
*Editor's note: I have had* such *a busy past few weeks! Last weekend [Alana](https://gliff.org/) and I went up to Seattle for the [TRANSplants Zine](https://www.instagram.com/transplants_zine) issue #3 release party, and I found the experience challenging to my creative practice (and like, personal philosophy?) in a number of good but unexpected ways. One of my takeaways is I want to try writing less for the blog (at least in the short term) and instead focus on pieces I can take to open mics. Hypertext can feel like a bit of crutch at times, and I want to see what sort of writing I produce when factoring in time and the spoken word.*

*With that in mind, here's my first attempt at a 5-minute read, with some edits for the web. I'm hoping to find a mic in Portland where I can take this soon.*

<hr/>

July 2004. After lurking for several weeks, Social sciences professor Susan Driver finally contacts the LiveJournal group called “Birls”—a “community dedicated to boyish/androgynous girls.” Driver is researching how queer teen girls form subcultures online, and the birls’ interactions have shaken her understanding of gender and sexuality. The birls are more than happy to answer Driver’s questions about what exactly it means to be a birl, and why they all seem to be so horny for each other. Driver notes:

> Commenting on the sexual allure of birls becomes a daily ritual of birl members, reinforcing self-confidence and collective bonding[…] Such affirmation unites this community as a place to find sexual acceptance. Their mutual belonging rests on a mutual appreciation of their appeal as birls.

June 2019. Sol Brager, a birl alum, publishes a comic about Birls titled “[LiveJournal Made Me Gay](https://thenib.com/livejournal-made-me-gay/).” Brager writes, “we were, even if we didn’t realize it, constantly negotiating the borders of birlhood as an identity, as a community of belonging, and as a community of desire.”

September 1998. TransGender Forum webmistress Cindy Martin puts the finishing touches on her latest “pictorial” in CorelDRAW, then uploads it to the worldwide web. A pictorial is a collage of glamour photos of a specific TGForum member, showcased as a “special feature” on the site. Martin links each member’s pictorial to their ad in the personals section, a page replete with photos of every TS, TV, CD, and TG who has the means to get online. Though many members call themselves heterosexual, being able to peruse each other’s flirtatious photos seems to be one of the most important functions of TGForum. The degree of care that Martin puts into each pictorial is obvious: she knows what it’s like to want to be valued, desired, seen.

May 2023. I’m on a video call one Saturday morning with the other admins of a large transfem Discord server. Nobody on the call apparently wants to be responsible for the NSFW section, where user generated content runs from ooh-I’m-being-so-bad bathroom titties to edgeplay. One admin proposes cutting the section entirely, and I push back. “I’m not into lewds personally,” I say, “but it seems like a lot of people get something out of it.” We eventually cut the kink channel, which leads to general outrage and my own shameful departure.

April 2025. Dripping wet, I stand in my bathtub and angle my phone up from my thighs. I take the picture, and post it to the group chat, with the caption: “POV: you’re about to eat me out in the shower.” My friends light up the post with pleading emoji reacts. I’m not sure why lewd selfies have started feeling more appealing to me—is it the validation that I’m desirable? Is it helping me accept my new pussy? Or do I just need to be reminded that someone out there knows I exist?

Early 1962. Illustrator Vicky West and a handful of other members of a crossdressing club in San Francisco arrive at a house with paper bags that hold their illicit outfits. Their host, Virginia Prince, invites them in and instructs everyone to put on their hose and heels—*together*. According to Prince, no member can narc the rest out for crossdressing if they all watch each other dress.

...

Before West moves to New York City in 1968, Prince will rename the growing club the “Society for Full Personality Expression.”

Mardi Gras, 1978. Photographer [Mariette Pathy Allen](https://www.mariettepathyallen.com/) shares breakfast with a group of crossdressers at her hotel in New Orleans, and starts to take pictures of their poses and gestures. Allen spots Vicky West, and feels something that will cause her to shift her career to focus on gender diverse subjects. Allen later says that it was “as if I were seeing into someone’s soul, unburdened by masculinity or femininity, as if in covering her male anatomy with a beautiful dress, her *full* humanity was present.” (emphasis mine)

June 2025. Nervously, I approach the now 85 year old Mariette Pathy Allen at the bustling opening of her retrospective. I gush to Allen about her work, and how it helped me find empathy for an ancestry that I initially struggled to connect with. She smiles at me with her soft periwinkle eyes, and then compliments my “nice” face and “not too broad” shoulders. I wither, reduced to my passability. Later, it occurs to me that Allen was trying to do me a kindness—she was trying to see me the way she thought I wanted to be seen. But I don’t need a famous photographer to see that I’m worthy of desire. I have my own people for that.


Community of Desire


I feel like I’m at my clockiest right now, which is ridiculous. I sit at the food cart pod, watching couples review menus as I poke at my pad thai. My bleach-blonde highlights are up in a claw clip, and bruises from a night out dancing show through my tights. No matter what I do, or how I show up, it feels like I have more eyes on me than ever. Some of those eyes are cruel, but most are just inquisitive. The biggest shift I’ve noticed in *how* I’m being clocked seems to come from the people I spend time with in public, and that determines how much I get to let down my guard and just feel normal. Moments of normalcy and quietude out in the world have felt increasingly hard to come by.

Back in the bad old days, trans women were told to follow the Rule of Two: if you’re seen with another trans woman, you’ll both be clocked. Stay separate to stay safe. I went to an iris garden with Lily and her daughter last weekend, and despite being clocked again and again, our 2-femme-women-with-a-child dynamic profoundly shifted the gazes I met: sometimes quizzical, but almost always followed by smiles. Women with a child make sense to the world, in a way that two trans women on their own do not. (Later in the car, Lily would joke about how if anyone were to press us on who the biological mother was, we both should step forward.) I pulled Lily’s daughter in a green wagon meant for hauling potted plants as we wound through the blooms, and when the coast was clear we charged giddy down a pea gravel path, laughing the whole way. The three of us stopped to smell every kind of iris we passed, even the ones marked Fragrance: NO on their placards, and we savored their fresh, peppery scents. We fit in, just a little bit, and were rewarded with room enough to be with each other.

Casey Plett talks about the seductiveness that tastes of legibility can provide in her perennial essay collection *On Community*. Here she is describing some of her dates with cis men:

> And suddenly, the world feels different. Particularly when that man is not aware that I am trans—which is even rarer, but truly, suddenly the entire world is whole-cloth different. Bartenders treat me differently. Strangers on the street, their body language is different. I walk to the bathroom in a restaurant and I can feel myself walking differently, and in the mirror I see a softer, happier, more restful woman. It’s like a puzzle you never found the last piece to but suddenly it turns up and the picture is complete out of nowhere. Every song, every movie, and, beyond that, every piece of family lore and wisdom that rests on conventional heterosexuality—suddenly it all snaps into focus[…] What I’m talking about here, it’s a feeling like I’m sharing something with *not a small group but with the world.*

Speaking of restaurants, when I’m out with Lindsey, there’s no question who wears the pants in our relationship. Lindsey gets the eye contact and banter from servers when we’re out trying new breweries or getting pizza, and Lindsey gets offered the check. Her read as “the man” in our relationship—for responsible things, at least—has always been like this, honestly, even since before my transition. Years of contractors working on the house and late night beers shared with male friends at campfires attest to Lindsey’s inherent approachability. As of late her gender presentation has been shifting even more butch, but just because there’s a more obvious pants-wearer between the two of us doesn’t mean my femininity has started making any more sense to others when I’m with her. Reliably, when we’re at a bar I’m almost always misgendered by my drink choices (excuse me, I’m the girl drink drunk), and often I’m talked over or ignored by wait staff until we hit an awkward silence. Part of the joy of being a trans woman is you get cast as a man when doing so provides an opportunity to impress a cis woman, and cast as a woman when there’s an opportunity for misogyny. Best of both worlds. Lindsey and I don’t fit a script, we never have, and while you would think that two partners ostensibly listing away from each other in the gender continuum would give people a damn clue, it really hasn’t.

Another book I’ve been revisiting is Maggie Nelson’s *The Argonauts*. A friend gave me a copy years ago, and I found myself reaching for it again initially as an example of unorthodox essay form. I got my socks knocked off by Vivian Blaxell’s *Worthy of the Event* last month, and her final essay on the relationship between form and content in writing (and more importantly, literal shit) stirred up some self reflection around where my blog writing has been heading. I keep telling myself that I’ve been experimenting more and more with what constitutes a blogpost, but that’s not really true, some of my earliest entries are machinima and lyrical essays. Back when I was making egg art, I liked to talk about my fascination with “the formal qualities of digital media,” and aspired to make form that first defined content, which often meant that it lacked content. These days my relationship with form feels like I’ve cooked up way too much yogurt in the crockpot, and I’m pulling every odd-shaped container out of the weird corner kitchen cabinet of my subconscious in order to scoop some of it out. I’m trying to do the best I can with what I produce, but there’s not much intentionality to it.

Blaxell’s writing got me thinking about Maggie Nelson because Nelson seems to work in small, unrelated bites while she secretly feeds you the main course. *The Argonauts* is an unbroken string of short paragraphs, often with quotes of philosophers and writers folded in, like swirls of cinnamon and raisins in a dough. Nelson veers and coasts through her meditations on gender, attraction, what it means to be queer, what slipping and falling out of visible queerness into seeming heteronormativity can steal from a person. In order to resist typecasting as Het Mother, Nelson shares with the reader the joy she experiences in what it means to be queer and a mother at the same time by stripping the experience down to the studs, which is the sensorial: baby tongues white with milk, feathery earrings and “scribbly” blouses, labial lips touching without sensation, a leather belt sliding through a palm. Maybe there’s something I can glean from her scratch-and-sniff approach to shared humanity.

Maggie Nelson and I have a shared grief for what felt like control over our legibilities. There was power and eroticism in Nelson’s prior life as a proudly out dyke that became more subtle as she built her family with Harry Dodge. I had high hopes when I started transition of being understood as *just* a woman, and those moments continue to be rare and highly contextual. It’s almost worse that I get snatches of ease in womanhood, like a payout at a slot machine, random reinforcement in different spheres and modes. I increasingly understand how one could develop a taste for these moments, an addiction that determines the bounds of a life. But I think it’s probably better that I acknowledge my queer existence for what it is—and relish the taste of normalcy when I can—as nothing more than an unexpected treat.


Tastes of Normalcy


When I first started transition, I thought of it as a video game tech tree—grinding on the paperwork branch, checking my stats with regular bloodwork, crossing off people to send coming out letters. So many things were quantifiable or could be categorized. I tried to make sense of myself using labels and clean definitions, which meant my feelings didn't have to be complicated. <span class="editor" data-content="And—you felt like you were good at it. Expand on that." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> Something changed in me recently—I’m not as self-assured as I used to be, and that new self awareness has been tipping me into spirals of shame. As odd as it sounds, I actually feel okay about this because I think it reflects some personal growth. <span class="editor" data-content="More odd to say that you feel okay when you've been sobbing in bed for hours multiple times a week and are primed to explode at the slightest amount of feedback from your partners. Revise." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> I recognize more of a need for nuance in my positions, and this has led me into a sort of autistic skill regression as I unmask and refactor myself. But I’m being really abstract, let me share some examples.

I first noticed the shift when a reader(!) emailed me a few weeks ago, asking if I would be open to being cited in a book talking about trans catgirls. The request prompted me to revisit [Catgirl Crusade](/posts/catgirl-crusade), which remains my highest-traffic blogpost for some reason, <span class="editor" data-content="Nice job with the clickbait title :3" onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> and I found myself feeling pretty mixed about the conclusions I reached. While I stand by my central thesis around my awe for trans ancestors, and I still feel annoyed when transfems are stereotyped as all being catgirls or puppygirls or whatever, what I wish I could have understood when I wrote about my skepticism toward catgirls was—let people enjoy themselves? At this point, I’m just happy that people are seeing photos like the picture from Le Carrousel and choosing to engage with them. <span class="editor" data-content="This feels abrupt, what changed that brought you to more self awareness? Or has the judgment just shifted elsewhere? Elaborate." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> I recognized in my older writing a judgmental attitude—a need to set myself apart as “doing trans woman right,” as opposed to those cringey catgirls. I feel embarrassed at the degree with which my defensiveness showed through in Catgirl Crusade. These days I like to think that I’m playing less respectability politics. <span class="editor" data-content="You're avoiding how your defensiveness stems from grief for the legibility you lost with transition. Remember how nice it was to be invisible? Your changing relationship with grief could give us the 'why' for your shift." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span>

Recently I was out at tea with some friends. One friend was talking about struggling with HRT access, and as we got into dosages and regimens, I found myself flying off the handle as soon as the word “spiro” entered the conversation. <span class="editor" data-content="Here we go." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> Because my migraines are impacted by how I take estrogen, I had to learn a lot about administration methods early on, and it became quickly obvious to me how most transfems in my life were on criminally low doses of E. Doctors seem to be terrified of [prescribing](https://startwith4mgestradiolenanthateweeklyandtestatonetothreemonths.com/) E at levels where it will suppress testosterone production. I have seen so many transfems experience crashing moods and malaise and fall into despair because their medication doesn’t seem to be feminizing their bodies or quieting their brains. <span class="editor" data-content="You're holding back—isn't this exactly you're going through right now? How does your insecurity about your ability to even take care of yourself factor in? Elaborate." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> Even writing all of this out has my dander back up, which is exactly how things played out in conversation with my friend. I had to step back and calm myself down when I realized how disregulated I was becoming, and how the horror and rage churning in me wasn’t helping her. <span class="editor" data-content="'Disregulated' feels like a pathologizing dodge so you don't have to own your feelings. Revise." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> My friend knows how to listen to her body, had a plan to take care of herself, and knows that I and other people in her life were available to help work through medical issues should she choose to reach out. I don’t need to get on my soapbox any time HRT comes up, even if I disagree with someone’s approach—I just need to be there. <span class="editor" data-content="It's nice to see that you're working on emotional maturity when talking with your friends, but your conclusion sidesteps your emotional experience of shame. Revise." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span>

One more reflection—I decided to get on an FFS consult waitlist at OHSU after hearing that the plastic surgery department had reduced their wait times by adding a few new surgeons. I still feel guilt for doing this, because early in transition I proclaimed very loudly that FFS was not something I was interested in pursuing. Even last year I was doubling down in [Cave Girl](/posts/cave-girl) on how my remaining dysphoria focused on my genital configuration, but here I am five months out from The Surgery and that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I’m honestly ambivalent about FFS—I’m not going in with a burning desire to have my skull shaved down <span class="editor" data-content="'Ambivalent' seems like the wrong word. I saw you looking at yourself in that photo from the park the other day." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span>—but I feel guilty in light of my earlier protestations. It seems like I was trying hard to prevent the possibility of a change of heart, probably because there was something in me that was interested, but I wasn’t ready to accept it. <span class="editor" data-content="Expand on the relationship of guilt to shame—tell us more about how your feelings of compromising your own standards have been metastasizing into self judgment and disgust." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> Why can’t I just, you know, be open to changing my mind on wanting things and be ok with that? Oddly, getting a date for a consult over a year from now has quieted down some of the anxiety I was feeling when I first decided to get in the pipeline. <span class="editor" data-content="Second 'Oddly' we've encountered, feels like a crutch. You were deflated when what you thought was going to be a 6 month process turned out to be closer to 2 years. There's an opportunity for you to open up here about your actual desire for FFS and struggles with dysphoria, passing, and beauty standards, but you're still pushing this 'will I won't I' narrative. You wrote this whole section beautifully outside of your blog a month ago, why not borrow liberally from it?" onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span>

When I dig deeper into the feelings that come up from these incidents, I sense underneath my reflexivity and shame a deep exhaustion with myself. I’m _physically tired_ of having to disassemble the barricades I built to defend my fragile ego and give myself a sense of control those first few years. <span class="editor" data-content="But on the other hand you're still building barricades, too. Look at how the story you're telling here offers a tidy conclusion, when actually things are still really messy. Revise." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> I’m tired of the toll that these big emotions are exacting on me once I recontextualize them. But I feel like in spite of these struggles I’m gradually learning how to let complex and often contradictory seeming feelings and truths sit next to each other and evolve without resolution. <span class="editor" data-content="Debatable—you do a lot of telling us that the instances you cited have led to a shift, but you aren't telling us yet why things might have changed, or what action you're taking." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span> So maybe this is another inflection point for me—my approach to transness has moved from needing firm stances in order to feel legible, to operating in the grey, where it's okay to change my mind and discover new things about myself. <span class="editor" data-content="You literally pulled this blogpost once you realized that you were yet again telling yourself aspirational stories about self improvement, when in fact you are still struggling hard. Until you can accept yourself as a flawed person and own your mistakes without slipping into shame, you won't be capable of sitting in the grey. The emotional awareness that comes from self acceptance in transition isn't enough—without finding self compassion as well, you will just hurt. So revise. Revise. Revise." onclick="if(this.dataset.content){this.innerHTML += ': ' + this.dataset.content; this.dataset.content='';}">Editor's note</span>



Touch of Red

Reflections on Eid (Clap if you believe in fairies)


In my continued drive towards inscrutability, I've assembled some of my recent thoughts about absurdism, gender and shame into an interactive website. I wanted to make something that feels like how my thought processes have been working on these topics, like shuffling a deck of cards to make new associations. Check it out here:

<h2 style="text-align: center">
  <a href="/post-media/epe-baby/index.html" target="_blank">~~EPE, Baby~~</a>
</h2>

EPE, Baby


> Sound of silver, talk to me<br/>
> Makes you want to feel like a teenager<br/>
> Until you remember the feelings of<br/>
> A real-life emotional teenager<br/>
> Then you think again <br/> <br/>
> *— LCD Soundsystem,* [Sound of Silver](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kmTQj8x0N8)

Yesterday I celebrated 3 years since I stepped through the mirror and started my life over as Erin. In so many regards I’m pleased with where transition has taken me: I feel my emotions so much more clearly, I’m plagued less by dissociation and depersonalization and their accompanying cataracts over my memory, my body has transformed in ways that I never thought possible. I live as a woman and recognize myself as a woman (albeit a strange one, with a mysterious past!).

