Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

YAYTEBOOMER!!!!!!!!!! ALEXANDRIYAY!!

blooming post

hiii kate, hi alexandria !

also latebloomer this is an incredible ilx username reveal/plot twist/bit of foreshadowing

Welcome Alexandria! Sorry you had to go through that bad stuff so early on. A beginning is a very delicate time, and it's really hurtful, and a lot of work to overcome, when someone comes at you with the shamehammer that early on. I'm still afraid of it to a certain extent - it still feels awful - but people have given me so much support and love and acceptance that now I feel like I can handle it. I'm glad you're moving forward with your life at a pace you feel comfortable with despite being hurt by people you trusted. If it helps, every day there are more of us on Team Love/Support/Acceptance and we will not stop until you and every other trans person out there has more gender euphoria than they know what to do with. :)

Ogmor so much of my life feels like first-act foreshadowing now...

Hooray <3 <3 <3 Alexandria!!!!

Wau @ Kate and Alexandria, congratulations, y'all and others itt are bravely embracing who you are to an extent that genuinely inspires awe in me.

Is anyone from the board planning on going to the National Trans March on DC on 9/28? I'm going to go down and stay with my cousin, and she and her boyfriend are going to march with me. If anyone else is going I'd love to meet up!

Alexandria you've been on this godforsaken site probably as long as I have and i've always considered you a superior human being, one of the truly delightful regulars of ILX, and i salute you.

What Omar sez.

cosign, stoked for you (and kate!)

hope this doesn't change anything for banaka though :)

also ogmor otm haha

I'm getting verklempt y'all

Thanks everyone for the kind words. It means a lot<3<3<3

congratulations to kate and alexandria!

'Grats Alexandria!

Congrats, congrats everyone!

congratulations kate and alexandria and much <3 to you both

Congratulations!

congratulations, both, and good wishes

It is a joyful thing! Happy for you!

congratulations alexandria! jeez, this thread is absolutely the loveliest thing right now

alexandria <3 <3 <3

Came out yesterday to my extended department (several dozen people) at our team meeting yesterday. Don't ask me how I managed it because I don't know. Wrote up what I was going to say beforehand. I'm proud of it. I liked the simplicity and clarity it had. Decided to stay home from the concert I was going to go to so I can take it easy and recover. I'm still an introvert and I still need to take care of myself and give myself space to breathe.

that‘s monumental, you are fantastic <3

FUCKING HELL EPILATING HURTS

Had some dysphoria yesterday. Overall I'm pretty low dysphoria because where I live nobody treats me with anything other than kindness and acceptance. The stuff that gets me is the way people deal with transitioning online. There's all this pressure for voice training. I'm not really happy about my voice, but only because of my actual speech impediment. I like being able to speak with a deeper voice, and most trans women don't, and I know that doesn't mean there's something wrong with me but it doesn't stop me from feeling it.

I also do really bad with photos. A lot of trans women take selfies, and I never learned how to smile for the camera. It's weird, I do like how I look in the mirror, but seeing a photo of myself, hearing my voice, these things I just absolutely hate. A lot of it is my face - I consciously do "natural look" makeup because I am middle-aged and most trans women are considerably younger and I can't look as good as they do. To the extent that "passing" involves hiding who I am, I don't want to do that; I just want to find a look that works for me. But I'm not pretty, I have a big nose, and that on top of the deeply embedded transphobia (the ingrained notion that feminine presenting people with male bodies are somehow grotesque or disgusting) I grew up with I guess set me off. I'm fortunate to live in a situation where nobody reinforces that toxic message.

For the time being I guess I should just keep avoiding having pictures taken of me. It seems to do more harm than good.

*** hugs ***

I've settled into a look that I think fits who I am and that I like -- the other day I was actually super-pleased with hair and makeup, like everything just came together. But boy do I get super dysphoric about my voice and my body.

I'm trying to be patient and view myself as a work in progress. I know a lot of people get benefit from the transtimelines thing, which again I don't do pictures so isn't something I do, but a lot of it is just being patient and knowing that there's a lot for me to do and I have time to do it. But it's also really nice when I can accept myself as I am now, which is more of an occasional thing!

