azure

Having and Giving

  • Reading time:9 mins read

I didn’t have a good childhood, right. I guess some people did? Weirds me out. I can’t wrap my head around that. Up until I managed to leave, I was continually told how much worse everyone else had it, so therefore I had no right to complain. If I failed to be sufficiently grateful that my parents weren’t even worse, I was a horrible child and I deserved whatever was coming.

It’s true that that most of my problems were a matter of neglect, rather than active violence or abuse. So that’s something, I guess. It’s just that it was a matter of record that no one wanted me. No one cared that I existed. They vocally, regularly, in so many words, resented the fact that I was there, and tried their hardest to wish me away.

I was hungry most of the time. I was left mostly on my own, to figure out my meals in a house full of things nobody sane would eat except each of them specifically and independently of each other. There were no meals and there was no compromise, middle ground of communally edible food because everyone hated each other. I’m pretty okay at baking because I learned in grade school if I wanted a birthday cake i had to work it out myself.

I has nothing to wear except old, too-small, torn and thin, usually dirty clothes that I had no say over and that often gave me a rash. I knew better than to ask either of them for help or a favor. If they didn’t turn on me, they’d find a way to fuck it up. I learned never to express emotion or betray a hint of what I wanted or needed or intended, lest someone scream or hit me or lock me in my room for a couple days. Best case, all I’d get is mockery.

They were both horrible, but of the two I think my father sometimes took a kind of pity. Like, he wouldn’t actually address anything or many any steps to make it better but he’d make these gestures toward… not an apology, but filling the void in some small way. That’ll do; assuage his conscience.

One of the reasons I’ve all this background in videogames is that around 1986 he found that if he kept up a slow but steady supply of the things, I would spend all my time with them and not bother anyone. He wouldn’t have to think about me again for days. Weeks. That was his parenting done. I don’t want to knock that entirely because, yo, I got a fair number of videogames to occupy me, and to use to escape from… all of that, everything around me. And I know we didn’t have a lot of money. But this wasn’t really about me, right. It was pure fucking guilt on his part.

Anyway, these gifts really made my mother livid. (Which also may inform part of why he continued to do it.) She got so angry at the idea of my… well, having things. So I never got any clothes that i needed. Nothing would ever get washed. She’d ensure I didn’t get any food that I wanted in the house, and again no one prepared anything. Were I to actually ask for something—some toy or book or whatever—well, who did I think I was? Royalty?

The exception being the odd, rare thing she got it into her head to bestow upon me regardless of whether I wanted it or not. Regardless of anything I said, any boundary I put up. I had no right of refusal. I’d unambiguously tell her straight out no, then she’d pretend it was news.

When she saw me receiving things that she didn’t pick out, that I actually wanted and enjoyed, she went fucking apoplectic. It was like, what the fuck was this; I didn’t deserve anything! If she saw me leaving the house with my father, she would scream at him, “DON’T BUY [them] ANYTHING!!“

So, okay. Let’s take a step back now. At this point there are a few possible ways to read this, right?

I know my mother used to be all hippie-dippy. I’d heard stories of how when my sister was a teen the former would dig through the latter’s drawers for any bras, so she could trash them. The patriarchy and all, you know. So, a lack of barriers, lack of compassion and theory of mind, Just plain fucking crazy, but second-wave feminism forever! There seemed to be some guiding principle here, even if a stupid one, applied maliciously.

All this time, these forty-some years, I figured, okay, what a flaming asshole—but anti-consumerism, anti-materialism? Sure, okay, I get it. Again we didn’t have much money, and I can see how especially in the 1980s, putting all this value on owning stuff would be perceived as, like, not so superb. Even now, I’m not totally ascetic—I have my books and games and movies, my small collections of things I’ve hung onto all my life—and I am so fucking broke that buying things isn’t really an option. But even if I weren’t, I’d think twice before any purchase. Do I really need this, I think. Do I really want it?

Here’s the thing, though. Just now while eating my garlic bread, I remembered a pretty key clarifying detail. My mother, who was so adamant against my having appropriate clothes to wear, food to eat, anything of my own that gave me a little joy in the void of humanity that was my childhood? She has a fucking consumer addiction.

She will never not spend money on any random thing you put in front of her, no matter whether she wants or needs it or likes it or has the money or not. She lives like a fucking trust fund kid. She will sit and watch QVC for 16 hours a day and buy at least two of everything they show. It gets so she’s afraid of the mailman because she doesn’t even know what she’s ordered. After the divorce, she got the house, completely paid off. Within a few years she’d taken out two mortgages, to pay off credit card bills from all the stuff she orders every day.

All this woman does all day is buy things for herself. Non-stop.

So. It’s taken me all these years to connect these dots, right.

She was so against my ever having anything at all. It was obscene for me to ask for so much as a sandwich. But it wasn’t about a lack of money. It wasn’t about anti-capitalism or anti-materialism. That wasn’t a problem at all. All of the neglect, the active denial of care or support, the rage at the idea of my being on the receiving end of anything but the scraps she hand-selected—it was all about me.

All of which to say: holy shit. Fuck her.

Just. Goddamn.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Fuck. Her.

What the absolute shit.

What.

I knew that my parents always hated me, but. Like.

I just.

So.

Yeah.

There we go.

I have no guilt, no qualms whatsoever, about wiping her from my mind. Any lingering crap about cutting her—anyone related to me—out of my life, I just.

No. Fuck her, absolutely and forever. This is not a person worthy of my pity, my guilt, or anything else. She can just fall down a well and die.

I’m not especially angry, even. I just—no.

I mean, I’m a little angry. but it’s not this overwhelming rage. It’s too tired for that. It’s more that I’m done. I solved the puzzle. I don’t have to ever think about this again.

Time to shut down that runtime. Clear that space.

Still at 42 years old, I feel such intense guilt for wanting anything at all for myself. It’s a thing I’ve had to actively work against since coming to grips with who I am, and recognizing my need to recognize and affirm and support this person whom I’ve discovered I like and want to be. And, that’s why all that garbage is there, inside of me. That’s who put it there, and that’s why she did it.

All this shit, it’s from some jerkass who called me an “interloper” for happening to be alive through no action or desire or consent of my own. Who actively wanted to deprive me of any agency, means, joy, or respect even as she ran up the bill on her own interests.

To her i was an “interloper.” To my father I served only as an excuse for her not to get a job. He was open about my older sister being the only good thing that ever came out of the marriage. Nobody wanted me, so for me to assert my existence, to remind them that I was there, was fucking evil to them.

And I just—no.

Despite everything, somehow—despite the pieces that I’m made out of, despite all my experiences and neglect and a fucking lifetime of trauma—I’m actually kind of awesome.

I never deserved to be treated like that, by anyone. Nobody does. Nobody would.

And, I love me. Finally. Despite everyone’s efforts.

I deserve to want things, materially and otherwise, within whatever ethical structure strikes me best. My basic needs deserve to be tended. I deserve joy and reward and support. I deserve to be a fucking human being.

Which is a thing that nobody in my life has ever told me.

Despite everything, here I am: still alive. and everything that I’ve been accused of.

What they did to me was wrong.

What my ex-spouse did to me was wrong.

And the list can keep going on, filling those gaps in between.

And I absolutely cannot carry that around with me any longer.

Never Not Queer

  • Reading time:5 mins read

With the end of my voice lessons, and the sudden nascent social need that followed, I followed my therapist’s advice and did that local trans Zoom meetup thing. It was… weird, and awkward, but I guess it reached a sort of equilibrium by the end. I don’t know if this sort of a thing is for me. I feel so lost in groups like this. Still I tried it anyway. So: bravery points for Azure! Would she have done this six months ago? No way!

I think I feel kind of weird in organized queer spaces, to be honest. I mean, any social situation is going to be odd, but—like. there are elements here, it’s like the Red-Headed League or something, right? Creating a space based on this sort of thing, it’s like, “Hey, you have Gender too? Amazing! Let’s both sit here and wait for one of us to talk!” That baseline of presumed trauma that underlies the queer experience also makes it, like—saying anything is a potential minefield. So that adds this extra layer of awkward. And I am So Very Inelegant in this regard, despite my efforts. So, whee, what do we do here, right? I’ve a notion I might manage better in spaces that are About Something, which also just happen to attract people who are very probably queer. That makes more sense to me.

