femininity

Function and Role

  • Reading time:14 mins read

So all this business about how the different aspects of my sexuality inform each other, and they all inform my gender, which reflects back on my sexuality, and how aspects of all of these play into my interests and fixations and feelings about myself and others, real and abstract—it’s a lot, right? It’s all connected in these ways that I’m struggling to entirely navigate. It’s easy to just say, forget it; I am who I am, and I don’t need to define everything. And: sure. But, the better I understand, the better of a grip I have on myself on my own terms. And I have to understand what my terms are, to be able to be true to them with full confidence and be in full possession of myself as a person.

Likewise, I’ve got all this toxic code planted in my routines by outside agents, that one needs a fine comb to strip out and patch. Part of that external stuff comes from possibly a better-meaning place, and it’s all this concern I have built up about the problematic implications of this or that conclusion or association I’ve made on my own terms, as if they serve to comment on anything or anybody else. Part of it’s just pure disease.

So I guess part of this whole project here lately, in regard to my sexuality, is de-heebing my jeebs by really taking a look at the why behind the connections I’m making; how they hold the meaning that they do to me, where that comes from, and what its real implications are.

One of the big things I’ve been chewing over is, so what does my interest in dudes have to do with my femininity? It’s a question that feels obvious in some ways, but in turn anything obvious about it feels highly questionable once one steps back to think for more than a moment. What does it mean when I say I felt I was “allowed” to be attracted to guys once I came to understand and accept myself as a girl? What can we unpack from this on a granular level, apart from and in contrast with any kind of presumptions one might carry into the discussion?

Well, broadly, one’s understanding of one’s identity colors the nature of one’s relationships to others. I relate to so many things differently through a correct understanding of my gender than I did with that misaligned filter. My own words sound so different to me. This plays out on so many simple, visible levels. I’ve found a need to exercise a kind of caution in some situations, some kinds of conversation, that wasn’t even on the radar before. I’ve noticed that people are just nicer to me in some situations than they ever were before.

Our dynamics from person to person aren’t neutral. There’s a lot that plays into the psychology and the associated emotions based on our understanding of who we are and how we expect to be perceived. And those are weird and complicated, based on all these micro-power spikes. Even my close friends, even people I’ve known for years, I don’t talk to them exactly the way I used to—or I should say, the way that my predecessor did. And that’s not entirely a function of my changing emotional or chemical landscape, though those certainly are universes.

So just in the most unspecific possible terms, when I take a step back and look at myself as a rebuilt person, the way I feel about this person is going to be different. When I judge how this person will relate to others, I have different expectations than I did for the old me.

More to the point, there are a couple of obvious components. A lot of it is just self-possession, right? It’s just that recognition of who and what I really am, regardless of what that may be, gives me a solid foundation to start to build connections to other people and concepts. Being able to nail down, okay, Azure—non-binary girl; aroace; pan-whatever; neurodivergent along these dimensions; this is all inarguable and fundamental and has always been, will always be essentially true, some wiggles and nuance aside—it takes a load off. Sets natural guides.

Another thing I really don’t want to downplay is my changing body. Like, my chemistry is totally different now. I’ve had my intervention, things are quickly repairing themselves. I have access to all these emotions I didn’t have before. All my tastes and preferences are changing. There is an inarguable link between the feminization of my body and this abrupt shift toward intense new ways of thinking. I feel like a teenage girl in so many ways here. I never really had a dramatic natal puberty, so this is a first for me and it’s kind of overwhelming. Again without wanting to get too crass about it, there is a measurable association between the amount of estrogen in my system and the degree to which my fixation with cock has reached absurd levels, as well as just… the feelings I get from certain kinds of healthy masculinity.

So those two factors are kind of accessible and clear and simple for me. I don’t feel the need to labor them too much. What I want to unpack is more to do with the puzzle dynamics of gender specifically as it pertains to sexuality and vice-versa, and how they pertain to my wiring.

As a social construct, gender is this made-up dumb thing but it’s also got these real internal components that really go beyond assumed models or whatever. Like, sometimes your body is just gonna respond a certain way, you’re gonna have a certain emotional response, and so on. Certain things are going to feel inherently right, and make you feel good about yourself and like a functional human being even as you would never dream of asserting them on another person, and some of those are going to I guess inevitably align with this prescriptive garbage.