And yet.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful or anything, but this year at my egg crack date I find myself sitting with impatience as I wait for the return of my adulthood. My life right now feels like the longest summer ever after high school graduation: a directionless holding pattern. Puberty still slowly burns through my body and brain, while new expectations of executive function are placed on me. All of my friends are in town but we all know life is going to take us in different directions. I really need a summer job, but I’ve been looking for months and nobody wants to hire recent graduates (especially when many employers don’t think they will stick around). I’m still working through the teenage passion of trying on new identities, so my wardrobe is a mess and I feel cringe most of the time. I want to start building something that’s going to last, lay the foundation of an adult life, but the college applications haven’t come back yet and I’m still stuck in my parents’ house.

I think this feeling is coming from a few different places. The most obvious one is the literal experience of second puberty—I don’t think there’s much to discuss other than I have another 2 years to go on that front. Another source is systemic oppression: it’s hard to feel capable when the State is weaponizing its bureaucracy against you, throwing up roadblocks at every turn, feeding into uncertainty. Power doesn’t want to contend with adequately resourced adults if it doesn’t have to, and so it makes things like employment, education, healthcare, housing and identification more and more difficult for trans people to possess. I feel lucky to have close to 4/5 of those checked off for the time being (hire me!). But lacking these things, and/or lacking assuredness in retaining these things, severely constrains my and my peers’ ability to move through the world and start making long term plans. I want to build more of a life—find a new home, restart my career, invest in some long term projects—but without being able to know what is attainable, what is a mirage, and what soon will be snatched from me, it’s hard for me to direct my energy.

Part of the experience of adulthood is a feeling of moving through time in step with the world and with the people around you. Transition smashes that feeling to bits. Many writers have outlined how trans lives often fail to adhere to mainstream temporalities because we experience a loss of cisheteronormative milestones. Our train jumps off the standard track of education -> relationships -> marriage -> parenthood -> retirement, and we keep on steaming ahead into the wilderness for parts unknown. Some people look for new milestones: get on hormones -> come out -> start voice training -> get a few surgeries -> maybe fit in some self acceptance work when the surgeries don’t solve everything. The question always comes back around: now what? I’ll admit that I still hear the siren call of the knife sometimes, but I know that another consult and wait and recovery is not what I need to move forward. To make meaning out of a life not structured by the norm can be exciting and promising, but it can also be deeply frustrating in its unresolvedness.

Paired closely with time is finesse, and the ease that it brings to one’s circumstances. Nothing is easy about gender expression when you’ve transed your gender. I was talking with a trans friend the other day who shared with me a feeling of intense gender envy that washed over her on a recent trip when she met an exceptionally put-together art curator who was about her age. For those of you not familiar with gender envy, it’s a sort of fantasizing about stepping into someone’s gender expression. Eggs and closeted gay people can sometimes confuse the feeling for attraction, when what they’re feeling is not so much a desire for the other person as for their aesthetic: outfit yes, but also mannerisms, the way they move through the world, often a perceived sense of effortlessness in a setting. It’s been three years of hard work to paper mache together a new understanding of myself, so when I meet someone similar in age who demonstrates 20 adult years of finesse, 20 years I’ll never get—the mix of longing and grief can be devastating. My challenge here is to not count that time in the eggshell or closet as a waste, to find the value that it brought me. Pining for an ease one will never have is a distraction from accepting the inherent cringe of transition into your heart, and the only way to build finesse is, unfortunately, to fuck around and find out.

The common thread that runs through all of these struggles—material instability, lack of a roadmap, the effort of showing up in the world—is a much higher level of complexity that trans people have to navigate in our lives. We have to pick our battles carefully, often without clear indicators of the likelihood of success. When I first came out, I was quick to judge some of the women around me for what I perceived as “slacking off” on fronts of transition. These days, I know better: we’re all doing the best we can to prioritize our limited energies in life, investing so much more of ourselves into just facing the demands of the world while so many cis people move forward without having to contend with the same obstacles. “Keeping up appearances” isn't an option for us, and acquiescing to that fact is the only way we can survive at all.

Not too long ago, I was out on a walk with two friends who had begun their transitions five and twelve years ago. I told them about my struggles with this feeling of perpetual adolescence, and asked if they felt like it went away for them. They both smiled, and the “elder” of the two chuckled. “yeeeah—it went away for a while, but then it came back,” he said. Not the answer I wanted to hear, but maybe it was the one I needed. Here's to three years—I'm gonna keep looking for that summer job, and managing the tasks at hand as best as I can.

World's Oldest Teenager

TV Cart Day


As senior transfem rock correspondent [@flaneurfemme](https://www.instagram.com/flaneurfemme) was stuck at home with the sniffles last night, I’m filling in on coverage of Transfemme Takeover 5, the latest show in a series running since 2023 that centers transfem-led bands and solo acts local to PDX. Yesterday’s edition took the form of an all-ages punk basement house show at [@snakefarmsux](https://www.instagram.com/snakefarmsux). The folks at Snake Farm have kitted out their basement with baffles and quality ventilation, so things didn’t get too sweaty, and the sound was unquestionably better than several “professional” venues I’ve attended in town.

[![Olivia Lyon](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7805.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7805.jpeg)

 I hadn’t been to a house show in over 10 years so I was a bit nervous that I wasn’t going to be cool enough to enter, but the door person accommodated for those of us with a deficit by giving us cobra hand stamps. (I know this is how it worked, because my dear friend and wingwoman of the night [@taylor.tldr](https://www.instagram.com/taylor.tldr) did not receive such a stamp, and instead was marked by a tally of her coolness level.)

[![Olivia Lyon](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7794.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7794.jpeg)

<video controls preload="none" poster="/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7796-thumb.webp">
    <source src="/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7796.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

First up was Olivia Lyon ([@olivviamary](https://www.instagram.com/olivviamary)) playing a solo set. Her songs were meditative, with plaintive vocals and delicate trills and progressions on guitar that started folksy but landed on sneaky jazz chords - complicated, heart rending. Digging back into her insta I see that she usually plays in trio form, and while the stripped down atmosphere was a solid opener for the night I find myself hungry to experience even more richness in her sound.

[![For You, Always For You](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7802.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7802.jpeg)

<video controls preload="none" poster="/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7803-thumb.webp">
    <source src="/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7803.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

For You, Always For You ([@foryou_always_foryou](https://www.instagram.com/foryou_always_foryou)) followed, with singer and electric banjoist Lillyn alternating between quiet moments of introspection and opening the floodgates of her voice to a deluge of anguish and grief. FYAFY was the most “punk” act of the show - raw, avant garde, stripped down to its core power. Lillyn would get into a clawhammer groove and the whole front row would start twisting and bouncing as the waves of distortion washed over them.

[![Garbage Witch](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7811.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7811.jpeg)

<video controls preload="none" poster="/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7809-thumb.webp">
    <source src="/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7809.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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You wouldn’t know that this was the debut show for Garbage Witch ([@garbandwitch](https://www.instagram.com/garbandwitch)), and I can’t wait to hear more from them in the coming months. Their style was versatile, polished, loose in a roomy way - serving up punk anthems and train beats and indie rock like nobody’s business. Garbage Witch closed with two covers, one of Ezra Furman and the other I missed in my notes, and band lead Miryam Weiss (aka. garbo) energized the already amped crowd further by teaching us to sing along with the choruses. I wanted to dance so bad to Garbage Witch but the room was packed.

[![Girl Fiend](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7819.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7819.jpeg)

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    <source src="/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7813.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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Finally closing out the night were indie rockers and TFT5 instigators themselves, Girl Fiend ([@girlfiendmusic](https://www.instagram.com/girlfiendmusic)). The musical stylings of duo Robin Cook and Elle Archer are what got me attending local rock shows regularly, and now that I’ve been to 4..? Girl Fiend shows and numerous Shaylee shows prior, I feel like I can say Girl Fiend has really found their balance since their formation last year. Shout out to Cook’s strong vocal stylings at this show in particular, and the new drummer (whose name I didn’t catch) brought the energy and tightness that their songs call for. Archer played a stripped down version of “Shaylee Baby” at one point that you could feel charge the crowd with frisson - all of us reflecting on its lyrics about that moment of early transition when you realize your life has been torn in two. Balance that with a number like the tongue-in-cheek, guaranteed-to-headbang “Cum Geyser,” and Girl Fiend’s thesis becomes apparent - voicing the emotional extremes that come from living life as proudly, unabashedly trans and queer.

[![Upcoming shows at Snake Farm](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7806.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7806.jpeg)

It can feel like drudgery to elaborate on “how things are” right now as a trans woman in the US. But the thing is,  there are still houses being packed to the gills full of rowdy trans girls who want to dance and cheer and feel music move through our reclaimed bodies. The story of the moment is incomplete without that reality, too, and if we dwell on the state sanctioned narrative and stay home and feel scared, we will never tap into the power that comes from congregating and sharing in rage and joy and grief together. TFT5 reminded me how not alone I am, and how talented and capable transfemmes will ever be. 

Show Notes: Transfemme Takeover 5


One of the first things you learn in drawing class is that if you go to make a drawing and you find yourself creatively paralyzed by the blank page before you, there’s only one way to move forward: make a mark. It doesn’t have to be good or expressive, you just need to get something down on the paper so that its surface is no longer dazzlingly pristine. Once you’ve made a mark, it’s easier to make more marks, and then you’re off to the races with your drawing.

Since my last blogpost in November I’ve felt myself faced with a similar problem - something about the previous post felt like it brought a finality to my writing here, at least for a bit. And then I had my vulvoplasty and spent two months deep in recovery before I felt like I could write much of anything. I have done other creative work since then: a hybrid essay that I submitted to a regional zine, some tinkering with new HRT calculators, a couple bumper stickers that are currently under content review at Zazzle. 😜 Oh, and I did a little writing for friends about an anime that I watched, [Stop!! Hibari-kun!](https://archive.org/details/stop_hibari-kun_owlversion/), a light-but-complicated series about a teen trans girl in 1980s Japan. I’ve been telling myself that I just haven’t produced anything that felt like it belonged here on Human Kibble, that what I’ve been making hasn’t been as theory-oriented or personal, but looking back over the blog there have been plenty of playful, experimental entries over the past three years. I think more accurately I’ve just been hesitant to resume writing.

Recovering from surgery has challenged my relationship to my gender and to my body. I’m finding myself balking at labels, and feeling more open to playfulness with categories than ever before. Oddly, the dogshit political climate has been a part of this, too. The White House continues day after day to take potshots at trans people, especially trans women, and something about the whole exercise in conjunction with how I’m feeling about my body has been putting me in a real [Susan Stryker](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Stryker_My_Words.pdf) headspace. That is to say, as the fascists in power seek to justify the “natural” basis for our erasure and oppression, I feel less inclined to seek a natural basis for my own understanding of myself as trans:

> I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense.

> Susan Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix"

Once I started feeling sharp enough to read again, I picked up [Anti-Semite and Jew](https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/anti-semite-and-jew.pdf) by Jean Paul Sartre, which tangles with nationalist rhetoric around natural orders and identity. I’m currently reading two other books, the first is [Feminism Against Cisness](https://www.dukeupress.edu/feminism-against-cisness), a new collection of essays that challenges the idea of “cisness” as a fallacy. The second book is [Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity](https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517901738/black-on-both-sides/). C. Riley Snorton digs into the white supremacist roots of our modern conceptualization of gender, and talks about how slavery and hierarchies of racialized gender laid the groundwork for transnormative narratives about sex and gender’s malleability. These two books together are turning over rocks in my conceptions of gender, exposing all the nasty little bugs of internalized prejudice that live inside me.

In all of this, I’m continuing to look for a better way to talk about the experience of transness, one that moves beyond transnormative and medicalist cliché. When we look at the past 11 years since the “trans tipping point,” I wonder, have we articulated ourselves in a way that will suffice? Not necessarily is it “correct,” but does the common understanding of trans identity further The Agenda? And right now with how things are in the US it feels like it does not. In continuing to grow an understanding of myself I want to keep trying to describe my experiences in transness in a way that subverts systemic narratives. I’m just as vulnerable as anyone to falling into [not even wrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong) patterns of rhetoric, but I’m going to keep imperfectly writing here, as I band together and care for the people around me, to try and make a mark in my own little way.

Making a Mark


Dearest babies,

Two and a half years ago I sat in support group feeling raw and new and wondered why almost no one there had been transitioning for over a year. I started to ask: where are the trans elders? I thought that maybe there was an end to transition, when suddenly everything would become easy, and vanishing into the background would become a possibility. Or maybe the elders were hiding, forced by transphobia and standards of a different time to go stealth. Maybe they just didn’t care about us, and all we had was ourselves to build the future we wanted. I worried that I - and the clutch of recently hatched eggs that I belonged to - was alone.

Babies, after every group meeting we huddled like estrogen lizards under the heat lamps of the nearby bar and schemed. We traded doctor experiences, stories of the transphobia and misogyny we began to encounter, tips for shoplifting from JCPenney. We looked at 90’s crossdresser manuals on how to be a woman, and laughed and laughed. We took bad photos of each other in the dim light, and dreamed of a Polly Pocket that, when opened, would reclaim our lost girlhoods. We started calling each other “tranny,” and “faggot,” and all sorts of other slurs, as signs of love for each other. And we started to fall in love with each other. We started to fall in love with ourselves.

After a while the support group got to be a drag, and what became more important was the socializing. Emerging from under the heat lamps, the clutch found better ways to exist with each other: dancing, live music, book groups and reading discussions, picnic lunches, MDMA-fueled cuddle puddles at birthday parties, and of course: endless bullshitting on the internet. Babies, we gradually found that we needed community more than we needed support. The support came naturally, from friendships, romances, and everything in between.

Slowly, as we swam in these new waters of being real people in the world, we started to bump into them. Other people’s transsexuals. They carried that same love that we did for each other, and all had walked paths different from us. We discovered that each encounter with a new transsexual was loaded with potential. A run-in at a pizza place could land a tgirl her own well-attended DJ night at a local bar. An online flirt could send girls UHauling across the country to form a GRS-recovery-based polycule. A chance outing to a rock show could open up a world of queer friends, all making music and incestuously swapping bandmates via Instagram group chats. Each person we met in our journeys had their own origin stories to tell, opinions on HRT, and takes on that one trans movie that came out recently.

We found ourselves welcomed by all these people into the unfolding dimensions of a trans world that we hadn't been able to see before. It turned out that we weren't alone after all, and that "elders" was a misnomer - we were surrounded by peers who were growing along with us.

Darling babies, you too will have your moment when you turn to the girl in line next to you for a beer at the taproom, the girl who you’re pretty sure you flirted with on a lex shitpost that one time, and say, “you wanna get out of here?” You’ll make out with her in the backseat of her car at 2am, finally touch a body like your own with love and lust, and realize how your body is all of you and not a meat suit like the anime told you. You’ll glimpse for a second the beautiful paradox that is feeling both monstrous and like a divine lightning being who scoffs at the gates of the underworld. You’ll find out that the girl’s ex used to date Seattle-based trans author Katherine Cross, whose book you were just reading, before the distance got too hard and they had to deescalate.

After that you’ll get cancelled over supposedly kink shaming someone on your local Discord server, and as you turn to seek support from your friends who know about kink on the *other* Discord server your eyes will open and you’ll see that you’re there. You’re on the great plateau that is the rest of your life, the long but finite Rest of Transition. You’ll look to either side and see yourself surrounded by those who went before you and those who have been beside you the whole time. And they will look back at you like someone who is not looking at a baby.

Babies, we are all feeling pretty alone right now, because times are rough and looking to get rougher. I don’t want to give you empty platitudes like the movie theater that emailed me last week, so I’ll say this: hang on to your clutch. Learn to be vulnerable with each other, and sharpen each other like a pair of knives. Take chances peeking out from under the lamps now and then, because you never know what opportunities you might find.

And above all learn to be kind, starting with yourself. It’s important to start with yourself because actions aren’t objectively kind and the safest place for learning that lesson is your own experience. You will try to be kind to yourself and you will fail and feel bad about it. You will try to be kind to others and you will fail and do the same. What matters then is what you decide to do with that failure. If you turn it into shame you will never become more kind. Listen closely to those you hurt, and own up to your mistakes. You’re a baby, you’re going to fall down and hurt yourself. It’s how you pick yourself up that counts. In time, you’ll be walking with the rest of us.

A letter to the babies in support group


It’s been nearly two weeks since I had my tonsillectomy, and it feels like my frontal lobe has finally come back online. People aren’t kidding when they talk about tonsillectomy being a hard surgery to recover from, the pain is significant at times and supposedly simple actions like sleeping and breathing comfortably can be elusive. I did a lot of laying around and playing video games or watching movies. I had hoped that there would be time to ponder and maybe even write as I recuperated, but between the fatigue and the drugs and the constant low-level pain I was in no shape for big thoughts.

My first big thought occurred as I was dropping Lindsey off at her work a couple of days ago. Sitting at a light, I thought, *Next year, when I go to the grocery store, it’s not gonna matter that I have a new vagina.* From there, I started thinking about all of the other things that won’t change for me after my vulvoplasty. *My wardrobe will be the same, I’ll live in the same house, I’ll still need to work at a job* (currently on the market, HMU). It’s kind of an obvious and mundane thought, but I found myself returning to it, and honestly it’s been unsettling in some ways and strangely comforting in others.

