Considering how old this body is and what a young trans I am, I think I look pretty good mostly. Some things will never be perfect. Other things are a work in progress. Generally, though, i am in good spirits about this. (Which again is so novel to me.)
I say this, as I am not having a particularly pretty day, and it has been frustrating me. But you know. not every day is gonna be a winner. It’s up and down, and today isn’t the end of everything; it’s the beginning of everything else. We’re done with the doom. Azure doesn’t need it.
For decades I’m used to every day being the start of the end. But it’s really not. It never has been. It’s just the start. On prior record, I’ve still got plenty of good days ahead of me. Probably my best is far ahead—way over the horizon available to me today. Yesterday was fine. Nothing is consistent, but there are patterns. and I’ve finally caught mine. not ever gonna let it go.
Being this new in a body this old, it’s kinda like getting a used car or a fixer-upper of an old house. you got a project ahead of you, fixing the damage and maintaining the bones of the thing, but you can make anything your own. Play up the strengths. It’s all in how you wear it.
For a while there I was almost concerned. That ongoing breast tenderness had ebbed down to a whisper, barely noticeable at all. Was this it, were we somehow reaching the end of the story after mere months? But—okay, never mind. Tits back to fire again. I haven’t mapped it out, but it feels like it moves in cycles—a certain number of days on, then off.
On top of that, generally I feel so fucking crampy and gross.
Which… with a more than a cursory understanding of biology, would make sense, right?
So yeah, I guess I should probably start to keep track of this business. Because on the basis of… really every month since February, but absolutely since August, there is a clear cycle going on.
It is established, if not particularly well-studied—because, trans healthcare; who gives a shit, right—that regardless of your genital situation, once you got a certain level of estrogen in your system, you start to experience periods. It’s not about the hardware (which is all basically the same anyway); it’s about the instructions that the firmware sends around. Of particular note is that at a certain threshold, breast tissue begins to produce a cyclical amount of estrogen, along with some other compounds that contribute to the process.
And, uh. whee:
It’s hard to get a good sense in two dimensions with bad lighting… but yeah, we’re entering the active cleavage zone. Bringing the gang together!
I guess my breasts are at critical mass already? I mean, seven months into my regimen they were at a size that the literature tells me a trans femme half my age might expect to reach after 2-5 years—and today they’re two cup sizes larger than that…
As I say, the real monthly roller coaster kicked off in maybe August, September? Which, yeah, would line up, right? And good grief, the soreness I’ve been getting since last night. It’s that kind of tenderness where you feel if you poke it too hard you’re gonna barf. Like a pair of giant cystic pimples, connected to nerve lines running from my toes to my teeth.
I guess It follows that it would build in intensity, month on month, as development progresses, right. And I mean, I’ll take it. Whatever! I’m used to feeling like shit every day of my life. It’s fine. If the trade-off is that life is worth living? That finally I don’t feel like this the other 80% of the time? Sure, whatever, lol.
On top of all that, today I… seem to have entered the chocolate zone. I’ve talked a little about my change in taste and food preferences, some of which has been weirdly cyclical as well, and… yeah, okay. We may have an answer to some of that as well.
Due to fairly systemic ignorance about this topic I was not aware that this feature came with the territory until I got here. But, I, uh. I guess I’m part of the club now, huh? One imagines a uterus just makes this all the more fun. At least the discomfort doesn’t come with a mess over here.
It’s just…
Yeah. so. With how much more bothersome it’s gotten month on month, it will be an adventure to see where these waves will go in the future.
So, I’m. For now…
I’m just—i’m gonna… stand in the shower and groan for an hour, I guess.
Seriously, how did I go over 41 years without breasts? How is that a thing that happened, where it never occurred to me, hey, something’s missing here? I know these things are sexualized in this culture—and I squeam at sex stuff, including words and basic ideation, when it involves me—but, like, that’s not the point of them, either biologically or in regard to why I’ve been going so mental about this lately.
It’s just, imagine suddenly having hands after never thinking about them much before. Boobs aren’t quite as versatile, but there’s this element of, oh, holy shit, that’s it; we’ve got it now. How did I not understand that a piece of me was missing? (Two pieces, I guess?) Now it’s just so obvious.
