What To Do If You Are Flat Like A Ken Doll

buythesea answered your question: Serious Question: sweats. mood swings. yes. Luckily, no mood...

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:17:37 -0500

buythesea answered your question: Serious Question:

sweats. mood swings. yes.

Luckily, no mood swings for me. But hot flashes, definitely.

kaydentransguy answered your question: Serious Question:

I kind of went through it when I was on Lupron (horomone blocker) but idk if regular T will cause it. have fun with your hot flashes!

Did you go on Lupron before your first puberty? If not, I’m very curious about that. I didn’t know they did hormone blockers for people whose bodies produce estrogen after their estrogen-dominated puberties had set in…

Serious Question:

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:18:11 -0500

Is menopause a thing I am going through right now?

New week, new genitals

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:08:36 -0400

#translyfe

On Tuesday I stuck a syringe into my own leg, and it felt like nothing.

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 18:39:33 -0400

I guess that’s one meaning for the phrase “growing up trans”?

It happened.

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 18:34:50 -0400

I spoke about my transition in a way I hoped I never would.

I was hanging out with some new acquaintances complaining about how the professor I want to do super hard core queer gender theory with didn’t get that I was trans, and someone started a sentence, “can I ask, when did you…”

And, like, I knew where this was going. Duh. “…come out as trans?”

“Yeah.”

And I was feeling lazy. And I didn’t want to go through my whole saga, so I said, “well, I started thinking about it about half way through 10th grade, and then I came out right before 11th grade, and then I started testosterone a month ago.”

As though those were the bullet points that were most important to know. I immediately realized my mistake, and backpeddled with a pretty soggy “and, I mean, obviously my transition meant a lot of other things, but that’s probably what you were asking, right?”

And the thing is, when a cis person who knows nothing about trans people asks you about your transition, or your coming out process, or how you knew you were trans, or anything like that, they have no idea what they’re asking you. They will listen to pretty much anything you want to say to them, because you are a foreign world and they want to find a path through their culture shock.

And somehow I decided that the years I spent not doing testosterone were less important to this person’s understanding of me than the month I’ve spent doing testosterone.

This is a rant, but I’ve been having difficulties around talking about my testosterone use.

When I talk about T, I get defensive about T. Even people who should have known better received the news with the assumption that I had finally copped out to a binary identity and the ease of being something recognizable (in case anyone read that as insulting to binary identities: if a binary identity come naturally to you, it is not a cop out. However, for someone like me, who consistently struggles to be seen in a way that technically does not exist in the world, taking on a binary identity would be akin to stopping your doggy paddle in the middle of the ocean: everyone gets why you would do such a thing, but you have given into exhaustion and let yourself drown.). And it’s funny, because I am indeed hoping that T will make things easier for me, but not at all in that way; never in that way. I’m hoping it’ll make genderfuck less of a presentation I have to work for every morning as I get ready to face the world, and more of something that will just be consistently true of the way I look, regardless of how much effort I’ve put into my clothing or makeup.

And the thing is, I want to be able to talk about taking T. It’s exciting, it’s a big step for me, it’s a new phase and a new curiosity. But I don’t exactly know why I need to share with every person that this is happening for me. Honestly, when I decided to do it, I thought, what if I just keep it a secret? What if I just allow what happens to happen, and people will notice or not notice and then it’ll be about me and my body and my desires, rather than me and the whole world’s perceptions of what it means to undergo medical transition. But I can already feel myself slipping into thinking of T as a notch on my trans proof belt. It’s something people think they understand, and I’m worried about letting it signify me without elaboration, and sinking me a little further into that ocean.

Apparently trans women actually can apply to Smith

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 18:40:18 -0400

Apparently trans women actually can apply to Smith:

Maybe this could work with other schools too! Apparently they don’t check your legal gender status, so you just mark your correct gender on your application and they take that at face value!

There’s more to say about the fact that this has apparently always been policy, but they have made no moves to make it common knowledge, but maybe we can spread awareness.

Click through for a better explanation.

This is my voice three hours on testosterone.

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 19:55:07 -0400

Whatever, whatever, I do what I want

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:17:29 -0400

I inject synthetic hormones into my body.

