Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

it seems more common than ppl talk about

personally i think family therapy could be dangerous, your child took a huge step in saying all this out loud to you. seek therapy privately if thats what you need. don’t not talk to them, obv let your child know you love & support them … but be honest that you need time to absorb the change. don’t make them go through all of your adult feelings just yet, it can be way too much for them to take on board at once & they may interpret it bluntly as lack of support.

i think we tend to want to talk feelings out with loved ones before we fully know what they are, and without understanding that unburdening can result in a new burden for the other person.

This is a really great point, VG.

I was hesitating about contributing to the discussion bc I'm cis and not a parent, but I am a middle-school teacher, and I have a lot of kids in my classes who identify as trans or nonbinary, or who use a range of pronouns. Deferring to people with more personal experience, but a few thoughts:

I agree with the concern about family therapy. If you have doubts and anxieties about your kid's identity, it's going to be hard not to bring those out in front of them. The important thing is to create an environment for your kid in which their identity is completely accepted and not a subject for special concern and anxiety, any more than it was when you thought they were cis. Agree with the advice to go separately, work through those feelings, and figure out how to address any concerns you have about your kid's general happiness without questioning what they're telling you about their gender.

I think the main thing is to focus on the present, not try to project the future or worry about the past. All you know right now is how your kid tells you they identify right now. And that is valid, whether it lasts a few months or the rest of their life. Adolescence is a time of discovery, and even if your kid does not end up identifying as trans later in life, they still need the freedom and support to figure out their identity in their own way and at their own pace. For now, I would assume they are trans because it's what they are telling you. If they tell you something different later, that's when you adjust, but there's no point in trying to anticipate future changes that may never come.

And this has been said before, but do keep in mind that with any gender identity, the way you present and the way you feel are not the same thing and don't always "match," for lack of a better word. If you haven't noticed anything - i.e., your kid displaying an interest in female-coded clothes or activities or w/ever - that may mean there's been nothing obvious to notice, and it doesn't invalidate either your parenting or their trans identity.

like: a parent can see a name change as a personal attack, like “i gave this to you & you don’t want it!?” and if it’s internalized those feelings may express as betrayal.

i recently had a conversation about this with a friend who is trans ... where the topic was checking photo IDs for proof of vax at venues, and the challenges and trauma that trans people often have with that ... the deadnaming. My parents were fairly traditional about baby gender stuff, in the "we will wait until it is born to find out its official gender" but they were 90% sure that I was going to be born with male anatomy. Why? idk. So, they didn't give a whole lot of thought as to names for a girl. So, when I was born female, mom and dad were like, "Uh, what girl names did we agree on?" For whatever reason, they didn't just go with the feminine version of the boy name ... anyway, it was a "make do" situation. And as a cis-person, I made do with the name my parents gave me. However, the conversation I had with my friend, made me think more about the privilege (luck) of being able to/being comfortable with "making do" with that given name.

Shorter version -- if the name you chose for your child was something you and your wife put a lot of thought and care into choosing, I can definitely see your kid's rejection of that name as being painful. ... also, akm, I think I first met you when your wife was pregnant with said child?

*not saying my parents didn't think about what to name me ... they did ... but their choices (both male and female names) were the equivalent of painting a house gentrifier gray: bland and neutral and capable of upward mobility

I think 15-16 is a difficult age for parents in general; your kid is really starting to grow up and be the person they are going to be, and to distance themself in various ways from the choices you initially made for them, and it all means they're going to leave in a couple of years, and that's got to be hard in a lot of ways. Especially if two years of pandemic kept you from giving them everything you wanted to give them in their last years of childhood. Again, not a parent, but I would consider that maybe some of what you're feeling now is stuff you would be feeling anyway, as a normal part of parenting in difficult times.

I was certainly pulling away from parents around 15-16, partly because of their homophobia, but also because I had crushes on all the older boys I did theatre with and I wanted to hang out with them and smoke pot.