As much as I talk a big line about dismantling transnormativity, I fully admit that I have my own internalized transnormative narratives to reckon with. There’s definitely a part of me that’s been imagining some future Post-“The Surgery” Erin, for whom life is all roses and butterflies because she has Finished Transition. Sitting in the car and thinking about the grocery store reminded me that I’m already there, and I need to act like it - while my vulvoplasty is going to mean some big changes for me in the short term, it won’t impact everything in my life, or even most things in my life. Maybe I’ll stride through the produce section with more confidence, I don’t know. But I can’t defer my hopes and action to an idealized future self and downplay who I am in the present.

I’m considering if there are places in life where I’ve been holding back because of this. One spot that stings when I poke at it is my relationship with community. I tried last year to more actively connect with people beyond my inner circle of fellow transitioners, and I made a little progress but not much. This year my health has been my biggest stumbling block in continuing that work, but I also think I’ve been carrying some self judgment of being “in progress” when I meet new people. It’s time I moved on from this notion and worked on finding more confidence in myself with others. I have some leads on venues for writing in the coming months where I can hopefully shake things up.

I’m taking comfort in the fact that I’m there, I’ve done it, this is my life now. I’ll keep working on the rough edges, but I like who I have become and I think I can keep this thing going. Maybe this is what some of my peers have meant when they’ve talked about finding an understanding of self where they are worrying “less about the trans part, more about the woman part.” I don’t see myself stopping writing about transness and transition anytime soon, but I can see myself engaging with it in a different way, maybe with less urgency. I think I have more to say about reintegration when it comes to a future self like what I’m touching on here, but I’m only just now articulating it and need to let it marinate more, maybe live it a bit.

One thing for sure won’t change about going to the grocery store when I get my vagina: I’ll still want to be [the most fuckable person](/post-media/thetwogenders.jpg) there. 😉

Self Checkout


Jen pulled what had to be a body from the crawlspace. It was rolled up in plastic drop cloth, and trailed a dark puddle. She peeled back a layer to reveal a bloated face with a scraggly beard. Several maggots slithered out of its mouth. It was Joseph all right. The man she had replaced.

A fly grazed her lips.

She couldn’t exactly remember when or how it had happened. Flashbulb memories sometimes popped in her head of a slick hammer, scrubbing her arms in a hot shower. A confusing time period when she had looked much like he did, but slowly metamorphosed into her adult form. It was all so hazy. But life had moved on for Jen, and she soon settled into a routine that had lasted these past two years. 9am was standup for her remote backend job at a startup in Oakland. Work until lunch, pop down to the carts at the end of the block. Maybe soft call out at 4, play some video games, or if stumped on a particularly tough problem head down to the tea shop in the evening for some focus time. Jen rarely socialized with her three housemates, but she kept up her end of the cleaning necessary to maintain their rented 1920s faux Victorian home in the Sellwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Jen was quiet, kept to herself. No one had any complaints, or at least not ones they would say to her face.

Augusts in Portland weren’t what they used to be when Joseph had moved to the city, with temperatures now hitting the triple digits regularly. Jen had the house to herself that week, as her housemates had all bought tickets to Pickathon together. It didn’t bother her - much - that the offer hadn’t been extended to her, but no matter, Jen liked the solitude, and the freedom to walk around in her underwear all day. With no AC what else was she supposed to do?

Jen was about to give herself her weekly injection that Friday morning when the first fly had landed on her thigh. She went to swat at it, forgetting the syringe in her hand, and nearly haphazardly stabbed herself with the needle as the fly skittered away in a frenetic dance across her skin before taking flight. Later while typing out a message to a coworker, the fly buzzed under her nostril, then snuck behind her mechanical keyboard. She picked up the keyboard but couldn’t find it. Annoying. She finally killed the fly with a notebook against the small window in her room, but no sooner did she sit back down to her desk before another fly took its place, humming past her ear, kissing her cheek. Jen killed that fly, and another, and another. It seemed like there was always at least one ready to harass her.

Mercifully, it was time for lunch. Jen threw on some shorts and a pair of Joseph’s old Tevas and headed out to the taco cart. *I bet Willow left some food out or something,* she thought as she walked. *Wouldn’t be the first time.* The sun on 13th avenue was relentless, and the air had a slight taste of forest fire to it. Joseph’s old painter friend from Reed would have described the orangey haze as “atmospheric.” Jen remembered a night not too long ago when the two of them were drunk and the painter had made a sloppy pass at her. Frowning at the memory, she ordered carnitas from the cart, and while squeezing some limes over her tacos she noticed a fly casually wiggle its way off her in the air. *A stowaway*, she thought. After returning home, Willow’s room proved to be spotless, save for a THC vape pen on the floor that must have fallen out of their bag on the way out the door. Jen snuck a hit off it. She needed something to distract her from her growing irritation.

Returning to work, the tickets seemed dry and endless. Missing paginated responses for a query. Alphabetical sort was wrong on one of the site pages. A customer’s API key had started failing, and no one knew why. Jen got the sense that her teammates in the Bay were pretty checked out that day, nobody was getting back to her on ticket escalations. Not that Jen expected more, Joseph had taken the job as a way to slack off and it seemed like everyone else on the team had similar motivations and were probably not even working. Jen wasn’t alone, though: the flies had returned. Again it seemed to be a steady stream, understudies replacing each other one by one as Jen swatted them now and then against her increasingly guts-covered windowpane.

By the end of the workday, the flies had conditioned Jen to brush or slap at the smallest sensations on her body. A hair brushing her face, an itch, became a fly in her mind and she responded with irritation. She found herself tensing at small movements in her vision, like highlights catching the frame of her monitor. *I’m an engineer, there’s gotta be a way to determine root cause,* she thought. It was time to learn who her adversary was.

Jen downloaded a bug identifier app and used her phone to zoom in on one of the insects she had mashed against her desk. *Conicera tibialis*, the coffin fly, or scuttle fly, read her search result. From the family *Phoridae*. Known to eat decaying organic matter, these flies can dig up to two meters in the ground to enter coffins and lay their eggs within. Often a vector of disease, coffin flies are a common pest in older commercial buildings like restaurants, but almost never show up in residential settings.

*What the fuck,* thought Jen. *Is something dead in the house?*

She expanded the search to Drew and Ash’s rooms. Jen felt bad being this nosy, but how could she get anything done with this constant parade of corpse bugs dive bombing her face and hands? Intrusions into each of her housemates’ rooms turned up nothing: no food left out, no odd smells, and definitely no dead bodies. Maybe part of it was that the shot hadn’t fully kicked in yet, but there was a rage building in Jen against her elusive tormentors. These flies were really getting under her skin.

Jen examined the kitchen cupboards, using her phone as a flashlight. Nothing obvious in the hall closet, the bathroom, the mud room. She checked under the porch as best she could, and all she saw was gravel.  Jen read a tip online to put drinking glasses over the drains to see if the flies were living in the pipes, but after an hour no flies had emerged. They still managed to find their way to her, doing their weird zigs and zags on surfaces and her body before arcing away.  It was late afternoon, and Jen needed a breather. She dipped back into Willow’s room for another puff of the vape. They won’t mind.

The mail came, dropped off by the carrier through a slot near the front door that Jen thought was quaint. She went to sift through the pile of letters as a distraction. Letter for Drew, junk mail, bill for Willow, catalog for Willow, junk mail for Joseph. She blinked at that one. It was some postcard advertising a rock and mineral show he had attended five years ago, not worth the effort to correct  but now a regular annoyance she received every year. She threw the postcard in the trash, and left her housemates’ mail on the communal dining table. A fly landed on the pile, rubbing its forelegs together. Jen went to smush it but missed before it escaped.

There was one place in the house Jen hadn’t checked yet. Like all hundred year old homes in Portland, Jen’s house had an unfinished basement, with standard issue contents: an ancient washer and dryer, forgotten luggage from housemates’ past, broken musical instruments, a busted couch, and a dusty Saint Andrew’s cross left by some past kinky resident. It was almost comedic in its cartoonishness, the way a set of rickety narrow stairs with minimal head clearance led to a single bulb hanging in the middle of the room. Definitely a murder basement. Jen hated going down there, it creeped her out and made her think a little too hard about the tenuousness of her housing.

Her landlord was a white gay man in his fifties named Darryl who liked to think of himself as handy, but usually ended up prolonging repairs any time a plumbing or electrical issue came up. Jen thought about how much of a fight it was to get him to change her name on the lease, a slow motion text conversation that dragged on for weeks. For someone who prided himself in being active in the LGBTQ+ organizations in town, Darryl sure seemed to struggle to not write “Hi Joseph,” on emails regarding repairs in Jen’s room. But Sellwood was a good neighborhood, close in with food options and a grocery store within walking distance. Jen couldn’t complain about the rent and amenities. If Darryl couldn’t do something about these flies though after Jen had given it her best shot, they might have a problem. 

Watching her head as she descended the staircase, Jen reached for the light cord and found it, revealing a much greater number of flies on the basement walls as the bulb kicked on. *Gross!* thought Jen. *Whatever attracted them has to be down here.* Jen prayed it wasn’t a sewage leak, but she could smell something incredibly off-putting. After a short search she discovered a crawlspace behind the dusty cross, and from there a form wrapped in plastic. She touched it, and a cloud of flies erupted out, landing on her and the walls and skittering in a frenzy. She shouted, and startled herself with the huskiness of her own voice. Shaking the flies off of herself, Jen panicked for a good minute until she was able to catch her breath.  

Once Jen found some composure, she remembered - slowly - that this was where she had stashed Joseph’s corpse that first night they were together. This was a murder basement, after all. It had been so long since she had seen Joseph in the flesh. Photos of him were unavoidable, his name was everywhere, but it had been over two years since they had stood face to face. Now, after dragging his corpse out into the main room of the basement and peeling back the outer layer of sheeting, she found herself surprised by how frail he appeared to be. Decomposition had set in, though unevenly - she was unsure why parts of him still seemed to be moist.

Jen heard a horrible crackling sound as Joseph’s head suddenly lolled to face her. “Jen.” he said, disgorging more flies and maggots. Joseph’s voice sounded like a rustle of dry leaves. His mouth had receded into a rictus howl, “You made it.”

“What the Fuck.” said Jen. “Fuckfuckfuck-“

Joseph interrupted. “My friends found you. I need to talk to you.”

Jen frowned, and backed away a bit. “You’re dead, man. I killed you a long time ago. What the fuck more do you want?!”

“We have a score to settle. You think everything’s so cut and dry.” Joseph moved in a way that looked like he rolled his eyes, though his sockets were empty. “But it’s not.” Joseph seemed to gather himself. “You thought you took my place. Good for you. But you didn’t take everything. You left some things with me.”

Jen felt guarded, and tried to play it off cool. She feigned a laugh. “What did I leave other than that stupid fucking hoodie you’re wearing?” It was a stupid fucking hoodie, with a picture of an internet meme from 2008 on it.

“You left my problems with me, Jen. Bad habits. Traumas. Dare I say, ‘insecure attachment styles.’” The corpse wheezed in a strange way, perhaps a laugh? “You didn’t kill them when you killed me, instead you just left them down here. You may think that you’ve escaped me by looking different, sounding different, going by a new name - but when you replaced me, those problems remained inside me, and fed off of me and bred. And now everything is starting to hatch.”

“This is such fucking bullshit,” said Jen. “I don’t need to listen to lectures on emotional intelligence from a corpse. And what did you know about any of that in life, anyway? So FUCK YOU. I don’t NEED your problems. I have plenty of my own problems to deal with. Leaving the house and getting stared at, arguing with doctors, having to deal with pricks like the landlord who still think I’m you, or worse, think I’m some kind of pervert, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE. And it’s LONELY. It’s hard to trust - anyone.” Jen’s anger gained a tinge of grief. “You know I had to go no contact with Mom, right? Can you even imagine what that was like for me?”

“Boo fucking hoo,” croaked the now obviously grinning corpse. “You split my head open and dumped me down here. I have no sympathy for you. I give you my FULL inheritance, flies and all.” Joseph’s head suddenly dropped and was still. A group of flies spilled out of his broken skull and dashed in all directions across the basement floor before flitting away.

The humming in the room grew louder. *Fuck this, I’m out,* thought Jen. She made for the stairs, only to smack her head against the low ceiling in the stairway. Storming into her room and grabbing her backpack, Jen threw some clothes and her laptop inside. *I can go crash at Steph’s house tonight,* she thought. *Work on another place to live tomorrow. I can’t stay somewhere with that many fucking flies.* Before heading out the door, she grabbed Willow’s vape. What the hell, no one will be the wiser.

Stepping into the humid summer night, Jen called an Uber and waited on the curb. Joseph was Darryl’s problem now. They always got along better, anyway.

It was then that Jen heard a faint buzzing coming from inside of her chest.


Finding Yourself


*(h/t Maddie for the title)*

This past weekend [I shared my big news](/posts/a-weekend-of-opposites) about my upcoming vulvoplasty in December. Vulvoplasty - also known as zero depth vaginoplasty, since no vaginal canal is created - is a gender reassignment surgery that is growing in popularity. I want to add my voice to the number of personal accounts about this surgery by explaining why I chose it, my experiences that led me to it, and where I’m at with my feelings at the moment.

Full disclosure, this post is going to get into a fair bit about sex and anatomy and my experiences therein.

### Road to Zero Depth

When you spend so much of your life telling yourself that you are wrong to want things, it can be hard after coming out to relearn how to recognize your desires. It was about six months into transition that I was first able to acknowledge that I wanted some form of GRS. I was going through the common early HRT experience of a sex drive crash and reboot, as well as the start of the slow changes that happen to transfem genitals on HRT. All this tumult in my body made me feel like this sexless amorphous blob. Eventually I realized that I wanted to enjoy seeing and feeling my body, but my genitals just weren’t cutting it for me any more. I began looking into vaginoplasty as an option and was crushed to find that the waitlists for nearby surgeons were years long. I decided to pursue an orchiectomy in the short term and get on a vaginoplasty waitlist in the hopes that several years down the road I could have the procedure without having to go out of state.

My orchiectomy in April last year changed things for me much more than I could have expected, and I started to find increasing comfort with my own body and sex. I learned that much of my pre-transition approach to sex had centered around projection and dissociation, often deflecting from my needs by focusing on my partners’ needs in order to distract myself and my partners from paying attention to my body. I slowly started to accept that it was okay for me to want things from my body and from sex, and that my partners were more than happy to meet me where I was. Though things had improved, vaginoplasty remained my longer term goal.

After more than a years’ wait, I attended a consult for a vaginoplasty this past May. The procedure I was interested in was a laparoscopic peritoneal pull through (PPT), or as Lilith calls it, a “robopussy.”  Because the consult had been scheduled so far out I had done a lot of reading in the intervening year, and so I went into the appointment thinking that I would be familiar with most of what the PA planned to cover with me. Instead, I found myself absolutely devastated as we reviewed the surgery, potential risks, and what recovery and long term maintenance would look like. I learned that this particular approach has no advantages over penile inversion (PIV) besides maybe adding an additional centimeter of depth. It occurred to me then that depth wasn’t a priority for me, and that maybe I needed to do some more introspection about what it was that I wanted out of GRS. After the consult I felt dazed and depressed for a little while, but I decided to remain on the waitlist and do some more soul-searching and research. My next appointment before surgery was going to be the following May with surgery potentially in 2027, so I had plenty of time to reflect.

A few days after the consult, my [“Cave Girl”](/posts/cave-girl) moment helped solidify for me that I really wanted a vulva with labia and a clitoris more than a vagina. I started looking into minimal depth and zero depth options, and reached out to a couple of clinics. In a stroke of luck, the PA I had consulted with said that my surgeon also offered vulvoplasties, and that timelines would be much shorter. We scheduled a second consult at the end of August to review differences between the surgeries. Imagine my surprise when the PA ended the visit by telling me they were putting my surgery order in and that I would most likely be scheduled before the end of the year. Within a few days a scheduler reached out to me, and I had a date in December!

### Why a vulvoplasty?

I know a lot of people might ask, “why get a vulvoplasty when you could get a vaginoplasty?” While it’s true that I’m a good candidate for full-depth, the simple answer is that it's not a commitment that I'm willing to make. While neovaginas are quite impressive in their construction and function, they come with their own compromises just like any GRS. With that in mind, I’ve been trying to think about GRS less as a way to resolve dysphoria or "correct" something to be closer to a cis genital experience. Instead, I'm trying to make my choices based on what will align best with my desires. I want to be clear here that just because I don't want a vaginoplasty doesn't mean that I don't think it's a good decision for someone else to get one, it's just not the right surgery for me.

Once I understood that I needed to look at GRS from a pragmatic perspective, I started reviewing my priorities. My top priority is my experience of seeing and handling my own body, so I know that I wanted to change my external genitalia. That means getting my clit rearranged, and having labia and a shorter urethra formed. I’m not terribly concerned about how my labia are going to look, as long as they’re there. There’s a lot of talk on places like the transgender surgeries subreddit about “aesthetics” or “cis-looking vaginas,” but ever since I worked tech for the Vagina Monologues in college in order to impress a certain person who I ended up marrying, I’ve internalized the knowledge that each pussy is unique in its appearance.

My next priority is my enjoyment of sex. Loss of clitoral sensation is an outcome for some in either vaginoplasty or vulvoplasty, and for others it’s a long slow process to relearn what pleasure feels like in the clitoris. Not having to deal with a penis any more is worth the risk for me. Penetration is important for me too, but I already have a way to do that that meets my needs quite well. Damage to prostate nerves is a risk in some approaches to vaginoplasty, and other people report reduced prostate response after vaginoplasty once the canal is in place between the prostate and rectum. Some surgeons doing minimal depth vaginoplasty (just inverting penile tissue, no dilation needed) attach the smaller canal to the prostate to enable easier stimulation, but I worry about long-term risks there. Given that I’m making big changes to my clit, I want to preserve at least one reliable avenue to pleasure, and for me that means leaving my p-spot be.