Why, after 6 years as a staunchly no-hormones trans person, I have decided to use T: a love letter to my body, and an open letter to the trans community

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 18:25:16 -0400

When I was 16, I began to question what it would mean to change genders. How could you tell, I wondered, what gender you felt in a given moment? What did gender entail? I wondered, too, whether an ideological disagreement with a gender binary was enough to put you outside it. I started to research how different people were approaching their gender questions, what the world of gender and sex possibility looked like.

I quickly found Hudson’s Guide and read everything. Because I started from a fundamental lack of understanding of even the basics of gender, I absorbed any opinion and advice I read. On Hudson’s Guide, this specifically meant some pretty binarist ideas about what it meant to walk through the world as a trans guy whose gender was acknowledged as valid. Still, Hudson is helpful for some things, and it was where I did all of my research on medical transition.

I was obsessive in my research during this period. I remember spending hours doing nothing but trolling the internet for the perfect answers to my ineffable questions. I couldn’t think about anything else. Still, somehow I don’t have a very strong recollection of my research into hormones and surgery. It must have been very quick. If people were posting their entire transition chronologies on youtube and tumblr at that time, I didn’t know about it. I must have looked at a couple of pictures, read that genetics dictated your likelihood of baldness and the density of your body hair, and decided that it wasn’t for me, never mind how appealing some of the other changes sounded. I was changing gender presentations every day at that time, and the idea of making intentional, permanent, gendered changes to my body felt senseless given the constantly shifting nature of my body needs.

That was it; I never looked back.

There were times over the years that I would wistfully watch someone else’s testosterone-induced transformation and wonder if I had made the right decision, but I would always quickly decide that I had. At the time—and in many ways still—it felt like a non-normative decision to make. I didn’t make the decision in order to be non-normative, but I have always taken special pride in the things that are true of me that set me apart. Many of the people around me had never met a trans person before, and the answers they were able to find from the internet and pop culture painted pictures I wasn’t in, so that meant that I was constantly asked to defend my choices and, by extension, to defend my gender. I lost friends as they got bored and impatient with the effort it took to justify my existence.

As I moved away from gender-switching towards seeking an understanding of my gender as constant, whole, and all-encompassing, the choices I had made despite all the pressure to do anything other than what felt right solidified into an identity, a badge I had to wear proudly so as not to lose it. I developed rhetoric and scrambled to spread it as I witnessed a lack of resources causing so many trans people to adopt the official narrative before their stories had even had a chance to unfold. Identity policing from in and outside of trans communities disheartened me, but also hardened me. I worried a lot about the exhaustion involved in pushing yourself beyond sanctioned existence and hoped for myself that I would find ways not to bow to the binary and end up medically transitioning to make life easy rather than honest. I adopted an anti-assimilationist ideology that I hoped would bolster my resolve if things got tough.

I never really found community, but I met individuals who understood what I was doing and why—people for whom the personal and the political also spiraled around one another. My ideal lifestyle involves my methods of survival and my political rhetoric refining and redefining one another until they become indistinguishable—until I am an angel dancing on the head of a pin—the perfect point of liberation. In reality, this has often ended up with me taking up my stance too extremely in my own life, forcing constancy and rationality onto my passions. Maybe my stead-fastness with my no-ho status was one of those times.

My first shot is tomorrow.

So what’s changed, and why am I allowing it?

Well, probably the biggest thing that’s happened is that I’m in therapy and I’m in a healthy relationship. I love myself more now than my 16-year-old self could have imagined possible.

See, when I was 16 and making decisions I was going to force myself to stand by for the rest of my life, I hated bodies. Now, don’t misread that. It isn’t that I hated my body (I mean, I did hate my body, but I didn’t especially hate my body) I hated all bodies. I thought all bodies were horrifying. In fact, I was in the habit of comparing my body to other bodies and preferring mine. This habit (and some choice reinforcement from my parents) caused a panic at the idea that anything might change about my body. It was beautiful as it was, but only because it fit a certain idea of what beauty looked like. My decision not to take T wasn’t just about not wanting to put effort into permanent changes that would only occasionally be right for me—it was about a complete terror that my body, with its high likelihood of hair going everywhere but the top of my head, would become disgusting.