Have you ever met someone and immediately you sort of forget you didn’t grow up with them? You feel they’ve always been there, and it’s weird to think there was technically a before-time? It’s that, but with an actual physical piece of yourself. This is rewiring so much, so quickly. There’s so much “oh.”
I am literally becoming a more complete person here, and it is so fucking wild, I can’t stop obsessing.
A thing I didn’t account for about transition is, okay, it’s one thing to have myself figured out more or less. But one forgets, so easily and so quickly—especially with this addled neurology I’m rocking here. Old habits are hard to break, even when they’re clearly wrong. One begins to doubt one’s self, often one’s basic sanity.
Having physical reminders? It’s amazing. It’s so helpful. It takes away such a cognitive, emotional burden to be able to look down and see, oh, right: boobs. Or feel them brush against my arm when I reach across. To mutter to myself, and for my voice to come back… well, closer anyway to how I want, without my thinking or trying. Having a daily routine, maintaining myself, doing my hair and makeup. Getting dressed properly.
All this grounding, it’s like writing a list and realizing, oh, I don’t have to carry all that in my head anymore and work myself up out of fear I’ll drop one of the balls. All this tangible aspect, it offloads so much burden, and at the same time confirms it’s not just imagination. I can relax.
I am so unused to anything in my head mapping to the world around me that I didn’t know what it was like or how much of a fucking relief it is to be able to just have reality taken care of, so I don’t have to hold it every moment of every day, afraid that it may shatter. I am so used to living exclusively in my head because there has been no interface. Now it’s like reality is spilling out of my skull into my waking, sensory world, and it’s so weird and trippy and makes me feel drunk. If this is reality, and it makes sense to me, what was that world I was living in before? This is why I say it’s like I’ve woken up. It really is. It’s everything before that’s now in question, fading into the cobwebs of a decaying dream.
It’s so strange to rewire my sense of being in the world on such a basic level. Like, this is what it feels like to be alert and aware and to feel things and know things and for all this to be confirmed instantly, viscerally. Is this what it’s like for everyone else, always?
I had no idea how much burden I was holding at all times, and how much space and power and resources that ate up. How it left no room for me to just exist, and breathe, and feel, and want, and be an actual human being. I didn’t know what it meant to be alive.
There’s so much overlap among PTSD, ADHD, autism, gender and sexual dysphoria. It’s common for them all to be… I don’t love the term comorbid, but you know. You’re toting around one of these disorientations, the chance you’ve got another one is that much higher than if you didn’t have any. And each one just adds another layer to the yergh.
There’s this sense of carrying around one’s own reality all the time that doesn’t match the models provided, which one has to learn to entertain and navigate while translating all the way. And until the disjunct becomes clear, there’s just this continual knowledge that something, everything is wrong, nothing is working, your ideas never seem to match the physical world, and you don’t know how or why. And it’s such a fuckery. It’s so isolating. Nothing makes sense.
For decades I’ve made the analogy that my waking life, it’s like watching a TV screen. If I fell hard into identifying with videogames as a medium, that’s because that’s basically what life was like. Sitting apart, pushing few limited buttons, hoping they do what’s intended. You want to take these other actions that aren’t pre-programmed in? Step over that police tape, see what’s up that hill, talk to the creature instead of stabbing it? Tough. Those aren’t the rules of this world. Learn to play the game right if you want to get anywhere.
It’s no accident that my reckoning with all of the above pretty much has happened in one rolling wave. It’s all tangled up, intertwined. And letting it out…
There’s also this anger, that I’ve never been allowed to feel. Like, anger is one of the Bad Feelings, right. Except it’s not, of course. Emotions are neutral. They just are what they are. They’re signals. What isn’t neutral is one’s behaviors; how one acts on them. Denying the feelings, that’s basically the first step to major dysfunction.
There’s a lot to be angry about. And it’s fine.
One of the overwhelming narratives of the last month or two is, how dare they keep me from myself? All of them. How dare they. And that’s really what it comes down to. This is what I could have been this whole time. It didn’t have to be the way that it was. I lived through that for no reason.