It may not help that a third of the conversation was devoted to awkwardly sitting in silence while one of the members, logged in from her phone at a laundromat, yelled at someone else in the laundromat without muting the phone. At one point I had to ask, are we all on the same page? When she rejoined the conversation, she’d just start talking about whatever she felt like regardless of what anyone else was saying, and… often one sentence would bear no relation to the previous one, in a way I found very difficult to follow. She eventually left.

Another thing about all this is—I don’t know how to spin this. So let’s just air my internalized garbage, right. I’ve been doing my transition almost entirely in a bubble here. There’s been the COVID, under which I’ve rocked the medical angle. Before that, I was dealing with too much trauma to go outside or look at or talk to people in any form.

I tend to think of myself as, like… moderate, in my transition goals, right. I’m not a binary woman, but I do want to embrace the femme on my own terms. I’m my own kind of a girl. Likewise I’ve only been at this for so long; I’ve got a long way to go. I don’t really know what I’m doing yet, and I’m only ten months into the body stuff. But sitting there in my lace top and skirt, a face full of carefully if ineptly applied makeup, nodding and listening patiently to these other trans women rant and talk over each other about cars, I have never felt so prissy in my life.

Gender is what you make of it. It’s made up social garbage. Nothing matters but figuring out a version of yourself that you can actually like. Hell, I am extremely non-binary by ideology and just my lack of understanding of, feeling grossed-out by, gender extremes and stereotypes. This isn’t about anyone else, really. It’s just about me, and… like. My trouble feeling like I fit in anywhere. No matter how tailored the space might sound.

I’m accustomed to feeling prissy and overly feminine in male spaces. My parents made it clear what a prissy child I was, and punished me for it. My ex-spouse made me feel extraordinarily prissy in the scope of my marriage, and made it a regular point of abuse. Here, though, I went in expecting, okay, there would be some common ground. Maybe a couple of super-girly femmes to make me feel normal, haha. Just left of androgynous.

Well. Guess not as much.

Again, this is just about me. Other people can do whatever, and it’s all valid. I just, it’s so hard to find a space that makes sense to me. I was so clearly the odd girl out here. as is ever the case. It just felt particularly extreme last night. Which is the last thing I expected, the last place I expected to feel that way. I’d mention some of the things I’ve been doing just for my own sake, to support my ideas about myself, and there’d be this collective shrug. “Yeah, I don’t really see the point of that.”

Then back to, like. Sports.

So, oh well. I need to get it in my head, I guess, that nothing is ever going to be set up for me. None of this is my world. Every little thing I do, I need to put it together myself from first principles or it ain’t gonna work at all and I’m going to come away frustrated, lonely, and miserable.

So when we come out of this pandemic… I guess it’s time to get building.

Neutral Femme

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Ten months in, it’s starting to get to the point where the femme is just standard—makeup, wardrobe, or not. Even on a garbage day like today, I can look at myself and see basically the person I know myself to be. We’re already so close to where we wanted, and this becoming is gonna keep happening for another couple years probably. I’m extraordinarily far along for, what, ten months? That’s nothing.

It’s such a shift in reality to walk into the bathroom, and even when I’m not trying to do anything really, there she is. There I am. This is a real thing. I actually exist. I’m bending reality back the way it’s supposed to be, and that old story is becoming just some phantom loose end.

Back before I began this, I had a vague target—an ideal scenario, that I didn’t know if I’d ever hit. It would be nice, I thought, to present more feminine than not even if I were to dress neutrally, do nothing special. Jeans and t-shirt, right. Ten months into, like, a five-year journey probably, and despite all these complicating factors like my height, I think we’re pretty close already.

This whole thing is exploration, right. I’m always gonna be non-binary, but the more I lean in to the girl zone, the more I map out all the territory that was denied me for so long, the more I realize how great it is over here. The more that I enjoy being a girl, that I realize this is just who I am. It’s who I’ve always been. I’ve never been this happy.

Hell, I’ve never been happy at all. This is an emotion that I literally never experienced until like two and a half months ago. and now, I just… love me. Which is so bonkers. I’d never have imagined I could do that.

But then, I’m not the same person I used to be. That person wasn’t made to be loved. They were made to bring me here safely. Well, as safely as they could.

Making Spaces

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Today was my final voice class of the semester. The two hours went by as usual, with no special event until the very end when the usual compelled gratitude session was swapped for an open-air discussion of what has and has not been constructive over the course, particularly under these conditions. There was a lot of silence, and as I will do I waited until I was sure I wasn’t about to speak over anyone else or eat up other people’s time before chiming in. I wound up getting weird and emotional, and giving a five-minute speech on human contact and safe spaces. With that, the instructor was like, okay, right. guess that’s it, then. Bye, everyone.

I may not be able to continue with the class in the spring, as they are reintroducing a fee. For someone with a steady income I guess it might be nominal. The older lawyer brushed it off as nothing. But if I had that kind of money, I’d be spending it on other necessities way before an online class. Still if that’s it, if we’ve reached the end, I think I got a good pile of basic principles and developed a feel for where I want to go. I can keep working on it from here, in a way I didn’t have the tools to do before.

You can see where I tried to manage the forest green eyeshadow dust that landed on my upper cheeks, as if i meant to do that. Oh, I insist, it’s just part of the style!

I don’t exactly make friends easily, but it was helpful to have a regular group every week—to check in, be myself, be affirmed, be supported the whole time. It i think helped slightly to unpick this basic terror of talking to people or opening up. It only hit me as it was ending, that was my main point of face-to-face connection—and now it’s over.

Between the classes and the HRT, this year has really shifted a lot of things. I never used to want human contact. It was dangerous, and it reflected back to me so much that I hated about myself, I couldn’t deal with it. But since the summer, I’m learning it doesn’t have to be like that. This regular connection will be weird to lose, and it may not fully click for a while. By that point, maybe it will be safe to go outside?

I’ve begun to notice that there are few scenarios in life where there is a right way of doing things. Mostly, there are ways that people have done things, that have worked for them. The way to proceed generally is not to replicate those results absent of their original context, but to study and adapt the things one likes. To play until one has worked out one’s own borders, techniques, ideas, and preferences—then to be curious and incorporate anything one comes across that feels like it fits. In most matters, that’s all you can do: be interested, have your own ideas, and be open to others’. That’s life.

There’s a confidence here that is new to me. I didn’t even see its growth until the training wheels came off. Now I’m not quite sure where to go. But, I do have options.

Understand the Concept of Love

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Narcissistic abuse is recorded as a specifically cruel, emotionally devastating and terrifying phenomenon that millions of children experience and live with; these wounds do not heal without ever being addressed, and for all of the victims currently experiencing it or trying to recover, it’s vital to create and share resources. It’s also vital to provide a space where all of us feel safe to discuss it and out all our abuser’s crimes. To say to these survivors and victims that narcissistic abuse isn’t real, or to not talk about it, is not only gaslighting but implying their entire lives didn’t happen, they imagined their own torture, and to take away the option of recognizing and fighting this type of abuse.

[…]

This is where we come to the goal of these specific attacks on survivors; the point is to stop us from creating and sharing resources because their pool of victims of abuse shrinks once all the signs of abuse are easily recognized and shared. Narcissists don’t like victims realizing they’re being abused, and leaving. They don’t like not having a lot of possible new victims who wont be able to tell they’re predators. They especially don’t like being held accountable for their actions or experiencing any consequences for it. This is why they find it perfectly acceptable for them to attack and threaten into silence survivors of abuse, in my case to the point of violent threats, rape threats, suicide baits and smear campaigns.

Furious Goldfish, Tumblr post, November 26, 2020

This quote from Tumblr is specifically about parental abuse, but it gets at the only real conclusion I can come to for why my last abuser would (dark-hilariously) threaten to sue me in the event I ever spoke about my mental health problems in public. The big problem for them seems to be, if they fail to control the story and exchange of information, it all starts to fall apart.

I don’t know where I would be now, if indeed I would be anywhere, without help from a few of my friends—some of whom kind of tried to warn me for a long time before those final events. but, I was just so used to being wrong about everything. I was so used to giving people the benefit, I couldn’t see it. My imagination wouldn’t stretch that far.