With me, I’ve got all these… gender feelings, that are complicated and that I am tempted to wind up with guilt over things that have nothing to do with me, no matter how I come at them. I’m an enby through-and-through, right. But I’m also obviously a girl. Which is fine, right. But one is tempted to read in this innate conflict, especially as the more comfortable I get with myself, the more I dig around, the more frickin’ femme I turn out to be, to a degree I’d not have anticipated. But this is what makes me feel like a real person. It’s clearly right.

I like makeup. I’m no good at it yet, but this really plays to my sense of self to a degree that surprises me. I have never felt more comfortable in my body than in delicate, lacy feminine-coded dress. I feel more human with smooth, shaved legs—even as I think hairy girls rock. I’m an individual, and as an individual I just… seem to be put together in such a way that all of this makes me feel well and right in myself in a way I didn’t know was possible. I didn’t know I could own myself, like myself, in this way—to not find myself revolting. Turns out, I’m great!

None of that is in any way prescriptive or indicative of broader thoughts or expectations toward femininity or what it means to be a girl or non-binary or trans or to hold any kind of attraction or lack of attraction to others. It’s just the status quo of Azure. Nothing more. It’s about putting the pieces together to make a whole person, whom I like and respect and want to be—exactly because of the innate, verifiable, undeniable truth of every atom of what makes her who she is. It’s about asserting the reality that I’m finding, that was denied me.

So it’s into all of that that we play this concept of, now that I understand myself as a girl—but more specifically as this girl named Azure—I have this availability and this certainty and this confidence to access these feelings, at the same time as my body is going nuts with its hormones and sensations.

Okay then, we’ve got this basic stage for why it would make practical sense for this to be a juncture where, if these feelings were gonna get un-repressed and we’d work to accept and own them on our own terms, this would be a reasonable time for that to happen. It makes sense. But, why “allowed”? Why do I feel permitted to house these feelings as a girl, when they were all out-of-bounds before I understood myself?

I think there are two aspects to that. One is just, I’ve put this work into disassembling and stripping all that external garbage. These feelings were always here; I know they were. That’s not the issue. To a large extent what kept them in check was the internalized homophobia [sic], combined with my basic disgust for myself as a person, to the degree that I was led to understand my identity. I’ve put a lot of work into dealing with this junk that was put onto me, that had nothing to do with who or what I am, and just scraping off a critical mass of that was enough to send this impulse bursting through the crust to assert itself.

Another part is, uh, a portal to another land of weirdness, and it scrapes right up on this area that I really don’t want to get into right now, but I guess I’ve talked about it a little bit already—so here we go. It’s to do with sexual roles, right. This topic has all of these complicated dynamics of its own, to some of which we can apply all the above discussion about Azure just being Azure. But the more that I unpick this topic the more it helps me to understand my feelings toward myself as a girl, and vice-versa.

The better I understand the dynamics of my pretty darned innate, hard-coded sexual role as it applies to my gender, the better I understand a lot of practical elements of the trauma that I’ve experienced in my sexual relationships, from the perceptions and expectations set on me. Obviously to be a girl doesn’t mean to be passive, it doesn’t mean to be a bottom, any more than to wear skirts and pantyhose. Azure is just Azure. But to understand the components of me as they add up to a whole person and color and are colored by my own personal femininity…

So here’s a thing. I of course have a penis, as girls will do sometimes. I have absolutely zero dysphoria in regard to my penis as a part of my body. It’s marvelous. It’s almost a shame I’ll never have opportunity to share it. It’s so pretty, seriously. I love it. What I very much do have however is role dysphoria. And this has taken a very long time to unpick, despite indicators going back literal decades. It’s still strange for me to talk about, as is anything to do with sex. And I’m getting really close to some danger zones for trauma. In brief, though, the act of using my genitals for a sex act does not make me feel good, along several axes at once. I just… am going to stop with that, because I can feel the panic rising. But of course there are certain coded expectations that one will carry around based upon anatomy—and I think it’s really taken me a long, long time to fully work around to detaching from those associations and expectations.