Lastly, I don’t want to deal with the maintenance of regular dilation of a vaginal canal. Plenty of women say that it’s not much of a concern most of the time, but the truth is I just don’t want to have to think about it. If I were incapacitated in some way I could lose depth by neglecting regular dilation, which could lead to further health complications. With my migraines and my chronic illness, my body requires enough maintenance as is. Thankfully if I realize later on that I would prefer a canal, I can still get one installed in a followup surgery. It won’t be as easy or affordable as a one-shot, but it’s nice to know that it’s not entirely off the table.

### What’s Next

The next few months are going to be filled with a lot of anxiety and excitement for me as I prepare for my surgery and the weeks of recovery that will follow. I recognize in my gut what has become a familiar nervousness in my transition, that feeling of sizing up the chasm before the required leap of faith. It might seem like a contradiction to say that I feel confident as well, but I’m pretty sure that until they roll me back into the operating room and knock me out I’m going to be sitting with some anxiety no matter what. I’m confident in that I feel like I’ve done my due diligence in understanding my options for GRS, and in the steps that brought me to choosing vulvoplasty I’ve grown in my understanding of myself and how to recognize my desires. All of GRS is a compromise, but I’m compromising on my terms.


Gettin' Labed Up


I have two contrasting experiences from this weekend to share with you, but first some big news. I have a vulvoplasty surgery date in December! I’m working on a longer blogpost about the details and my reasons for going with vulvoplasty, but the important thing to know is that while I’m beyond excited I’m also a bit scared and trying to find peace with the direction I’ve chosen to take. Even though vulvoplasty is a less common gender reassignment surgery, I’m pretty sure that it’s right for me, but I’m still finding myself visited by doubt. I’ll be sharing more specifics soon, but for now it’s important to know to put my weekend in context.

On Friday I attended HUMP! Film Festival with Lindsey, a meta, and a friend. I had low key wanted to see HUMP! ever since I heard about it over 10 years ago (the Portland Mercury used to advertise for it *relentlessly*). A bunch of indie filmmakers make and submit under five minute long porn films to the Fest, then sex advice columnist and HUMP! organizer Dan Savage and team review and rank the submissions. Their top 20 films are then shown to the public. Some of the films were funny, some were cool and experimental, a lot were boring gay guys boning for the entire time in fancy lighting. I had heard that HUMP!s before often featured significant queer content, but this year there was no obvious trans representation - *at all*, hardly any queerness, and minimal kink (except for this one gorgeous needleplay piece). There was also a heavy male gaze bent to almost everything that was shown.

Watching the films, I felt this growing sense of wrongness about my own body, and how it didn't resemble really any of what I watched, or when it did it was disjointed. I have a feminine body, but my body didn’t look like any of the femmes I saw on screen. I also had a strong reaction to the sex depicted - there wasn’t anything that looked like the kind of sex that I and my partners have. It made me feel like I didn't fit or belong, like I wasn't welcome. I recognize now that if, like Savage said, they received 500 submissions and showed 20 and not one had a trans person, that that was a deliberate choice. But while I was watching in the theater it made me start to doubt myself and my decisions around transition, especially in light of my upcoming GRS. I felt disgusting.

I couldn't tell that this feeling was building in me but I kept getting more and more irritated at people talking behind me, so I thought at first that I was just really pissed off about that. What should have tipped me off was the moments I was coming close to tears watching people have sex in ways that I will never experience, no matter what hormones I take or surgeries I have. I found myself hit with this deep shame about my transness, as film after film went by with no bodies or acts that connected with me. I was kind of mean to my companions afterward and hard to be around while I was working out why I left the theater so pent up and sensitive, and a bit later after some reflection I felt really embarrassed for how I behaved. I like to think that I recover from bouts of dysphoria pretty quickly these days, but my shame and disjointed feelings from HUMP! lasted well into Sunday.

I had plans with Lindsey and meta to go on an outing Sunday afternoon to Rooster Rock, a local clothing optional beach. None of us had ever done anything like this before, but we had heard from a number of friends that the setting was very queer and body affirming, so we thought we would give it a shot. Still mired in insecurity, heading to a nude beach sounded like a recipe for disaster to me, but after several days of temps in the 90s and wildfire smoke-choked air, a few hours taking a dip in the Columbia seemed preferable to being sad and alone at home. I got my act together and we headed out.

Swimming and walking around at the beach turned out to be, for me, erotic in the Audre Lorde sense of the word. I felt empowered and connected to my body in the exact opposite way that HUMP! had made me feel, and not sexualized or objectified or “incorrect” in the slightest. Instead of worrying about how I appeared to others, I was just one more pale person out there with my lumps and bumps doing this wacky clothes-free thing. I was able to focus on enjoying sensations - the temperature difference between the hot day and the cool water, squishing my feet in the sand and algae and mud, jumping totally naked into the Columbia river and feeling the water rush past me, dancing topless in the sun to 90’s R&B on a neighboring group’s boom box and letting the music guide my body.

People were the same level of chill as any other beach and seem to give each other space. I know I was getting checked out and clocked by some of the men there, but we were all looking at each other and I didn’t really give a fuck because everything else felt so good. Even more, it became very apparent to me how starkly different my body is from theirs. Next time the mirrors in my house think they’re gonna get me down with notions of residual masculinity I’m going to revisit that memory.

Rooster Rock saved me from HUMP! by reminding me that I don’t exist for others’ consumption, and that I need to live my life for myself. Transition has changed me so much, and I love what my body has become. Best of all, it’s all mine.

A Weekend of Opposites


I’ve been asked by a few readers to write a followup to [my post from last year](/posts/the-jewel-heist) about my orchiectomy. Here are my observations now that I’m over a year out. This post is going to be fairly graphic when talking about anatomy and sex, so you have been warned.

### Anatomy
Since my surgery I’ve played around with names for the area that used to be my scrotum, and have settled on the term “folds” that a friend coined. I like this term because sometimes if I’m sitting in particular ways the tissue will fold prominently down the center and look like labia majora, which can feel extremely gender affirming. My folds started out quite dangly after my operation and over time shrank a bit. They don’t retract tightly against my body, and they don’t get stuck to my leg on a hot day, either. Every once in a while a fold will sneak out the side of my panties, but it’s not so bad and it’s not like many cis women don’t experience this with labia either.

My folds’ center suture healed kinda gnarly, but I barely think about it. I didn’t really take care of the scar tissue with scar cream, so that one’s on me. Shortly after my surgery I experienced strange aching or shooting inguinal pain, and this went on for over a month before going away. A couple other members of my support community, the Ball-Free Bitches, reported similar, and my suspicion is that it has something to do with the remaining spermatic cords shrinking. Unlike the rest of the Bitches I still get the occasional ache on one side. I believe that this relates partially to scar tissue from a botched inguinal hernia surgery I had as a little girl, because even before the orchi I would get weird aches or zings around there.

### Hormones
Let’s talk about hormone changes. With no testicles, my body doesn’t produce much testosterone at all. While I am now permanently dependent on HRT for sex hormone in my body, my big realization before surgery was that I already was dependent. There was no going back for me, and realizing that made committing to the orchi much easier. I had been suppressing my T successfully with estrogen monotherapy for many months before my surgery, so my typical levels didn’t change significantly. What did change, however, was my bad days. I’m on oral estradiol, and some days my levels drop for reasons unclear, which presents itself as a mood swing. Before the orchi I would experience an increase in testosterone during the drops, and so I could get kind of sulky and grumpy, and a little aggro. Now when I experience a drop I find myself becoming sad, more prone to cry or act catty or feel overwhelmed. While having low E2 days are no fun, I definitely prefer the change in flavor.

### Everyday Life
Moving my body through the world has improved for me in a number of ways. I find it much easier to sit with my legs crossed at the knee and walk with more of a sway to my hips with my legs closer together. It was a truly euphoric experience for me to try out my new walk a few weeks after the surgery, and not feel anything swinging between my legs or potentially catching on my thighs. I can also sleep on my side now, which is not something I found comfortable before. Clothing fits better as well, with much less bulge (not that my testicles were big, but it made a difference), and again there’s just an ease to how things feel when moving or sitting in leggings or high inseam pants. It’s nice to wear bikini bottoms when swimming.

### Touch and Sex
Sensation in my folds is neutral to pleasurable, and much less anxiety inducing. The testicles and spermatic cords seemed to just provide pain, and so touch and handling around the folds feels more comfortable and safe to me now (although my knee-jerk reaction remains). Removing my balls made it significantly easier for me to allow myself and my sex partners to touch my entire genital area, and this has massively improved my sex life. Before, I only felt comfortable with touch on my girldick, which could at times make me feel dysphoric. Now I can enjoy stimulating my folds, and also I’ve gained easier access to my lower regions, like my perineum and anus.

I can now reach my “phantom pussy” (h/t Grace Lavery), the upper part of my perineum about a centimeter down from the folds, without having to move my balls out of the way or worry about injury. I can be fingered on my phantom pussy and it feels much like I would expect fingering the outside of a physical pussy would feel. A partner can even kind of lightly slap my folds with their upper palm as they do this and the sensation is tremendous. I own a Magic Wand-style toy that I sometimes lay from phantom pussy to clit head and vibe the whole area. I can grind on a partner’s leg with no fear of injury, and it feels really gender affirming and gay.  There’s also a sort of scissoring that two post-orchi transfems can do, grinding on each others’ thighs at the same time while remaining face to face.

### Conclusions
Overall, 10/10 would do again. I’ve been telling people it’s the second best medical decision I’ve made in my life (the top being starting HRT). Getting an orchiectomy turned out to be an easy way to stabilize my hormones and reduce my body dysphoria while I worked toward my longer term goal of a more involved gender reassignment surgery. The orchi helped me better understand what my needs are for GRS as well, because it wasn’t clear to me just how much of my dysphoria came from simply having testicles. I’ll be writing more about my GRS decisions in a subsequent post.

The Jewel Heist Part 2


As regular readers of the blog know, I’ve been struggling with chronic illness this year. This month I may have found a way forward to recovery: I’ve been diagnosed with chronic tonsillitis, and will have my tonsils removed in late September. I’m both excited and a little scared at this development. Adult tonsillectomy is supposed to be a hard recovery, and there’s no guarantee that this surgery will solve everything. Still, I feel confident in the ENT who diagnosed me, and worst case the surgery removes a source of pain that I’ve been experiencing regularly.

In the process of trying to figure out my symptoms I started wondering if there was a connection to my cycle ala “period flu.” Tracking my bouts of sickness on a calendar seemed to indicate a 31 day cycle from start to start, and I experience big mood drops during most bouts that can be remedied with an additional milligram of estradiol. Up until this point I had been skeptical of transfems having periods, since not many people report cramping etc. The more I looked into it though the more convinced I became that transfem menstrual cycles seemed possible, whether or not my illness in particular was linked to a cycle.

Something I think that everyone on hormone replacement therapy should know about is the body’s system called the [HPG Axis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamic%E2%80%93pituitary%E2%80%93gonadal_axis). HPG stands for hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and gonads. To give a quick and dirty explanation of the axis, the hypothalamus regulates the production of sex hormone in the gonads via signals to the pituitary gland by checking periodically to see if the bloodstream has “enough” sex hormone. The hypothalamus doesn’t care *which* sex hormone is present, just that there is enough. If sex hormone levels are low, the hypothalamus and pituitary gland activate sex hormone production in the gonads. HRT works by constantly keeping sex hormone of a type not produced by the gonads in the body at adequate levels in the bloodstream, preventing the body from producing sex hormone itself. When people talk about “suppressing T” in feminizing HRT, for instance, that means making sure estrogen levels are high enough that the HPG axis doesn’t kick into action and activate androgen production in the testicles.

In addition to regulating sex hormone production, the hypothalamus also regulates the menstrual cycle. I started wondering, what if I could find a way to identify and measure my hypothetical cycle? Would I see a link to my bouts of illness? I brainstormed with Lindsey on the issue, and she floated a potential approach: monitoring my body’s responses to HRT using a fertility tracking kit. Theoretically, if I have a period, I should see fluctuations in hormone levels in response to my steady intake of estradiol and progesterone. Right?

[![Photo of the fertility tests in use](/post-media/forever-fertile/tests.jpg)](/post-media/forever-fertile/tests.jpg)

I ordered a fertility test kit that provided me with 30 tests to play around with. 15 measured E3 (estriol, a metabolite of estradiol), and the other 15 measured a combination of LH (luteinizing hormone) and PdG (a progesterone metabolite). You dip the tests in urine like a pregnancy test, then lines show up in a window indicating the concentration of hormones. The kit comes with an app that scans the test and does some sort of computation to determine hormone concentration. For 27 days I measured my hormones every other day. I held my oral E2 and rectal (cough) progesterone dosages stable over the entire period. I made sure to never measure my first pee of the day since it’s usually the most concentrated, and tried my best to test at the same time every day. I would have added a 28th day, but I screwed up one of the LH/PdG tests and had to throw it out.

[![Chart of my E3 levels over 27 days](/post-media/forever-fertile/e3-levels.png)](/post-media/forever-fertile/e3-levels.png)

Here are my results from 7/31 to 8/26. First, you can see that my estriol remained high and mostly stable. The crash towards the end of the measurement period corresponds with one of my sickness bouts - I can confirm I was having severe mood swings while feverish. For comparison with estradiol levels, I did an E2 blood test this week that puts me at around 200 pg/mL, which is what I expected. A cis body that produces estrogens would most likely have a much less constant level of E3, so that’s a clear difference for someone on HRT.

[![Chart of my luteinizing hormone levels over 27 days](/post-media/forever-fertile/lh-levels.png)](/post-media/forever-fertile/lh-levels.png)

My luteinizing hormone results might be more noise than anything. Concentrations remain quite low for the typical range, and there’s not a clear peak like occurs typically before ovulation.

[![Chart of my PdG levels over 27 days](/post-media/forever-fertile/pdg-levels.png)](/post-media/forever-fertile/pdg-levels.png)

Oddest of all was my progesterone data. At the start of the collection period there’s what looks like a steady increase, like I’m maybe entering the luteal phase of my cycle, but then everything gets fucky towards the end. Some of that is, like the E3 results, probably tied to my sickness. There might be other factors, like how reliable boofing prog is in practice, and I also have some suspicions around how accurate the app's image processing of the test strips really is. Anyhow, there’s clear variation in my progesterone metabolism over time, which is worth considering.

I can’t confidently say that I found a cycle, but I did find *something* in that my hormones fluctuate over time and especially when my body is fighting infection. If I were to continue the experiment I would probably buy a kit just for progesterone, since the E3 and LH variation didn’t appear particularly interesting, and space out measurement to every 3 days to capture a bigger window to continue looking for a cycle. It’s been an interesting experiment, and I can’t say I’ve heard of anyone else trying something like this before.

Forever Fertile


*Editor's note: This writing feels like a piece of a larger work I'm starting to form that collects concepts I've discussed on the blog, and so it's not really "done." I'm sure there's more to be said on this topic, but I want to share what I have so far.*

---

I’ve been using the term “reintegration” to refer to the process of reconciling with one’s pre-transition self. Cultural messaging often encourages trans people to dismiss or even hate our pre-transition selves, which strikes me as suspiciously aligned with both older transnormative gatekeeping practices (leave your loved ones, change your name, skip town) and with the exaggerated narratives that trans people have used (and often internalized as a consequence) to work around those same gatekeepers (I’ve always had a clear conception of my gender, I hate my body to the point of self destruction). The value system that created both viewpoints is one of assimilation or death. Imagine instead a world where trans people are typical members of society who still retain our uniqueness, a world where transition can be celebrated as an act of enormous personal growth.

If we cannot regard our past selves with compassion, how can we expect to grow as emotional beings? How can we expect others to share in our joy if we start from a basis of self-hate? I think the harder but ultimately more fulfilling path for the individual is to acknowledge who we were, and find love and understanding for that person, however problematic and dissociative they might have been.

To speak from experience — Deadname was a prior version of me who had dismantled access to his full set of emotions in order to protect himself from feeling the dangerous gender feelings. He dissociated regularly using computers and a heavy weed habit, and he was cranky when he was sober most of the time. That crankiness now reminds me of how babies get cranky — they don’t know how to understand the feelings from their body and it just turns into an emotional outburst.

Deadname tried really hard in therapy to learn tools to feel his emotions, but it was never going to work because his emotions were intentionally sabotaged. It’s taken some time, but I now feel compassion for him because of how much he struggled in life. I also feel gratitude for how he tried so hard to protect me and get me to a safe space to come out. There’s also some guilt for how he hurt people in his life because of his immaturity, and I’m still dismantling many of the defense mechanisms that he built. I don’t resent him, but there came a time for us to separate because I was just being weighed down.

What reintegration has looked like for me since then has been identifying and changing the maladaptive behaviors and views that Deadname put in place in order to protect me. This has required a lot of introspection, creativity, and willingness to try new things. The first place I started was being open to the idea that I have always been transgender, and walking through my past with that lens. When I think of my childhood as a trans girlhood, suddenly a lot of strange or frustrating experiences make more sense. How I formed (or failed to form) relationships, how people treated me in gendered environments, rules that I put in place for myself, old habits and interests that no longer suit me - all of the logic behind these things has begun to come into focus and I can see how I arrived at my present. Once I could understand my past self’s subconscious motives, I could begin to develop empathy for who I was before.

Other parts of reintegration are more focused on the present, and learning to see myself as I am rather than as how I’ve thought of myself. Some of this has been personal growth not unique to trans people — developing body positivity, embracing the erotic and rediscovering my relationship to pleasure, working on vulnerability and intention in my relationships. These are things that my past self was incapable of approaching with candor, and so now is the time to pursue them.


