A thing to remember is that cis people often have a strange and fraught relationship with gender too. There are consequences in failing to adequately perform one’s assigned gender, even if one agrees with it. Achieving Maximum Gender is a big power goal for many cis people, especially neurotypical ones. It’s something more to win at.
When cis people feel undermined or shown up in their gender performance, or are misgendered, it’s a Big Fucking Deal. So if you’re trans and feeling weird about your whole situation, take solace in understanding it’s not you. It’s the concept of gender. Everyone struggles.
Well, not everyone. But anyone. That’s the nature of performance. People are just people, really, the lines we draw are arbitrary, and everyone’s faking this thing to try to meet some external standard. Not everyone picks up the skills or applies them the same way if at all. Some are years behind their peers.
What’s important in the end is just figuring out a way to like yourself. Be the person who you recognize as “me” and can feel feel comfortable inside. That’s it. That’s all. Whether you’re cis or trans. Playing someone else’s game is just a recipe for despair. People are people.
Now over six months into HRT, there have been some clear effects. My body has taken well to the regimen, reacting strongly even to low starter doses. It seems obvious this was something my body was starving for. The first thing I noted, within moments of the first pill hitting my bloodstream, was how much clearer my head got. This thick fug that’s always been a part of my mind, it lifted a little. Soon I became able to feel emotions. Like, viscerally, physically. I had always thought of the term “feelings” as poetic, but now there was this burning sensation in my chest. Looking online, it seems like the shittiness I had felt every day since I was maybe eleven, it’s… similar to menopause. It seems like for decades my body was physically waiting and looking for chemicals that it wasn’t getting, and so just made my life hell demanding them. Just mentally, emotionally, this has been a revelation. Is this the way normal people feel, because suddenly I feel like a real person.
The physical side also kicked off quickly. Skin, scent, eyes. What small hair loss was happening in the corners of my scalp turned right around. I am still waiting for some more pronounced fat redistribution, around my face and hips and thighs. As impatient as I am for that, my body has other priorities at the moment, it would seem.
So.
Despite frequent pressing questions from medical staff, I wasn’t really asking for boobs. The notion didn’t factor into my ideas for myself. I’m not a sexual person, right, and that was the frame I used. Now, though, I am struck daily with how cool and validating this is. It’s just this obvious marker that I am who and what I am. That I exist. That my body belongs to me. That this is all really happening. And, it’s just neat.
People are people. Humans are not particularly sexually dimorphic. Any differences between what we arbitrarily define as the two sexes are subtle and inconsistent. As a result, then, any small change makes a big apparent difference. Psychologically, more than physically.
I just wasn’t prepared. It felt weird or pervy to dwell on. But, it matters. So many people have laid claim to me over the years, telling me what I could or couldn’t or must do with my body, most of which just caused me to hate myself more, dissociate further from this tangible thing I was attached to. This body, it belongs to me now. It is an aspect of me. This part of me, this physical form, it’s becoming a thing that I want to inhabit. That I am starting to feel attached to, that has begun to reflect me. I am turning into an actual person, who exists in the world.
With boobs.
Look, boobs are hilarious. And cool. And I get to have them now. Because I am kinda-sorta a girl. So I get the Cracker Jack prize.
I feel like I just went back to complete some certification I was forced to drop several ages ago. Picking up life wherever it was I left off.
I am real, and I am awake. And maybe someday soon I will be able to push through my trauma and take care of myself. Make a home. Build a world that I want to live in, filled with kind and sincere weirdos who just appreciate each other for who they are. I deserve to be a person. And I think I am figuring out how to make that work, bit by bit.
My therapist told me today, it’s night and day, comparing me now to when I first came in to see her. It’s like I’m transformed, she says. There’s a lot of mess still to deal with, but, like.
I’ve said how the real me is taking over recently. That other person is being depreciated and packed away, and Azure is in control of their own body for once. It seems like this is a visible change.
Your new captain on this expedition
I mentioned the nurse and some other interactions I’ve been having, and how it just seems like the last few weeks people are being nice to me to a degree that I’m not accustomed. What she said, it was… interesting. She described how the attitude one expresses toward one’s self serves to prompt others’ responses. It becomes this feedback loop, where if you treat yourself as someone deserving of respect, people tend to respect you. And, the reverse—well. I’ve been living the reverse for most of my life.
It’s always been very clear to me how wrong I am, you see. Ergo the mask. It was only ever good for surface-level contact if that, maybe a few memorized scripts, because I can’t fake a damned thing. And when it faltered, yow did people make this clear.
Knowing how this works, it doesn’t help in itself, right. But it does help to clarify some of the dynamics I have experienced (particularly over that last decade, but really for the last 40 years). And why the more distraught I feel, the more toxic the situation seems to become.
This whole concept sucks and is unfair and is gross, and it feels like the opposite of the way people should behave to a person in distress. But that seems to be the situation. And now, it seems I may be entering the early stages of the reverse kind of a loop—what with this new self-possession and what scant interactions I have experienced with others.