I definitely remember getting into arguments with my parents at that age about my name and how indicative it was of how boring and conventional they were and how I was very much "not that" ... and my mom's response (because my dad would just walk away or tune out when it came to arguments and emotionally fraught topics) was, "we knew you were going to be your own person, and we don't expect you to be like us, but we did the best we could, and if you want to not be the name we gave you, then we won't be upset, though we will probably slip up and call you by your birthname because we are creatures of habit, like you said, boring. ... Just don't change your name to Hitler, because then we would be upset and kick you out of the house."

xp I didn't pull away from my parents enough, in retrospect; I tried to stay a kid for much too long. A combination of being a people-pleaser, having a very anxious dad who I didn't want to worry, and being a late bloomer, probably on the ace spectrum, and confused by adulthood.

It makes me very happy when I see how many of my middle-school students already have this very distinct sense of identity and pride in who they are. I don't remember having a sense of clarity or pride about anything at that age.

(If I may briefly digress about my wonderful students: we did an assignment recently where they created ads for pets and then we had adoption interviews in class and the groups would ask questions - like "do you have a yard?" and then confer about the answer before saying, "Oui, tu peux adopter _____" or "Non, désolé." One group of students who all identify as gay created an ad for a 17-year-old genderfluid lesbian frog, which was then adopted by another student who identifies as gay. One of the adoption questions was "Are you gay?" because they wanted the frog to go to a gay home, and the answer was a very firm and happy "Oui!")

c'est adorable!

Sarah you are correct, my wife was pregnant with said kid one of the first times we met (actually we met earlier than that but I think the first time I played 21 Grand myself she was pregnant). Thank you all for the discussion on this topic; emotions have settled down at home slightly. We're not all sure where everything is going, but we're trying to be supportive and non judgmental and reaffirmed our love for our kid which I think helps a lot. Ironically discussions of this topic typically tend to be very binary: you either are for this 100% or you are an evil person, and really there are so many things at play that unless someone is going out of their way to be a bad actor, as long as people are being open in communication (which has been a challenge in my family in general) I think things can turn out alright. I hope I'm not being naive.

hi my older kid is trans. i have thought about starting a thread for parents of LGBTQ+ kids on ILX and linking to it here for interested nonparents who had input, but i honestly wasn’t sure how useful it would be or how much positive participation there would be. but if someone else wants to start it i would post on there.

I would take part. Now I'm the age my parents were when I started to come out, there is so much I can see that was flawed and disastrous in the way they handled it and I would love to save anyone going through what I did.

here you go:

IXL Parents of LGBTQ+ kids

forgive me the length, I obv have a lot of feelings:

I won’t presume to know yr child exactly, I’m trans and came out much later than sixteen, but figuring out yr gender feelings can be so much more complicated than having “always” been like this or that. I was assigned male at birth, but was very physically feminine as a kid and perceived as such. I think if I had been born later, and the only trans people I saw hadn’t been jokes or villains, almost universally presented as disgusting, lying, weird men in dresses, I might have processed it otherwise. but, I was born in the 80’s, so I rather aggressively tried to overcorrect, doing things like cutting my long eyelashes off at 5 or throwing away all of my less-than-properly-male-coded toys around 8. tbh, I was (and remain) more of a lil lesbian tomboy than the classic “I knew I was a straight high femme since I was conscious” cis-pleasing trans narrative, which I think is difficult to discern from the outside but is very real and something I’ve since shared with and had validated by many sapphic people, both cis and trans.

there are lots of reasons for a kid strongly performing an assigned gender presentation, and some of the time it’s because they definitely aren’t that gender and it terrifies them, or because they’re a more complicated mix of gender vibes than is easily identified from without, especially from a cis perspective

I would add that you should def take yr child’s lead on this, but if they ask for support in seeking hormone therapy, please listen. for transfeminine people, exposure to T has lifetime physical effects that we spend a lot of money and pain (physical and otherwise) trying to reverse.

