So far as I know, there was never a time that I didn’t prefer to be a girl. I mean, who wouldn’t; it’s so obviously better. Yes, the world is shitty and horrible in reply. But existentially, it’s so absurdly stacked that it never seemed fair. Why couldn’t that be me? The gender I was given sucked so much. The mind reels at how life might have been for me, had I ever been given a choice—been told even in passing that gender was a thing that came from inside you, and no one had the right to say you were wrong. That other people didn’t get to tell you who you are, and anything they hand you is only a suggestion.
Like, just to have that concept of autonomy in my head, to understand I didn’t need to accept what I was told, that I was not obliged to play along. That there was no wrong answer, except what didn’t feel right to me. Just given that basic support, there wouldn’t ever have been a question. If who I am really is up to me, then oh my God. Well yeah, duh. How is this a question, then? No takeback. Forever. Get me out of this bullshit. Please.
I just—I never got that message. I never knew that I could just choose to be the person I wanted, and that by virtue of wanting that and making that choice, that person would then be who I was. That I wasn’t doomed by other people’s impossible expectations. That I could just say no. Set a boundary. That I didn’t need permission to be a human being.
Nobody ever once told me that, until right around when I turned 40. Nobody told me that if I wanted to be someone, I probably already was that person. And all I had to do was embrace it. That was the biggest, most alarming reality shift in my life. For four decades, I had never been permitted to be fully human. In consequence, I never was.
We really need to do better at giving people options when they’re young. Just letting them know what is possible, what is allowed without being bad or letting anyone down; give them choices for what they can be and do if they want, and for what no one else ever, under any circumstance, has the right to dictate to them.
Not letting people make up their own minds about themselves—it’s fucking abuse, is what it is.
You hear this canned story about trans people always knowing who they were even when people told them different, and though I’m sure it’s true for some—for those with a certain personality or a healthy home environment—it feels like inspiration porn for the cises, to me. Some kind of a bottled feel-good narrative about the human spirit that doesn’t force them to question their belief in the system. I’m shy and nervous and I want to be good. I’ll do almost anything to avoid causing problems. I never had the benefit of certainty, because I never got that message, that I even had the right to be myself. What I knew instead was unending melancholy and frustration and surprise every fucking day when I woke up and I somehow had not reached the end. I did not understand the point of it all. Why was I even alive?
If only someone had talked to me. If only they had asked. Ever, once. My entire fucking life.
Continuity of self is a weird thing. I mean we’re each a different person every day we continue to live. All the matter in our bodies turns over every seven years. But in my case it’s a bit more… specific and pronounced.
I haven’t always been here. Though this body is mine. Like, it’s always been mine. And I’ve always been me. But I wasn’t always awake, and present. I only fully came alert last summer, and inherited this body and these memories and attitudes from the person who had been carrying them around all those years. And it’s wild to sort out.
Like, I’m the real person here. But now I’ve sort of waltzed into this situation four seasons in, and I’m like okay, fuck, how much of this actually pertains to me, how much do I need to pick it up from here? These aren’t my memories and thoughts, but some I can claim easily. Other baggage I’m like… why is this here? What does it have to do with me? Why did they leave it behind? What do I do with it now?
This is my life now. I’m a complete, stable person for the first time, as many problems as I may continue to have. But there’s this ongoing process.
When I think of things that happened before, when that other person was stumbling around with this body and this life, I don’t know what to do most of the time but to say “I.” All these memories are in the first person, you know, even if I wasn’t there at the time. But I really feel like I need to stress, I was alarmingly, destructively dissociative for most of my life. And now that I’ve shed that, and I get to just fuckin exist here, the past becomes this deeply weird territory to relate to. There is continuity, but what do I do with it?
I almost feel like I’m lying when I speak in the first-person about the past.
People I knew before, like, last summer—well, obviously I know you and have all these carry-over memories and feelings and whatever. But I feel like I’m recompiling all these relationships now, and there can be occasional… hiccups, while I figure out how to build my own kind of connection. It’s funny to see all this confirmed in my interactions with people who knew some previous me. Like my therapist, who soon after the hand-over quickly realized that I was not the same person she had been talking to before.