It’s so frickin’ weird, I said to her. It puts me off my guard every time. Why are people being kind? Why now?
Well, it seems that may be part of it. It’s because I have found who I am. And, people seem to like them.
I am not my abuse. I am what my abuse was trying to prevent. I am the person everyone was afraid I would be. And that person is starting to wake up.
There is much that I only technically consented to. Because it seemed best. Avoided some perceived bigger problem. A problem which often was manufactured, for the purpose of gaining consent. A concentrated decade of this. After a diluted lifetime.
I just accepted the fact I couldn’t do anything. The last time life seemed to carry some possibility was some 24 years ago. Today I feel I can just, make it mine. This is my life, my world, my body, my self. Even the aches and pains, they’re mine.
I can feel my mask slipping. There’s a sort of a hand-off. The person I’ve been forced to pretend to be, who has shouldered all this garbage, has begun to rest, and allow me to take over and just exist.
That other person is another life, with its own anxieties and concerns. They carried me, found me, helped me figure out who I am and what I need to do. They’re tired, harried. They need to go back where I’ve been hiding all this time. I’m grateful. They did their best. They protected me as well as they could. They’re done now.
Every so often I feel like a girl. And my whole body gets warm. The world starts to feel real. Everything begins to make a little sense; I feel connected to some kind of a story. It just comes to me, a realization. A toggle. And there it is, and somehow I’m human. Complete.
I’m not used to feeling like anything. Just this fuzzy ball of consciousness, resenting my humanity. This goes back forever. As far back as memories make sense. I’ve been an abstraction, unable to recognize or tolerate the entity holding my place in this game I cannot understand.
Now there’s this anchor. I’m still a space cadet, and I’ve got a whole host of distractions. But, I have a tether to this body and the world it inhabits, and now I know the truth, and sometimes when I don’t think about it, I find myself back on the ground. And I finally get it.
This is that sense of self it seems that everyone else has by default. They’re worn and damaged and a big old mess that I need to keep toiling away to repair, but they exist, and I like the model and the controls make a kind of sense to me. Sometimes I wake up, and they’re me.
And it’s just… kind of astonishing. There I am. There I’ve always been. What did I wake up from? It’s like that morning haze where you clear away the dream logic and sort out where you are and what day it is and what you need to do this afternoon. Except so much more vivid.
It comes when it comes; brains do what they do. When it does, it may follow my evening meds. It’s not hard to connect those dots. What strikes me, though, is how not just right but transparent it feels: this wave of Self and Reality and Truth. The pills are only a catalyst.
This gender business, I don’t mean to play by anyone else’s rules. I’ve been messed up for far too long, and this is my own scenario to sort. I’m going with whatever seems true and correct. And where I get that wrong, I will adjust. I’m a girl, in the lower-case. I’m just me.
Whoa, fucking yikes. Social overload. Just spent two hours talking to people I don’t know over video conference. I feel so tense right now. Presumably this will get easier? But, the grad student I have been paired with for one-on-one is cool. Aside from voice, she asked about my interest in other kinds of communication and signalling, like body language. And. Yo.
Autistic, right. Nobody ever taught me this for any gender, so I never picked it up. I’ve always felt very strange in face-to-face interaction, and people often feel weird talking to me, because I Do Not Signal in a way that makes sense to neurotypical people. Which sometimes is awkward. Sometimes is absurd. And sometimes it’s dangerous. (E.g., cops, security.)
But, on top of working on the voice: posture, body language, gestures. This is beyond a gender thing. This is a Being-A-Person tutorial that I’ve never had.
She also framed makeup as an element of non-verbal language, that she could help with. And. I’m going to have to steep on this some more, but. Yeah, okay. I hadn’t internalized presentation as communication, with its own grammar and symbology, but of course that’s what it is.
So everything works differently for everyone and placebo sure is a thing, but two pills into this regime I can definitely say they have an immediate mood effect. What I get from estrogen is what it seems like caffeine does to other people. I’m instantly more alert, able to cope. Due presumably to my neurology, caffeine helps me to focus and calms me down. It actually makes me a little tired. It’s like a warn brain shower.
But, I’m… one of my basic daily troubles is feeling capable of… like, anything. It takes me hours to get out of bed, even awake. Doing anything at all, having the energy to get started, feeling like it’s possible for me to engage, is such a struggle. I’m always so drained and discouraged. Halfway through walking home from the supermarket I’ll think, I could just sit down and die here.
And, like. The sudden energy and meed stability I’m getting now with the proper hormones in my system, I don’t have it within me to make this up. I don’t think this is placebo. I think this is correcting a real imbalance. And… I must wonder, do other people feel like this always?
And the effect, it hits so fast. Like my system was starving. I am no longer on my last thread, weak and tired and helpless, where it all could end at any moment.
I could have been doing this the last 25 years, and not been suffering.
Now if I can just medicate this ADHD, we’ll be onto something.
As it is, I’ve had my morning coffee and I am yawning. I was alert until then. But better than going uncaffeinated.