I know there’s a lot of scaremongering out there right now, but tbrr a few months on HRT doesn’t have much of an irreversible effect (I know this for certain because I was on it for a few months, realized I might want kids, and went off for a couple more months to ~preserve fertility~. my skin stayed kinda soft but everything else snapped right back) and is often enough to know whether the mental effects make one feel better or worse

I’m not immediately prescribing yr kid 200mg spironolactone once daily or anything, just want to emphasize that knowledge and support would have saved me so much pain and regret.

I also strongly believe that every term we use when talking about gender and sexuality should be thought of as a weak point of gravity around which actual humans revolve at various orbits, and not as discrete prescriptive categories. resist the urge to strictly taxonomize, or to seek some perfect formula that determines their exact immutable place on the queer spectrum.

(I def wouldn’t recommend directly insisting yr child do the same, it’s simply not going to be a welcome message from a cis parent, but you might gently guide them toward prominent, articulate queer people who talk about this, especially since v online kids right now tend to get quite Linnaean about it all. a trans comedian, of all ppl, Jes Tom, pointed out how colonial these taxonomies get, quite literally “this is who you are, here is your flag, now resent each other and defend yr territory” and now I can’t unsee it)

there are, for instance, people with my same dysphoric relationship to their bodies but who use different words and ways of describing their identities. we don’t have a choice in who we are and how we feel in our assigned bodies and genders, but we do have some choice in how we metabolize and verbalize it, and those choices are all correct, even if they change and grow later.

finally, please take comfort in the fact that, if they are indeed she, it isn’t the worst of the past anymore. things are still way too hard, the social and legal barriers to treatment and acceptance still too high, and a reactionary movement keeps trying, and in some places succeeding, to roll things backwards, but it is more than possible to lead an overall safe, happy, successful life as an openly trans woman, and the path is so, so much less of an active minefield than it once was.

Are you able to find any counselling services in your area to help with this ? Not "conversion therapy or any such thing" just for support?

Welp, just explained shit to my brother (who I knew is in Germany an hour ahead and asleep by now), then to my sister (who I got them blue ticks from, so she has read my statement but... has not responded). The Canadians are being very helpful currently. Gunna talk to my mother tomorrow but oof... this vodka will be run out by then...

Best of luck to you

I've been finding out what gender dysphoria feels like. Turns out it's quite shit :(

it's not much fun. i'm sorry. i thought for years i couldn't have it bc i haven't wanted to pursue diagnosis or medical intervention (for complicated reasons) or fully commit to being one or the other like i thought you had to. but i'm pretty sure i do and it explains a lot of childhood (& adult) weirdness

I'm not sure if I want to go down the medical intervention route either. I hope you're able to experience some gender euphoria at least some of the time.

I thought I was nonbinary but something's shifted in my brain over the last couple of weeks and now I'm wondering if I'm maybe trans. I've been feeling some discomfort around my body in a way that I didn't before. Is it possible for a nonbinary person to start to experience this kind of dysphoria for a while and then for it to just go away again? I hope the answer is yes but I suspect that's not how it works :(

it's possible but it may be trying to tell you something- I'm still not sure what that is in my case. I would probably seek some sort of treatment if money, family and politics weren't things to consider

trans/nonbinary don't have to be opposed, you can have both or drop one or the other- you can also be a nonbinary trans man or trans woman - or anything else that feels like it fits better at whatever moment. I like agender or genderqueer more for how I feel but nonbinary works for me too

there's a lot of pressure coming from all sides about needing to be certain about being one thing or the other and consistently being that thing - which I don't think anyone is actually like including the straightest cissest people - but you can use whatever label or gender expression feels best for the situation you're in. although if you do converge on something that really feels like you then grab it (and if that doesn't happen it's not a problem at all, though it might sometimes be useful to pretend that it has, for pragmatic/strategic/explanatory reasons)

if you have or can find or make some space in which you can play around with it a bit you can and should do that (that doesn't ever have to stop unless you want it to). I hope you can find a good way to move towards wherever it is you need to go or whoever it is you want to be

and if that turns out to be you all along that's great

(btw I don't mean to suggest people who were born that way are wrong but that doesn't apply to me)