Turns out I developed an anti-cissexist, body liberationist theory out of a deep-seeded fear of bodies born of cissexism and body colonization.

Lucky for me, the theory holds water. Even luckier for me, it’s actually been helping me to liberate myself as a person with a body. As my fear and loathing of bodies has been eroded by my belief that all bodies are valid, worthy, and beautiful and that they should be autonomous, I’ve come to really, really love my body. And unlike my old “love,” which was based on the shaky foundation of stasis, this new love is firmly rooted in a love and understanding for all bodies that my 16-year-old self would never have thought possible. What this means is that I’m no longer terrified that my body might do the thing that bodies do best: change. I am not even perturbed by the idea that I might not like all the ways that it changes. I feel able to approach any changes that don’t excite me with the understanding that I have the capacity to find love, healing, or both.

This is all to say that when the question of whether I had made the right decision came back up for me recently and wouldn’t go away, I thought that changing my mind might be a betrayal of my politics. How could I continue to tell people that being trans didn’t require a cissexist understanding of how bodies are sexed, doesn’t require self-hatred or medical transition? How can I continue to argue that it is the world that must change, not us? I don’t worry about that anymore. My politics have always asked the questions, how can we counter a normative gender narrative? How can I keep from getting caught up in gender norms coming from anywhere but inside me? How can I live my life as a trans person whose gender is mostly a source of great joy to them? Taking testosterone does not stop me from asking these questions; it actually helps me answer them. It also doesn’t mean I have copped out to pressures to assimilate myself into the binary. That isn’t why I’m taking T, and my hope is that it never will be.

My entire exploration has been chasing an answer to the question, “what if?” So now I’m asking it again: What if I stopped allowing my fear of change to stifle my curiosity? What if it took people 5 seconds to decide which binary gender applied to me, instead of the two it takes them now? What if I took this hard-won love for my body and let it propel me forward? What if things could be even better than they already are?

I want to be clear now that this decision is not a reversal of my previous one. Rather, it is a continuation of my previous one. There is no moment in which I wish that I had started T earlier, no moment of my gender exploration that I regret. Indeed, I could not have made this decision at any point in my life before now, because I could not have made this decision out of anything but a deep, deep love for myself, my body, and my gender. It is not a concession to any of the forces that have tried to tell me my life was impossible. It is the decision to acknowledge and prioritize my desires. And I feel pretty damn good about that.

countonlybluecars answered your question: New life plan: Pretty sure I live like this and the only...

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:45:08 -0400

countonlybluecars answered your question: New life plan:

Pretty sure I live like this and the only family member I’m out to in any way finds it frustrating and inaccessible. we’re growing though :)

I mean, I’ve been making myself accessible for years now, and it still feels frustrating to some people in my life, and frustrating to me too. The thing is that most of the people I actually feel safe around usually didn’t need me to be all that accessible in the first place. I’m lucky and privileged to have found so many people like that, and I’m currently not feeling very patient with anyone else.

Sending strength and patience your way!

Queer Party Outfit: Enacting Queer Stereotypes

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 22:02:00 -0400

Queer Party Outfit: Enacting Queer Stereotypes

New life plan:

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:52:50 -0400

Treat everyone as though they are a badass ally who already knows the basics and is ready to validate and engage with my lived experience. Act as though they aren’t unduly curious and don’t have any questions. Don’t give them any opportunity to exoticize me or treat me like a magical, mystical other. Make it clear that my expectations are high, but not unreasonable. Remove the “you are special” element of allyship.
When it turns out I’m wrong, make sure they feel like they let me down by not listening hard enough and not trying to figure out the answers on their own; don’t allow them to imply that I let them down by not making myself available enough to their curiosity and ignorance.
Don’t give any fucks; don’t make any concessions.
Get free.

This’ll work, right?

Rainy Summer Day

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 18:56:57 -0400

Rainy Summer Day

Do you like good, feminist porn that foregrounds genuine pleasure so that people can see their desires represented?