A curious thing is, everyone I interacted with the other day about my medication, from the nurse to the pharmacist, they asked if I had taken it before—and when I said no, they perked up. “Really?! Congratulations!” Like, they genuinely seemed to think it was the coolest thing ever.
One curious effect: blushing. I have not tended to blush, much at all. It’s not a thing that happens to happen. Until now. Every little thing, the last couple days seems to elicit this heat from my cheeks, my temples. It feels pretty weird, let me tell you.
I rarely to never judge others to the extent I judge myself. Things that are completely unacceptable about me, I wouldn’t think of criticizing in another. This is a hard thing for me to get past; just being kind and treating myself with the same compassion as any other person.
With that in mind, getting on HRT has really clicked my transness into reality. It’s obviously not a precondition, but, my head; my own issues, right. All this self-doubt. But this isn’t a phase; I’m not confused or playing around. It’s who I am, and I’m finally acting on it. It’s—I feel this sense of gratitude toward myself, and of relief. Like, finally I’m actually listening. And so much of this reticence, it’s just melted away. I’m not pretending; I’m doing, I’m being. Like, there’s this missing part of me I’m just now finding and unwrapping.
In my case also the HRT was actually a necessary intervention. Beyond any other effects, it’s clear I’ve been working under a chemical imbalance for most of my life that’s been playing havoc with my mood, energy, and cognition. It’s hard to express how fundamentally awful I have always felt. Like, what the baseline normal has been. I’d like to just… hand that to someone chipper for a day, and see how they function.
But, you know. Everyone has different needs. I’m just talking me.
I’ve still got my litany of problems, but. I feel like there’s a major existential issue resolved, pretty much. Fuck doubt! I’m so pleased with myself it’s hard to know what to say. When have I ever taken real care of me? Now I need to just keep listening. But the door is open.
I remember when I lived in Oakland, people would invite me out, and I couldn’t go. Part of it was masking exhaustion or poverty or any number of other things. But just as often, I’d have, say, a pimple on my neck, or my hair looked weird, or there was some other minor problem. I’d sit there for days and days, sometimes weeks, until I felt presentable enough that I could tolerate someone looking at me. But I had so many other anxieties I didn’t really know how to process this one in isolation.
Part of it’s a more general problem, but I’m seeing how many of the standards I’ve applied to myself have been gender-related. Like, the things that freaked me out about myself tended to be more masculine. I’m never been very masculine, which maybe makes them stand out more.
The pressure to present masculine was both largely impossible and unwanted. Yet I didn’t feel like I really had another option. I tried to carve out this curated semi-androgynous space that was just me. But it was fragile, and it wasn’t quite right either. On top of that were all the more general repulsive bodily things that nobody is fond of, and that there are so many industries devoted to making an even big deal out of, but that weighed so much harder considering the shaky balance I was treading.
And you know the killer? Almost none of this was entirely conscious, to the extent that I only now pieced together what was going on. It was just some low-level voice whispering in my brain in a code without words: you are gross. If you can’t mitigate, you can’t go out like that.
I did not have a good childhood. My parents were absent and neglectful on a good day, on a day I could relax and enjoy the silence. But the way they had about them when they chose to compliment my appearance, the things they chose to focus on, it skeeved me. Made me feel worse. Like, I don’t know how many times I was sent to tears when they tried to comment on me, only for them to turn to a rage as a result of my response.
I know I’ve talked about how I’ve wound up sort of cloning my early abuse scenario in later life situations. My ex-spouse was hugely controlling, over every aspect of how I presented myself. I got so much shit if I refused to change for them a fourth time before leaving the house. Now that I’m developing a better handle on my gender issues, that dysphoria has moved up through the layers of consciousness so I can get a better grip on it. But it’s not necessarily any quieter just because it’s out in the open, and applying to something I can easily point at.
It’s better to be able to say, okay, I don’t feel in control of the way I’m presenting today and it’s freaking me out than to be crushed by this overwhelming wordless swirl of oh god I am gross everything is wrong what is happening that sends me back under the blankets. But by also coming out of stealth mode, it’s almost scarier in a way. Like, I have this specific daunting thing relating to a much more obvious and visible-to-anyone issue. I can’t mask this like I can mask my autism. Neither of which I should be masking, ideally. But it’s scary.
It’s all masking—the unhealthy side of queerness, of neurodiversity. All about presenting in a way as to make other people comfortable, to avoid standing out, even as it kills you. And once you learn that survival skill, it’s hard to force yourself to stop trying to survive.
It’s a long road to find the courage to simply be and assert who I am, and stop trying to fawn and appease people who either don’t care about me or don’t care about being appeased. I’m… safer, now. In so many ways. I need to get that into my head. I’m gonna be okay. I can let go.
(Now as to how all of this interacts with my aroaceness… cripes, that’s a whole thing. I’m almost reluctant to spell it out, given the nuances that would entail and how easy it is to write off asexuality as a real, valid thing. But, it surely gee-whiz does factor in!)