I'm about two weeks away from an appointment with an endo. I think I'm sort of doing this thing backasswards because while I'm generally out as a queer somewhat GNC dude, I'm not widely out as trans largely because I'm middle-aged and I'm still not 100% sure that HRT is a path I'm going to follow. At the moment I think my plan is to start, see how I feel, then make up the rest as I go along. Meanwhile I've lurked around ILX since the mid-aughties, but never contributed much, which is to say that I'd be delighted by an invite to the 77 thread and the opportunity to learn from there.

if you're worrying about not doing things in the proper order, the good news is there is no proper order, i think we're all sort of just making this up as we go along. there are plenty of people who don't come out until they're on hrt for a while.

one of the things i love about this board is that while there aren't a ton of trans people here, the ones who are tend to be more roughly my age. i definitely think there are unique challenges that gen x-ers have coming out but also things that we often have going for us that the younger people don't. i know there are other places for older people coming out but i just haven't clicked as much with them for whatever reason.

anyway i realized today that yesterday was the first time i went out as femme in a cis space, as opposed to just going to a queer group, and it suddenly makes a lot more sense that i had a touch of dysphoria.

i'm not nearly confident enough about my body to wear a lot of clothing explicitly marked as femme, so my own styles tend toward androgynously gay middle-aged soccer mom—yoga pants, big shirts/sweaters/hoodies—, middle-aged Patti Smith fan, middle-aged flannel lesbian, middle-aged soft Kurt Cobain, and middle-aged Catherine Christer Hennix lol.

wrote something this morning

The first time I saw someone self-identify as an attack helicopter I was hurt and upset. This was, of course, the intent. These days I mostly find it to be an interesting response to me.

There's, first off, the tit-for-tat aspect. I can't have what I want, apparently, because they can't have what they want. The idea that anything could be about anything but them is intolerable. Having gone through long periods of severe depression, depression which closed off my horizons so that I could see nothing beyond myself, I can relate to that.

I also am increasingly inclined to accept them. Sure, why not? I have the right to self-determination, you have the right to self-determination. And if a key part of their self-determination is wanting to be something that hurts and destroys... honestly, such people, it's easier to treat them as attack helicopters than it is to treat them as human beings.

Of course, that's only part of it. The other part of being an attack helicopter is being able to fly.

I dream of flying. A fair amount. Sometimes people will tell me that that's actually a sex thing, and I can't say for sure that sex has nothing to do with it, but that seems awfully reductive to me. I relate more to the Alfreda Benge poem "September the 9th".

I can sort of hear the response from self-identified attack helicopters now. Believing something, they might say, does not make it so. The woman in the poem can't fly, never will fly. She doesn't have the _bone structure_ for it.

Why is it so important to them? Why do they need to insist that she is incapable of flying? I mean, it's not up to them whether or not she can fly, is it?

I guess it wouldn't be fair to them, would it? If she could fly and they couldn't? Human beings can't fly unassisted, that's central to who they are. Their limitations define them.

The woman in the poem isn't trying to fly unassisted. She flies because the swallows gracefully accept her. Of course they do. To fly is to be graceful, and in any case they have no reason to not accept her.

I was told for many years, believed for many years, what was impossible for me, but I have a hard time believing that after seeing so many other people do those things, have a hard time understanding those people who continue to insist that I am fraudulent. I'm glad I'm no longer in a position where I'm required to care about or accept their bizarre beliefs.

Trigger warning: Transphobia, suicide talk.

I support the right to self-determination. So if the dev of Heartbeat says that he is completely an 100% a cis man, I accept that and will gender him accordingly. If he says that the characters in his old-school RPG, basically all of whom are kawaii animal girls with a wide variety of cute outfits, are all canonically cis human-animal hybrids, well, it's his game, he would know. If the existence of trans people, some of whom _might even have played and enjoyed his game_, is upsetting to him, well, that doesn't make him anything other than a totally normal, reasonable, and ordinary cis person. Just because us trans people upset him so much that he wants us to kill ourselves doesn't mean that he has any personal issues around gender that he would benefit from working through.

So I guess I'll just remove the game from my library, then. I'd ask for a refund but apparently "game author wants me to kill myself" is not covered grounds for a refund under Steam's refund policy. Well, I'm sure he's not the first person I've given money to who wants me dead!

Just because us trans people upset him so much that he wants us to kill ourselves doesn't mean that he has any personal issues around gender that he would benefit from working through.

I don't play many games—and I'm very much on the fringes of anything that could be called games culture—so I rarely see shit like this unless I go looking for it, but when I do I'm always just stunned by the sheer juvenility of it all. You can do anything with your life and you spend it coming up with increasingly tortured reasons to celebrate being pointlessly cruel to some small minority of people? Shit, I've been best pals with depression and self-loathing for most of my life and even I don't hate myself that much.

just here to say congrats and big love to all of you <3

looks like i picked the wrong week to start taking e

i started taking e this week too, why is this a bad week for it?