Lately I’ve really begun to understand that one of my key problems is less innately to do with me than it is that for my entire life, starting in my formative years, I’ve been victimized by people who don’t understand the concept of love. People with complete control over me, whom I’ve just accepted for who they are, because why would you not—while they do anything to me. Take out all their insecurities and grievances, project all their problems on the person least able or likely to object—until such a point as it reaches a threshold, something happens, and something snaps. And I’m forced to wall them away for my own protection, all the while still blaming myself for failing to tough it out. If only I could have, if only they would have—

But, you know, not everyone is a monster. Most people aren’t. What I faced, what I learned to expect from others, that’s not healthy. It’s not sane. Nobody should have to live with that. Nobody should accept being treated the way I was treated.

I’ve been set up for so much failure in life, for so much fear, needlessly. I’ve been lied to for decades about what people are like, about what’s normal. And it’s all kind of profane.

And unlike my abusers, I think I do understand love. basically. I know it better than most people, in some ways. From what I see of people, Love is much more of a constant than I had been led to understand. People are kind. People are helpful, affectionate, accepting, concerned. Not everyone, but in general. And—I’m still learning, right, but i think i’m getting better at seeing through all of this. At seeing the world for how it really is.

Bit by bit. all this training that I never received. it’s kind of… i’m sorting it out. slowly.

Upward Maintenance

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Considering how old this body is and what a young trans I am, I think I look pretty good mostly. Some things will never be perfect. Other things are a work in progress. Generally, though, i am in good spirits about this. (Which again is so novel to me.)

I say this, as I am not having a particularly pretty day, and it has been frustrating me. But you know. not every day is gonna be a winner. It’s up and down, and today isn’t the end of everything; it’s the beginning of everything else. We’re done with the doom. Azure doesn’t need it.

For decades I’m used to every day being the start of the end. But it’s really not. It never has been. It’s just the start. On prior record, I’ve still got plenty of good days ahead of me. Probably my best is far ahead—way over the horizon available to me today. Yesterday was fine. Nothing is consistent, but there are patterns. and I’ve finally caught mine. not ever gonna let it go.

Being this new in a body this old, it’s kinda like getting a used car or a fixer-upper of an old house. you got a project ahead of you, fixing the damage and maintaining the bones of the thing, but you can make anything your own. Play up the strengths. It’s all in how you wear it.

The Gully

  • Reading time:3 mins read

The what-seem-to-be period symptoms were ebbing today, so I figured, fine; might as well get some more groceries before the plague gets groovy and it will be unsafe to go out at all again. Took a larger than usual tote bag with me; one I hadn’t employed before. As usual there were no fucking baskets, so I threw the food directly in my bag, to procedurally unload at the scanner and more sensibly repack.

As it happens, about ten feet from the self-checkout, the bag exploded. Handle came right off, pulled the stitching right off like a zip cord I had to ask the lady there (luckily not the one who has acted… oddly to me) for a couple paper bags. Problem was, the bags here are really thin—and they have no handles. They’re not made for actually carrying. Still, I scooped them up and did my best.

It was a mile’s walk, with two heavy bags—lots of jars and fluid cartons, right, and no reasonable way to carry them beyond cradling them in the crooks of my arms, adjusting every few seconds as they continually slipped from my grasp. Hips were of little use; I was busy walking, and the bags were thin and irregular. I was terrified of tearing.

I got maybe a third of the way, and had to take a breather. Luckily my neighborhood is well-stooped, so from there I could rest every block or so, wipe away the sweat, try to get some feeling back into my deadened arms. No schedule; as long as I made it back, I was fine.

Way up often here on my street, I happen by this lady, out to garden at concrete or lug about great sacks with her gray hair and her elbows. Today she was down sweeping a concrete gully against the apartments—off and below the front steps where I panted and groaned. She tried gently to shoo me, till she learned I was resting. From there we moved to light patter—she aiming to keep her distance and most of her business, but with a certain ease.

It was nothing much, really; just me and this old lady, in social-distance nicety while she cleaned up a planter disaster. I couldn’t have been more than three, four minutes to gather myself. but it was nice. She was sweet. Distant, busy, yet compassionate. Just a little moment of human connection, you know, in all of this. I don’t get that often.

With my front door at my back, I just fucking crashed. I barely had it in me to put away the freezer and fridge things. Even now after a short nap I can barely lift my arms; it’s awful. I keep feeling tears streaming down my cheeks, from the sheer effort of moving—but that journey, and that respite, sort of confirmed my resolve to do something once we’re out of this whole nightmare. I want to make more contact. There are a lot of kind, sincere people out there, if you wait and listen for them and allow yourself to be a little vulnerable.

Sometimes all you need to do is share a stoop.

Bracing

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I’m going to need a bigger bra soon. This isn’t gonna be viable forever. When I measured back in September, my bust was just under 40 inches. It’s now at just about exactly 42. which would in stupid American sizing make me, what, 36DDD. (In UK sizing, 36E.) Which is to say, that estimate of about a cup size a month still holds. For how long, until we reach stasis?

I’d been sort of wondering what was up with them. Again I’ve no sense of proportion, and they haven’t been actively sore for a while—and also I keep having these distressing detransition dreams, which leave me in a weird state on waking, wondering if everything is still as it should be. As it turns out: yes.

Beyond the breasts, I’m starting to gain a little shape in general. Still early, but it’s a real start. Since I did those measurements, my hips have gone from 40 to 42 inches. Which is… not insignificant, for two months of growth.

I need to get a better mirror, and a camera lens that doesn’t flatten everything out, and lighting that replaces some impression of the depth lost to two dimensions. But, yeah. Once I’ve got the concrete numbers in front of me, I can see it.

So it’s finally happening. We’re really doing this. The boobs are great of course—really, really good, as it turns out—but what we’re really here for is the hips. The hips and the butt, and the thighs, and the face. As for that—well. It’s harder to measure for sure, but it’s becoming clear to me that we’ve got some major changes there too. Beyond appearances, even. When I press my tongue into my cheek, the flesh is easily twice as thick and resistant as it used to be. I’ve noticed some difference since way back, but lately, it’s unquantifiable but so obvious.

And having absolute data for everything else—the breasts, hips, thighs (which, oh yeah, are a little bigger too)—sure does help support that idea, even if i can’t easily check it. What are the chances that this one thing that’s supposed to change at roughly the same time as that other stuff, and looks like it is, actually isn’t?

I mean, look at this. I did not use to look like this:

No makeup or anything. Fresh out of the shower. (Though, after my first-ever go with a hairdryer!) I feel like that moderate asymmetry from over-engagement of the jaw muscles on one side is starting to smooth out, the more hollow side filling in and the other slimming down. Just a bit. The lips, the eyes. Just all this subtle stuff I can’t put my finger on.

With all the empirical changes, the verbs are also starting to click. All these facets of posture have fallen into place for me, basically at once. In the past, I’d always considered posture to be this stifling concept—holding one’s self rigid to this expected form, for the benefit of other people. A masking behavior, to present a false image that matches what people expect to see.

But there’s another side of that, that’s about not performance but self-affirmation, self-care, holding one’s self together; asking yourself who you are, and trying to back that up so that you feel good and that the physicality supports and reflects the mentality of it all. Creating this physio-psycho feedback loop.

It’s also interesting just how many elements there can be to posture. It’s not just standing or sitting up straight, right. It’s about engaging your body toward certain kinds of desired readiness, removing stress where you don’t want it. And the dimensions to that are everywhere! I’m noting and working out posture issues in my lower back and my hips; my upper back and shoulders; my neck; my jaw, throat, and tongue; my eyes, my lips; my legs, my arms. I’m just actively holding so many things differently, consciously reshaping my form so that I can carry myself the way that I want to. And for all that, despite my ADHD and lack of of executive function, it’s not as much juggling as you’d think.

And again, this habituation, it’s not for anyone else’s benefit, or to match some kind of a social code. I’m not performing; I’m conducting system checks. There’s all this information that goes back and forth, as I settle into the person I know I am and whom I want to be, and as I existentially embrace her.

This is a lot happening at once, as things have tended to be since maybe August, but it’s good. I feel like this body language business is some basic shit I’ve been lacking my whole life; the art how to Be.

So much of my transition, so much of my adjustment to what’s actually right for me, seems to be a matter not of taking things on and forcing issues but of just letting go. The posture business, it’s less about manipulation than about learning to let go of tension—allowing myself to snap back into a natural and comfortable and healthy form, as compared to how trauma had taught me to hold myself. It’s exactly the opposite of holding stiffly in some some uncomfortable position. Hell, my changes in posture allow me to move in ways I never knew I could. who knew that hips were hinged like that?