I've been feeling execussively fluid lately partly due to covid/internet/substance fueled dissociation and I'm so fucking confused about this stuff all the time. i'm autistic/adhd which is inseparable from my gender problems and those diagnoses will be impediments to accessing trans-related care, given this country. I rely on state benefits which I'm paranoid about being cut off from (again) if I try anything funny- and I don't want to wait years for some treatment that might not come for something I only sort-of-maybe think need, which will upend my relationships and put me even more in the crosshairs of an exterminationist eugenicist political tendency than i already have been. none of this is ideal and some of it is cowardice and I'm arguing against the part of myself which is probably right here bc what I probably need also feels like the last thing i need right now. but sooner or later something will have to give

That sounds so hard for you. I don't know if I want to wait years for treatment that I may or may not want either. And yeah, I know that someone can be NB and trans and that it takes time to figure it all out, the not knowing and confusion is still difficult though

It doesn't seem like any of that is cowardice on your part by the way

hi Left and paolo

gender dysphoria is shit. the worst fucking thing ever. worse than benzo withdrawal syndrome. benzo withdrawal syndrome is pretty fucking bad and can kill you, but it eventually goes away. there's only one way that's shown any efficacy in gender dysphoria at all, and that's gender affirming treatment, whatever that looks like for the individual person.

and when i felt that euphoria, it made it worse for me to suffer the dysphoria. when i understood that life didn't have to be like that, when i knew how things _could_ be... the more i knew the less not transitioning was an option for me. the more i realized just how _much_ i'd fucking been suffering, that i wasn't an "underachiever" or a fuckup or a failure but someone who was going through levels of pain incomprehensible to anybody who hasn't felt it. you want to know how bad gender dysphoria is? look at the lengths we go to relieve it once we _know_. this year hasn't been fantastic for me. i broke up with my wife, i lost my house, half the country fucking wants me dead. it's a little bit stressful. at the same time, even considering all that, my life since transition is so much _better_ than it ever was before. anyone can see it on my face, how much fucking happier i am. every day i live is a gift. every day i live is joy beyond what i had ever imagined.

anybody reading this thread, cis, questioning, trans, whatever, anybody reading this thread should check out https://genderdysphoria.fyi/ if you haven't. a lot of the stuff we were taught about gender, about being trans, about gender dysphoria, turns out to be absolute horseshit. we know better now, it's just a matter of getting the knowledge out there. the Gender Dysphoria Bible isn't perfect but it's better than any other source I know at explaining the basics.

paolo, gender dysphoria... it will go away sometimes, but the thing is, it will _always_ come back. always. and yes, you can be nonbinary and trans. lily alexandre (great youtube video essayist) did a video with the clickbaity title "Do Binary Trans Women Even Exist?" (yes, of course they do, but a lot of us _are_ non-binary.) i generally don't tell cis people i'm a non-binary trans woman because i don't feel like _explaining_ to them. not an obligation any of us have, _explaining_ it, _justifying_ ourselves. the more allies know, the more it helps us, the less we have to justify ourselves.

Left, there _is_ a documentable correlation between neurodiversity (autism and ADHD are forms of neurodiversity) and trans identity. i'm autistic and have ADHD myself. in terms of getting treatment... america isn't one country. if you're in a red state, get out. our survival depends on having access to care, having access to community, and what's going on now is the beginnings of a fucking pogrom. my advice to anyone trans in a red state is run. run like fuck.

yes, i'm privileged as fuck to be able to say that. i'm professionally employed. i can afford my rent. make the decision that's best for you, but know that where i live in the pac nw, transition is covered by medicaid, and we. are. everywhere.