But it’s also frustrating at times when people don’t get it. Like, people I know from years back, who kind of just behave as if nothing is different, as if they’re still talking to that person. I mean, I get it. But I’m not them. The ideas and memories that you have may not necessarily apply. I’m right here, you know. I have my own identity. Let’s try this again, maybe.
Anyway. I’m happy to be me. I just uh, kind of wish someone had set the alarm clock for 1996 instead of 2020.
I know in my bones that to what extent my ex may be aware of my gender and sexuality, my disability, my poverty, they’ve convinced themself it’s all an act. I’ve just been on estrogen the last year, I’m just spending all of my time in therapy, refusing to pull a normal job off the job tree, to rack up marginalization points so I can try to maneuver for the moral high ground, for the purpose of… making them… look bad? To deny them what they’re owed? While I cackle smugly?
Just, you know. For… reasons. Because that’s how everyone thinks, in their world. It’s all about power with them. Everything is a calculated move, angling to some kind of a showdown.
I think through all our relationship, they saw me as an enemy agent of sorts, that they could maybe bend to their will as a special weapon—like I carried this great innate power, that I defiantly refused to wield for their benefit or my own out of some mix of laziness, spite, and pride.
As compared to this disabled queer from a disadvantaged background, with no resources or safety net, who was fucking terrified day in and day out, unable to understand what I was doing wrong.
But that made no sense to them, right. I was just being willful, clearly. And one of these days they’d find the way to break me.
And, well. They broke me, all right. Not quite in the way they planned, I reckon.
It’s cool, though. Sometimes the only way out is through.
And here I am now. Still not really functional, but at least I know who I am.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing is, I am non-binary but i am also a girl. I am aroace but I am also pan. The second, deeper part of each is the scary one to embrace and contemplate and perform, even for my own benefit and familiarity—but to do so is necessary to be a whole, unashamed, self-loving person. For me it’s this big fucking leap in each case, and I just have to trust in my knowledge of what I know to be true about myself—and in the patience and kindness of the people I choose to assemble.
I don’t know if there’s existing terminology or theory around this, but my efforts to square the circle of my sexuality lend me to think in terms of internal and external attraction. I want to make loose parallel to gender identity versus expression, as point of reference.
It is simultaneously true, I am finding, that I am aggressively and proudly aroace, and that my well-being is tied up in embracing this—and that I am also obviously, confusingly pan. I can and have whittled this down to all these granular modes of attraction, and fine, yes, but. Really what it seems to come down to is outer and inner identity. In theory I can be attracted to anyone, gender being no particular issue, and in creative terms have been kind of melting over this realization. but in reality…I don’t. I won’t. I can’t. It’s not how I’m wired. And I don’t want it.
This is, I sense, a thing many aces struggle with. There’s the real and practical side, then there’s this breezy theoretical side that finds its outlet in art and literature, that is genuine and valid and important—but there’s this boundary. It’s appreciation, with no desire to act. That appreciation is equally valid and important and true, and both that and the internal side are parts of who I am.
I feel like I am invisibly growing queerer and queerer inside my head, burning up with all this baffling new insight and appreciation and potential and dying to explore it creatively or whatever. But in practice, expression? Just. no? I will never be attracted to a real person. Never mind the active aversion, sensory issues, trauma, and all of that. Don’t feel it, don’t notice it, don’t want it, kinda freaked out about it, find it super unpleasant.
As for the nuances of the internal side… whee, uh. There have been a lot of realizations there. but they feel so weird to talk about, and it seems to create the wrong impression when I try to put it all into words, so I’m gonna have to stew on that a while longer, I guess.
I talk a lot about this dividing line, and how I am not the same person as the previous caretaker for this body, but seriously, all my memories prior to maybe a year ago feel so unreal. It’s getting harder and harder to remember specifics, like grasping at a dream.