There is an ongoing sort of monitoring, at least until the habits form and I can free that space to think of something else—guiding one’s muscles and parts and even more existential mental moving parts. But that stiffness and discomfort, that’s not what we want at all. This is more like a brace, to help heal from injury.

Critical Mass

  • Reading time:3 mins read

For a while there I was almost concerned. That ongoing breast tenderness had ebbed down to a whisper, barely noticeable at all. Was this it, were we somehow reaching the end of the story after mere months? But—okay, never mind. Tits back to fire again. I haven’t mapped it out, but it feels like it moves in cycles—a certain number of days on, then off.

On top of that, generally I feel so fucking crampy and gross.

Which… with a more than a cursory understanding of biology, would make sense, right?

So yeah, I guess I should probably start to keep track of this business. Because on the basis of… really every month since February, but absolutely since August, there is a clear cycle going on.

It is established, if not particularly well-studied—because, trans healthcare; who gives a shit, right—that regardless of your genital situation, once you got a certain level of estrogen in your system, you start to experience periods. It’s not about the hardware (which is all basically the same anyway); it’s about the instructions that the firmware sends around. Of particular note is that at a certain threshold, breast tissue begins to produce a cyclical amount of estrogen, along with some other compounds that contribute to the process.

And, uh. whee:

It’s hard to get a good sense in two dimensions with bad lighting…
but yeah, we’re entering the active cleavage zone. Bringing the gang together!

I guess my breasts are at critical mass already? I mean, seven months into my regimen they were at a size that the literature tells me a trans femme half my age might expect to reach after 2-5 years—and today they’re two cup sizes larger than that…

As I say, the real monthly roller coaster kicked off in maybe August, September? Which, yeah, would line up, right? And good grief, the soreness I’ve been getting since last night. It’s that kind of tenderness where you feel if you poke it too hard you’re gonna barf. Like a pair of giant cystic pimples, connected to nerve lines running from my toes to my teeth.

I guess It follows that it would build in intensity, month on month, as development progresses, right. And I mean, I’ll take it. Whatever! I’m used to feeling like shit every day of my life. It’s fine. If the trade-off is that life is worth living? That finally I don’t feel like this the other 80% of the time? Sure, whatever, lol.

On top of all that, today I… seem to have entered the chocolate zone. I’ve talked a little about my change in taste and food preferences, some of which has been weirdly cyclical as well, and… yeah, okay. We may have an answer to some of that as well.

Due to fairly systemic ignorance about this topic I was not aware that this feature came with the territory until I got here. But, I, uh. I guess I’m part of the club now, huh? One imagines a uterus just makes this all the more fun. At least the discomfort doesn’t come with a mess over here.

It’s just…

Yeah. so. With how much more bothersome it’s gotten month on month, it will be an adventure to see where these waves will go in the future.

So, I’m. For now…

I’m just—i’m gonna… stand in the shower and groan for an hour, I guess.

The Question of Me

  • Reading time:10 mins read

Continuity of self is a weird thing for me these days. I’m not kidding or exaggerating that I, Azure, am a different person from the last custodian of this body—but I’ve inherited all these second-hand memories and feelings, some of which translate fine, and some which feel so alien.

A model of self-Azurance

My mind is often very different from theirs. In a real sense, I have to keep asking myself, is that how I feel about this thing or is that how they felt? I know they liked this food, but does that mean I do? Am I doing this activity just because they did, or am I getting something out of it?

This also raises all sorts of odd existential questions about experiences. If they experienced a thing, does that necessarily mean it happened to me, just because I remember it? I wasn’t there, and I likely would have had a different experience if I had been. How much of my memory applies to my reality?

This sounds a little nuts, I know, and if I weren’t living this I would start to bring up denial, dissociation, and all manner of diagnoses that make sense from the outside. As a lived experience? Uh, no. Kind of the opposite. I was dissociative, in denial, for like 40 years. Now, at last, I’m not. I’m actually here.

That whole persona I built as a defense mechanism, that empty lumbering shell—that wasn’t even a real, full person. Now it’s like I’m woken from a coma, and I’ve got all these weird fucking dreams to sort out. I know they literally happened in some form, to that hollow entity—and I know in objective, certainly legal, terms that that person was me. But, in mind terms? No. It wasn’t. I wasn’t there for any of that. If I was, I was asleep. Everything before a few months ago feels as real as my dreams last night of running from home as a teen, which (unfortunately) I know didn’t happen either.

So many things feel reset, that in real terms aren’t. Except—in even realer terms, for many of them they might as well be, since there is no practical element, so the only thing that makes them real is persistence of memory. And a lot of those are related to trauma.

A lot of trauma is tied up in this notion of being in various ways ruined forever, right. Nothing will ever be okay. This tarnish will never scrub away. this defines me now, not by my decision. To be able to step around that and go, huh, that sucked, but it doesn’t apply? That’s… novel. This is a world unfamiliar to me.

There’s so much baffling stuff going on in my head, like moving into a new apartment and trying to figure out where to put everything; how to manage the space; how to organize old memories and tools so they’re useful and they reflect the new circumstances. Maybe selling a few. It’s this question of how to push forward as myself, without lying to myself or anyone else about the legacy I’ve inherited—yet without lying that any of this was really me either. It’s fuckin’ weird, and not a thing I expect makes a lot of sense to others.

All of which to say—I don’t like to talk about sex, right. though I am making an effort to lately in parts and places, for my own good. I have so much wound up in this topic that can easily bring me to a panic. But also, what horrible funhouse memories I have—those aren’t mine. It is with some relief and with great caution that I observe the distance here between me and my predecessor. I don’t want to misrepresent myself, but insofar as my person, there is no real lasting effect to any of their experiences beyond my terror, And that feeling, it isn’t even mine.

I have this big, scary box of crap to sort through, when I can be bothered. But that jumble, it’s all just stories to me. It’s, it doesn’t directly pertain to my own lived experience, or to who I am as a person. Azure wasn’t there for any of that. It didn’t happen to her. It’s abstract now, like a gross movie I watched when I was younger.

Again this isn’t the most important topic in the world, and there’s certainly no rush. But, while I am going through this whole process it makes sense to whittle at this big, scary pile until it’s all filed away and not so scary anymore. None of that defines me, as heavy as it may be.

I can take what charms, talismen, advice as I find quaint or reassuring or useful. But, it is no small thing to be able to step away from the box and go, yeah, not gonna carry that around. Not gonna give it my energy to unpack. Radioactive as it may be, it’s really not my problem. Me, I have nothing to regret because I’ve only been alive for a matter of months. So how much of that pile of yikes I choose to own, we will see. But that sum will be my decision, not something that was done to me.

Well, that’s terrifyingly real.

Another way this all manifests—this notion of me—is with the question of age. This feels like a bigger issue for me than it reasonably should. For this question there is of course an empirical, objective answer; my body has been around for so-long, it has grown and decayed so-much—whether I was there or not. Even if we take for read the thorny issue of self, and that all these things I assert the stronger each day about how I just inherited this body, we’re getting into misrepresentation material if I start to mess with the serial numbers, as it were.

But it’s not that simple of course. Though as a baseline I’m more present and less dissociated from my body and the reality around me than in my best of memories, and I accept that this flesh is a part of me and I a part of it, a mind can’t be carbon dated per se.

And it’s like. I don’t want to lie, right. I know how old my body is. I know how long some version of me has been around. I remember government cheese and the days before widespread VHS rental—but also I know I’m running off a new install here, and those memories are all just backups spooled from a tape drive.

Without makeup disaster, getting a little closer to subjective reality…

Mentally, emotionally, then, how old do I think I am? Again: complicated. It’s funny; I think for 40 years I sat in a sort of limbo, waiting around to grow up—and now with all these hormones in my system, I’ve finally reached adolescence. I’ve never felt like this before. This is so weird.

But clearly I’m not a teen, right. In no way does that make sense. I’ve got way too much lived experience, even if much of that is drawn from an archive. Also this decaying body is a pretty strong signifier, if not enough to tell the full story.

An even bigger and perhaps more useful cue is this new bodily autonomy and emancipation. I’m in a stage of my life where for the first time really I’m choosing where I want to be, who I want to be; what kind of a life I want to make for myself. You know, the sort of thing that young adults do.

Help, the robot is drunk.