One of the things that has helped a whole bunch is the physiological changes brought about by HRT. Stuff works differently now, right. The anatomy works differently. Emotions are different. Physical sensations are different. Arousal is just this completely different narrative now, one that is… better. That actually kind of, makes me feel affection toward myself and the world rather than just shame and horror. My feminized body does not respond the way that my predecessor’s did, all of which supports my feelings toward myself as a girl and comes as an enormous existential relief. It’s just another development like my tits, right, which emphasizes the reality of what I know to be true. And you know, anyone can be anything. There are plenty of girls of any genital situation who are all about being the assertive or penetrative party or whatever. And that’s rad. But, my body cooperating with my mind and my emotions, putting me all on the same page for once? Phew.

So as a girl, this is one component of my understanding of myself; of how my gender functions in relation to me as a person; of how all these elements of me feed into and communicate and support each other in a healthy way that allows me to feel well and respect and love myself.

I break out all of this to say, that—the relationship of my sexual role to my gender—is the other part of what I think I mean when I talk about being “allowed” to feel this attraction as a girl. Or that’s a non-trivial ingredient of a larger picture. That’s the internal part, not to do with other people’s baggage. What I think is accessible to me now, it also has a logistical, even uh geometric, component that I was not fully able to process before, that has to do with my understanding of my sexual role, wound up as it is in my understanding of my gender.

In terms of my own personal dynamics with masculinity, I have zero interest with the role others have projected onto me. But now that I have largely broken away from my body even being able to respond like that—I, uh, have come to better appreciate alternative modes of engagement. Which isn’t just to make attraction all about what parts go where, right. That’s just one component, even to the subject of sexual role as pertains to gender. What it is, is indicative of a critical shift in perspective toward my personal and emotional role in respect to dudes. To understand myself as a girl, and for my body to work as it now does, is for a certain amount of logic to go click. Suddenly—oh! I get it now. If I’m over here and they’re over there, it looks like this now. I get how this works. It makes sense from this angle. Okay, vroom vroom.

Again much of this presupposes cisness on the point of the masculine party, because this all exists in the aroace magic hypothetical zone. And I already have long wrapped my head around how I feel about those of us in the weird zone, right. That’s relatively easy to understand.

So basically, a big part of it is just a matter of unlocking this modality of feeling in relation to my body and my role, that didn’t even exist until I was in a place to embrace my girlhood. It was not “allowed” in that I could not reconcile it with my prior understanding of me. That attraction was always there, but even absent of other people’s garbage, until I understood who and what I was, I had no idea what to do with it. Even if (misplaced) homophobia weren’t a thing, 20 years ago the thoughts and feelings would have felt divorced from reality.

But seeing as a girl, I get it. I have the perspective that I could not have had, in terms of the dynamics of how I fit together as a human being. Now it has become, for lack of a better term, logical. Which basically triggers a green light. Thus do my dreams become a dick parade.

I mean.

Again, I’m sure things will calm down eventually. Even with my hormones being as they are. But well. This is where we are at the moment.

So. Fine, okay. This is part of what it means for me to be human. This is part of who Azure is. So might as well bask in it, I guess.

Connective Tissue

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So, a curious thing. Now that I have tits, it makes me feel way less weird to look at tits. There are a few things going on here, with my recognition of my gender and my sexuality and all the physical, psychological, emotional changes that I’ve experienced in a fairly short time.

It used to be that naked forms would just make me deeply uncomfortable. I’d avert my eyes, try not to think about it. It felt lurid to engage, like some kind of a boundary issue. In the event that I did, I felt ashamed of myself, which just built up and kept getting weirder. Now that I better understand what’s going on inside me, that I have a better relationship with myself and trust my feelings and reasons, a lot of that has fallen away and it’s easier to appreciate form for what it is. Now that I can look clearly, I see beauty and commonality.

There’s a universality to us, right, for the brief period we’ve been around to record our experience and what we think about it. Now that I understand that I’m looking for connection, that’s what I’m finding—a common humanity, a common femininity. A piece of everyone in everyone else—but more significantly, me. I wasn’t part of the equation until now. I was outside. None of this was for me, about me. I had no right to it, just as I had no right to myself. Except of course I do, as much as anyone. (And I am the only one with a right to myself, goddamn.)