I barely can wrap my head around what I dealt with, for so long. It’s a lot. There’s so much that I’ve accepted as normal, that’s just… clearly not something a person should have to put up with. But it’s getting better. I’m finally putting together this world that I guess comes pre-assembled for others. Becoming human.
It turns out, reality is intoxicating. And I want to feel it, encourage it, declare and define it as an ongoing work. I need to keep this moving.
This is a lot of words about something stupid. But I’m going through a thing, okay.
The thing about measuring for a bra is, it forced me to recognize what was going on in this empirical way. I think what still stuns me is how they feel like they leapt at me out of nowhere. I was vaguely aware of their development, then all at once I had to address it. While I was otherwise preoccupied, these two separate mounds of flesh slowly began to aggregate. And, you know. When it’s not supported, stuff’s gonna spread out. Shape isn’t gonna be as obvious.
So they progress to the point that one finally turns their attention to these deposits and goes, huh, guess they’re growing a bit; should look into this. And by then… those modest rolling bumps, they consist of so much material. And if you just gather it up, give it a little support? The slightest pressure and suddenly, wait, these are actual breasts. When did that happen? What? Like, just lightly cup your hands underneath and hang on, there’s a shape here. Cleavage appears.
What I’m saying is that physics play into my obliviousness, then my sudden realization. This tissue is malleable, right. It deforms like a Japanese pudding with any pressure, including and especially gravity. (Which is in part why one wears a bra, yes.) And the reason I’m dwelling on this again is that I checked and despite the destruction of our postal service my first bra still seems set for delivery in three days. And, that’s gonna change things. It’s gonna be this leap where suddenly these untamed lumps are collected and contained, and… there’s a lot there.
In just a few days, I’m… my whole profile is going to change. The way I carry weight is going to shift. There’s going to be visible cleavage. This is becoming real, you know.
And it’s just.
Again it’s not even about the breasts, right. Not in and of themselves. The significance here is more symbolic. It’s kind of a landmark in reclaiming myself, healing my damage. Becoming myself, at last. It’s this objective metric, helping me to see the change in me in much the way the measuring tape was an objective metric allowing me to clearly see them.
I am so bad with measurements without an outside guide. I am so bad with intuition and emotion and vague mushy notions about things. Like how despite the blinking neon lights it took someone dragging me aside and pointing to them for me to see my queerness. I just shrug and accept and don’t really know how to quantify the qualia that make up my world. I appreciate every bit of proof I am who I am. The breasts to my sense of self, the measuring tape to the breasts—it’s all measurement of a measurement of a measurement; this existential train dragging me to the acceptance of my own fucking reality.
More and more, the reality keeps crashing in—showing me that I’m right. That I am me, despite everything. Despite all the denial and harm.
At the end of it, it’s just boobs. Like half the people on the planet. Big deal, right. But I’m going through puberty here. If I’m a little juvenile, I think it’s warranted. There’s a lot wrapped up in this. More than I realized until it was impossible to ignore.
I’m sitting here, feeling overcome at just the thought of claiming that piece of ownership over myself. Putting on that bra, shaping my chest, understanding that this is the new normal, we’re really doing this, and a hearty fuck you to everyone who tried to stop me for 30 years. Who accused me of being myself, like it was the most reprehensible thing.
It’s a point of reference.
I’m making progress. Measurable, objective, real, meaningful, visible progress.
I’m so swimmy, all the time. Flailing in the void. But it’s working. I was always right, even when I didn’t know what I was right about.
I’m going to be okay, maybe. I’ve got this. I’m fixing things. It’s not too late.
Things are finally going right.
It just so happens that this landmark is goofy and comical and… sort of neat, in a visceral way. Which in itself complicates an already complicated set of emotions wrapped up in this. I feel so strange for feeling the way I do about something so base and silly.
This all crept up on me. I had no clue what value or significance it might have. I just wrote it off, until there it was. It wasn’t on my agenda at all. But apparently it’s what I needed anyway.