I may have mentioned that my taste for food has been shifting since my transition. This is pretty normal, of course. Change your body chemistry, your body is gonna start bothering your brain for different complementary materials. In practice it still feels so odd.
It’s hard to navigate. I’m autistic, right, and I’m very particular about what kinds of sensory input I can deal with. It’s taken decades for me to explore and branch out and work through what’s acceptable to me. Since my tastes calcified somewhere in adolescence, they haven’t really changed; they’ve just expanded. I’ve managed to tack things on, break through barriers, develop things further. But it’s all hooked into the same architecture, same basic assumptions that have never shifted. Now I can’t safely fall back on any of that.
I used to be all about sugar and carbohydrates. Whether it’s my metabolism or my neurology, I dunno, but I couldn’t function without a constant input of quick, easy energy. (Even then, functioning was a philosophical matter.)
Now the things I naturally assume I’ll want, I kind of shrug at. They’ll sit there, and I can’t really imagine eating them. In their place, I don’t always know how to read the new signals. It took so long to figure out the old ones. But definitely acids and oils and fats. It’s all about savory things now, which… really weren’t a major concern before. I’m super into stinky cheese and fermented things. I find myself drawn to just, raw vegetables in a way I wasn’t overly. Stereotypical as it may be, I seem to crave as I never have. I was always into, like, gummy and hard candy, right? All sugar, no fat. This is almost the flip of that.
All of this is comprehensible, right. I know what my body is doing and why. It’s just, there’s a lot of identity in this.
As I say, Azure is not the same person as that shell she stomped around inside, or that stomped around on autopilot as she largely slept. If you could even call them a person.
I hadn’t factored how much of my prior sense of self, such as it was, had been scrubbed by that last decade. by this total breakdown of my humanity. Which… in hindsight was weirdly helpful for finding the person buried beneath all that and clearing the room for her to finally grow properly.
But she still inherits all these memories and notions and understandings, and many of them no longer apply, or are fading in ways that are hard to predict. And it’s… really confusing. I’m starting from zero on so many things. This life is just so completely new.
Christ, I’m looking at pictures of the person I was two years ago and I don’t even recognize them. Their features look all strange to me; they look a decade older, and so haunted. Even a year ago, I’m like, who the fuck is this and why do they look about to shatter?
This is making me uncomfortable, and I’m not inspired to continue with this spelunking because holy shit, but, uh. I get what my therapist was saying, even at a glance. I have a long way to go, lots of things still suck, and I can’t hold more than one idea in my head per day, but damn if there hasn’t been progress.
I’ve often mused about how age has been catching up to me, how for half my life I’ve looked sort of vaguely 20-ish maybe, and up to a couple years ago people kept assuming I was still in college. Now this body is 42, and I think it looks about that. That’s fine. It is what it is. But holy hell, in fall 2018 that person looked like they were one foot in the grave. It’s just so alarming.
It’s not just an abstraction. I think my former situation, it was literally killing me. Now? I’m actually alive. For the first time. It’s just a start, but—better late than never.
Many alt-periodical grafs have gone toward the five seasons of trans subtext that the “Diamond Days”/Homeworld arc brings to the fore and nails down as Kinda The Point Of This Whole Deal. What I’ve not seen discussed is how “Legs from Here to Homeworld” states its thesis on that.
Maybe because the episode was posted online several months before broadcast, so most of the commenting class didn’t first it in the specific context of the 90 minutes of theme-dump that it served to introduce. Maybe because since the bulk is set on Earth, it feels less connected.
What gets me about the episode more than anything, though, is its first scene. We have a few seconds of dialog that summarizes what happened in the last episode, to catch people up. And then, Yellow stomps up to drag us into the story.
“How could you do this to us, Pink? Why did you let us think you were shattered? Why the strange disguise? Why are you doing a voice? Why didn’t you say something at the trial?”
Yes, it’s expository. Yes, it’s functional. But take another look. I’m talking about the weird part.