The deal with the last year or so is, after the crash made it clear that the interfaces I’d been running just weren’t tenable anymore, it’s been this intense period of messy, laborious deprogramming before I can even get around to installing a new operating system up in here. Nearly every part of me, the instructions I’d been given over the course of four decades were completely wrong, and the labyrinth of workarounds I’d built to manage them—they never quite worked, but in the course of recent system overloads they had melted into irretrievable slag.
Just based on these alpha builds I’ve been putting together, this new code, that for once reflects my system architecture—gosh, it’s… lighter. Is this what it means to be a person, I wonder, and not a tool for someone else’s life? I just, it’s so much easier to be me, for me. Compared to the fucking disaster simulation I was running until so recently.
Yes, okay, we can try to reverse-engineer the expected output of an allistic cishet male; we’ll just build an emulator on this autistic aroace nb demifemale hardware we got sitting around. Why this hardware? It’s all we got! And that’s the only operating system compatible with the formats we’re gonna be handling. So, make do! See if we can simulate those cues with a < 50% fail rate.
Works just awful! Overheats and stutters constantly! But, it’s… fine, if you give it time and space. Well not really fine, but it can maybe sort out the result eventually, if you’re patient. Wait, how many instructions are you going to feed in here?
Oh.
Uh… okay, well. That might take a few custom scripts, to deal with the extra demand. They’re extra glitchy, and can’t run too many at once or else it—no, it’s… look, you can’t just push its buttons like that. You need to enter one character at a time, see? What do you mean, throw it away? It’s—there isn’t anything else. This is all there is. There will never be anything else. You just need to know how to—wait, where are you going? It…
Maybe I can reboot it?
Hello?
Seriously, my whole life has been like trying to emulate a SNES on Sega Genesis hardware.
Okay, so, gender update for those keeping careful notes. This whole process, it’s a matter of letting go of enough to allow me to identify a more-or-less static point. My gender is in no way fluid; it’s been the same as far back as I can remember. It was just obscure to me. What makes it tricky to identify is that it’s not a binary identity. I just don’t get the gender binary. Both extremes weird me out, and strike me as performative nonsense. But, I’m clearly not male! Never have been. I feel no affinity with even tepid maleness. Quite opposite.
With some distance now, disentangling some of my wiring from the expectations of all these years, I’m more clearly able to see what’s happening. I’ve been coming at this from the wrong perspective. I’ve been taking it as a retreat from maleness, but… I was never male to start? It’s more accurate to flip the board. The question isn’t about maleness, because that’s not a question. The question is about femaleness—because I don’t feel, never have felt, entirely female in a strict binary sense, but, importantly, I do feel a basic connection to this sphere. Just, not all the way.
There’s a specific point where I sit, where my mind has always been. It’s something like 40% female, 60% nothing-in-particular. And, I’ve always felt the most in common with those in that general range: gender non-conforming women. This is the kind of non-binary we’re looking at. Roughly. Sort of. I guess we could say, demigirl/demigal/demiwoman: kinda female, kinda not. However we frame it, the specific question is here is of femininity versus neutrality.
This has always been how I’ve thought of myself. I just, it’s been difficult, and scary, to get to the point of seeing and identifying and acknowledging and accepting and, now, embracing. I’m genderqueer, yes—but from the other angle than I had been trying to approach it.
Right now in terms of expression and identity I feel like I’m kind of lapsing back from the center, more deeply into a basic underlying femininity that doesn’t fully define me, and I wouldn’t want it to, but is… there, clearly, nonetheless. Which is the basic dynamic I feel. This is getting close to a final word, as far as figuring out what’s going on with me.
I’m, when I’m in a place that I can afford it, I intend to go on HRT. This should help to put a few more tiles in place—neurologically more than anything, frankly. Catch me up more fully.
What I find kinda interesting is how all of this goes along with sexuality. I’m clearly aroace. I just—I don’t work that way. And with the above in mind I now better understand some of the confusion I’ve felt. What I’ve often confused for romantic or sexual attraction, it’s more empathy; identification. I haven’t known how to process what I’ve felt, and so I’ve done it poorly, through a bad model that someone else handed to me. It’s curious to go back; see how this maps over the years. How really what I was feeling in most cases was, “I see myself in you.” (But, not like… that.)
There are still many dynamics to unpack, and this will probably take the rest of my life. But. I’m at least on a course to allow this to happen. And, it’s happening.
I guess that’s a thing about the way I approach concepts: I have intuition, right. And my intuition is often well-founded and correct, at least in regard to things I’m prepared to make conclusions about, but I’m not prepared to accept it until I establish the detailed reasoning. Often in the process of reasoning it out I realize I’m off on the wrong track, or I’m mistaking what I see due to that whole tunnel-vision thing—missing relevant details, that would suggest a different reading. So there’s this paranoid rigor I need to commit before I’m satisfied.
If something doesn’t fit, and I don’t have a reason why it shouldn’t, it really fucking bothers me even if the overall picture seems consistent and right. It takes forever for me to procedurally web through and tie off all these tiny threads. And I’ll probably go back; revise!