I know I have six years of college behind me (Christ), and I’ve still-too-recently escaped from a really bad situation, to live by myself near the downtown of a city that I like… with no job, or prospects, or particular skills, but with a new sense that there is something ahead of me.

That’s a pretty major shift. Since middle school I’ve always felt my whole life was behind me. From about the age of 12 to 40, each day I woke surprised that it all was yet to have ended. I couldn’t imagine any kind of a future. Now that’s all sort of flipped, and all there is for me is future.

So let’s say, given six years of college, how old would that make me when I’d be a person like me? I’d be about 24 now. And—yeah, that registers. It makes sense in a lot of ways. Everything after 2002 does feel like a thick, chalky Vaseline smear in my mind. And if we conflate me with my predecessor, I also think I’ve had only about six years of my life living alone and away from any controlling party: my last two years at university, two years in Oakland, and the past two years since… the incident.

Even physically, though this body is getting up there, that muted and delayed and drawn-out first puberty sort of complicates things. Let’s face it, I did not age normally for like 30 years. (Though I did age like a decade in those last couple years of my marriage.) There are so many ways my growth has been stunted, and whatever angle you choose, the math keeps working out just about the same, such that I am the person I am now.

As it happens—as science progresses and people and culture slowly evolve—do you know the age when adolescence is now understood to end? 24. And when I walk around, as myself for the first time, starting my life as a real human being, that’s just about exactly how old I feel.

hahaha seriously?

So we’re stuck in this sort of a reality gap, right. Developmentally, mentally, emotionally, Azure seems to be about 24, maybe. That seems right. She’s a new person, but everything considered, that’s what she seems to add up to. But to assert that beyond my head would of course be dodgy; in practical, real-world terms i’m clearly not 24. It’s just not true in any measurable sense. I’d never want to make a real claim to it, because I’m not delusional or prone to deceit. But in equally real existential terms, in regard to the software I’m running, yeah. That’s about Azure’s age.

For the things that don’t matter, then—online surveys, login forms—that is the age I use. Because multiple things can be true in different ways at the same time, and if we’re just measuring Azure, as a person? It’s accurate enough. who cares. I am who I am. And it’s got nothing to do with your rules.

Every day I’m struck with how strange this all feels. I arrived here way late for the party—but here I am now, and I am spectacular. Now it’s up to me to make the most of the mess that was left behind.

Skirting the Center

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So yesterday for my nine-month follow-up, we went on a little adventure. Got a little bold. Previously the only time I’d worn a skirt outside is that once, to the mailbox around the corner—and at the time it felt like I was running through fire. But here I figured, I’m basically a girl now. It’s getting kinda hard to hide, even when I dress androgynously. The more femme I go, the better I do psychologically. So why not just do it.

And I did. I wore a skirt and tights. Put on a lacy top. Did my above-mask makeup. Walked the two miles to my appointment. Only got hit on once.

The whole time, I just felt chill. No one gave a shit (aside from that one creepo), because why would they. People are people; everyone’s got their own thing going on. I am who I am. It’s fine. It’s whatever. I can just be myself now.

I got there a few minutes early and after waiting over two and a half hours, I got to see the… less helpful doctor for like five minutes. She barely titrated me up at all, though it seems there’s plenty of headroom. We’ll get back to that, though.

Everyone there did, however, keep calling me “ma’am.” That was novel.

After my session, I walked the two miles back, then halfway to the CVS to fill my prescription—before I realized I’d forgotten my wallet at home. So that’s halfway back again, then all the way to the CVS and back. Altogether that was like seven miles in a day, and oh my God I do not have New York legs anymore, never mind lockdown torpor, and I may never walk again after this.

So, I only got my estradiol bumped up to the level I had been unofficially taking anyway, which blows because I was looking for a tangible increase. Every time this goes up, I feel a little bit more human, a little bit less gross and ill, a little more myself. But, we’ll take what we can get I guess.

What’s interesting here is my hormone levels, which I don’t think I’d been given before. So the goal is to get my T down below 100, into a normal feminine range, right. I’m just on a moderate dose of spiro—150mg out of a theoretical max of 400. As it turns out, my T levels are… 9.

Nine.

I don’t know what they’d be without the spiro, but that seems… uh, low. Considering the modest dose I’m on, and that the target is below 100. This of course does not surprise me in the shape of it—I know I’ve never been brimming with testosterone, right—but the exact number strikes me as hilarious.

I guess this would help to inform why I have suffered so little damage, broadly speaking, to the point where I figured my shit out and started to get my health in order.

So yeah, they felt no particular need to mess with my spiro dose. And that’s fine.

In terms of headroom for estrogen—okay, the ceiling is vaguely defined, but for an adult woman it’s around 350. Right now, my levels are at 170—so just under the square middle again, right? We can double my estrogen and I’ll still be in a healthy range, if close to scraping the top.

All of which is to say, in three months I’m gonna make a right old fuss about increasing my dose. There’s no reason to trickle this out, guys. I’m fine, I’m getting healthier. And this is what I need to get there. Just gimme my darned hormones, jeez.

But there’s a sort of nutty day. My legs are dead, but my hormones are awesome (if not quite where I want them yet) and very normal for a healthy adult woman. And, like. That’s what I am. I can go outside, dress how I want, act in a way that comes naturally to me, and no one cares.

On the way back from the CVS, I felt this weight fall from me despite my fatigue. All of this, everything I was doing, it was under my control. This was me, living my life. And it was fine. I didn’t have to watch the way I walked, try to control my autistic arm movements to avoid weirding out passers-by. If anything, all my neurodivergent tics seem that much less strange from a girl than from a boy—such is the culture we have, and the associations we make.

I just felt so relaxed, and inside myself, and present in the world. I saw all the young people walking around on a Friday night… in the middle of a pandemic… none of them wearing a fucking mask… living their lives, chatting, laughing, going to restaurants, and I realized, holy shit, I’m a real person too. If not for the plague and poverty, that could be me. I could have friends. I could be going out and doing things. And no one would care that I am me. If anything, they’d probably be nicer to me than they ever were to that awkward lumbering shell.

Like, I could be doing this. I could be alive. I could have a life. One of my choosing. I could make a world for myself.

But first, well.

Let’s get the world in order, I guess. And see if I can find a way to support myself.

God, though, when all of this is over? Everything is going to be so very different for me. For the first time, I feel so much potential. I want to be here. I want to live. I want to be free to simply fucking exist.

And I can be. And it will be good.

…

Eventually.

Prose of Pagnosia

  • Reading time:4 mins read

My face-blindness is a fucking cartoon. Even if i know to watch for someone, I don’t recognize them if they change their hair, their dress, their posture, their accent. If I see someone who looks vaguely similar, I’m like, am I going mad? Did they always look like that?

It’s bad enough with, say, actors in a TV show. Where things really get strange is with people I know in real life—even people I really should be able to recognize, like my parents or my (now ex-)spouse, right. But, welp! Brain has other ideas.

Say I’ve known you for thirty years; see you on the regular. Then you show up where I don’t expect you—maybe wearing a new hat? My brain: who the everlasting fuck is this, and why are they talking to me like they know me Though I should add, if you talk in your normal voice, I’m likely to figure it out in a minute. Voices, I’m okay with.

With my ex-spouse, they’d do their hair differently and I had to just stare. Was that really them, I wondered. It had to be, right? Was this some sort of a trick? I felt like I was talking to a completely different person; like someone else had been swapped in. It freaked me out, put me on edge. Anyone could claim to be them.

Once at—when I was a teenager there were these strange, depressing parties held for dial-up BBS meet-ups. There was a girl; we were in this weird nebulous relationship, and I think she eventually lost patience with me and my aroace dithering. (Not for the last time!) Once as I arrived at one of these shindigs, a person who looked not at all like her, but had kind of similar hair, ran up to me and hugged me for some reason—and I was freaking out. It’s not just the unwanted contact. It was my brain, going, fuck fuck is this actually her? Did she always look like this? Why do I not remember?

The scene was weirder still in that I don’t think I knew that person at the time. so I don’t know what she thought she was doing. Maybe she had the same problem as I?

Probably not.

But, like. You can see how I always have felt like reality is shifting under my feet, like I’m living in some kind of a dream. Nothing feels nailed down to me, or to act along any kind of consistent rational logic. And here we’re just talking faces.