Now when faced with a nude female form, at least in representation, I don’t get much more than a residual embarrassment. I get the relationship now. And it’s a meaningful one, to at least some extent, that helps to shed light on my relationship to my own body.

Glibness aside it’s not really as easy as, hey I’ve got breasts; it’s no big deal, whaddayamean. There’s a lot more going on here. It’s more that I’m starting to understand what it is to be human. As I lose shame over my own body, so I lose shame over the concept of bodies. And as I lose that shame I’m afforded the room to connect and appreciate and embrace a beauty that kind of feeds a cycle. It’s an acceptance of my place, now that I know what that is. Now that I understand how I fit in with just… Everything. Everyone. In a way I never did.

Rounding the Curve

  • Reading time:2 mins read

On one of the many occasions I had to drag myself out of bed last night to pee, I glanced at the mirror and—heck, my side-boob is looking really nice. There are all these artful curves now that I didn’t notice before. That whole arc from the armpit, down and under, is all filling out in this neat way. Gee whiz.

I’ve talked a little of the stages, where first all this mass builds up—this rough heap of tissue—then more recently that tissue has started to take more definite shape. Where there had been lumps, we’re starting to sculpt all that same stuff into more confident curves. It’s this slow process, hard to really notice day-to-day; hard to measure. Then one morning at 3 am you look at your tits from a new angle and realize, whoa. How long has that been a thing? It’s so fascinating!

And for that matter, since when did my butt look like this? The heck? That kinda came out of nowhere. Even when I stretch into a more masculine posture—which is starting to feel a little awkward now—there it is. It’s just, there are these curves now. All over the darned place.

Then, it’s a work in progress, but—I’ve always worn tights or stockings under my skirts, right. Beyond the whole issue of cold, I’ve just been deeply insecure about my legs my whole life. Like, it really really bothers me. And now, it’s… not terrible?? I yanked my tights off, and I was like: huh!

I’m not gonna say they’re rocking my, uh, socks off… aside from… my… just… doing that. But, it’s not making me want to die, to look at them! They’re just sort of there, and fine, and whatever.

So. That’s… something. I guess?

The birthmarks still make me feel weird, and there’s no real doing anything about them. But again, better. I’m starting to look almost look human!

I guess it has been a year, huh. A year and a day.

Happy birthday to me.

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.

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.

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.

Planting the Forest

  • Reading time:11 mins read

So there’s this online clothes service… thing, where you give them your measurements and vague preferences and on request or stated interval they send you a mystery box of curated stuff with a free return envelope for whatever you don’t want/can’t afford. I got a $35 credit, so I figured what the hell. Worst case scenario, they send a bunch of stuff I don’t like; I send it back, and don’t pay anything. Best case, I get one or two things I do like, that are covered by the $35 credit, and I send back the rest—and still pay nothing. If I get just one piece of free affirming clothing that I like, it’s worth a trip to the fucking mailbox.

Right?

Turns out, I was both overly and inadequately optimistic.

Like most places that carry women’s clothing, this service, their sizing is all weird and byzantine and bespoke, but I did my best with the fairly rigorous measurements I have assembled—which to my surprise mostly worked out. Sometimes astonishingly well.

I woke after a few days to a phone alert that the box had been delivered. And—well! As it happens there’s no fucking way I could afford any of this, but the experience did make my head swim with new ideas and help me to confirm a few things about this new person whom I am.

Like, say, jewelry. I mused earlier about piercings, and have rattled on internally about necklaces and rings and bracelets—and this package has only solidified those thoughts.

As would become a trend, the piece they sent was… not quite right, and I doubt I’d have kept it even if the price had been other than ludicrous, ($74?! Haha! I’m no expert, but I’ve passed mall kiosks before.) But more importantly, it felt good to wear. I liked the weight and the movement. It just feels good to have something like this (if not this in particular) on my wrist.

There is, as it turns out, a real stim value to jewelry, which—the concept feels like a revelation to me. I want to associate jewelry with, like, Christmas trees, right? I’ve always thought of it as pointless baubles and decoration. But there’s this visceral quality that matters, on a nerdy psychological level. It’s so soothing to have this jangly thing on me that I can fuss with as needed. The sensation makes me feel more grounded, more present and real.