Anyway. This whole shift of perspective here, that lines everything up correctly—it establishes many other parallels I hadn’t considered. I’ve never bought into masculinity on any level at all; what I’ve worn all my life is this noncommittal neutral mask, much as one masks for autism. And it’s never been a lie, exactly; much as one’s autism mask is a projection of the least objectionable and most functional parts of one’s self for allistic circles, so as to avoid being singled out as a problem, this gender mask never served to pretend something was there; just to deflect.
Fact of the matter is, the best I could do was cling to the truth of this neutral space: no, I don’t subscribe to the gender binary, but here’s this… confusing void for you to misinterpret, because that’s the best I can do. This is as male as I can give you: this… whatever-it-is. Which was never ever convincing! My whole life, everyone around me has known there’s something up. Without a guide to interpret this limbo, usually they conclude I’m gay. And get very concerned about that. Which has complicated, and is complicated by, my asexuality to no end.
I’m terrible at masking. It’s exhausting, and I just don’t know what I’m doing. I’m also very bad at lying except by omission, which just leaves these conspicuous voids. And there’s the whole demoralizing element, knowing that who you are is so objectionable that you can never ever let go. Never let the mask slip for one second—which only makes it the harder to keep up. You just internalize everything. And every time you do slip, which will be constantly, others will be quick to jump in and let you know. You just learn to dissociate. You’re awful and wrong and not worth thinking about, even on a basic level; even to take care of your daily needs. All you’ve got are these thin, cracked masks that aren’t fooling anyone, and this swirling, anxious void behind them where all you can do is find things to lose yourself in because the alternative is facing this loathsome monster that everyone keeps identifying for you.
Again, though, that gender mask, it’s based in a weird kind of truth, or allergy to lies at least; my gender, it’s not binary. I don’t get the gender extremes. They’re so strange and performative to me. I think, what are you people even doing, and why? I’m, like, 60% agendered. So, that’s what I’ve held up, limply, to hide the rest of the answer that’s so much harder to grapple with.
But, as I’ve been saying since I’ve started to be open with myself, when I have to pick one or the other on a form, the obvious answer is female. I’m not a woman, exactly, entirely, but the other option doesn’t apply at all! Not a little. And, I’m not absent of gender entirely. There’s something there. I’m just, I’ve never had an opportunity to get in touch with it. I don’t know what to do with it yet.
Right now, genderqueer is the best general descriptor. It captures that essential ambiguity, all with a tone of icon-smashing defiance. But now that I’ve established the what and where and how of that ambiguity. to more precisely define myself as a demiwoman (demigirl? demifemme?) resolves all those conflicts.
So all that mild sense of disquiet, of knowing that I wasn’t quite getting something right, and nervousness about what that might be? That’s pretty much evaporated. I’ve assembled a pretty good sense of myself, at least as far as this dimension is concerned. Now I can move forward, and figure out what it means to me—and what, if anything, I may be able to do about it.
So, yeah. I keep rehashing this stuff in writing, because this is the way that I think. But, the way this all is panning out is, I don’t fully respond to either binary gender and I never have—but where I do fall, it’s not ambiguous. It’s clearly much closer to female than male. And the more I respond to this, and realign my thinking and conscious sense of self to what’s always been steering this thing underneath though I’ve been told never to look, the less constantly-awful I feel. This base level of garbage I’m used to feeling, it just goes away.
Again I’m cautious not to be performative or reactive, and for it to come from a place of truth—and earnestly, it’s just such a weight off, every small step toward femininity I take. At least, a sort of dorky, passive femininity. My brain, I’m wired to be girly on balance.
This is the me whom I love. And so many prickles fall away when I’m allowed to drop the awful mask and just… be this person. This big part of me, I do see as female. Yes, in sum I can’t deal with the binary thing—but for this aspect, it helps to think of her as a her.
Again with the containing multitudes; the truth in the singular “they.” I imagine it’s easy to misread or pathologize what I’m saying here. It’s just hard to explain neurology except in metaphors to concrete external things with existing nouns and verbs, like relationships. Different parts of me guide different parts of my day. Domestically, moment to moment, just in terms of keeping myself company, she’s the part who tends to take over and feel most comfortable. When pondering, I tend to go to this gender-blank space tied to the other person I’ve learned to be all these years. The one I use to face the world.
Whenever there’s a danger of encountering other people, I’m… not sure what to do. Azure’s sure as heck not confident enough to take the lead at the moment. My usual face has always been useless for that. That leave me with this awful mask I’ve been forced to hew out over the years. And I just hold it up, show people something along the lines of what they may well expect or want to see, and hope no one looks closely enough to notice all the cracks as I scuttle out and do as I need, then retreat. At which point I toss the mask aside, breathe, and decompress.
Building this relationship with myself—that’s one thing. Building it to a point where I can show my real self in public, that’s something else. Something I’ve never figured out, but I now better understand why not. We’ll figure this out together, eventually, I think. Maybe. Again it would help to live almost anywhere else, but… I’m starting to get a hang of my situation enough that maybe I’ll be able to do something about this in the next year or so.