Left, transness is not a question of cowardice or bravery. You're not "cowardly" for transitioning, I'm not "brave" for transitioning. I transitioned because I _could_, end of story. Transition turned out to be the _easy way_. Maybe it's not that way for everybody. Some people go through too much shit, lose too much, have to detransition, and there's no shame in that, no cowardice. Transness is about _survival_. That's it. You do what you need to do to survive.

Left, paolo, anybody else questioning, anybody else navigating this, please DM me if you want to talk. i don't have all the answers. a lot of the questions people ask don't _have_ answers. all i can promise you is that i'll listen. it's been over three years since my egg cracked. it's been a wild ride. there's nothing i love more, nothing i _value_ more, than talking to other people about it.

thank you Kate I really appreciate that. I know I have to confront this soon. I think some of your posts have brought me closer to realising this

I'm in the UK which I guess has red state and blue state characteristics. where I live is safe-ish (there is literally a terf/trans graffiti war going on down the street). most people I spend time with are supportive up to a point but it's hard to come out as something I can't explain esp when I'm known for being flakey and impulsive and basically still a child mentally anyway. NHS waiting times are such that the services probably won't exist by the time I'd be given for treatment & private isn't an option for me right nowsl- but I think I know where I could get some hormones. I'll try to find some less cishet friends locally as well (the most visibility queer ppl I see around are intimidatingly hot though...)

*right now. dammit

yeah the uk is in a bad state right now, the shit going on with the NHS, fuck

you could always check out the TGUK discord server, not being from the uk i've not been there myself but discord's been really good for me

idk if you're transfem or transmasc, i can't speak to T but transfem HRT is generally safe and effective, even if you're DIYing. there's some small risk of liver damage but that's mostly from the old premarin stuff, bioidentical estradiol doesn't have a really high risk associated with it. obviously it's preferable to do it while under a doctor's care but the nhs gic gatekeeping policies are so out of touch with the clinical realities of gender-affirming care as to be actively hazardous to the health of trans people. where i am we have informed consent. you walk in to your gp and say "hrt, please" and they check your liver enzyme levels and give you a prescription. this tends to work out very well and produces overall better clinical results than the uk policy.

regarding visibly queer people being intimidatingly hot, if it makes you feel better nearly all of them have imposter syndrome and feel like they aren't actually hot and/or not really queer enough.

Thanks for taking the time to type all that out Kate, that's a really good post and I'm so glad to hear that your transition has gone so well for you :)

The thing I'm finding hard is not knowing whether I want to transition physically or not. Until recently I was happy enough with my AMAB body and wearing some makeup and femme clothes now and again. Now I'm feeling confused about whether I want my body to be more feminine or not. Ideally I'd like to be able to just shapeshift but unfortunately that's not an option yet. I guess a good thought experiment could be 'how would you want your body to look if you could magically change it whenever you wanted?'. I'd probably spend more time in a female body tbh

However, for some reason I don't really like the thought of taking hormones. I can't say why, it just makes me feel uncomfortable to think about how my body would change if I was to do that. I'm not that happy with my body now but for some reason the thought of taking hormones and watching my body change is difficult for me. This doesn't make a lot of sense I know. I guess it's like I want to make these changes by magic but actually thinking about the practical details of how it would work in real life make me feel weird.

Left - it's good that you have some support, are you out to anyone that you know about your gender identity? Also OKCupid is a good place for meeting queer people I've found, even as friends

Not a problem paolo, honestly I'm really passionate about trans community and helping out people who are trans and questioning, it's basically all I talk about :)

I don't think your worries about the slow effects of hormones are weird at all. I remember early in my transition, I often had the Slapp Happy song "Bad Alchemy" running through my head. In this song, lyricist Peter Blegvad, who to the best of my knowledge is a cisgender man, describes a queer dream he had. In the dream, he and an intersex person spend all night watching a bowl containing a mixture that has separated, liquid on top, sediment at the bottom. He wakes and tries to make sense of the dream. "Am I bad alchemy?", he asks, "neither one nor quite the other?" Ultimately, he concludes that "What we feel we have to solve, is why the dregs have not dissolved".