Getting more into the meat of the wardrobe, bottoms have long been an issue for me. It’s hard to find men’s trousers that are both long enough to fit the limited range of acceptable cuff lengths and thin enough to fit me without tying a fucking rope around my waist. Also my hips and thighs and waist and butt are changing, if ever so slowly, and it would be nice to get something that I can wear outside when it’s no longer skirt weather. But, well. Here we start to run into some well-documented systemic issues.

These things are still cut a little low for me personally—I want coverage up to my navel, so my hips are taken care of—but otherwise the fit is… absurdly close yet exactly right. It’s funny; my leg length is completely normal in women’s pants, yet causes all these issues in men’s sizes. And with the stretchy material, these sort of mold to my thighs and calves even. I don’t know if I need all my clothes to be as tight as all that, but now I do know my measurements, and that I should be able to find something in my size with little trouble. Finally.

Thing is, I’m used to paying, what, $20 for a new pair of jeans? More often $5-10 from a thrift store. So what do they want for these? $78.

hahahahahahaha get real.

It’s then that we get into the particulars. I start to make concessions and excuses, and think, well, these pants are kind of nice, and maybe the waist isn’t quite what I want, and I didn’t expect them to be this tight but there’s a place for that, and maybe if they cost $55 less I’d keep them. As I strut around, though, I notice all the little things, most prominently that famous bugbear:

There are no pockets.

I don’t mean the pockets are stitched closed (why does this happen?), or are shallow but could maybe be extended with a little seam work. I mean, there are stitches that indicate the appearance of pockets but there is nothing actually there. It’s entirely cosmetic. A false front.

For seventy-eight dollars, fancy dress pants that are entirely useless.

Whee! Yeah, okay. This is the world we’re living in now. Okay. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but as with so many things sometimes you just need to live it for it to click entirely.

So frustration aside, we now stroll into the realm of confusion.

I don’t know what this top is supposed to be, but, uh. No. I guess I like the whole paisley print thing, but I don’t understand the cut and the fabric is strange, and… it doesn’t suit me in general. On the upside it’s the cheapest thing in the box, at $38—almost affordable! On the downside, it’s not my thing at all. I mean, paisley is good in principle. Otherwise? Yeesh.

Two interjections before we move onto more viable territory:

  • Excuse my bedhead in all of this. As I say, I literally just pulled myself out of bed to find the package delivered.
  • I swear, my mirror cannot be un-gross. I clean it, and ten seconds later it’s magically just a wall of handprints—even if I haven’t touched it (so far as I know). Must be the ghosts.

The next thing is nearer to a thing I might conceivably wear. Thing.

I’m told this shawl-smock whatever is meant to be a kimono. I don’t really see how that makes sense. But whatever it is, it’s rad and I want to see more like it. But, probably not for $44. Because again: i am poor. Chop off, like $15, and maybe we’ll start to think about it. Even then it’s pricey.

If this is meant to go with that paisley top, I’m… like, that seems like a dangerous intersection of patterns. Confuse your enemies. Dazzle your friends. With a flat color it should be fine.

And finally, the centerpiece:

I’ve never actually worn a full dress before, and this one confuses me to put on. I keep burrowing into the wrong holes. But, haha, the cut is novel and it seems to fit just right.

I mean, the dress isn’t super duper interesting in its own right, but gee does it open my head up to new ideas. It seems to fit just right. And I don’t think I’ve worn anything more flattering in my life. It is… a little scary how accurate it is in terms of what it feels it should emphasize, and not.

As with everything, the problem here is the price. I guess maybe $68 could be reasonable for someone, but not for me. That’s just money I don’t have, and if I did it would be going to keep me off the street and to keep the power on. If I could afford it, though? I guess I would be exploring more dresses like this. Because, jeez Louise.

So although I don’t get to keep any of this, the adventure has been constructive. I know I have my sizing correct. And I know that a V-neck is good, for the way I’m shaped now. I guess I work well with a low cut, even. If I go for a dress, a wrap style might not be a bad plan apparently. And now that I know how good I look, it’s hard to keep my mind off of it.