If you know me, you know about my sensitivity to sound. Much of that’s an autism sensory thing, but also it just slots into my memory centers better than most things. I don’t remember names or faces, really, but I remember voices very well. And melodies and rhythms and so on. That sensitivity plays into one of the bigger elements of dysphoria in this whole process, and one that’s taking a bit more effort.
I’ve had years of voice training—albeit decades ago, while working on my music degree—so it’s not alien territory, finding new shapes for things. But I’m awful with practice, and discipline, and my muscles are weak from lack of regular use. So that’s this ongoing project, finding my literal actual voice as sort of a conduit and icon of finding my more metaphorical one. It’s hard. Like, really hard. But I’m getting somewhere.
This is a major thing for me. There’s this switch in my brain, where I feel like when I get this down, I’ll have my larger sense of self pretty well nailed. I’m not in a rush; like anything, I’m trying to be earnest here and to get this right. It’ll happen if I keep chipping away
So there are two things, really. There’s the voice, which I’m slowly working on, and there’s the facial hair situation—which was never tenable, even when I was masking as male. It’s thin, it’s patchy, it’s slow, and it’s prone to ingrowing. I’ve never wanted it, but now I’m done.
That at least has more concrete solutions, whenever I’m financially able to pursue them. It’s a tangible thing I can point at and say, yeah, I can take care of that eventually, when the resources are together. It’s quantifiable; so fine. The voice is more of a personal struggle.
In the short term, as far as tangible reflections of my inner life… well, frankly I’m kind of girly anyway, which has always been part of the struggle with others trying to box me into a shape that physically and mentally doesn’t fit. But I’m maintaining my body okay, for once. I’m taking time to actually just pay attention to myself. And it’s making a big difference, emotionally. As well as helping to dissuade the impression that I just climbed out of a gutter. I also have been mending key clothing articles, and have bought some small basic items.
Nothing extravagant. A couple of cami tops. My old underwear was all falling apart, so good time as any to replace it. Everything on sale. But, just a simple swap of a few elements makes a huge difference in impression—illustrating how fucking arbitrary gender is as a construct. People are all basically the same, underneath all the mental and emotional and physical and social decorations we lace onto them.
Then I’ve got my eye makeup coming on Friday. (Again, cheap as I could find. Gotta eat and maintain a place to live, but also gotta start somewhere with emotional needs.) Super oblivious here, but also curious enough that I know I’m gonna go in deep in figuring this out.
I feel like if I were still in New York I could just go outside like whatever, and nobody would give half a shit if they happened to notice at all. But, I’m not in New York! So I still feel a bit under siege. Still, hey.
Just, to compile a couple of previous comments: yeah, as scrawny (even malnourished!) as I may be, I do have noticeable fatty tissue to my breasts—as people close to me have on occasion made, well, an occasion. This often contributed to my body issues when trying to mask as male. It’s not even to the level of an A-cup, I don’t think. Not that I’m an expert. But it’s there-enough to be a talking point. And it’s interesting how the “shelf” in a cami affects this. I’m so goddamned—I need to eat more, right. I could use some fat on me. But even without HRT, I like the shape things are taking.
The more I conform my handling of my body to its actual shape, and my real sentiments, the more comical it feels that anyone ever tried to paint something else over this. Like, really? I’ve had so many body issues in my life, precisely because it’s failed in all these attempts. But taken away from these external influences, and just attended as its own thing, I’m… I kinda like it, actually? I’ve always been made to feel… gross, and misshapen, and like a lost cause. But I can work with this.
Nearly every part of my body has caused me to feel ashamed at some point, either for going against what I was told I must be or for supporting that mold so ineffectively that I was made to feel broken. But flip the tune, and it’s really just the voice and whiskers that need work. After that, it’s little things. Maybe HRT could help fill out my face a bit, pad some areas better. I’m sure it would help my brain! This is all subtle stuff, though. Polish. Which… I don’t know. Again, no rush. But it’s a consideration, once some other stuff is settled better.
Also, I’m at the elevation of Big Bird. So I’m never going to not stand out. But, whatever.
But anyway, I notice just the way I move and hold myself, and respond to things, it’s changing so much. I’m not accustomed to smiling, at all. Or feeling allowed to gesture or use my hands. And all of this stuff, there’s this level of freedom. Like a real person is forming now.
I’ve never felt entirely real, you know. I’m sure I’ve talked about this extensively over the years.
I don’t actually know the deal with my hormones, but amongst my total lack of a sex drive, my retention of scalp hair, my total lack of body hair (except sparsely on the limbs) and my pathetic facial hair situation, I suspect that I’m not quite bursting with testosterone. I don’t know that I have a lot of estrogen going on either. But proportionally… well, again with my body’s features. I think I may just be low on both, considering how frickin’ long it took for me to develop at all, and how slowly it did once it started. Which may in turn have something to do with why I tend to look… quite annoyingly young, actually.
And also, potentially, have to do with the autism thing. Maybe.
If I were a mouse.