Holy shit, reality is hard. I can tell you, this is part of why I have never felt motivated to do recreational drugs. The effect I am promised there, that’s the opposite of what my head needs. I don’t need perception to get blown open, man. I need to be able to consistently wake up and expect that I’m living in the same universe as yesterday, which it almost never does. Everything is new to me all the time. There’s no history and reasoning to any of it, and it’s so fucking hard.

That is to say, historically speaking. From recent experience, I feel like Azure has an easier time of it than her predecessor. It’s still hard for me at times, but by God I’ve never felt this rooted. They sure never did.

Between the above and my inability to remember names, you can see the how social situations might threaten to wash over me, carry my sanity away with a hiccup and a gurgle—even before we get into, like, social mores and performance and expectations, and having no idea what anyone means or what they think I do.

It’s scary, man. I don’t know how people do it. I guess their brains just work right, huh?

Me? Why, I get violent anxiety attacks. It’s rad.

Then people scream at me for embarrassing them by having an anxiety attack. Which helps a lot. Remember what to do if anyone you love happens to be in distress.

Ha ha.

Anyway, that’s why I never talk to anybody ever. The end.

Writing the Unspeakable

  • Reading time:23 mins read

So sex, right. I don’t like this topic. It makes me cry, and not happy tears. There’s so much built up in and around this, that hurts and scares me to examine. It’s fortunate, sort of, that being aroace means I don’t have to actively contend with it much, except in my own head.

As I’ve unraveled elsewhere, there are a couple ways to frame the relationship and the distinction between my aceness and what has become clear as my pansexuality. One approach is more granular and is about modes of attraction—I don’t experience sexual or romantic, and my neurology and trauma complicate sensual attraction, but there’s an element of aesthetic and platonic is definitely on the table. The other is an innie/outie thing, sorta like gender—you know, like identity versus presentation. That’s an inexact parallel, but it gets at the idea of this outer practical awareness and expression (aceness), versus the theory and fantasy and inner life (panness) that never thinks or wants to cross into real behavior—which doesn’t make it any less a part of me.

The aroace angle is easy enough for me to manage. That was just a matter of identifying, oh that’s why my interactions have always gone this way; that would explain these other things that never added up. Okay, cool, so it turns out that’s just how I’m wired and there’s nothing wrong with me. Phew, good to understand that at last.

The inner modes of attraction are harder, for so many reasons. There are so many layers of shame, and fear, and bad memories and past violence and trauma and blame and accusation. and it is weird and difficult to realign my feelings with my current understanding of my gender.

I grew up ostensibly male in the 1980s and ’90s, in a rural area. It’s not just that “gay” was the ultimate insult; it’s that it was a pathology for those with power over one’s life to be concerned with: You’re not one of them, are you? Do we need to send you somewhere? I had all this other stuff going on as well, of course. I was neurodiverse and I was badly, reluctantly playing out the wrong gender. For reasons beyond my understanding, everything about me was wrong, and I could never betray a word of my full, true thoughts or feelings on any subject, without putting myself at risk.

The most terrifying shame out of all the things I shouldn’t be thinking and feeling, and here we get to the point of this discussion, was my fixation with dicks—a topic I always tried to dance around and not to dwell on, but it would always surface. So here I demystify it: I have always liked dicks, okay. It is what it is.

In the year 2020, with our current nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality, and with all the discourse and controversy about genital preferences, this is sort of a different world to be breaking this down in. but in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, masculinity was super not appealing to me—which made it more confusing. How was I to resolve this attraction?

Back in the present, I know now that I am pan. My block against attraction to dudes on principle has to a large degree melted with time and hormones and understanding of my own gender in particular, though still it feels so fucking strange and triggering to wrangle with. And with that dam down, it’s now clear that my attraction to people—in theory if not in real life, where again it simply doesn’t happen—has everything to do with who they are as people; that gender doesn’t really enter into it meaningfully. (Trauma-based hang-ups aside, of course.) But it is also clear to me that on a personal level, though I can appreciate any equipment based on its attachment to the person who’s sporting it—the person being the only thing that really matters—all things being equal, given a choice, I have an obvious preference and fascination for the penis. And it’s clear that this fascination ties into a lot of other things about me.

I am of course passive as hell in most things, even the topics that engage me, and the aroaceness sure as heck indicates a lack of active engagement with sexuality or attraction. It’s more that sometimes, ideas come to me. and then, there they are for me to manage somehow. And in all this ideation… well. A thing I have observed a few times, with increasing clarity, is the possibly strange way i have always engaged with porn. As I’ve explained before, I tend to see the central figure as the protagonist like any story, and to identify with (usually) her on her journey. And, as it turns out—oh. That’s not just an abstraction, huh. Like, it’s more than empathy and narrative analysis.

Not to cross lines between porn and reality, but, well, again reality doesn’t much enter into my sexuality. it’s all in my head, all the time. But all things considered, I am so clearly a bottom, right. Almost exclusively. It’s all about navigating things done to me, rather than seeking to do them. Which, whee, sheds so much light on my history, such as it is. Which has exclusively been with cis women who insisted on perceived gender roles, and so expected me to take on the behavior of a certain cultural narrative, growing more and more frustrated with my timidness, reluctance, confusion. It had nothing to do with attraction to them or otherwise. In each case they were at that time the center of my life and my attraction was proportionate to my all-encompassing love. That’s the only motivation that matters, right. It’s the performance that freaked me out. Had they initiated rather than always expected me to and grown furious when they felt forced to lower themselves to ask me, and had they taken the lead, I would have let them carry me anywhere. Instead there was this tangle based on assumed roles, that they would not deign to discuss.

To equate the penis with action is of course reductive—I have a dick, and I like my dick, and we’re having this discussion here—but there are connections going on with all of this, right. It’s not the realm of binary black-and-white objective labels, as we’re talking about people. And likewise not everyone with a penis is male, not everyone with a vagina is female, and it’s all complicated and that’s great and weird and as it should be. Again, case in point: me. But my preference for dick, it makes a kind of sense that wends through every part of my being, touches so many things.

It is perhaps messy to be pan, yet to have a clear and unambiguous preference for one mode of genitalia—but we’re messy, right. Of course attraction isn’t based on what’s in a person’s pants, and even if it were, a preference isn’t exclusive. Once you get that far, who cares? It’s messy in the same way that I can be pan but far more importantly aroace, and that it all makes a sort of sense because people aren’t math problems. There is only so much external logic you can apply to a person. It’s not about the outside, about all these boxes and labels. All of that is just death.

But yeah, this is all me coming to terms that i’m a girl who dreams about getting railed by hypothetical dicks even as she recoils from any actual touch. And, like. I shouldn’t feel shame about who I am, right. That’s what I am trying to get past, so I can just fucking live here, goddamn.

I like dicks. That’s a part of who I am, and it’s normal and it’s fine. Because people are fucking weird, man. I have talked about this all a little, in bits and and pieces and behind ciphers and in private conversation that has unintentionally gotten weird, for which I feel I hope appropriate chagrin. But here’s me thinking it straight through, finally; coming to terms with it all.

Of course in real life also, sex is gross and unsanitary and awkward and emotionally overwhelming—and with my sensory issues, it is viscerally unpleasant. Perfectly normal behavior just hurts to the point of weeping, in the manner of whacking one’s shin or funny bone. So yeah. no. Fun thing about keeping it in my head is, one can overlook the practicalities like that and work on the basis of aesthetics and fascinations without having to deal with, like, suffering and disgust and a big mess to clean up.

On which note, HRT has also been amazing to me. I swear, nine months in, I have not experienced one adverse effect. Nothing at all. Everything is the way I want it to be, and that I have always felt awful that things weren’t since I was about twelve. It’s a little bizarre how it even affirms my basic attitudes toward sex—which my body did struggle against a bit, when on the wrong hormone path for so many years.

Sex is gross and undesirable and overwhelming and unpleasant, but a feminine penis is so much better-behaved, it’s superb. All the literature they hand out is framed to make this sound like a scary, undesirable side effect to put one off of treatment. But, uh. no? It’s very good. It is such a relief to no longer experience random arousal, and that in the rare event I feel compelled to engage nonetheless, hardly any mess now!

See, the thing about the feminine penis is that it wants to behave like vulva and vagina. It’s all the same hardware basically, right, and the hardware gets its instructions from the hormones it’s sent. so the priority shifts toward lubrication instead of ejaculation. So in all this there is way less of a sense of urgency. It becomes more about the journey than the destination, as it were. (Though yes, multiple destinations are entirely feasible, if one’s brain can handle it.) Which is also in part why it doesn’t demand attention the same way.