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 01:01:00 -0400

Do you like good, feminist porn that foregrounds genuine pleasure so that people can see their desires represented?:

If any one has any extra money they can shoot to an awesome cause, now is the time: Doing It Again (the trans woman porn project, if you don’t know) only has hours left on their kickstarter. They’ve got lots of rewards for donation if that provides an incentive to you, but for me the best is that if they reach $15,000 (they are about $1000 away from that goal), they’ll have enough money to make a third film dedicated specifically to the sexualities of people with non-binary identities. I seriously, seriously want to see this happen, but I cannot put up the 1000 bucks all by myself. It’s got to be a team effort, so even if you can’t donate any more than you maybe already have, I hope you pass the link along to other people who might be interested in having such a thing exist.

brinconvenient answered your question: I have a bag that says “Freud can suck my dick,”...

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 20:36:40 -0400

brinconvenient answered your question: I have a bag that says “Freud can suck my dick,” but I kind of want one that says, “Harry Benjamin can suck my dick.”

idk, while Freud really perpetuated the oppression of women through his work, HB did a lot of actual good to promote the needs of trans folk. Continued… The HB joke is funnier if you’re telegraphing your trans status and playing off of anatomical expectations, but it feels mean to HB, whereas Freud really should be sucking dick. “Envy” indeed…

Brin, while I’m sure he appreciates your concern for him, have you read the standards of care written and carried out in our pal Harry’s name? I definitely recommend it if you can stomach it.

Here are some choice exerpts (TRIGGER WARNING for cissexism, gatekeeping, and other assorted bullshit)

Two Primary Populations with GID Exist—Biological Males and Biological Females. The sex of a patient always is a significant factor in the management of GID. Clinicians need to separately consider the biological, social, psychological, and economic dilemmas of each sex.For example, when first requesting professional assistance, the typical biological female seems to be further along in consolidating a male gender identity than does the typical biological male in his quest for a comfortable female gender identity. This often enables the sequences of therapy to proceed more rapidly for male-identified persons. All patients, however, must follow the SOC.

The Clinical Threshold. A clinical threshold is passed when concerns, uncertainties, and questions about gender identity persist in development, become so intense as to seem to be the most important aspect of a person’s life, or prevent the establishment of a relatively unconflicted gender identity. The person’s struggles are then variously informally referred to as a gender identity problem, gender dysphoria, a gender problem, a gender concern, gender distress, or transsexualism. Such struggles are known to be manifested from the preschool years to old age and have many alternate forms.

in order to provide puberty delaying hormones to a person less than age 18, the following criteria must be met

throughout childhood they have demonstrated an intense pattern of cross-gender identity and aversion to expected gender role behaviors

gender discomfort has significantly increased with the onset of puberty

social, intellectual, psychological, and interpersonal development are limited as a consequence of their GID

serious psychopathology, except as a consequence of the GID, is absent

the family consents and participates in the triadic therapy

I mean, I get that this was a cool first step and all, and that, thank goodness, more and more places are moving away from these requirements, but the joke that is so great about “Harry Benjamin can suck my dick” is that Harry would never, ever, allow someone like me to have a dick.

Date Night: Femme on femme, we do it right.

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 18:36:52 -0400

Date Night: Femme on femme, we do it right.

I have a bag that says "Freud can suck my dick," but I kind of want one that says, "Harry Benjamin can suck my dick."

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:52:40 -0400

That’s a funnier joke, right?

The details debate

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 21:20:45 -0400

Jesse: ‎Enoch, seriously, though, don't feel too obligated to detail the brands that each outfit includes unless you're passionate about the brand and want to suggest it to people for a particular reason. Blogging about your clothes does not need to translate into free advertising for clothing stores. Obviously, if someone is really interested in a particular piece, they might ask you where you got it. Or if you're really excited about a specialty item or a cool brand that offers something unique, you might feel inclined to share. To me, the best fashion/style blogs are those that focus on inspiring with their imagery, rather than those that focus on telling you how to achieve that specific outfit by buying those exact pieces. Most looks don't come with a specific price tag: they can be interpreted using pieces from different sources and price ranges.