“Why are you doing a voice?” she asks.
…
Yikes.
That’s not a throwaway line.
There are all these in-jokes that aren’t really jokes, right, about what people actually want from a transition versus what everyone assumes and even tells them they really want. Usually (not always) the highest priorities have to do with immediacy: simple everyday signifiers.
Things like one’s face, one’s voice, hair, that from moment to moment help affirm a person’s identity, to one’s self and others. Voice is a subtle yet major one; you can do a lot of things with your face or your hair or your wardrobe. Your voice, though, that’s more difficult.
It’s harder technically, and it’s more existential. To a significant extent, we all associate our voice with who we are. We talk about our sense of identity as our inner monologue. You often can tell more about a person from their voice than from their face. I know I tend to.
So, it’s kind of a big question mark for someone in the middle of a transition. Like, what do we do about this, then? On the FtM end, hormones can have some effect. MtF, not really. If there’s a solution, it tends to be voice training, which is fine, but it brings its own issues.
The most obvious problem is that it’s hard. It takes a ton of practice; a ton of time; a ton of investment. It’s exhausting, stressful. It’s hard to keep up all the time, to get to the point where it clicks and starts to feel sometimes right, sometimes natural, and then a habit.
The bigger problem goes back to the existential thing, which goes back to the basic anxiety at the core of so much of the trans experience. It’s that basically what it comes down to is a performance. Which makes it a big pressure point for the whole delicate cognitive lattice.
The nature of coming to grips with one’s gender identity, it’s about a search for truth, right. Realigning one’s self-concept with what’s actually going on neurologically, emotionally; with the way one’s brain is in fact wired, regardless of what others have always insisted.
But like any search for truth, there’s always this sense of, well, but what if I’m wrong? What if what everyone’s been telling me my whole life is right, and I’m just having this episode, deluding myself? What am I even doing? That doubt, it’s often, usually not that far away.
Which is the button that White Diamond serves to hammer on like a maniac some 75 minutes later. But for the moment we’ve got Yellow Diamond, confronting Steven about why he’s “doing a voice.” Which sets the scene for eight episode-slots of pointed existential invalidation.
Like. Most of the things that go into a transition, they’re nouns that one wears. A voice is a verb, that one acts. Your voice is your voice. It’s the key to everything in a way. And to enunciate one’s truth necessitates a performance. Granted we’re all a story, but. Well.
To single out Steven’s voice in particular as a signifier of “Pink” just pretending, playing a little game, it’s such an easy blow, and in the context of what the show is talking about during this arc, there’s no way that line is in there by accident. Few lines in this show are.
I mean, yes, surface level it’s a non sequitur, or nearly so; a gag of the rambling train-of-thought mode that the show often employs. On a metatextual level there’s the fact that actually, Zach Callison has been affecting Steven’s voice since halfway through the first season.
But more to the point, it’s there to sting, on a thematic level. That outright dismissal of something that, in a real world context, would have taken so much work, be such an easy pressure point to all of one’s existential doubts… it’s really nailing down where this is going.
I just, I felt like drawing out that sequence of words. They struck me the first time I heard them, even though my head wasn’t completely in a place to interpret them at the time, and they’ve stayed with me since. They stand out more than anything else in that first chapter.
So the shit is, with the emotional defenses I’ve leaned on most of my life, the only people who tend to get through the barriers I’ve set up are those:
With superficial charm
With no sense of boundaries
Who refuse to take “no” for an answer
Kind of a big failure there. One of my big projects this year, I think I’m going to have to map out a re-wire of my whole social alarm system.
End effect of my current setup, the people who’ve gotten close enough to have a controlling influence on my life have tended to be aspirational boomers. Like, they see everything as an acquisition and the world as a game to be won. Life is theirs to claim on a whim, and whatever may stand in the way of a want is the cruelest form of oppression.
I’m not really into acquiring things (aside from irregularly adding to media libraries, but I don’t see ideas as things so much), or winning… much of anything. And I don’t understand most burning desires. So I guess this makes me a perfect foil, until they start to feel foiled.