The first year or so I was on HRT, I did definitely feel myself "neither one nor quite the other". Not only was the process of HRT imperceptibly slow, but I'd learned to see myself in a certain way, use a certain name, certain pronouns, and this self-image persisted even though the self corresponding to that image no longer existed. Moreover, the change in my self-concept was not a linear one. There would be good days and bad days, good moments and bad moments. Sometimes I could literally see my face change in the mirror from a man's to a woman's, or vice versa. It was odd and often, though not always, unpleasant.

This is one of the reasons community was so important to me. The paradox was that I needed to learn to trust myself, but at the same time I literally did have lying eyes - I persistently saw myself as being masculine in ways that other people did not. Over and over again I saw beautiful women say that they looked like ugly men, and seeing this I dared to hope that I might perhaps not be the ugly man I saw myself as.

Transition was a profound and often difficult change for me. Looking back on it, I do think there was something alchemical, something _magical_ about it - something more than is documented in those timelines of physical changes. I wouldn't call it _bad_ alchemy by any stretch of the imagination.

I was afraid to start HRT. I wanted to start HRT, but yeah, it was scary. My greatest fear... well, it wasn't a fear, it was an _expectation_. I expected that it wouldn't work. That it was another fruitless hope, another thing I could try to buy myself more time before trying electro-convulsive therapy or something.

The inexplicable, incomprehensible thing about HRT is that it _does_ work, works for damn near _everyone_ who tries it. The documentable risk/benefit ratio is absolutely insanely skewed on the "benefit" side. The first thing people who've seen us notice is how much _happier_ we all look afterwards. You can see it in photos. Those timelines, they're not always completely fair comparisons in a lot of ways, but the smiles? Those are _real_.

Sorry, I get carried away. I know it sounds like a sales pitch, which is why I make sure to talk about the negative consequences of HRT, which are mainly that bigoted assholes will treat you like shit and try to kill you. That's a pretty big downside. Personally I prefer being hated by them to hating myself like I used to, but I'm pretty privileged and fortunate in a lot of ways. Everybody faces different risks, so every individual has to determine what's right for them. And there are no wrong answers. The flip side of facing a choice this difficult, where there's nothing you can do that won't have serious negative repercussions one way or the other, is that there's no such thing as a _wrong_ choice. Nobody has the right to second-guess you. Nobody has the right to tell you that you're wrong.

bigoted assholes will treat you like shit and try to kill you.

To clarify I don't mean that people will attack you on the street or anything like that - depending on where you live that _may_ happen but it's generally pretty rare. I mean more like they'll try to bully you into self-harm and systematically work to deny you access to life-saving gender affirming treatment. Which I guess when I put it that way they're kind of doing already, so, you know, six of one, half a dozen of the other.

hi! i'm visiting my dear aunt in St Louis. it's been making me think about some things. my other aunt (her sister) who was my dad's best friend growing up always made fun of me for being effeminate ever since i started presenting that way - my dad passed when i was young so it was a real bummer for me. she was my favorite aunt when i was a kid. and it's weird these days because i miss being close with her, and wish we could be in each other's lives again, but also feel like she's contributed to the tearing down of my confidence over the years. but yesterday i think i made the decision to reach out anyway because in the end, it's my feelings about her that matter. i think i forgive her.

sorry to just butt in - to be honest i was also just looking for an excuse to say hi <3 hope all are doing well this mornin' and hi Kate :D

hi! i'm visiting my dear aunt in St Louis. it's been making me think about some things. my other aunt (her sister) who was my dad's best friend growing up always made fun of me for being effeminate ever since i started presenting that way - my dad passed when i was young so it was a real bummer for me. she was my favorite aunt when i was a kid. and it's weird these days because i miss being close with her, and wish we could be in each other's lives again, but also feel like she's contributed to the tearing down of my confidence over the years. but yesterday i think i made the decision to reach out anyway because in the end, it's my feelings about her that matter. i think i forgive her.