Elaine: To each their own? Obviously it's your blog and you shouldn't feel obligated to do anything you don't want to do, so this is just my two cents. I only read fashion blogs where I know the blogger is buying clothes in my price range, because in my experience it is really difficult for me (time/$-wise) to be inspired by bloggers who only wear products I can't afford. And on the flip side to that, I am way more inspired by people who put together looks that total under $50, because I like that affirmation that I could put together looks as awesome as that for comparatively little money. For me, attainability is really important, so just like how I'm not going to follow fashion blogs run by tall skinny white girls (because that's not my body type), I'm really not at all inclined to look at pictures of people dressed in only D&G (because that look isn't attainable to me). Again, that's just me though.

As an aside however, I would personally find it questionable if someone doesn't support a company enough to want to give them free advertising, but still supports the company enough to give them money. Like, for better or worse, fashion blogging is inherently about consumption. Obviously it's really difficult/expensive to support ethically made products, and nobody is going to fault you for shopping somewhere with poor labor practices if that's what's practical. But those are still choices you should stand by if you're going to be putting it on the internet and trying to inspire people with them. (Which is not to say that it's more ethical for you to detail brands or whatever, because again, your blog your choice, but I think it is important to consider what's keeping you from putting your mouth where your money is.)

(Hope that wasn't too harsh/judgmental! Obviously I love you a lot and support you in your decisions, but you asked for feedback so these are my thoughts and preferences.)

me: I guess maybe I should call it gender style blogging rather than fashion blogging? The point for me is more showing the various ways that I dress my gender that make me feel good/work with what is available to me in terms of body, clothing, senibility, and not giving a fuck any more. It's definitely not about the individual pieces or how you can replicate the look by going out and buying the same stuff. You're right, Elaine, that I theoretically wouldn't want to give my money to a company that I wasn't ok with, but the threefold truth is that a) I frequently do; indeed, I can't think of a single brand that I wear that I am excited about. For me, shopping is done out of desperation, not pleasure. I do it about twice a year, when my wardrobe starts to feel sparse, and then I buy anything I can find that kind of fits, and I buy it in every color they sell that doesn't wash out my skin tone. Most of my awesome stuff comes from the closets of really all of my relatives, and for some reason that always seems to mean that it's impossible to find another one. B) even if I did have brands I liked, I'm not sure that would be the same as wanting to advertise for them? Though I see that the point you're making is that if you like a brand, you want them to get positive reinforcement and be able to survive and whatnot. C) I'm not certain there is any outfit I could put together from things I own that would have cost less than 50 bucks, so I'm already (among all the other reasons) not someone whose style you want to emulate, which makes a lot of sense, but isn't something I could fix by detailing the brands of my clothes.

Everyone else: What do you think? Weigh in!

[TW: Racial slurs] I really understand where you're coming from. I'm a black ciswoman, and the other day I was at a part with friends, and one of my "friends" called me nigger. I of course reacted angrily and NONE of my friends reacted, well, at all. At best, my partner said that this person shouldn't have called me that because I'm "sensitive to race." I don't believe not wanting to be called a slur goes under "sensitivity," rather I'd call it "wanting to be respected as a human being."

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 00:12:54 -0400

Word. Even when I give people the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that people are afraid to speak up, or whatever, I have a lot of difficulty dealing with stuff like this. Someone at my office told me that I was “pathologizing” myself by getting angry when no one responded to my polite request that we stop throwing around gendered words that didn’t apply to all of us. It’s kind of like, someone has to be uncomfortable here, and who would you rather it be—the asshole who wasn’t being respectful or the person who deserves respect and isn’t getting it? I wouldn’t have to isolate myself if you made any effort to include me.

Another thing that happened is that this same person told me she was upset by my implication that just because some people were being insensitive it was everyone’s problem. I reminded her that people either not getting that there is a problem or not speaking up about it does mean that it’s everyone’s problem. I would never have let something like that happen to someone else. I’m really sorry that not even your partner backed you up on that. That’s really fucked up, and I hope that either your partner sees what they did wrong and is begging your fucking forgiveness and promising it won’t ever happening again or that you are well rid of them.

More on Misgendering and Isolation

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:56:01 -0400

When a cis person is misgendered, like it or not, they have cissexism to reassure them. The rest of the world will gladly tell them, “hey, don’t worry, we know you’re really your gender.”

When a trans person is misgendered, we have nothing but our own word, and we have been taught never to trust it.