Estrogen reverses autism-like features in mice | Spectrum | Autism Research News Two new studies provide clues that may explain sex differences in autism prevalence. Italian researchers have found that injecting estrogen into the brains of young male mice reverses some of the… spectrumnews.org
There’s a lot going on here that as yet is poorly understood on an academic level. Anecdotally and experientially, though, it’s clear that LGBTQIA+ and neurodiversity are kinda all aspects of the same thing. It’s all overlapping alternative mind models.
And a lot of it, a lot of the brain-shaping that results in these different neurologies and thereby mind experiences, it seems to be linked to developmental hormones. Not always in ways that make a clear linear sense. Like, why the deep association between autism and transness? It totally makes sense on a lived experience level. Like, yeah, of course. Obviously. But logistically, it’s a bit of a “Huh?”—brain not getting enough estrogen, so it settles into this other shape that… not infrequently makes one feel detached from assigned gender? Huh?
I can’t speak for the AFAB camp, but on this side of things, estrogen deprivation means… what, hunger for more estrogen or something? Is that what’s happening? Is autism happening in part because the way it’s developing, the brain knows it wants more than the body’s giving it?
The logic would make a little more linear sense for AFAB transness, inasmuch as, oh, brain not absorbing much estrogen. So, that means a more male-ish brain, right? Maybe? Kinda? Again the research isn’t particularly established on this as yet. As it wouldn’t be, right? But a thing I find kind of interesting, is that my experience with autism is, uh, much more like autism in women. Which adds another dimension to the whole mess.
My autism, my asexuality, and my gender issues, they’re three angles of basically the same discussion, all about neutral acceptance of the shape of my mind. Of those three, by far gender is the most interesting, in part because it’s the most confusing for me, and most rewarding.
Like, the autism I kinda… I knew it was there, and how it basically worked. The main issue has been accepting it as valid rather than something offensive and wrong. The asexuality, sorta similar. Just, accept that I don’t care about this thing and that this is perfectly fine. They’re both important to nail down, but they’re pretty straightforward once you get to the point of acknowledging them. Everything about gender is so much more complicated, and it goes so much deeper. There’s so much I’ve not really, well, dared explore, by comparison.
I feel like I haven’t even come close to the core on this. There’s so much I’m just… it’s like magnetic barriers, you know. I know there’s something there, but the pain and avoidance are so thick and repulsive. Ergo, I guess, the elation with every nudge I make in this area.
I’ve always been so scared of myself. And I’m only starting to face why any of that might be.
All of which serves to unfold what I said earlier, about surveys. If I have to tick a binary box, it’s going to be female at this point. Not because that’s accurate, but because the question itself is inaccurate. And one wrong option is nevertheless less wrong than the other.
Working outside the gender binary sure is a thing, as far as figuring out how this space maps to what feels natural and true to who I am. It’s mostly about embracing femininity without overcompensating, since I’m okay leaving masculinity in the dumpster almost wholesale.
I’ve spent decades lying to myself in order to make other people feel comfortable, so I don’t want to start a new series of lies as this knee-jerk response. What this is all about is figuring out what’s real. So I’m really cautious of anything that approaches performance.
To that end, I’m slowly looking for where I’d probably be sat if I were assigned differently at birth, rather than manifesting and aiming for some kind of idealized end goal. And I think this is helping somewhat, reassuring me I’m making the right choices.
Which is steering me toward sort of a casual librarian lounge mess mode, rather than something, you know, fancy.
I am a piece of work. So that’s reality. Modulate the disaster; don’t pretend it doesn’t exist, or that I’m a different person. Just figure out the new key signature.
It’s funny to me, kind of, how much work other people have had to do over the years to paper over my physical appearance, to edge me into looking at all masculine. I have, like no body hair (except thinly on the limbs). Bad at facial hair. Delicate features. Thin at the waist. Even as scrawny as I am, I have, uh, noticeable fat deposits in my breast area. When I shave regularly and let my hair grow to a comfortable length, and stop repressing my facial expressions and body language and posture, and dress a little differently, all that work vanishes. Like, just allow me to relax and flex and stop trying to manipulate me, and without any makeup or medical transition or anything, I… kind of default to a feminine shape. More so than clearly masculine, anyway.
Except the height. Which is absurd, and awkward no matter what.
There’s so much self-consciousness I need to deprogram; all these years of people shouting at me to correct my posture, correct my walk, correct the way I use my hands, correct my actual facial expressions. And it’s gotten so jammed up I can’t walk without thinking of every step.
The mind isn’t just a brain thing, and the brain doesn’t exist in isolation. There’s a level of physical comfort that has to go along with mental health. And it just feels so much more natural to embrace what’s here, rather than fight against it. I am essentially more feminine. This is the better part of me, and the part of me I like more. I don’t like what’s been imposed on me, most of my life. It hurts. It feels dehumanizing; like I’ve always just been someone else’s property. I don’t care about that person, either how they’re expected to act or look. Which is a big factor in why I’ve never felt compelled to take care of them, taken much of an interest in them, and—as long as I associated them with who I am, or am supposed to be—was consequently so full of self-loathing. They were never real. Just an automaton for others’ use.