Even in the event of arousal, which again is way less frequent, it comes more of a decision point. It’s not a case of, Christ, guess I need to take care of this huh. It’s more like, oh. Well. There’s an option. Do I feel like making time for this right now? 90% of the time if you’re like me, the answer is probably no—because there are other things to do, it’s a hassle, it’s time-consuming, and it’s not very important. For that one time out of ten you do make the time, it’s way less annoying and gross and… depressing, than before.

I feel like I have control over my body for the first time, or rather that I am on a level with it and we are able to communicate clearly and agree on principles and priorities. It’s so wild that everything now works how I want and expect. I guess some people who put a lot of stock in sex might be frustrated, but it’s so cool to me that all my aspects can be friends now rather than constantly argue. I am a greater whole than I used to be, as a result of dynamics like this—of which this is just one dynamic example.

So for like three decades my physiology was one of a million ways I felt like I was fighting myself. This sense of calm that I feel now that all my parts are alight may contribute to my ability to finally step back and take tally of my sexuality and attractions; figure out what I really feel and want for myself.

This shift in function, it plays into a broader shift in my self-image. There are of course a few angles to this: general self-worth, confidence, fear about asserting boundaries, shame about my general weirdness—but my body plays into it big-time.

Historically I have had big old issues about being seen. There was a sense of danger and vulnerability, and also of this disgust and shame I felt for my form. I didn’t want to see or acknowledge myself. I definitely didn’t want to be touched or commented on. I was horrible.

It brought me to tears to be stripped down without my protective layers. Shorn of jackets and waistcoats and sweaters and shirts and trousers and everything else, there was no hiding my horribleness: my long, bony limbs, my weird chest, my birth marks—and of course my terrible skin. It was bad. It took such trust to get me that far—and if trust faded?

It’s funny how late, even into my transition, I processed what all that was. Somehow I’d never connected my body issues with my transness, even after accepting that I was trans. There was just so much rewiring to do, I guess, and it took a while to get to that particular wound—one I had no interest in touching. Appropriately enough.

About six months into my regimen, I decided that I actually really like my body and where it’s going. Suddenly now I am not ashamed to have arms and legs and a torso and a face. (Well, the facial hair is a problem still, but.) It’s all on a knife’s edge every day, and my mood is up and down and all over the place, but I have never felt this before, and like so many things lately it makes me drunk with novelty and glee: Hey wow! I’m not completely disgusting! I can apprehend myself as a person worth seeing and touching. With my hips and my breasts and the changes to my face and posture, I enjoy the way I am now shaped. I can dance naked in the mirror, and think, wow, I love her.

So that would seem to be another hangup in the can—if one were to desire sex, which, still: no. For all the reasons. But, like. Since we’re clearing house here, sanity dictates that I work through the issues that aren’t really about me or my wiring and wants and needs. And my body issues, they aren’t innate. I’m dealing with them. They don’t need to affect the choices that I make.

The goal is to get it down to the necessary hang-ups only; the things about me that I can’t, and don’t want, to change. I want to be making decisions based on truth, not trauma, even if the answers turn out the same. When faced with something as big and confusing and momentous as sex, I want to be able to confidently say, nah, not for me—not to melt into fear and uncertainty.

Wound up of course in all of this drama is the age-old question of what it means to be trans and to have gendered attraction. The paradox being, by lifting my mental block on a gender in order to nullify gender as a factor in attraction, my brain goes into these gendered conniptions.

It can be hard enough to wrap one’s head around the meaning of gay or straight attraction if one is just flipping polarities, right, from one binary gender to the other. There’s the label logic, but none of this is rational. One’s perception is all based on a lifetime of emotional appeals and enforcement. If you’ve got decades of people incorrectly calling you a boy, then attraction to girls doesn’t feel gay even if mathematically is sort of works out that way. And vice-versa, one presumes.

To be non-binary, though, the labels all become sort of a mockery. I guess, Logically to be non-binary and gay would be to feel attraction to other enbies, right, but, like. It’s more complicated, right, in part because these terms and categories are inadequate. Again, people are weird. So of course the sensible thing to say is, fuck the labels. You’re queer; just do you. Feel what you feel. Who cares. And… right! Sure. if we’re going to be sensible, absolutely that. But, what’s sensible about any of this? To assert that, we’re just dismissing our natural emotional response, which is a sucky kind of a solution. Due to the way this fucking society works, there can be (and in my case is) a lot of trauma and headfuckery to untangle and work through to be able to get to the point of just shaking it out and saying, yeah, lol, whatever, love is love—as true and perfect as that ideal may be.

All of which is to say, to accept myself as in some capacity pan means wrangling with the very visible and visceral hangups over this one angle of attraction, that have been so long wrapped up in fear and threat and accusation, and the labels that I’ve absorbed that go with it.

It’s funny in a way. Because I was (ineffectively and erroneously) raised to be male, I can’t help but read attraction to men as gay. What’s funny about this is that, this should in itself be a good thing, right? Let’s all be gay! Hurrah! And in any other context, it transparently would be. But there’s so much wrapped up in this. For me this isn’t fun-gay. This isn’t happy-gay, iconoclast, freedom, anarchic empathetic human acceptance rainbow self-direction gay. My brain wants to process this to at least some extent as weaponized, accusation, terror gay: the thing to be denied at all cost.

The other funny part is that, like. It… kind of really isn’t? Again if we’re just going mathematically—which doesn’t work when we’re talking about people, but here the architecture serves a support purpose so let’s go with it—how can attraction to males be gay if I’ve never been male?

So it is that there’s all this internalized garbage, that elicits a certain protective panic to surface the moment I start to relax and think, you know, it’s fine; this is true; this is just how i’m put together; I can appreciate all people the same way—yes, even dudes, okay; it’s fine! I try to bring down the wall and make things equal, and just admit what’s in front of me, and something in the back of my head begins to sputter and go, oh no, oh shit, oh God, I can’t be thinking this, no one can know about this, I’m going to get in so much trouble, help. So that’s a reflex I’m going to have to keep working on. It’s nothing inherent to me. it’s just an injury. with a really strong immune response.

To go back to the labels, everything is a big old shrug here. Nothing feels straight; every kind of attraction is some kind of queer. I’m in this weird old gender space where, like, I’ve taken myself outside of normal kinds of polarity, even as I continue to recover from the above garbage. so just the act of feeling any kind of attraction at all becomes—like, no attraction will ever be straight again.

In a sense being non-binary makes it easier to just go, yeah, whatever. Gender is a fuck; people are people; find attraction where you will, or don’t. It’s all the same; don’t worry about it. But to embrace this also adds extra pressure when I recognize my hang-ups. I don’t want any of that mess guiding my thoughts and my feelings, since it really has nothing to do with me and just ideologically it’s gross, right. With all this rumination on dudes and dicks, I feel like I’m putting way more emphasis on this one angle of attraction than it probably warrants, to the point where it comes off as a little weird and fixated—but that is, I think, because it bothers me. I’m trying to wrangle this deep terror, in the face of reality. It’s so hard to admit. I feel like I have to keep looking over my shoulder, like I’m going to get in trouble. But this is one of the last pieces in the puzzle of me, I think; one of the last facets to embrace until it can stop hyperventilating and accept that everything will be okay.

It was so much easier to accept my asexuality, followed a little later by my clearly non-binary gender. Accepting my femininity was more of a drawn-out, mildly terrifying struggle, but I think i’m pretty well committed to that concept now. (Like, seriously. This is amazing.) In broad terms, recognizing myself as pan feels like it should be simple—but then, this. It’s so hard to talk about, especially as I have such a strong aversion to sex and romance, right. On top of the more present and visceral issues, I have all this trauma wrapped up that I don’t know when if ever I’ll begin to unwind. Then admitting this in particular? Oof.

Which is of course why I have to do it. God, I have absorbed so much crap—but I need to fucking accept myself for who I am. I don’t want Azure to have to deal with any of this. She is a new person. We’re dealing with our shit, so Azure can just live her fucking life.

So in terms of my innate qualities we’ve done my lack of attraction and interest in anyone ever, which are 100% valid and important to recognize and assert. We’ve also addressed the neurological issues—the physical discomfort to sex and sense of ickiness about the whole business. In terms of things have been done to me, we’ve gone through body issues, shame, confusion over my orientation and what it means. What I think is left is a sense of physical fear.