Sorry to be a dumb cis person, but what does "e" refer to in this context?

estrogen

"spironolactone" is a drug commonly taken with estrogen (in the us at least) to block testosterone, and now you know the pun in my username

and yeah, i grew up thinking of "e" as a slang term for molly

why is this a bad week for it?

oh it was just a dumb airplane joke about the SCOTUS business. cheers tho!

“Spironolactone T. Agnew” lol. have actually thought of getting a SC state motto tattoo—“dum spiro spero”

oh yeah, i've mostly been ignoring the supreme court thing. they can recapitulate bowers v. hardwick again if they want; i'm not expecting them to acknowledge my civil rights.

congrats on the e, btw!

i see a lot of people online complaining that spiro is basically the only fda-approved anti-androgen, we'll see how it works out!

btw k., did you ever get access to 77? i copied and pasted your request to the mod request forum but sometimes they do seem to totally miss requests and it needs to bumped.

the "dum" in that motto makes me think of "dum maro dum". i don't think i'd toke spiro.

they can recapitulate bowers v. hardwick again if they want; i'm not expecting them to acknowledge my civil rights.

OTOH i agree with the writer who observed that "they're seeking the right to gloat; they can already fire us" and OTO i'm like i don't want them to have that right, either!

did you ever get access to 77? i copied and pasted your request to the mod request forum

thank you for that! i haven't yet, but i didn't really pursue it, etc. i will tho, i'd like to read it.

I may be getting off of e soon - I talked with my new primary care doctor about being unhappy with the pace of some of the physical changes in my transition, so she gave me a raft of options to think over including Depo-Provera and progesterone taken as (sigh) a suppository. And a friend of mine recommended asking if I can switch from spiro to Lupron, as it appears to offer much better results for a lot of transwomen.

I certainly don't _like_ gratuitous and egregious cruelty, I don't like when it gets rewarded. The Supreme Court can declare gratuitous and egregious cruelty constitutional if they like, but they can't ever make it OK.

I mean people can go to Hobby Lobby if those are the values they want to support, and I guess people do because Hobby Lobby is still in business. We go to JoAnn's. My hope is that in the long run people will find that gratuitous and egregious cruelty is not a good foundation for a business, no matter how delicious your chicken sandwiches may be, but it's a hope and not an inevitability.

The real frustrating thing to me is when one doesn't have a choice. Whole segments of the economy are, it seems to me, at base hostile to LGBTQ+ people, including home improvement and anything involving pickup trucks. God forbid our toilet breaks and we need a new ballcock for it. God forbid I need some furniture moved.

I was kind of surprised that my GP gave me pills instead of transdermal stuff. I guess I'm in reasonably good health, but I am over 40.

I know a lot of people just starting (as I am) get frustrated at the lack of changes. I'm just not sure what I'm expecting from the changes. People say things like mood, softer skin, different sexuality, redistribution of fat, but these are all abstract things, none of them cause any dysphoria for me, and if none of them happened I don't actually know if I'd be unhappy. The stuff I want to change - less male pattern baldness, less belly fat, (arguably and in a very complicated sense) my extremely male voice, is all stuff HRT won't do anything about.

If anything there's just this general feeling I have of being slightly out of balance hormonally. Being too quick to anger, too slow to tears. Honestly that's all I want out of HRT, is to be able to cry. I also see a lot of people in the US complaining about spiro and wishing they could take Cypro instead, particularly in terms of the physical changes.

I am still waiting for someone, anyone, to just blatantly not accept me. The most I get is hesitation and awkwardness, which is bad enough but which I can't really give people shit for, I don't think they're necessarily in control of their gut reactions to that extent.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-limits-of-the-bit/

i only know a bit of chu from reading her tweets and maybe some of her recent ~takes~ but just on that basis this review of her new book doesn't seem too surprising.

The nonbinary pronoun "they" has been named Merriam-Webster's word of the year.

The American English dictionary revealed that searches for the term have risen by 313% in the last year. The definition of "they" as a nonbinary pronoun was added to the three other separate definitions of the word in September.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/10/americas/merriam-webster-they-word-year-scli-intl/index.html

Still going in fits and starts but I guess I'm out to my brother, the admissions department of a major university and a faculty advisor so uhhhhhhhhhh

Congrats! "Fits and starts" is how this sort of thing usually goes as far as I can tell. :)

So it's Trans Day of Visibility and none of us are supposed to leave the fucking house, so that kind of sucks. In lieu of that I guess I'll just say it here: My name is Kate and I am a 43-year-old transgender woman. Whoever you are, whatever you're going through, you are not alone.

Hi Kate!