Defining Reintegration


As a visibly trans person, it can feel threatening or overwhelming to move through the world sometimes because of how much people stare. There are different kinds of stares: knowing smiles from older women, slack jawed ogling from men, and the occasional I-am-shooting-daggers-with-my-eyes death stare from transphobes. The cumulative result regardless of the intention of the stares is a feeling of aggressive perception from the outside world, and so you have to decide how to proceed. You can try and go stealth, or be closeted. You can pretend like you don’t see people staring and keep going about your business. You can aggressively return eye contact; sometimes this is a good choice for shutting down gawkers or transphobes, but other times safety takes precedence.

Or, you can own it. Give them something to look at.

I have to give credit where it is due to my girlfriend Lilith for coming up with the concept of visibility tanking. The name draws from the video game concept of tanking, where a “tank” is a character whose stats allow them to soak up a lot of damage without being taken down. This is useful in games where a party of characters fights an enemy, because by drawing fire to the tank the rest of the party is protected and can deal damage against their opponent from a place of safety. By extension, “visibility tanking” means soaking up stares for being trans in a very intentional way. This can take many forms, and again being mindful of safety is a big factor when choosing your approach.

I think that visibility tanking is a form of praxis. It reminds everyone - but especially cis people - that we are here, we’re queer, and we’re not going anywhere. To other queers it can be a show of solidarity and provide safety in numbers (and hey, you never know when being visible will turn into making a friend!). To eggs and people in the closet, it can be a demonstration of what it means to take up space as your best self. And visibility tanking isn’t something we just do for others, we do it for ourselves to affirm our own worth and beauty. We choose to be seen because we are worthy of admiration and desire. We are beautiful in ways that society can scarcely conceive. We deserve to occupy public space just as much as anyone else.

The easiest way to visibility tank is just to lean in on looking trans and beautiful. There are definitely trans ways of dressing and doing makeup etc. that don’t pretend to be cis at all and can be great sources of joy. For me personally this means wearing a lot of obnoxiously loud colors, but for other people it can be dressing gothy or punk or tradwife, whatever. The point is you’re not trying to blend in at all, you’re there to dazzle. If you’re going to tank alone, you should do it somewhere that you feel very safe. Like the old adage tells us, sometimes that means being the most fuckable person in the grocery store.

Visibility tanking with a trans friend or lover expands on this exponentially. You’re significantly safer because there are two of you, and speaking from experience it really blows minds when people see not one, but TWO trannies gliding down the street together. The mundane becomes magical: sharing lunch or a shopping trip can be a reminder to those around that they have NO idea how many trans people are in their midst, much less are actively enjoying themselves. Introducing PDA into the mix takes the tanking to a whole new level. It is a radical, powerful act of reclamation to share affection as two trans people in a visible way, because it demonstrates our capacity for love as full people, refutes the pornographic reduction of trans identity, and reminds all that joy can come from forms beyond that which our culture prescribes.

Lastly visibility tanking as a group is the boldest reclamation of public space one can make. To roll up to a venue as a *crew* of transsexuals is a thing of power. Previous generations were often cautioned against this, because once one person in a group of stealth trans people gets clocked, everyone they associate with suddenly falls under scrutiny. The wonderful thing about choosing queer integration and visibility over the assimilationist strategies of stealth and passing means that this point is moot: we want you to know we’re here, and we’re not alone. And hell, you can always bring a couple of cis friends too to really drive the point home that a better world is possible where people can share space regardless of gender identity.

For anyone still on the fence about visibility tanking, I want to close on two reminders. First, use discretion when tanking, obviously some venues (or cities or states) are just not going to be a safe place for this. Tanking is best suited for places where you’re pushing the envelope, not ripping it open. Second, *most people don’t fucking care about seeing you in public.* Most people are engrossed in their own little worlds, and those who stare are generally outliers. That’s not to say that the feeling of being perceived doesn’t build up, and sometimes it’s just not the right day to push back. But if you have the wherewithal to do so and you’re feeling good about yourself, I challenge you to give visibility tanking a try. As trans people we often grow up in fear of being seen for who we are, and once we come out it can feel like straining against all of our instincts to willfully step into the light. When we hide from each other, though, it can seem like we are more alone than we actually are. Making the choice to be perceived as a trans person in the world is both a powerful political statement about your right to public space and an affirmation of your own self worth. It feels good to choose to be perceived.

I’ll see you around.

Visibility Tanking


A technical writer friend of mine likes to talk about the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Prescriptive grammar uses rules to guide how sentences are constructed and words are used. Descriptive grammar instead prefers phrases and words as people use them in common parlance, and deemphasizes the importance of underlying rules in favor of clarity to a greater audience. I think that a shift I’ve been experiencing in my transition has been from prescriptive to descriptive gender embodiment. When I started transitioning, my efforts were all about doing woman “right” - voice training, dressing femme, being critical of my gestures and movements, etc. Essentially, I was following the transnormative prescriptive approach to transition. Now that I’m over two years in, I’m more interested in what kind of woman I already *am*. I use what I learned from my prescriptive period to help shape how I express my gender now, but being open to my natural tendencies is feeling a lot more comfortable.

I think I approached transition at first with the intention of fixing an error, and now I’m realizing that transition is instead a process of self-actualization. One recent example of personal growth along these lines is how my [“cave girl”](/posts/cave-girl) moment challenged the stereotypical femme standards I was holding myself to, and gave me the kick in the pants that I needed to start working on my body positivity. Now I’m trying to allow myself to take up more physical space, and I’m working on stressing less about my weight. I’m dressing more “soft butch” at times, and at other times I’m garish and colorful - very queer, very obviously not cishet. My newfound appreciation of my body has also shaken my assuredness in my desire for vaginoplasty, and I’m having second thoughts on whether full depth is for me, much less any additional bottom surgery. I realize that I need to chase after what I *want* for myself, and not what’s *“correct,”* and if I do that my womanhood will follow. I’m having to accept what that implies in terms of my responsibility in acknowledging my wants and needs. And *having* wants and needs, ugh.

It’s tricky, because when you’re trans people expect you to know what your wants and needs are right off the bat. I don’t know anyone who can confidently say that they stepped into transition with a clear picture of an outcome, or that their desires didn’t shift over time. Attaining some wants and needs often reveals deeper desires, like how for me beginning physical transition “gave me permission” to desire further modifying my one-and-only-precious-body-given-to-me-by-god, so I dyed my hair purple and started getting tattoos. All sorts of unnecessary medical and legal gatekeeping bars the way to meeting certain desires, and we have to balance those wants and needs with the time and effort that it takes to approach fulfilling them. On top of all that, trans people are a population who have been essentially raised to hide and minimize our gendered needs by social pressures. It takes time to undo the internalized behaviors and stories we tell ourselves to stay safe.

Following the prescriptive path can in many ways seem easier: here are the things that you need to do, do them and then you’re a real girl. There’s no need to wrestle with your feelings, just run down the checklist and you’ll be done. I’m exceedingly lucky to be a part of a community of trans people who have rejected this approach in favor of carefully considered self awareness, and I attribute a big part of this shared ethos to the large presence of nonbinary trans people. Without a transnormative checklist with which to approach their gender, enbies have no choice but to actively engage with the desires in their hearts in order to discover their own gender embodiment. I don’t think I would have found the self acceptance that I have now without many, many deep conversations with friends who have fae, monstrous, or enigmatic genders, to name a few. Older trans communities were often binary-centric and homophobic, and so I suspect this is a new development in the cultural evolution of transition.

One last piece that I’m sitting with is how the prescriptive outlook is often structured around waiting for things: waiting for HRT to do its magic, waiting for consults and surgeries, deferring dreams until one has “transitioned,” never able to live life to the fullest until the checklist is complete. While I don’t want to downplay the challenges I face in attaining my wants and needs, I don’t want to spend my life in Dr. Seuss’ Waiting Place either, treating my transness as something that only eventually will I fix. *I am already whole*. I accept and acknowledge my desires, some of which may require waiting and hard work and pain, but I try to live as a complete person whether or not they are fulfilled. “Doing the work” every day is challenging because it requires a great deal of vulnerability with myself, but it allows me to live in the present. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to finish the checklist and then ask “now what?” after living a life predicated on waiting. Or to wait and wait and never make it at all.

Already Whole


Imagine that you’re a method actor and you’ve just been hired to join the touring Broadway company of Shrek in the titular role. Every night for years you perform as Shrek to audiences across the country, living and breathing Shrek. Then one day, the tour ends and you are no longer Shrek, you go back to your smaller roles in various plays and musicals, but the trouble is you’ve been living Shrek for a long time. Your reputation precedes you, and people have a hard time thinking of you as anyone other than Shrek. Worse, you’ve internalized a lot of Shrek - at this point it’s second nature, the lumbering around, the accent, the affectations. Crossing paths with old cast members can sometimes mean extra effort to not slip back into your Shrek headspace. It’s easy to be Shrek because you’ve practiced so much, but you’re not Shrek, you’re just an actor.

Sometimes I can feel Shrek creep up inside of me when I’m with people who knew me before I transitioned. This past weekend my parents came to visit for the first time in many years. We had a phone call recently where I told them that prioritizing visiting me would make me feel supported in my transition, and they did just that. The last time they saw me in person was when I was eight months in, and I probably seemed like a very happy mess. I’m still happy, but I have so much better of a grasp on who I am now, and I’m more practiced at feeling my feelings and being present in my body. Still, because they knew me as Shrek for so long I felt anxiety about whether they were seeing past my green days. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t being enough not-Shrek. Although they were referring to me as their daughter, I felt like a woman who was their son, and I worried that I wouldn’t seem “different enough” from Shrek for them.

One helpful reminder a friend gave me after the visit was that just because I had ways of connecting with my parents before transition didn’t necessarily make them Shrek things. I enjoyed spending our time together nerding out with my dad about oldies music, and exchanging deep thoughts with my mom about the state of the world. Those things aren’t gendered, and it’s where we know we can always find common ground. Still, I wasn’t sure what in *my* eyes would make me feel more like a daughter around them.

But what does it mean to feel like a son, anyway? Like I’ve written about before, I didn’t grow up as a boy, I grew up as a closeted trans girl. My parents and I had so many interactions where I think a cis son would have responded to things in a way I did not; I was “socialized trans” and they had to internalize that in their parenting. I think I’m expecting them to treat me differently because *I’m* still struggling to shake my own self-perception as Shrek in the time before my self acceptance. Even now, more than two years in, I have to remind myself that I was never really Shrek. There are some behaviors that my parents would have changed when I was young had they known I was their daughter and not Shrek, but also in many ways they always treated me as their trans daughter whether they knew it or not.

If I’m honest, the truth is talk has always been cheap with my parents. In my childhood there were so many speculated career shifts, moves to other locales, potential pets and adopted siblings that never came to fruition. Additionally, Baby Boomers aren’t exactly known for their emotional vulnerability. Before the trip, my mother ran an estate sale to purge my late grandmother’s house of valuables. When she arrived in Portland, she gave me a delicate champagne pearl necklace that had been in the family since at least the 1950s, a treasure she had saved me from my grandmother’s jewelry box. I think I need to give more credence to my parents’ actions, and consider that they might be trying to treat me as their daughter as best as they can. Pearls are not exactly the kind of present that you give to an ogre.

Growing Up Shrek


I talked a little in [Common Ally Slurs](/posts/common-ally-slurs) about how I considered “authentic” a slur, mostly because “allies“ say it in an empty, meaningless way. Thinking on it more, I want to take this a step further and say that exhorting trans people to seek their “authentic self” is harmful because it perpetuates unattainable and fixed ideas of personal identity. By making transition about aspiring to an authentic self at any given moment, systems of power excuse themselves from accountability and therefore any need to make lasting change to provide material support to trans populations. I see this happening in two ways, which I will detail shortly. Instead of aspiring to determine what constitutes the authentic self, I think that a better question to ask is “what is working for me *right now*?” Our awareness of self and needs shift over time, so goals we set for ourselves in the past may not be reflective of our present. We can best care for ourselves by accepting the layered, revelatory nature of transition.

The first kind of authenticity is more dated but still comes up: cis-passing as authentic. This really only applies for people who present more binary-aligned, the idea being that by working to learn gender expression and affectations that are supposedly cis one can cultivate a certain authenticity. Historically being more cis-passing meant that medical gatekeepers were more likely to treat a person as a “true trans” and therefore give them access to more resources, so the only successful trans people under this model were the ones who had the money and time in the first place to invest on being cis-passing. Obviously there are other reasons that someone might want to be cis-passing - safety in a transphobic area being at the top of the list - but also many of us internalize cultural beauty and gender expression standards that are difficult to attain generally and not actually reflective of the breadth of cis experience. This regressive approach towards authenticity creates a class divide in transness and sets the bar of many trans people’s self evaluation at a height most cis people couldn’t clear.

The second kind of authenticity seems to be more commonplace and can be much more subversive. It says that our authentic selves are both individual and knowable, in the sense of the slur “I’m so glad you’re being your authentic self.” There are a couple problems here. First, does anyone really live their life with a clear idea of what their authentic self is? Pulling from Judith Butler by way of [Abigail Thorn’s latest video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVilpxowsUQ), if gender is performative, the private inner self that is gendered is an illusion generated by our actions. That authentic self is a mirage that is constantly shifting, not something we can provide on a form for voice therapy lessons. I’m thinking about how many times I was asked early on about my “transition goals” and just felt like throwing up my hands in exasperation. Second, this language frames transition as a sort of personal expression of individuality, as opposed to a process of recognizing and addressing real physical needs for a person. If transition is expression, it’s easier for systems of power to shrug off providing resources for trans people because we’re just as “valid” without those resources. There’s a [really good Substack post](https://sadbrowngirl.substack.com/p/the-un-importance-of-wearing-clothes) by Jules Gill-Peterson that talks about how this framing of transness opens us up to transphobic legislative attacks. 

Both of these framings of authenticity are transnormative because they imply an A-to-B process for transition, and both allow institutions to disavow their accountability to trans populations. We need to espouse a broader understanding of transition as an ongoing process of self discovery that can sometimes be surprising. When I first came out, I decided passing wasn’t going to be an option for me because of my height, so I concentrated on being “boring woman who is obviously trans.” Eventually new dysphorias revealed themselves to me, and some older ones became less important, and I found myself working towards surgeries and hair removal but also caring less about my no-longer-cis but non-passing voice. I discovered euphoria in showy and colorful forms of femme gender expression, and more recently came to embrace aspects of how my transfem body breaks traditional feminine beauty standards. At none of these points could I have seen what the next layer was going to reveal about myself or what my future needs were.

We deserve systems that aid us in pursuing bodily autonomy wherever we are on our gender journeys, towards whatever ends. This is also a reminder to take heart, because the stories and phrases that surround us rarely reflect the true nature of what it means to be trans. Transition asks us to radically accept who we are at any given moment and embrace change as our needs and desires reveal themselves to us. If we can hold that in our hearts, we can free ourselves from the anxiety of how “authentic” we are, and just *be*.

My Beef with Authenticity


Over the past year some friends and I have collected a list of slurs that many people who consider themselves trans allies seem to use “in support” without thinking. Here are the most common ones I’ve heard thrown around, along with explanations as to why they are slurs and alternatives for allies to say. For full disclosure, this list is coming from a mostly transfem perspective.

A note for trans people before we start: Slur reclamation is for many people a healing part of the experience of being queer, and I encourage you to make the slurs here part of that practice for yourself. Doing this inoculates you against the grossness of the slurs so that you can be more resilient and speak up (if you wish) when slurred by “allies.” Also I have yet to find another trans person who didn’t think it was funny to be slurred in an obviously joking manner.

__The slur:__ “You’re so brave/inspiring“<br/>
__The breakdown:__ This is maybe the most common slur I hear, and spending even a little time with it reveals its intellectual laziness. Trans people have to be brave because the world is transphobic. We don’t want to have to be brave, and reminding us of how much shit we have to put up with isn’t a particularly caring thing to do. We don’t want to “inspire” people by suffering hardships that we shouldn’t have to suffer just to live our lives.<br/>
__Say instead:__ It really depends on context what to say here. If a trans person is sharing a personal experience, you can say something like “thanks for sharing, I learned a lot from that.” If the trans person is talking about the difficulties of transition, maybe “I didn’t realize how hard it can be. I’m here for you if you need anything.”


__The slur:__ “You are valid”<br/>
__The breakdown:__ This is often well intentioned as a way to welcome a trans person to the in-group of a gender, but it implies that the ally has the authority to make that call. Trans people don’t need anyone to tell us that we’re valid in our gender. Saying someone is “valid” is often as empty a platitude as saying “thoughts and prayers.”<br/>
__Say instead:__ Since it’s not really your place to validate someone, maybe there’s something else you’re trying to express, like “I really care about you” or “I want to support you however I can.”

__The slur:__ “Preferred” / “Identify as” / “Living your truth”<br/>
__The breakdown:__ These statements imply that to transition is to perform a fiction. The trans person isn’t really their gender, they just “identify” as that gender. Similarly “living your truth” implies that it is the trans person’s truth that they are of a gender and not an objective truth.<br/>
__Say instead:__ Use language that makes it clear that the trans person *is* their gender. In the case of “living your truth,” consider something like “It makes me so happy to see how much more yourself you are.” A little cheesy, but it grounds your remarks in objective reality.

__The slur:__ “Being your authentic self”<br/>
__The breakdown:__ This feels like a combination of pedestaling and patronizing. Isn’t everyone trying to be authentic? Conversely, how much of our presentation in the world is ever truly “authentic?” The first time I got hit by this one was by a voice training coach who said her goal was to help me find my “authentic voice.” I’m still unsure what she meant, but her usage felt like weasel words to avoid defining training goals.<br/>
__Say instead:__ Keep it specific. If there’s something that impresses you about how a trans person has changed since coming out, compliment them on that. A good rule of thumb generally is if it’s a compliment that would feel weird to say to a cis person, you shouldn’t say it to a trans person.

