every word we speak is borrowed from its inventor, usually anonymous and hundreds of years ago. a nuanced eye for ideas that tickle you to play with is paramount. as the smiling man observes, we live in a society. outside ideas, prompts, inspiration—it’s all grist.
art is the way that we process it all—refine it, play with it, extrapolate, disassemble, question, find our own individual meaning and joy and then run with every realization that is so obviously true.
i have never wanted to be anyone but the most low-to-hardware person, who is so nakedly self-evidently real that i never have to pretend, never have to hide, never need feel ashamed or embarrassed of anything that i am—only of what behavior i happen to misjudge, what damage to others my poor choice of actions may cause.
i am azurelore because i refuse to be defined by arbitrary rules. because i refuse to define myself by any other measure than those i have taken pains to build, interrogate, and vet as genuinely meaningful and constructive. because like an old rusty appliance i have stripped down every piece of me.
hrt is wild. it’s awesome, it’s important, it’s transcendent. it’s an essential life-changing medical intervention to correct for a congenital disorder that you never asked for, that has probably been misdiagnosed your whole life, that simply is what it is.
but you are more than a hypothalamus.