Building this relationship with myself, talking with myself, tending to what this person wants and needs, it’s so novel. And it feels so amazing. I really like this person, who I’ve been forced to ignore for so long. And the more I bond with them, the easier things become. It’s—not only did people have to fight constantly to box me into that shape, that I was so bad at holding, but the amount of strain it put me under, trying and largely failing to hold it together for all those years. It’s comical how long it took for me to understand why that was, given that the moment even the slightest pressure is released, sproing. Revert to my natural self.
I guess the main thing is I was never once in my life told it was okay to just be that person. So many of my health problems, down to the physical manifestations of stress, come from trying to accommodate people who don’t care about me. Well. Now I’m starting to fall in love with me—the event it seems like everything in my life has been engineered to prevent. So it’s all over for that nonsense. And I’m just… at fucking last, you know?
A thing I haven’t seen discussed, and maybe I’ve just been in the wrong places, is how accurate to experience the singular “they” feels as a pronoun. Interrogating, accepting, befriending these aspects of one’s self—one feels like one contains multitudes under the banner of “I.” That is to say, as pertaining to a gender-diverse experience. The only sensible way to discuss it is to split and anthropomorphize different parts of one’s self, which isn’t quite accurate, but there’s an active internal relationship going on, different elements rising at times.
I’ve always had a poor sense of self. The confusing thing, that I’m only just working out, is that this doesn’t mean disliking myself; it means being hopelessly out-of-touch with a concept of me. With an inner narrative about who I am, and why, and how I feel about that.
This is an engineered situation. I know I’m not alone in this, except in that my experience is my own. But the effect is that this whole zone of selfness, this area that defines me and what I want and need, it’s fogged over with a perception filter. I try to look, and I roll off. To look at myself, try to identify myself as a person, even work out what I might want from moment to moment, it’s like making eye contact with a stranger or staring into the sun. Or checking one’s inbox, when an unpleasant response is likely. More than that. It feels shameful.
I lived in an abusive house. One of those where almost daily my father would congratulate himself at me for not hitting me, and telling himself (one suspects) more than me how grateful I should be, because other people had it much worse. Constant screaming. Near total neglect.
There were no mirrors in the house, except a high and dark one above the bathroom sink and a palm-sized one high up by the front door. I’ve mentioned this, but it seems important. I never got in the habit of seeing myself. I learned to keep my head down, make no demands or noise. If I did nothing, didn’t add to the noise, didn’t draw attention to myself, I could maybe get through the day without any of the surrounding war landing in my lap. Life was a matter of deflection, avoiding confrontation, reading danger signs, and pleasing the unpleasable. In return, at best, I got nothing. I got left alone.
And when I mean alone, I mean alone. No one ever really talked to me. Asked me questions. Showed me how to do anything, take care of myself. I had to figure out how to survive myself, sort of, in a house with two adults. As long as I was blank, I was fine. Because, if I weren’t blank I would be wrong.
In hindsight, anything would have been wrong. But I also… I didn’t have a strong concept, again, but I knew almost nothing that people expected of me applied to me in the slightest. In the ’80s and early ’90s, concepts of gender and sexuality weren’t so developed in the culture that would reach a small town in Maine. Whatever other people were doing, it sure didn’t fit me. Lots of people assumed, or feared, I was gay. I knew that wasn’t quite right either.
This whole scenario, it created a sort of limbo where it was impossible to move forward. The warfare between my parents undermined a desperate attempt to attend college out-of-state, and I just wound up doing what I was expected, trying my best to hack out a tolerable space in it. It wasn’t until I was 25 that I stumbled onto a lifeline, an excuse to get me out of that house. I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t care; I had to go. And I shifted into a totally different abusive situation. Someone looking for a void mirror like mine for themself.
So it went. I’m now 40; of those, only three years have been of my own company, outside of relationships where my lack of a sense of self was the main draw for the other, and I was a tool for their vanity. The point of me was not to be a person. I was obedient, so as to survive.
Obedience is the thing. It’s the only way that I’ve known, yet I’m so very bad at it. I’m okay when it means doing nothing, but when it means to do that which comes naturally to others, or to play a role written for me, I don’t have it in me. And this is where the pain comes in. The depression, the anxiety, the shame, it’s actually nothing to do with me. My poor self-concept isn’t a concept of a poor self. That’s not where the hyphen is. It’s all to do with the narrative put on me by others, that I’m expected to reflect without flaw. And I’m not so glossy.
Getting to know myself, it’s scary. I’m so used to checking over my shoulder. Making sure no one sees me glancing in the mirror, or the glass of the shop window. What I see there, it feels forbidden on so many levels. But, it’s all that I have. I need to take a serious tally. When I step away from the shame of looking at all, and the fear that what I find may not match the expectations of those who control my fate, I like the person who I find. It’s a shaky relationship, the one I’m building, and one started far too late. But at least I’ve found them.
I still don’t know what to do about all this, how to support this person who it seems that I am, how to help them be who and what they need to be. But I see them now, and I’m coming to understand. And I’m starting to care. So this can be my little project from now on.