I’m sitting here, crying—but from happiness. Which is itself unfamiliar. Yes, crying from happiness is unfamiliar. But also, just… happiness? That has to be what this is.
I’m starting to realize I may have never felt actual happiness. That has to be that I’m feeling, and this is so novel.
I need to get rid of this facial hair at the earliest moment I can. This is driving me nuts. Right now, it’s this and my voice that are the two big things that give me problems. I mean, I can manage both, but I’d rather not have to. And this is such an easy thing to deal with… if one has the money. And there doesn’t happen to be a pandemic outside.
My priority for erasing this mess:
upper lip
chin
throat
jaw
cheeks
The upper lip is most noticeable and darkest and hardest to hide and most psychologically… troublesome. The chin is viscerally annoying and prickly and hard to deal with. Other areas, decreasingly so.
With this neurology I’ve got here, it’s hard to express how much energy it takes for me to shave, and how dizzy and ill I feel afterward, what with all that standing around and waving my arm around and close scrutiny. Physically it wipes me out, never mind the emotional exhaustion from acknowledging it, focusing on it, engaging with it. So, often I don’t. Which on its own makes me feel worse and worse until I do.
When I do—it’s not perfect, but it feels like my whole face shape changes a little, and it’s soft, and I can stand to look at myself, or rest my chin on… anything, really. Part of the mask is scraped away, and I feel like me. It’s this big achievement. All this effort, and now there I am again, Christ. Then repeat the same cycle tomorrow, forever.
What, another day? I only just finished the last one.
It would be such a difference not to have to outlay all that energy, making myself feel awful, so as to not feel a little more awful, every single day. And for it to be completely effective, which this isn’t. For it no longer to be a concern, so I can move on.
I remember when I first heard about laser treatment, maybe 15 years ago—I think it was offered in Japan at that time but not here, so it was this novel thing—and I thought, wow, that would be really desirable, but how could I excuse it? I didn’t have the right yet to want anything. I didn’t see the point of making myself better. I just wanted to not exist, really. So I filed it away to chew over at some indeterminate point that was unlikely ever to come.
It says, I think, a lot that this has been such a growing point of insecurity for me since maybe 1992, and for a decade there it was used as a major point of control over me. I wasn’t allowed to touch it. I was told in so many words that my body didn’t belong to me anymore. (When had it ever?) The odd time I couldn’t stand it anymore and I shaved it off, they were so aghast and disgusted. I looked like an alien, a child, a girl. I wasn’t to just do that to them without telling them. What would people say?
Anyway, without going back down that well again, this is the next thing I need to wrangle. And in practical terms it’s… like, theoretically it should be simple and straightforward. All it takes is money, which I don’t have but I can maybe figure out. But again also: pandemic.
One of the places around here, they had some kind of a deal where you paid a flat fee for forever treatment—however long it took to get rid of everything, which I know can take several visits —and could pay that in small installments. Something like $40 a month. Which, y’know. That’s… not terrible. It’s a thing I could maybe figure out how to manage. Except, it’s plague outside. Even worse, it’s plague inside, particularly with self-care facilities where people will linger. And technically this is not vital, time-sensitive treatment. So that’s a barrier.
I’ve held out for 30 years, so I guess I can wait a few more months and see if we can fix the problem every other fucking corner of the world has figured out. (Ha ha, have I even met America?) But I don’t want to. And for once, that matters. I never let it. But this time it does.
I matter.
So. This is a priority. We’ll figure it out. Somehow.
The final class of the summer session, my voice group began to get into nonverbal language, which we’ll explore in more depth this fall. What struck me was, eight out of ten of the signifiers they went over that day were things people have spent a lifetime drilling out of me. One thing after the other, they were all, “Here’s what you might want to try doing,” and it was precisely what I have always been told not to do: “Cut that out. It’s inappropriate. It’s gross. Do this other thing that makes you uncomfortable instead.”
But I’m no good at lies, and I can’t really perform. So I just bottle up, and do nothing. I suppress what I’m told is wrong, and I can’t make myself do what I’m told is right, and I glitch out and get weird.