__The slur:__ “Fully transition” / “Passable”<br/>
__The breakdown:__ These imply an end state to transition, as well as a binary mindset (“I’m a woman now, I’ve fully transitioned and I pass.”). This sort of language is dated and doesn’t reflect most people’s experience of transition, which is an ever-shifting thing, and passing is not often the goal.<br/>
__Say instead:__ Not everyone will want to answer this, but if you’re close to the trans person you might say “Do you mind if I ask how things are going in your transition?” Be prepared for rejection, but if they do want to share, listen with empathy. You might learn something.

__The slur:__ “How are you hotter than me” / “You don’t look trans”<br/>
__The breakdown:__ The implication here is that the “ally” expects trans people to be ugly or disturbing looking, which is a hurtful way to characterize trans people. I chalk this one up to a deluge of negative stereotypes in the media, like the “man in a dress” trope. Many trans people are conventionally hot, and many trans people are hot in ways that cis people are not. Beauty and attractiveness extend beyond cis beauty standards.<br/>
__Say instead:__ “You’re really hot.”

__The slur:__ “[Having a trans body is] the best of both worlds”<br/>
__The breakdown:__ This statement demonstrates a profound ignorance of trans bodies and gender dysphoria. It objectifies and fetishizes the trans person as an exotic body, it misgenders because it implies that they are not wholly a particular gender (and there’s some nonbinary erasure in there too), and it ignores how trans people relate to their own bodies (ie. having a trans body doesn’t feel like the “best” to everyone).<br/>
__Say instead:__ Nothing. Don’t make generalizations about trans bodies. Educate yourself on what it’s like for trans people to experience gender dysphoria and fetishization.

__The slur:__ “We center trans voices” / “This is a safe space”<br/>
__The breakdown:__ I have yet to witness a situation where statements like this weren’t just empty virtue signaling. If you’re an ally, you should be making spaces that are safe for trans people to express themselves regardless.<br/>
__Say instead:__ If you must say something, say “Transphobia will not be tolerated here.” Then follow through if a trans person raises a concern.

__The slur:__ “Welcome to womanhood”<br/>
__The breakdown:__ This is a difficult one partly because it hurts trans women in a number of ways but also because the women who say it are hurt themselves. Women say this to each other when one woman shares an experience of misogyny or sexism and her listener has experienced a similar hurt and has had to push down her feelings around it. “Welcome to womanhood” broadly means “you need to ignore your pain and your feelings *in the same way that I had to.*” An ally unaware of the already hurtful implications of this phrase might say this in a joking way to a trans woman intending solidarity, but specifically for trans women there are some added layers that make it even more problematic. It can sound like “you chose womanhood so deal with it,” which makes being trans out to be a choice and is invalidating of the trans woman’s gender. Also it can imply that the trans woman is ignorant of the pain of sexism experienced in womanhood, as if the trans woman was not already a woman and aware of what women experience.<br/>
__Say instead:__ “I’m so sorry that happened to you. I’ve been hurt that way too.” Then ask if they want to talk about it.  That’s what empathy and solidarity look like, and we can heal together.


Common Ally Slurs


Fair warning, this is a ramble about part of my experience trying acid last Saturday. If trip reports sound as exciting to you as hearing about someone else’s dream, feel free to move on.

Before the trip Lilith had told me about a game she and her girlfriend had come up with on one of her previous trips where you look into a mirror and play around with how you perceive your facial features as if you’re looking at a character creation screen. Lilith had said she found this malleability of appearance helpful because it helped her cement her feelings around FFS and acceptance of her own appearance. I was excited to give this a shot, but when the visuals kicked in and Lilith and I made our way to my bathroom mirror, something else happened for me.

When I looked in the mirror I perceived myself differently than usual. I was a lot bigger and taller, and more solidly built. A little bit “apeish,” but not in a bad way, more having a primal human sort of beauty. I felt like I was seeing more of my features that I thought of as masculine as instead being feminine but not meeting stereotypical feminine beauty standards.

I know I carry around some body dysmorphia, and typically I can combat it a bit by comparing my reflection in a couple of different mirrors. Some days it feels like one mirror will have it out for me and another will be more tolerant. With this in mind, I moved to the full length mirror in my bedroom to get a second opinion. Instead of giving me a different read, the mirror’s reflection was consistent for once with the bathroom. I could see my whole body, and I looked quite feminine (whoa hips!), still a bit bulky and primal. I’m not sure how best to explain this part but I could see my body as much more dykey and less femme than I typically think of myself, and again not residual-masculine. I realized that the only gender dysphoria that I was experiencing was from my genitals.

The drugs were really kicking in at this point, and while trying to explain what I was seeing to Lilith I started to hear and observe myself speak from a more removed perspective, like I was offset a foot from my brain. I paid attention to my intonation and gestures and pitch, and even more of the dyke read was coming through. I thought “I look like a cave girl and sound like a big bossy dyke,” and I honestly felt happy with that. It was a way of perceiving myself that I hadn’t experienced before. It was reassuring to interpret what I previously thought of as leftover male features of my body as just a different sort of femininity than I was used to.

One of those bits of transfem lore that gets circulated around is that most of us go through a phase early on where we start out presenting extremely femme, then as our bodies change and we get more comfortable in our femininity the pendulum swings back to something less exaggerated. I dove into femme expression with gusto as soon as I could and denied that I was anything but that, but this reevaluation of my body has me questioning my stance and feeling a little sheepish that I, too, might be living the trope.

Frankly I’m a bit shaken by the experience, not just by how I looked but by how I seemed to present myself in the world with speech and posture. I’m hoping this experience effectively stripped away some of the stories I was telling myself about appearing masculine, but it also means that I have more work to do on body acceptance and what that means for my gender expression.

Cave Girl and the Treachery of Mirrors


In 2014 I was about a year into my career as a web developer. I was doing all the good little programmer things: going to tech talks in town, reading Hacker News, following tech celebrities on Twitter who linked to interesting projects and code tutorials. I felt like I was starting to find a community that I could fit into, and I was trying really hard to consume the right nerd culture in order to get all the references and seem like hot shit. The trouble is, I’m me, and so the media that I found myself drawn to was not the nerd mainstream. No, in retrospect what caught me in its hooks was the gender.

I remember distinctly thinking, *wow, there’s a lot of trans women in tech!* and combing through every piece of media produced by every trans woman I encountered. There was something intoxicating to me about playing body horror games by [Porpentine Charity Heartscape](https://xrafstar.monster/), or reading essays on art and culture by [Liz Ryerson](https://ellaguro.blogspot.com/), and I wasn’t quite sure why. Another thought I remember having was: *I wish* I *was trans!* Did I bother to investigate what it meant to be trans, or what my feelings might be hinting at? Absolutely not! I think the intoxication and “admiration” I felt for the trans women I encountered in tech media were another [dog button](/posts/that-was-not-easy)-style conflation of emotions. What I really felt was *longing to be like them*. When eight years later I would stand looking in a mirror and say “hi Erin” for the first time, I would finally satisfy that longing with the satisfaction of knowing that *I get to be trans*.

I don’t think that feeling of “I get to be trans” is something that many other trans people start transition with or necessarily end up feeling later on. For past generations of trans people what being trans meant was that you had a lot of work to do. You needed to “complete” transition, focusing on passing as your desired gender, and usually culminating in bottom surgery. As I’ve addressed in other blogposts, the transnormative narrative is a fiction - no one ever is done with being trans, and most people ’s experiences don’t follow the imaginary path from point A to point B that cis people came up with in order to make us palatable to a society that wants to forget we exist. These days there’s much less of an emphasis on this path, but things are *bad* out there, with trans healthcare bans driving refugees to flee to safer states, and bigots feeling emboldened by these attacks on our rights to take things into their own hands with transphobic violence. It’s hard to feel like transness is a gift when so much of the world seems to hate us. It’s hard to not feel shame about being trans when so much of the world makes it out to be a shameful thing.

It puzzled me for some time that I have such a positive outlook on my transness despite it all. Just this week though I realized that I’ve faced a similar challenge before. I grew up in the southern US where evangelical Christianity is king. Every so-called secular institution there is guided by Christian leadership and attitudes, and it’s hard to participate in anything community related without visiting a church, or having a group prayer, or using religious language in conversation. It was scary when I realized at 15 that I was an atheist and that I had to put on a good face for everyone and close my eyes during prayers until I could find a way to get out. At times I felt like it wasn’t so much that I was confident in my beliefs as much as I was faithless in a world built on faith. I was ashamed that I couldn’t seem to muster that faith that seemed to come so easily to everyone around me. What changed everything for me was finding and befriending other atheists and agnostics when I went to college. Suddenly I had peers in real life who understood my circumstances and who were willing to share about their own struggles. It made being an atheist feel wonderfully unremarkable.

I suspect that isolation in transition - especially in early transition - can be detrimental, because then all you have to guide your understanding of transness is what you can find in media, which for the most part tends to be either transnormative or caricatured for virality. Seeing other trans people on social media set me on the path of understanding transness as something normal, but it was participating in trans community in person that helped me find love and acceptance for myself. “I get to be trans” means I get to be surrounded by friends who can share my joys and help dispel that feeling of otherness. Being “done” with being trans is no longer a concern, because I can live in the present. When it comes to interacting with cis people, things are still hard in a lot of ways, but I have a confidence now that I didn’t used to because I know I’m not alone. Maybe one day being trans will be a boring thing, a mundane aspect of human biodiversity that everyone recognizes as such. We have a long way to go, but until we get there I will continue to take heart in the fact that life has given me a second chance and so many wonderful people who love and accept me. *I get to be trans.*


Gratitude


Sometimes you write [a blogpost](/posts/a-transsexual-suspect) and a beautiful whole assembles itself but there are still a few screws and washers left on the floor. Early in my research phase for the post, blog reader and poet [Misha Moon](https://www.instagram.com/poemsbymisha/) tipped me off that John Irving is not without trans members of his own family. If you cry easy, dear reader, have some tissue ready when watching this CBS segment from last year.

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Garp Errata


> "A book's true when you can say, 'Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.' Then you know it's true.” - Jillsy Sloper

This past month I found myself rereading a book I first encountered over 20 years ago, John Irving’s 1978 bestseller *The World According to Garp*.  I was first introduced to the book when I was maybe 14 and my father told me that he picked my name from one of its characters. One evening I found his copy on the living room bookshelf and smuggled it back to my room. I wasn’t prepared for the subject matter I encountered - there’s a lot in there that isn’t exactly age appropriate for an 8th grader - but beyond the rape and mutilation there was a lot to take in about gender and feminism. And what exactly did it mean that my namesake fell in love with and married a transsexual?

*Garp* is a hard book to summarize. It’s about the origin, life, and legacy of a writer named T. S. Garp. Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, works as a nurse until she publishes a book in the early 1960s titled *A Sexual Suspect* about her experiences of sexism and her desire to live in a world free from lust. Jenny’s book is an instant hit, and she uses her money from book sales and talks to aid feminist causes. Garp, a fatherless only child whose two proclivities are wrestling and writing fiction, struggles to assert his own voice beside his mother’s fame, but manages to find his place as a published author and start a family. We read pieces of Garp’s writing in the book, and watch as his family stumbles through ridiculous situations as they live out their lives.

The most prominent theme of the book is sexual intolerance. *Garp* asks: what could life look like with gender equality? What happens to the family, to culture, to politics? Irving approaches this work with the exactness of a butcher, finding the joints in the carcass of mid 20th century America and deftly cleaving through. We see characters building chosen families, relationships between men and women forming based on mutual respect and care, and growing societal acceptance of transgender people. The road to these changes is not easy, though: there are stabbings, assassinations, politically motivated self mutilations, and so many affairs. Irving ultimately promises not a perfect future, but one where gender equality can become mundane. For me, that’s more powerful because it feels like Irving gave me a way to imagine the way there.

One oddity in the book’s structure that immediately stood out to me is this: every chapter has a pivotal moment involving an erection. I think this is Irving’s coal mine canary of toxic masculinity as time passes in the book: what happens to the erection? At first they are unwanted, violent, motivated by lust. Later on, we see Garp (when they’re his) discovering restraint: nothing has to become of an erection, it’s not more important than anything in his life. As the book goes on the erections come to relax harmlessly or are directed more appropriately. But not without that one midway that gets bitten off! In reading other reviews and analyses of *Garp* I can’t say I’ve seen the regular erection mentioned before. I have to wonder if my noticing it has anything to do with my own relationship with them.

When I was a teen first reading the book, erections were a constant source of anxiety for me. What was going to trigger my next erection? How could I hide it? Why did I have to get so many of them? I wore baggy clothes and untucked shirts to anticipate any pesky erections. Garp’s seeming hyperawareness of erections reminded me of my own, and I felt doomed. That feeling stayed with me for 20 years, until I was a month in on HRT, and started waking up without morning wood. Then I was having whole days and weeks without erections. I can’t understate the degree of relief that this change brought me. Talking with other trans women about hyperawareness around erections, I get the sense that our distress caused by them was more much exaggerated than that of a cis man because we had an added layer of bodily incongruity amplifying our embarrassment.

Noticing the erection theme led me in my second reading to wonder if I was picking up on information a cis reader might miss, and with that lens in mind I ended up surprised at *Garp*’s trans literacy. The book was written between 1972 and 1977, and so the word “gender” didn’t yet have its modern meaning. The word “transgender” hadn’t been invented. No, the characters we meet are *transsexual women*, and they’re not transitioning, they’re *going through their sex reassignment*, which included hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery. Irving doesn’t really get into the lingo of the time beyond that, but because I’m familiar with 20th century trans history I was able to spot details that reveal Irving had to have been familiar with what transfeminine transition was like back then.

The character Roberta Muldoon turns out to provide a way for Irving to touch on so many facets of transness, sexism, emotional intelligence, and family. A trans woman who comes out later in life, Roberta was the lauded former Philadelphia Eagles tight end number 90 before she read *A Sexual Suspect* and realized that she needed to transition. She starts estrogen and hides the changes until her physical strength noticeably declines, then switches careers to the sports awards show circuit. Roberta decides to come out publicly, but she’s met with sexism. and her former colleagues renege on their job offers to her.

Dejected, Roberta seeks Jenny’s help in regaining her career opportunities, but instead finds herself joining Jenny’s inner circle. She becomes Jenny’s chief strategist and head of operations at the feminist retreat Jenny has fashioned from the Massachusetts mansion that was her childhood home. Roberta recuperates from bottom surgery there, and soon meets Garp. The two become fast friends because of their shared love of athletics and for Jenny’s vision, and they pick each other up off of the floor again and again over the course of the novel.

Roberta is pitch-perfect to me: she *sounds* transfem through her tone, her relationship with her emotions, her feminine-with-a-gilded-edge-of-coarseness word choices. Here’s a bit of dialogue from a late night phone call she makes to Garp when a sex partner rudely dumps her:

> "He said I wasn't *enough* of a woman, that I confused him, sexually - that *I* was confused sexually!" Roberta cried. "Oh, God, that *prick*. All he wanted was the novelty of it. He was just showing off for his friends."<br/>
> “I’ll bet you could have taken him, Roberta," Garp said. "Why didn't you beat the shit out of him?"<br/>
> "You don't understand," Roberta said. "I don't feel like beating the shit out of anyone, anymore. I'm a *woman*!'"<br/>
> "Don't women ever feel like beating the shit out of someone?" Garp asked.[…]<br/>
> "I don't know what women feel like," Roberta wailed. "I don't know what they're *supposed* to feel like, anyway. I just know what *I* feel like."<br/>
> "What's that?" Garp asked, knowing she wanted to tell him.<br/>
> "I feel like beating the shit out of him *now*," Roberta confessed, "but when he was dumping all over me, I just sat there and took it. I even cried. I've been crying all day!" she cried, "and he even called me up and told me that if I was still crying I was faking myself."<br/>
> "The hell with him," Garp said.<br/>
> "All he wanted was a great big lay," Roberta said. "Why are men like that?"<br/>
> "Well," Garp said.

I love how Roberta voices the difference between the societal messaging she’s received on how to be a woman vs her lived experience. Roberta does want to beat the shit out of the jerk, but she’s unsure that that’s how she’s supposed to feel and act as a woman. That uncertainty - am I doing “woman” correctly? Should I *know* how to do “woman” correctly? - plagues so many of us daily. She acknowledges her feelings once she can pause and feel them, something it’s implied she couldn’t do before her transition (and would perhaps go straight to beating the shit out of the guy).

The dialogue about being “confused sexually” is inverted later in the book, when Jenny calls Roberta “the least sexually ambiguous person I’ve ever met.” Jenny sees Roberta’s transition as a considered act of self determination around gender that few people ever approach, and I think she’s right to do so. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about cis people in trying to explain myself as a trans woman, it’s that many have a profound laziness in regarding gender, and very few cis people are willing to overcome that initial hump of self reflection in order to even approach developing empathy for transgender people.

Lastly we see Roberta ask, “Why are men like that?” and it’s not the only place in the novel where she speculates on the motives of men. Roberta acknowledges that her lived experience has not been that of a man - she sees a hole in her understanding. This is something that I constantly have to remind myself of even now, despite having written as many blogposts and [American Girl Doll plays](/posts/my-dolls) as I have about my girlhood. The reason I have to work to remember that I can’t speak about men’s experiences is because, I feel, my transition hit me so unexpectedly. I wonder if it’s any easier for trans people who knew for longer to unlearn this misplaced empathy.