Just as a garment, this is so comfortable and natural to me. I mean, yes, the fabric is soft and warm and stretchy and nice. But also, I just feel confident in a way I’m not used to. It’s like, wearing a dress like this, everything clicks. I make sense to myself.

So! Guess this is fully my thing now! Every day, becoming a little more human, huh.

I think if I had a dress like this, I’d want some kind of a necklace to break up that space. I guess we’re entering the jewelry zone, huh. (It’s mostly gonna be silver. Or, you know, white metallic.)

All in all this was a reasonable, if not quite right, menagerie. That top is kind of weird. The rest of it, some good beginnings of ideas at least. I like the feel and cut of this dress. Turns out, I like a jangly bracelet. Everything beyond the ideas, it needs to go right back before I do it any damage or wear. (This is making me a little paranoid. Better hope the return mail works properly.)

Altogether that’s $302 they wanted for those five items—which… you know, I’d hope to have paid like maybe $75 for, by whatever impoverished fantasy bubble my mental calculator currently lives in.

Someone out there surely will mock me for this, but I don’t get paying that much for clothes. If we weren’t in a pandemic, thrift shops are of course a thing that exists. Often you can get a decent top for a couple bucks. Maybe five, for a pair of jeans?

So yeah, this service ain’t gonna work out. But hey, fun dress-up session. Again also, it’s also good to know that my measurements seem to be right on—and that it is possible to find clothes that fit me! This is such a novelty! And an important point. I have never in my life found masculine clothes for my frame. And, that’s because, not only am I not a dude; I’ve never been shaped like one. And now I’m really not.

All of which speaks to—hrm.

A thing I’ve been learning just recently is—presentation-wise, my tendency has been to play it slow and safe, right? Dress down in public, even as my tits become harder to hide and my face changes and my hips grow. I’ve been reluctant to go too overtly femme, as I didn’t imagine I could pull it off and I felt kind of vulnerable to think about it.

But, turns out. It suits me. Like, this is actually me.

It’s not only fine; it’s not just that it works okay and I shouldn’t worry about it. It actively works really really well. way better than the half-steps I’ve been settling with and way better than anything I’ve worn in my life. And I feel amazing. Like, I found something here. Maybe if I could dig up something similar, but cheaper—and with a bit of lace? A dress, and maybe some cheap, stimmy white-metal jewelry. I hadn’t at all considered the stim factor, and now I want to keep going with it. (Again, god, I wish thrift stores were a thing one could reasonably visit in the year 2020.)

I just had this flash. Imagine waking up in the morning and actually being excited to get dressed—like, it being a fun thing that served to enrich one’s day, rather than a thing one had to do. I bet that’s what it’s like for some people, assembling themselves each day.

It also is becoming clear to me just how much clothing affects one’s presentation. I mean—duh, right? But normally I don’t much notice clothing. It’s just a thing that rests atop the essence of a person, and my attention brushes right past it like the furniture of an entryway. It’s decorative, not structural.

The thing is, no detail exists in a bubble and clothing isn’t just about the clothing; it affects how everything else is read. Weirdly I think even my face looks different when attached to well-fitted, clearly feminine-coded dress. The brain, it picks up all these different peripheral contextual clues, which add up to change the overall perception, the meaning of any component detail. Change the bulk of the signals, and that changes how one reads what’s left.

Even a face, it’s relative, not absolute in what it serves to communicate. My face is more masculinized than feels comfortable to me—the jaw, the brow, the chin—but much of the significance to those elements seems to dissolve next to a form-fitting, low-cut dress and other distractions.

Masculinity, femininity; they’re arbitrary and exist on a scale. Different people have different faces, and even with testosterone damage mine is fairly androgynous really. So take a broadly androgynous face and surround it with all these other signifiers, and one’s perception shifts to fit one’s expectation. It’s kind of like color theory. The features look different as dimensions in a broader context than they might seem on their own. Lots of women have an angular face, and if everything else is coded feminine nothing seems all that strange about it.

Figuring out a lot here that I hadn’t really thought about. I’m going to be chewing on all this for a long time.