sorry to just butt in - to be honest i was also just looking for an excuse to say hi <3 hope all are doing well this mornin' and hi Kate :D

― Swen

you're not butting in, you're welcome here!

my thing on forgiveness is that i can really only forgive people who apologize to me. like, my mom, every time i try to talk to her about my childhood she gets super defensive and makes excuses and starts blaming my dad for everything. i care about her and want her in my life, but if she doesn't think she's done anything wrong, i can't forgive her, i can only excuse her. and as much as i try, she keeps doing stuff that hurts me. so none of her kids except for my one brother who was the Golden Child still talk to her. it's been interesting. lately even her sisters have started noticing that she's honestly a pretty awful person. i'm glad she's facing consequences, even though i'm sad that she's probably not going to learn anything from it. a lot of people don't face consequences for their actions.

omg that song - i thought i was the only one

thank you so much for everything kate it's amazing, i'm sorry i can't respond to everything but i have been taking it all in and thinking about it a lot esp the HRT stuff. paolo the shapeshifting thing is v v familiar

i'm really sorry to everyone who has shitty family situations to deal with- of course forgiving or excusing anything is a choice you have to make for yourself but it can't be easy

i'm lucky enough to have an OK relationship with mine, i'm not out but i've heavily implied it. my mother is much better than the average uk 2nd-waver on trans issues in the abstract (it's not hard to be) but she does casually misgender and deadname her friend's they/them teenager behind their back despite knowing better which is less encouraging (i know there's a sociolinguistic element to how naturally they/them comes to people by generation- not to make excuses). i think she could learn to be OK with me but the chance that she won't holds me back

i'm seeing my sister soon which could be a start- we're both sort-of-out as bi, she does pride stuff a lot more than me, we've never talked about gender except in a theoretical way but she's probably the most reliably pro-trans person i know. we were both into a grab bag of the same and different "girl things" and "guy things" growing up (still are) so i have wondered about about her too. but maybe everyone is like that

yay! slapp happy fan twinsies!

coming out for the first time is super super scary but it's also so exciting - going in i focused so much on the fear that i would come out to someone and they would reject me that i didn't really think about how it would feel to come out to someone and be not just accepted, but _celebrated_ for who i am. it feels fucking awesome. one of the reasons i never really felt compliments or praise was that i felt like they wouldn't say that if they knew who i _really_ was. now, people know who i _really_ am and they actually like me _more_ for it. it's kinda mindblowing.

no pressure to respond to everything or even anything i say. just wanting to share the little i know :)

<3 such lovely thoughts ...

so interestingly one of my best girlfriends last night called me - her 12 yr old just came out as gay. luckily born into an amazing family but agreed that it's a total crapshoot and even though she and i were observing on how different acceptance is these days, still so much to educate people on. anyway that's it from me for now, but i love this thread. sending you strength and levity, Left!

TYVM and the same to you Swen!!

thanks again Kate - I really appreciate the depths of knowledge and experience and care you're bringing here- idk how to adequately respond to it all

seriously, you don't need to respond to it all. just be the best you that you can be :)

I think I might be a trans woman now

Recently I have been struggling with my gender identity and this feels good to say. It seems like a step in the right direction

Congrats on the egg cracking thing. You have a long but worthwhile road ahead of you.

Thank you! Egg cracking is a painful process but I feel like I'm getting somewhere

btw as of now i am going by the name ivy

nice to meet y'all again

do not sweat it if you accidentally refer to me as "brad," my parents will forever for instance

it's also still in my username (for now) after all

Ivy! Hullo

Do you still prefer they/them?

she/her and they/them are both fine, thank you for asking, i always forget about that part