Later in the phone call Roberta expresses distrust about the motives of her urologist who did her sex reassignment and urology in general, calling both “creepy.” I’ve read about what getting gender affirming surgery was like in the 1970s, and Roberta is justified in sensing creepiness beyond her urologist literally wanting to fuck her. At the time, urologists and other gender affirming surgeons in the US were starting to form professional networks and patient pipelines in order to maximize their profits. This would culminate in 1979 with the formation of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, HBIGDA, which would go on to become WPATH. Hil Malatino addresses the sordid motives of this monetization and professionalization in his essay “Beyond Burnout: On the Limits of Care and Cure,” and how detrimental it was for both potential patients and for the trans communities that organized around their need for medical transition. It’s disappointing that in the 46 years since this book was published that trans people have not much more reason to trust our doctors than we did then.

One subject that barely gets a mention in Garp is homosexuality, and when it does show up it’s hand in hand with trans gatekeeping. Lesbians fighting for gay rights are welcomed by Jenny at her retreat, but Roberta is leery of them, calling them “that damn lesbian crowd.” Roberta’s “bitchiness” towards them stems from the fact that the women she encounters seem to be practitioners of political lesbianism, a movement in the 70s that asserted that sexual desire was irrelevant in the face of patriarchy, and that true solidarity meant fucking only other women. In Roberta’s case this attitude turns trans exclusionary, and dismissive of her desire to live as her gender. This isn’t the only place that Irving takes a swipe at what he sees as misplaced efforts in second wave feminism, but it’s the least contrived example:

>"Well, they tried to confuse me," Roberta said. "When I was preparing myself for the operation, they kept trying to talk me out of it. 'Be gay,' they said. 'If you want men, have them as you are. If you become a woman, you'll just be taken advantage of,' they told me. They were all cowards," Roberta concluded, though Garp knew, sadly, that Roberta had been taken advantage of, over and over again.

After an incredibly tragic car accident (the novel’s apex of situational irony) kills the youngest Garp child and maims Garp, his wife, and his oldest son, the family moves in with Jenny to be nursed back to health and figure out where things went wrong. Since Garp and Helen are incapacitated, Roberta takes on a motherly role in the life of Duncan, Garp’s remaining son. Roberta continues to function as a third parent in the Garp children’s lives as their numbers grow, first with the birth of their daughter Jenny, and later when the mute teenager Ellen James is taken in by a sympathetic T.S.

As time passes, Duncan grows up to be an accomplished painter, but he struggles with depression. He engages in risky behavior and soon loses an arm in a motorcycle crash. While Duncan recovers in the hospital, Roberta has an unnamed young trans woman who she’s taken under her wing stay in his New York apartment. (I’m assuming she’s not given a name because the last chapter is basically Irving killing off everyone with a name, and we only just met her.) The woman begins to write letters to Duncan about his home and his artwork, and soon the two are penpals. They eventually fall in love and marry, but not before Roberta dies from what sounds like an aneurysm brought on by her irregular use of Premarin. Again this is between the lines, but based on the circumstances of her death Irving had to have known that blood clotting was a risk of the estrogen available at the time.

Roberta is laid to rest with a posthumous honor by the Eagles at one of their games in a way that I don’t think that we could expect from the present moment. The sports announcers, though awkward, are careful to use Roberta’s name and pronouns correctly, and one of them credits her for “[doing] a lot for people [with] *complicated* lives.” The Garp kids are surprised to hear her be treated with such dignity in this way, having braced for a misgendering. I even felt myself tense up when I started reading the paragraph. But to Irving, this kind of treatment follows logically from gender equality: it’s what people deserve.

The Garp siblings and Duncan’s wife later come together from time to time to reminisce about Roberta and celebrate their lives. After a few drinks things get silly:

> "There's no sex like transsex!" they would shout, when they were drunk, which occasionally embarrassed Duncan's wife-although she certainly agreed.

Finishing *The World According to Garp* was like emerging into the sunlight after a marathon spelunking expedition. I had started with a fairly basic question about the name of a character and instead found myself plumbing depths of the trans experience and feminism in the 70s. Bubbling over with enthusiasm about the book, I decided it was time to call my father to see what he remembered of the story. We had a good call, but it turned out I was a little off base.

“I got your old name from two places,” my dad said, “from that book and from some soap opera of the time. It really didn’t have anything to do with the character at all, I just liked the sound of it.” He didn’t read the book until 1984, and didn’t really remember much of the plot or that there were transsexuals in it. We talked about feminism in his upbringing, and parenting me and my siblings in the 90s. I asked him what he could remember about media depictions of trans people in the 70s, and he said while he could remember gay stereotypes nothing came to mind regarding trans people or casual transphobia.

He did tell me a fun story, though, from his high school years. When my father was 16-17, he worked part time as a janitor and stocker at a department store in Norfolk Virginia. This particular store had a periodic sale that would run called “midnight madness,” where the store would stay open for a full 24 hours. Being young and without seniority my dad would often get stuck with 10pm-5am shifts, which tended to be not particularly mad, quiet even. Multiple times when working these shifts women would come in to shop who my father said he could tell were different in some way - I think he used the term “classy” to describe how they dressed. He couldn’t say what exactly it was about them was different, and they behaved like any other customer, but something didn’t quite click. It wasn’t until much more recently that my father realized he had been assisting closeted trans women who had been emboldened by the late hours to head to the department store and do an affirming thing: shop as themselves. 

I felt sad thinking about the lonely existence of those women, this being one of their few ways to shop safely in public. I was reminded of the advice given at the time to transitioners to never move in groups, to isolate lest someone notice the combined gender incongruities of the group. To think of an author not long after writing stories about trans characters finding acceptance, family, love - was truly radical.

And what became of Duncan Garp, with his nameless wife? Later in life, the two attend a coming-out-as-trans party for a friend (because, in the world according to Garp, we celebrate our friends’ self acceptance). Duncan laughs from one of his own jokes a little too hard while drinking a martini, asphyxiates on an olive, and dies.

Deadname or not, for me that is a whole mood.


A Transsexual Suspect


My dysphoria has been bad for the past two weeks. Not *bad* bad, but definitely more grating than it has been in the recent past. It’s just, all these little things keep getting under my skin. The mirrors have been conspiring with each other again, I’ve been deadnaming myself here and there, and the time it takes to get myself dressed in the morning has stretched out. On top of that, some things that I thought I had total clarity on - how I define my sexuality, specifics desires around vaginoplasty - suddenly feel up in the air. It’s been frustrating and bewildering, and to some degree I feel like *“Shouldn’t I already be past all of this?”*

I can attribute part of my instability to my aforementioned health issues - it’s hard to feel good about yourself when you don’t feel good. Other parts come from the reflection I’ve been doing since I passed the two year mark on HRT last week. When I first started spending time in community with other trans people, many of the women I looked up to were hitting two years on E. I idolized them for what I considered their obvious successes in that time. Reaching two years became a big motivator for me, and a way to let myself off the hook when I felt like I wasn’t meeting my own standards for “progress.” *If I can just make it to two years*, I told myself, *everything will be okay*. And of course as Alana likes to joke, “[insert duration of time here] is when the HRT REALLY starts to kick in.” Now that I’m here, I’m proud of how much the work of early transition has paid off, but I can see that I still have a lot of growing to do, and some struggles I face that trigger dysphoria for me are never going to go away. I’m pretty sure I’m always going to get stared at, hear a pause when I say “this is she” on the phone, feel defensive when in a room full of cis women.

Reaching this milestone seems to also be where my questions around what’s next in my material transition as well as how I define myself come in. I recently took Lilith to her vaginoplasty consult, and despite knowing most of the material we covered I found myself doubting some of the conclusions I reached over a year ago when I decided to get in the surgery pipeline. Am I willing to wait as long as three years for this operation? Am I willing to dilate for the rest of my life? Could I settle for zero/minimal depth instead? What is it that I really want? Similarly, I was offering some advice on a lex post regarding sexual orientation labels and something about writing out my understanding and affiliation with the term “lesbian” kneecapped me. Is “lesbian” a label that has ever benefited me in any way? Can I just be queer without picking a flag? I’m not so sure my quick and vocal embrace of being a lesbian is as helpful and accurate now as I thought it would be at the start of my transition.

Speaking more generally, I suspect that when it comes to my relationship with my transness I give off a really put together vibe to my trans friends and acquaintances. (I have no idea what the cis people in my life think, see [my previous entry on The Void](/posts/parents-and-the-void) for my best guess.)  I’m not sure when I learned to speak and write with authority - maybe from dashing out manifestos during my net art blogging days, maybe from leading a team of developers at a startup - but the truth is when I write with authority there’s a combination of self-persuasion and unassailability that I’m usually after. This blog has been and continues to be my aegis, where I’ve come up with these narratives that hold together so much of my current understanding of myself. The truth is, I tell stories that make it seem like I have my shit together because I need those stories.

Admitting that I’m fallible and prone to mistakes like any other person, scrutinizing my desires - and dysphoria is a reflection of desire -  is really hard for me, and I feel a lot of shame when the mask slips as it inevitably does. Sometimes too, things just boil over and I find myself melting down in an embarrassing way. [Bath Bomb](/posts/bath-bomb) is simultaneously one of my favorite pieces of writing on the blog and the one that makes me cringe the most. Some of my peers tell me I need to lean into the cringe, and I’m taking some baby steps there. Last month I attended a brief creative writing workshop for transes in town and managed to get some gushy feelings down on paper. What I didn’t manage to do was talk to any of the other participants. I’m going to attend another one next Friday, and I’m hoping to do better.

I’m sure that this wave of intensified dysphoria will pass and then it will be back to the long retail shift that is the bulk of transition. It hurts to sit with the idea that some dysphoria is going to continue to be a destabilizing force, no matter what milestones I’ve passed. When I surprise myself with new desires or newfound clarity on old desires, it can be scary to sit with that and to ask (to borrow a phrase I heard in support group) “how many more elephants are in the room?” But I really don’t get a choice on these things, I’m going to keep bumping into elephants just like everybody else. I need to work on finding my peace with that.

From This Position


As you might have noticed, I’ve been pretty quiet for over a month. The reason I’ve been depriving you all of my keen wit is that I’ve been in poor health this year and especially since early February. Dealing with persistent illness has made it hard for me to sit down and focus on writing. I’m trying to determine the root cause of my health issues, so updates may continue to be sporadic for a bit. In the meantime, here are some assorted notes.

One thing I tried in order to address some of my symptoms was a brief switch back to transdermal patches for HRT. Patches have less side effects than pills, so my hope was that maybe there was something in the pills exacerbating my problems. This didn’t turn out to be the case, but I did learn an important change in technique this time around. I stopped swabbing with alcohol before applying patches, and my contact dermatitis was significantly lessened! I’m going to make a note in [Patch Notes](/posts/patch-notes) to skip the alcohol step for anyone who comes across it.

I’m a sucker for the discourse (💿🐴) on my local Lex, and when someone mentioned the article “I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out.” by Jennifer Coates as required reading for trans people, I had to investigate. I’m not going to link to the writing because my final impression was that the article was transphobic, self-hating, and vaguely MRA-adjacent. I ended up discussing the piece in depth with a few friends and we all reflected on how Coates stood up transition as this performative thing yoyu did for uncharitable cis people as opposed to a process of personal growth. One of the primary false assumptions (among so many others) that the author makes is that HRT is all about aesthetics. I had a discussion with some friends about this, and many folks echoed my sentiment that HRT changed their minds more significantly than anything. I like the analogy of “running better on E (or T)”, it really feels that way, like there’s less gunk in the fuel lines of my brain.

Somewhat related, I like to occasionally subject my friends to the [Internalized Transphobia Test](https://www.idrlabs.com/internalized-transphobia/test.php), a short online quiz derived from survey data. [Here’s the paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6983734/) the quiz is based on. The questions are pretty stupid honestly, it’s often hard to disentangle what they ask from one’s trans experience specifically. But who doesn’t love the occasional pithy online quiz? Here are my results, I have a lot to work on in terms of being judgy of others (but we knew that).

[<img src="/post-media/internalized-2024.png" alt="My results in March 2024 from the Internalized Transphobia Quiz"  />](/post-media/internalized-2024.png)

I’m having a great time reading [“Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender”](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dr-kit-heyam-ph-d/before-we-were-trans/9781541603080/?lens=seal-press) by Dr. Kit Heyam. We know that trans people have always been a part of human civilization, but how does one search for and interpret trans history when transness is in many ways a contemporary concept? Trying to project our modern labels on the past is an erasure of historical nuance and ambiguity, so to see trans history we need to instead take a more expansive look at gender diversity, which can mean thinking of transness as maybe more broad and - dare I say it - transient, than we are typically accustomed. The stories take place all over the globe and through time, which is quite invigorating for anyone like myself tired of the crowded memoir-space of the 20th century. I’m currently reading a chapter that digs into how entangled gender and sexuality are in so many cultures, including our own. I’ve found that it’s almost a taboo to talk about this in queer spaces and so it’s nice to see a historian not just validate this entanglement but call out the implicit false narrative of progress.

Hopefully I’ll have more long form writing to share soon. I’m sketching out a pamphlet idea called “What are Eggs? A Guide for Allies” that may or may not eventually end up on here. In the meantime I’ll be doing the best I can to take care of myself. Thanks as always for reading.

Kibbles n' Bits


On the Gender Reveal podcast, host Tuck Woodstock asks his guests - most of whom are trans - how exactly they would describe their gender. The answers range from pithy to complex; many guests explain that they give different answers to cis and trans people because trans people usually do a better job of understanding nuance in gender. This same dichotomy is something I’ve become familiar with as some of my friends have discovered over time that aspects of their gender seem to be outside of the binary, often using descriptors like like “creature” or “fae.” To cis people these people might refer to themselves as a woman or as a nonbinary person, but in trans spaces the nuance comes out.

When I first started transition, I described myself as a “nonbinary transfem” because I was afraid of calling myself a woman and it seemed like to claim a location on the binary was  kinda… gauche? This proved to just be confusing to cis people and not actually protective. I also tried hard at first to blend in and be as boring of a ”nonbinary transfem” as possible as I could to the cis people in my life, despite my ebullience about transition. That didn’t last. Pretty soon I realized that I didn’t have any sort of nonbinary feelings about myself and that I should just own being a woman. So I’ve used the term “woman” since then to refer to my gender.

I hadn’t done much reflecting on potential nuance in any of this until this past week. In a discussion on Discord about how much of gender is a costume, one of my friends wrote about her target gender being “regular girl,” and something about it slapped me in the face. I realized that that’s kind of what I want, but there’s so much about me that will never be “regular.” My body will never be regular, my past will never be regular, and I have no intention of giving the impression that I’m anything other than trans, which is not particularly regular.

I just don’t see how I can unlink my gender from my transness. I embrace in myself how much of the gender landscape I have traversed on my meandering path to womanhood. There are aspects of womanhood and femininity that I embody that cis people will never get the chance to experience. Thinking of myself as lacking - not-cis - holds me back from exploring new frontiers of what it means to inhabit my gender. I keep half-remembering a meme I saw on Tumblr at one point about trans women being the “latest model of girl,” and in a weird way it feels like a better description and really builds me up. 

Latest Model


I've wanted to participate in [Hourly Comic Day](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/hourly-comic-day-24-hour-comic-day) for quite some time, and I finally had the wherewithal this year to make a comic. Click the preview below to read it!

[<img src="/post-media/hourly-comic-day/hourly-comic-2024.jpg" style="height: 400px; border: 2px solid currentColor;" alt="2024 Hourly Comic Day"  />](/post-media/hourly-comic-day/hourly-comic-2024.jpg)

Hourly Comic Day


You were the first person I knew to transition, so when I realized what I was up against I called you for advice. You said, “don’t ever expect to pass.” So I didn’t.

Instead, I focused on navigating visibility, on coming to terms with the bodily and mental changes I was experiencing, and I found that despite the difficulties of dysphoria and dysmorphia that I could make peace with my body.

I focused on finding other people like us, on making friends and acquaintances, on surrounding myself with queerness, and I learned that beauty extends far beyond the restrictive notion of passing.

I focused on understanding where we came from, on learning about our predecessors, on how attitudes have changed over the years, and I found that the old standard of stealth and passing was a double-edged sword created ostensibly to protect us, but also functioned to keep us separate and powerless.

I focused on organizing with others, on sharing care and resources, on moving beyond survival to true community, and I found my chosen family and love that I never expected.

You said, “don’t ever expect to pass.” At the time it stung, I took what you said personally. But now, at almost two years in, I see that it was the best advice you could have possibly given me.

Note for an Old Friend


I’ve been thinking a lot about names and especially deadnames lately. This stems from my investigation of the term “deadname” in [I Can’t Stop Thinking About Transness!!!](/posts/cant-stop-thinking), how it’s a relatively recent term and reflects a shift in framing in how trans people regard their past and present names. When I first started transition, I came into it with my name (well, my first name at least) and from there tried to speedrun the paperwork segment of the Transition Tech Tree, making updates everywhere I could. 15 months later and I’m still getting deadnamed by recruiter emails, healthcare systems, and junk mail. It seems to me like deadnames never die, they live on as zombies, shambling back again and again despite my best efforts.

I was helping my girlfriend Lilith move recently into a shared house, and it turned out that one of her housemates knew me from a bar trivia scene I was a part of 10 years ago. He recognized me and admitted he didn’t know my current name, so I filled him in. “But you used to be [Deadname], right?” He said in front of Lilith, who had otherwise only ever known me as Erin. In my head I was like, *dude, why would you need to ask that? I told you what to call me now!* Moments like this can feel like a stupid little cisgender gotcha - “Aha, you used to be a boy!” This is also why I carry a little hesitation around sharing transition timelines. Despite having made plenty of them, it feels a bit like doing the same trick myself, a little plea for validation by showing from whence I came. I don’t think it works, though, it seems othering to cis people and lends mystique to the past. Timeline swapping is a fun activity in trans-exclusive spaces - lots of opportunities to celebrate each others’ victories - but I think it gives the cis the wrong idea.