To be sure, this isn’t entirely unwarranted. It can be dangerous out there, for men as well as women, but especially anyone femme-coded—and especially if they happen to be transgender. And likewise it is not unwarranted to place much of that fear in the lap of men. I do not, for instance, to get get enbies and women honking at me trying to pick me up outside the grocery store, and that’s far from the scariest this could get.

But it is also true that despite a certain share of bad actors, the world is not a field of bogeymen and most people are not in fact monsters. Despite what some first and second-wave feminists may assert, this includes men—because people are just people, right. No one has to be a certain way; largely people behave as they think they’re expected to.

Now that I crunch the obvious, I think that historically this whole patriarchy thing has also helped to unnecessarily gender my attraction. It’s so easy to equate men with toxic masculinity and physical danger, right? In which case, zoop, there goes any interest for me. I’m not going to consciously put myself in a dangerous or violent situation, if I can avoid it—and threat is anything but attractive to me.

But that’s a gross and unfair attitude, and yes it feeds right into patriarchal notions with the presumption that boys just gotta be that way. And to be sure, our culture does create an element of yikes that i don’t want to think about navigating. But since were talking about intrinsic and extrinsic qualities, that’s not the former, right. Dudes don’t gotta be like that any more than I need to be shamed and traumatized over being the person who I am, feeling the things that I do.

I think that engaging with queerness and the variety of ways that everyone can ultimately just kinda be as one—coming to grips with my own gender, having interactions with trans men, and all of this stuff that goes into interrogating the systems that we’re living in—it’s helping to loosen up that deep associative fear, which has helped me come to grips with my reality. If I’m not terrified, it’s a lot easier to let other feelings in.

All things equal, people being equally cool and non-threatening—yeah, in that circumstance it really comes down to the individual. Gender’s not a significant factor. Of course we don’t live in an ideal world, so complications and fuss and worry do abound. A big problem in my marriage was, I did not feel safe. Like, ever. But especially not at my most vulnerable and under the closest scrutiny imaginable. That’s not going to help any sort of attraction or desire. But as that also demonstrates, that fear and danger are not exclusive to a gender. It’s all about the people, as individuals. The fear is individual, just as appreciation can be. Anyone can be a monster, but that’s up to them, and it’s not determined by any objective factor. There’s nothing rational or empirical or necessary about being a cruel person. It’s a choice that people make. That anyone can make, or not.

As I say, 90% of my reason for putting this stuff all out here in public is to help me push through the thoughts in a linear form and lock them into place so I can understand them all better. The other 10% is thinking, maybe there are some other people like me whom it could help—other neurodiverse queers out there, just trying to make their own sense of all this garbage they’ve been handed. Everyone’s different and will have a different experience, but gosh I’d be a lot better off now if I’d had something, anything to work off of when i was younger. So, as I help myself, maybe this is my addition to the global data bank.

Drizzled over all this of course is this glaze of defiance. Just, seriously. fuck all y’all, trying to shame me and force me to be something I’m not just for your comfort. I’m awesome. and I’d never have known that if I hadn’t dumped all that baggage. I deserve to be myself.

In the end it’s hard to see how anything will change. There’s no real visceral end to this introspection. I’m not gonna bang anyone, I’m not likely ever to enter into an intimate relationship. That’s just not what’s happening with me, and it’s such a fucking weight off to understand that part of my wiring. There’s no compulsion, there’s no desire.

What’s important to me is that I make the decisions I do for the right set of reasons. That my actions are guided by what I want and need and I think is best, rather than by fear and trauma and denial. And likewise, I want to be free to appreciate myself and others and the world in general, in the manner that I choose. I’m a grown woman, even if I don’t feel particularly grown, and I have a certain well of compassion and I know I’m not gonna be objectifying others. I’m not gonna be shamed for the things I think and feel. I am who I am, and I am beautiful.

And sometimes, not altogether infrequently, I dream of cocks and all the places they might go. As a healthy living person well might. Such is the folly of our lot.

Just, nobody touch me, please.

Girl as a Verb

  • Reading time:2 mins read

It’s interesting how “feeling like a girl” and “feeling human” are basically the same thing for me. I had no idea how much pain I was in until it started to lift.

Gender is such a weirdness. People take it as a noun, as a thing that is, when nearly all of it is read in terms of doing: how one holds one’s self and moves; one’s vocal timbre and tone and speech patterns. Just posture is this absurd, huge signal. I got into this recently, when I tried on that dress and bracelet and realized how different my face looked in a different context. It’s not about the fact of things; it’s about what they have to say.

To change how I sit or stand, it changes how I breathe, where I hold my tension, and sort of shifts the wiring that tells me who I am, to myself. (And based on how people have reacted to me the last few months, I know it changes the signals to others—mostly but not entirely in good ways.) I feel so much more well, and so much more me, and so much more feminine, when I tend to my posture.

We are all verbs, right. We’re never static. We exist in the doing. Who we are is a matter of procedure: our thoughts, our actions, our feelings, in response to our environment. Change the way you do things, you change the person you are, in your own perception and in others’.

Who we are is a matter of software, not hardware. (And what we are is a matter of opinion, which is its own process.) Act as the person you want to be, and that’s who you will be. The more that you do it, the more that you’ll feel it—and the more that will reinforce what you know to be true.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

  • Reading time:4 mins read

You know, along with this second (much more aggressive) puberty, i feel like a teenager. like, I never really went through any of this the first time—these thoughts, feelings, realizations. I just sort of got older, and drifted through this traumatic haze for 30 years.

I didn’t experience this becoming—this shedding of projected trappings, and euphoria of new agency and potential—that seems to be written in our culture. I literally was never that hormonal. I didn’t develop a matured sense of myself as a person. I kept waiting for instruction.

I think I’ve mentioned how it just feels like 20 years are missing for me—which I guess isn’t uncommon with trauma. But, I imagine that also plays into this a bit, probably. I have been in this holding pattern for 30 years, waiting for just my teenage years to hit.

This may speak a bit toward why I feel such difficulty accepting the notion of myself as a woman, but am a little giddy at being a girl. Heck, I never have really thought of myself as an adult, regardless of the gender I’m wearing. Adulthood is a thing you grow into, and I never got that chance.

I’ve been on pause for so fucking long, and my life is just getting started now. I feel so amazing, being me. It’s so confusing and embarrassing, but I just need to run with it and figure it out. And, fuck it; this is my life. Why am I treading water, trying to be good and not bother anyone, and afraid of the smallest frown of disapproval from some misery?

A few weeks ago I cried with what must have been happiness, because nothing else made sense, which made me realize that’s an emotion I had never in my life felt. Since then, on and off, I keep feeling it. My eyes sting with it now.

Holy shit, I am a real person. I am alive. A pandemic is the most awkward goddamned time to come into all of this, and fuck this poverty, but oh my God, I don’t have words for the relief. The weight that has defined my understanding of being, it has been melting away like so much salt in the rain.

I just want to exist. For the first time, I want to be alive, and to feel all of the things I’m feeling. I don’t know what i’m fucking doing. I have so much going on inside me that makes my face glow red, and I can’t figure out how to frame or describe, that I have come to know bothers everyone when I try to talk it out. But, just. Whatever, lol. Teenagers are meant to be fucking dummies, right.

I am going to keep clomping around in my wooden clogs and there will be toes caught in the process. I don’t need to be proud of that to be able to say, look, if you love me like I love you, you need some patience. I am going to be a little nuts for a while. It’s long overdue.

Tou gotta know my aim isn’t to make things awkward or do anything malicious. But, like. Fuck. I need to figure out what it means to be alive. This is all new to me. And it’s gonna be annoying and embarrassing, And you’re understandably gonna want to look away. But where’s the fun in that?

I am going to just go with it. and I am going to regret nothing. I am going to be a complete fucking mess. and you are going to love me anyway. Because you get it. It’s finally my turn. I get to do this now.

For once, I’m not gonna do the suffering. I’m gonna be suffered. Azure is gonna paint the sky blue, and you’re going to grin and pretend it wasn’t always like that. Because this is going to feed something magnificent. I don’t know what. Beyond, you know, me. But maybe that’s enough, right.

So, yeah. I am going full cringe. And this is going to get so very stupid.