In Dial M for Murder, you know how the husband dictates everything the wife should say to the police, explaining, “It’s much simpler if that’s how you say it happened; that’s what they expect you to say; it will raise fewer questions”—all of which makes her seem more suspicious? In hindsight, every relationship I’ve been in, they just lied to everyone about me—about who I was, what I did, where they met me, what my background was—and kept updating and feeding me these scripts that I was meant to play along to, to support their lies. If I failed to convincingly play the part or foresee lies they hadn’t provided but expected me to figure out, they grew furious with me for undermining them and raising questions they didn’t want to answer. I was going to ruin everything, by… existing.
I am so used to people being ashamed of me, and terrified that those things will reflect back on them. Of them being so ready to punish me for disgusting them, while telling me they’re helping me, and that I should be grateful. It’s such a thankless job, abusing me day and night. The least I could do was recognize their effort.
There’s all this overlap between ABA and conversion therapy, right. So many of the behaviors that they try to crush in autistic young men to make them seem presentable are traits that are described as overly effeminate. And for others’ comfort and my own safety, I sure have had to learn to mask my neurology. And now, we become aware of this. Now we come to actual, overt gender issues—and for me at least, it’s the exact same breakthrough. This is just like learning what stimming is, and why it is, and why it’s good and neutral and necessary. It’s the same process of seeing all these things I have been trained out of doing, and realizing that, no, this is who I always was. I was supposed to be that way.
It’s the revelation that everyone in my life, they were wrong. It’s that, holy shit, they all knew—and my obvious queerness bothered them so much that they tried to make it go away. And I ate it, because I didn’t know any better. I knew I was wrong, because I was always wrong, and they told me what I needed to do instead.
So much of my transition, it seems, is less a matter of learning some new performance than to learn to stop papering over my own natural behaviors to make other people comfortable. To figure out where things went wrong and how to be myself again.
There’s a reason I am such an awkward, nervous bundle of confusion. And it’s not my fault. It’s the abuse. Everything I get into, everything I unpick, it’s not about making this new thing. It’s archeology, digging down and piecing myself back together. Undoing damage. Rebuilding myself from first principles, with mostly all the same pieces but without someone else striding in every few steps to tell me what shit it all is and what I need to do differently, according to a completely unrelated set of plans that requires pieces I don’t even have.
It’s just. The epiphany of being told step by step the way I might want to try behaving to support my identity are exactly my natural behaviors that I have been abused out of performing because they were wrong and disgusting. I was always right. I was always me.
Though I have no expectations for HRT, and am already getting some of what I hoped in terms of mood stability and energy, I’ve a sense my body as it has developed will put up very little resistance. While I’m starving for estrogen, there is trace evidence of testosterone either.
My growth spurt, and voice change, didn’t hit until my late teens.
I barely had facial hair until my mid-30s, and it was still patchy until recently.
The only body hair I have is on my limbs, and even that’s mostly thin and vellus.
I’ve got no upper-body muscle mass at all.
My scalp hair has only in the last couple years begun to recede a little above the temples, into that M shape.
I’ve never had anything like a libido.
It’s just super clear that any masculine influence in my system has been weak, and slow, and unassertive. It arrives with a shrug. It is clear, based on a laundry list of factors I both have and haven’t mentioned, my biology is not… entirely standard-issue. I’m wondering just how hard it will hit me when my body realizes I finally do have some working hormones to work with.
What i can say is—I have notoriously poor circulation, which makes sense with my historically low heart rate and weak pulse. I’m like a lizard. And my feet are so very far away from my heart, they’re always frozen. I have long found that wearing thick socks can warm my entire body. Now, moments after taking my pill, I start to glow. I can feel my blood. My feet raise to a normal body temperature.
This is one of a million little examples of how I suddenly feel normal and complete and human and confusingly not-like-shit. I have never felt so consistently not-awful as I have since last Tuesday. For maybe an hour after every dose I just feel warm and fuzzy and high, then proceed to feel high-functioning (to my standard) awake for the next eight hours.
I have things to do in the morning, and I feel like at this rate I may just have it in me to keep it together.
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.
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.