Since I’m not a person in their eyes as much as a erroneous order in this service industry we call life, this leads to a constant state of “I want to speak to the manager,” and this cycle of abuse while I scramble and fail to do what apparently is expected of me in situations like this. They tend to assume everyone thinks like them, so I could only be messing up so badly on purpose to fuck with them, as part of my own twisted agenda. And, how dare I.
Anybody with an ounce of sense or sensitivity tends to, you know, leave me alone. But maybe, the sensible and sensitive are the people I’d less mind if they didn’t. Because most of my idea of relating to others, it’s been shaped by people in that first category, which is what’s made me so paranoid about others.
Not everybody is that awful. Heck, most people aren’t. It’s only the people who I can’t chase away so easily.
There’s also the detail about trusting myself and not giving in where it feels wrong, not compromising my own values to whoever has the stronger personality. Which has always been a problem. But, you know. If you’re gonna build safety filters, might as well make sure to calibrate them right.
As ever, don’t take this as me dictating the One Right Experience—I’m just talking about me here—but for me the one big story that for decades shielded me from recognizing my gender issues (blinding as they may be) is our collective obsession with sexuality. We sexualize the concept of gender. We sexualize—or at least romanticize—all relationships, all emotions that connect us to others. It becomes this minefield of expectation; of these models of behavior, of feeling, of thinking, of existing, that you’re expected to fall into—and if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.
Tied into all this are problems with representation, where unless you look for it, anything outside the gender binary might as well not exist except as a fetish. I know this is also a problem for other marginalized identities—objectification as the only recognition. You’re only valid to the extent you serve a purpose. I am terrified of being objectified; I have been for as long as I can remember. As long as I’ve been aware of sex, I’ve felt this vulnerability that I only recently have come to understand.
I don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction, but for most of my life I’ve been led to confuse empathy with a guilty sort of desire; for all that I’ve been told my affinity must be sexual, I recognize something isn’t quite right with that story. That uncertainty, that intangible sense of wrongness, it festers, leading me to feel just awful about the whole thing. There’s this anxiety that builds up about ever identifying with anyone, despite this strong relational draw to, in particular, gender non-conforming women (and active repulsion from identifying with men).
Getting through that, to nail down and embrace my sexuality, that was the first step—and it took me ages. Once I had drawn that division, I was free to unpick all the severed threads, to see where they led; what was going on with my attitudes. It’s only then I was able to recognize what I had so clearly been feeling the last four decades and why; how strongly I responded to seeing myself reflected in others, despite failing to grasp what I saw or how it affected me.
The notion that it was possible to be a gender non-conforming woman regardless of one’s assignment at birth, and not in the context of some fetish for someone else’s benefit, but just as a person, as an identity—it’s not a story one tends to encounter too often, culturally.
To exist for one’s own sake and not for the sake of someone else—this is such a long road. For that, I blame our culture’s obsession with sex and sexuality, none of which applies to me or the way I look at the world or myself. You know, I’m just me. I’m not here for any purpose except to be who I am. And through all this noise, I couldn’t see me at all.
As I say, other people are wired in their own particular ways, and take comfort and interest in things that bore me or make me want to cry. They’re not wrong for being who they are. It’s just that this one narrative, about how we’re meant to think and feel and relate to each other—it’s not The One. It’s not correct. It’s just a million slight variations of a single narrow story. Other stories are available.
The concept of sex, it was a shackle to me. To others it’s the key. The story is only wrong when it’s forced on you. And that’s the real point here.
Your story, it comes from inside. In this month of bricks and riots, and at any other time of the year, don’t let anyone else tell you who you are. Don’t buy into this notion that your script is sitting there, waiting for you to act out. Everyone around you, they’re all working through their own garbage, looking for validation of their own. But their stories, they have nothing to do with you. Yours is for you to tell yourself.
Love starts with you. Be kind to yourself, listen to what you’re saying—and let that make the whole world a better place to be.
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