Getting back to deadnames, there’s a real ease of mind that I’ve found in meeting people who have no prior name of mine to fall back on, who in encountering older pictures and media are prevented from fleshing that person out as anyone other than “pre-transition Erin.” But on the other hand, like I said, names are zombies.  I could continue to pour effort into erasing my deadname from the world to “protect” my friends and acquaintances from that knowledge, but do I have that kind of time and energy? I have one friend who ran GitHub scripts on all projects that they touched at their work in order to scrub the code histories of their name. I have another friend who has turned deadname-hunting into a sport, and works to actively retcon things like her high school letter jacket, creating artifacts of an imagined past. Good for them I suppose, but I guess where I’m at is I feel like that work gives the old name more power. It’s like a hydra; there’s an exponential increase of effort required every time you cut loose a head.

There’s also the phenomenon of “trial names” that some trans people use early in transition, which can further complicate histories and paper trails. I know several transfems who feminized their previously masculine name, and for some of them this was a destination while for others it was a stepping stone. It doesn’t seem uncommon either for people to have names that they want to use, but which get torpedoed by a disapproving spouse, and so in the infinite placating spirit of the transitioner they remain with their less-than-ideal name. These break my heart, honestly, and if I get the opportunity to call these people by their desired names I take it. (Maybe this isn’t helpful, but no one has told me to stop yet.) Some people seem to struggle on embracing a new name, going through a number of trial names. It’s not quite the same thing but it took me forever to pick a middle name, and I’m still a little iffy on whether I made the right choice.

Maybe the answer in what to do about deadnames can come from the same question of what to do about zombies. I’m thinking back to Shaun of the Dead when Shaun’s bestie Ed is infected but remains sentient enough that he can stay chained up in the shed in back of Shaun’s house for the occasional gaming session together. Is there some utility that deadnames can offer from beyond the grave? This doesn’t mean that I’m letting you off the hook though, Animal Crossing. I want my island back.

Deadnames Never Die


Recently I was having a discussion about an anime series with a fellow weeb, and I was telling her about watching the series Serial Experiments Lain when I was about 16 or 17. She asked me, “was this before you became Erin?” and I found myself flummoxed by the question. (It turns out I had misunderstood exactly what she was asking, but it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this post.) There were a few ways that I thought I could interpret her question. Was this before I was myself? No. Was this before I called myself Erin? Yes. Was this before I knew I was a trans girl? Yes. Was this before the concept of Erin existed? Not exactly.

[![Grover is becoming worried](/post-media/monster-end-book/grover2.jpeg)](/post-media/monster-end-book/grover2.jpeg)

I heard the name "Erin" as one of my potential birth names maybe when I was 14, and it resonated with me immediately. As a teen I thought about what if I had been born a girl named Erin (hah), or what if Erin had been a long lost sister.

[![Grover is increasingly agitated](/post-media/monster-end-book/grover3.jpeg)](/post-media/monster-end-book/grover3.jpeg)

Later on right before gender questioning I had this elaborate Jungian theory that what felt like a block in my ability to make art (see [Egg Art](/posts/egg-art) for details) was an indicator of my inability to tap into my anima, which I started occasionally thinking of as Erin. (Fun fact: I’m not the only person who I know that came up with this specific mental gymnastics routine.)

[![Grover is relieved](/post-media/monster-end-book/grover4.jpeg)](/post-media/monster-end-book/grover4.jpeg)

So at 16-17 I had been pulling on the thread of "who is Erin?" for a couple of years, and it wasn't until 2 years ago that I realized that I, in fact, was Erin all along. Like the classic Sesame Street picture book, I was the monster at the end of this book.

The Monster at the End of This Book


One of the gifts I received for my birthday this year was a collection of queer poems, prose, and stories spanning the classical period to the present day, from Catullus to [Cat Fitzpatrick](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrBvIjoYRPc). Flipping through the book I spotted a comic about coming out of the closet by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. I recognized Bechdel’s visual style, but couldn’t place from where. I mentioned reading the story to my friend Alana, who a few days later lent me a copy of Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel [*Fun Home*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun_Home). In a weird coincidence, Lindsey had also started reading *Fun Home* for her queer book group, so I had no choice but to dive in.

I wasn’t five pages into the book when it hit me: *I had read this graphic novel before.* Some loose memories started to coalesce: while I was in college 15 years ago, I used to sneak away at least once a week to the third floor alcove of the campus library where the art books - and more importantly, graphic novels - were kept. I think I discovered my “stash” looking for books on art history, but I was also a big fan of webcomics and Scott McCloud’s [writings](https://www.scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/index.html) at that time, so that might have been a factor as well. I would spend hours randomly pulling out comics to read through. I remember reading *Sandman* this way, and discovering the beautiful but p r o b l e m a t i c world of 70s underground comix. I also read a lot of queer comics, like Bechdel’s work. In my memory I feel my face getting flushed as I paged through meditations on sex and sexuality, looked at depictions of bodies very different from mine, and saw writers and artists engaging with gender in a way that I thought I was not allowed to do. I felt voyeuristic, peering into a world that I had no business in. I was excited, but also felt trepidation and shame. I never checked out any of these books, and I didn’t share the voracious amount of queer comic reading I was doing with anyone.

Sometimes reflecting back on my pre-transition emotions feels like looking at one of those sets of talking buttons people train their dogs to use. I had four buttons: Angry, Excited, Anxious, and Silly (unlockable usually when drunk or high). This was really confusing and limiting for me. For instance, if I felt sad I would usually press the Angry or Anxious button, and I couldn’t tell that it was actually “sad” that I was trying to communicate. Similarly if I felt understood, vulnerable, or yearning for gender alignment - I would press Excited. Problem is, I would press the same button when I felt sexually aroused, so I interpreted the physical response encountering media like queer comics that brought my gender feelings to the forefront in the same way that I interpreted my response from watching porn. This led to shame (press the Anxious button), and so I thought I was a pervert and hid what I was doing. Transition has gradually healed me, and my emotional awareness now is much more nuanced than it used to be. I can remember in my first few months spending time with sadness for the first time in 20 years and just *relishing* the hot tears flowing down my face. I was starting to finally connect directly with my feelings.

It turns out this reduction of emotional awareness is a really common experience for trans people before we accept ourselves, and I suspect it’s part of why historically gender euphoria from practices like crossdressing has been interpreted by society as fetish. The critical misunderstanding is the assumption that everyone can access their full set of emotions, and so trans people should be able to tell the difference between sexual arousal and gender euphoria. Trans people however are often extremely practiced at disregarding our own feelings because of years of social reinforcement that our feelings around gender are “wrong,” and so that muscle of awareness atrophies. Because we have repressed our emotional awareness in order to protect ourselves, we fail to make distinctions between intense feelings, like euphoria and arousal.

One example of this wire-crossing that many trans women get scared by in early transition is the “euphoria boner.” Sometimes early forays into gender exploration can give trans women erections in addition to the joy they experience, and this can cause a lot of shame. As emotional awareness recovers, the euphoria boners go away but the feelings of affirmation stay. I’m really glad that I had heard about euphoria boners early on because otherwise I’m sure I would have been disgusted by myself in my first few experiments with clothes and makeup. Once I came out to myself and found myself using the overloaded Excited button less, I was able to better piece apart my feelings, and the erections went away - what a relief!

Returning to my comics reading in college, I'm unsure what trans stories I may have encountered back then, and if my memory of Alison Bechdel’s work is any indication I might only remember them upon rediscovery. Given my levels of emotional repression I’m not sure how much any particular comic could have helped me figure things out sooner, but my time in the library did *something* that helped set me in the right direction. Years later in the first few months of my gender questioning phase I sought out an inordinate amount of comics online in order to understand what I was going through. Some examples included [Real Life Comics](https://www.reallifecomics.com/comic.php?comic=june-29-2020), [Comics By Xan](https://comicsbyxan.com/), works by [Tess Scilipoti](https://www.tessscilipoti.com/itsokaytocry) and [Robin Brooks](https://www.instagram.com/assumptionprime/), and tons of one-off meme comics on [r/egg_irl](https://reddit.com/r/egg_irl/). More recently some trans comic artists I’m into include [Sam Szabo](https://store.silversprocket.net/products/enlightened-transsexual-comix-by-sam-szabo), [Bishakh Som](https://www.instagram.com/biche_bash), [Mattie Lubchansky](https://linktr.ee/lubchansky), and [ND Stevenson](https://www.imfineimfine.com/). As more trans comic artists come out and share their experiences, I'm hopeful that future eggs wandering through comic and graphic novel collections will have an easier time of it.

Self reconciliation seems to come from approaching memories as they surface with gentle curiosity. Unpacking emotional repression is hard work because it requires admitting that what we think of as our conscious choices are often informed by unconscious motivations, such as protecting ourselves from gender feelings. It's especially hard to then take that acceptance and use it to peel back characterizations we may have applied to ourselves, like "sinful" or "perverted." I think the work is worth it though because addressing memories of repression can be an opportunity to find forgiveness for ourselves and unburden ourselves from shame.

That Was (Not) Easy


I’ll preface this blogpost with an admittance that I’ve written a messy ramble through multiple topics tangled in my mind right now. This is just another one of those entries where it’s more important that I get something down now than continue to refine.

### TransGender Forum

At the end of November my friend [Alana](https://linktr.ee/alanaxstorm) shared with me an [archive](https://archive.org/details/transgender-forum) she had found of TransGenderForum, a transgender special interest website from the late 1990s. We spent several days digging through the pages of the site, reading articles, looking at pictures of members and events, and discussing the differences between trans culture then and now. In my grasp to understand the modern concept of transness I keep encountering what feels to me like a rift between the 20th century’s conceptualization of what it means to be transgender and that of the present day. Reading through TGForum seemed like a way to gain perspective on the other side of that rift. Alana is from Gen-X and wrestled with the earlier understanding of transness when she first approached coming out in the 2000s, and so she had some familiarity with what we were reading in the TGForum archive, but I was seeing most of it with fresh eyes. To contrast with the present understanding, Julia Serano’s *[Whipping Girl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Girl)* seems like a foundational text for most of the language we use to describe trans people (and especially the transfeminine experience), but it came out as recently as 2007.

It’s worth noting that because this is the mid-90s internet that we’re talking about, visitors and members of TGForum tended to be white, affluent, and tech-adjacent. TGForum isn’t a broader picture of what it meant to be trans at the time, it’s a specific subset of the experience. Also nearly everyone using the site was AMAB. There’s a small section on transmasc issues and information, but the bulk of the site is dominated by transfems.

“Transfem” is honestly a sloppy label to apply because contemporary terminology is quite different from the categories people identified with back then. For most of the 20th century the “gender community” was a melting pot of CDs (crossdressers), TVs (transvestites), DQs (drag queens), TSes (transsexuals), and TGs (transgender people). “Transgender” could refer to nearly anyone in that list, it meant something more like anyone who tampered with their assigned gender either occasionally or permanently. To be transgender was to sit somewhere between a hobby and a pathological condition - sometimes the TVs talked about going “full time,” as opposed to, say, being a girl on the weekends. Several articles talk about TVs going through cycles of purging their clothes and makeup to swear the whole thing off, only to find themselves “dressing” again. Other people write in ways that show their struggles with what we now call gender dysphoria. There’s a lot of fun slang, like “genetic girl” instead of cisgender woman, or being “read” instead of clocked.

[<img src="/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/hormone-cookies.png" alt="Cartoon of 'Mrs. Benjamin's Hormone Cookies' from TGForum"  />](/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/hormone-cookies.png)

[<img src="/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/nightcap.png" alt="Screenshot of some snark from a weekly chatroom conversation about trans issues"  />](/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/nightcap.png)

I can imagine that for many people experiencing feelings of gender incongruity, community like TGForum was a double edged sword. On the one hand, the framing of transness a hobby or interest could make engaging with their feelings around gender seem easier and more palatable to themselves and others. On the other hand, the 90s concept of what it meant to be transgender did little to affirm those who felt compelled to permanently change their sex, and in fact was largely unsympathetic unless you checked all of the boxes that institutions of the time expected. Doctors following the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care (SOC) required individuals seeking hormones to undertake the “real life test” (RLT) of living in their desired gender for a year before they could get a prescription. This was an impossible hurdle for most. By the early 90s research was starting to come out that the RLT was harming transgender people, but the WPATH (then HBIGDA) did not completely drop the requirement in their standards of care until 2017.

Another complicating factor in what it meant to be trans at the time was the relationship of the gender community with gay communities and gay rights activism. The transnormative narrative that one was required to reiterate in order to receive healthcare was that one had known since they were a child that they were trans, and that they were heterosexual (attracted to the opposite of their desired sex). As we know today, the vast majority of transgender people are homosexual, so many were turned away by this requirement (or more likely gave up early due to the chilling effect). Culturally gay people remained to be accepted by the culture at large, so many TVs and TSes were low-key homophobic. Additionally the gay activist community had spurned, trampled, and strategically jettisoned trans activists since Stonewall in the 1970s and later with ACT UP, so many transgender organizations were leery of building bridges with groups that they saw as inherently hostile.

[<img src="/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/gender-sphere.png" alt="ALL HAIL THE GENDER SPHERE"  />](/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/gender-sphere.png)

There’s an assumption on TGForum that the reader is a straight AMAB, often married. T4T doesn’t seem to be discussed much. It seems like if one was a TV it was acceptable to have a wife or an interest in women; once one became a TS attraction to men was expected. There’s some talk of bisexuality in the personal ads, which maybe signals the shifting sexual mores. There are articles on how to break the news to one’s wife about crossdressing, including an incredible sample by a very straight “Genetic Girl” wife about how she’s not a lesbian, but having sex with her TV wife for the first time was the best she ever had:

> Although I have never had a lesbian encounter, nor do I ever intend to seek one, I nonetheless have the opportunity, through Vanessa, to explore fantasies. I admit to liking her breasts, and her shaved body - I enjoy the smoothness of it. I encouraged her to have her ears pierced, and find the dangly earrings a real turn-on. When she puts on a black, lace teddy I bought her for her birthday, with garters and stockings, it is an incredible turn-on. If she underdresses (wearing women's lingerie under male clothes,) I think about it all day and imagine what the night might bring.

*From* I Like It! *by Linda Kaye*

It seems to me like a lot of the TV/TS culture of places like TGForum had internalized the SOC, which led many transitioned members to embrace AGP later on. Because of their privilege, many members of the site failed to recognize their positionality and therefore the degree to which their "hobby/lifestyle"  was predicated on respectability politics. Stealth is assumed as an endpoint for the TSes; to fit into the world as a cis straight woman is the only way to go once one is no longer a TV. This probably reinforced a Dead Sea Effect when it came to activism, if I can speculate - once you were passing and stealth, engaging in political action was incredibly risky, so why stick around?

### A Young Culture

<audio controls>
  <source src="/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/HALLOWN.WAV" type="audio/wav">
</audio>

Alana found several WAV files embedded in the archive that were sound clips from the 1953 movie *[Glen or Glenda](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045826/)* by the notoriously untalented transvestite filmmaker Ed Wood, and so after a giggle from a few quotes I decided to watch the whole film. *Glen or Glenda* is a product of its time, coming hot off the heels of Christine Jorgensen’s internationally hyped sex change. The premise of the movie is that there are two kinds of individuals who feel the need to crossdress - transvestites who are projecting their “love object” onto a fictional character (their alter ego) instead of their spouse because of problems in their upbringing, and hermaphrodites or “pseudo-hermaphrodites” (intersex people) who require a sex change in order to align themselves with their preferred sex. The main character of the first of two stories, Glen/Glenda, struggles with his desires to crossdress, and experiences some trippy montage sequences before deciding to tell his fiancee of his “condition” and seek professional help.

The movie tries to be sympathetic towards the crossdresser - it treats Glen’s desires as a largely harmless quirk and a solvable problem - but can’t seem to make it’s mind up on whether or not crossdressing is good, actually. There’s some strange bits where our director and writer Wood seems to suggest that womens’ clothes are inherently superior to mens’ - not the first time I’ve heard this assertion from an egg (the author herself has been found guilty on more than one occasion). From my perspective, the 1950s *Glen or Glenda* model of TV/TS seems almost identical to that of the TGForum members in the 1990s, with a few adjustments for technology and medical care. I felt surprised that things seemed as conceptually stagnant, compared to the progress that had been occurring in other fields like feminism.

Given this seeming inertia, it’s been startling to me to reflect on how extremely young our contemporary concept of transness must be. Part of the difference comes from general framing (people are born trans, it’s not a mental illness), part of that is the recent radical shifts in standards of care, but also culturally there’s a lot of new language, like “cisgender” as opposed to “genetic” for instance. On a whim I hit up Google Trends and Ngram to see how often people have been using “deadname”, and was surprised to see that the term dated back to the early 2010s:

[<img src="/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/trends.png" alt="The Google Trends result shows the term 'deadname' originating in the early 2010s"  />](/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/trends.png)

[<img src="/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/ngram.png" alt="The Google Books Ngram result shows the term 'deadname' originating in the early 2010s"  />](/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/ngram.png)

As attitudes about sexual orientation, queerness, the invalidity of the binary, etc. shifted in younger populations, there wasn't a bridge between groups like TGForum and people finding their gender identity through non-stereotypical crossdressy means. I can see how the TVs and TSes might have found more radical concepts of gender and sexuality as threatening, because it undermined the legibility they thought that they were finding to larger society. But with the benefit of hindsight, it looks to me like that respectability was a fight for table scraps. Op-eds gushing about the appearance of a stereotypical crossdresser In Twin Peaks or Patrick Swayze’s performance in the movie *To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything!* strike me as kind of desperate. I find myself thinking back to Grace Lavery’s recent assertions in *Pleasure and Efficacy* that transgender people effectively destroy ontologies. We hinder ourselves when we try to fit the mold that society offers us.

[<img src="/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/alana-rant.png" alt="Me ranting to Alana about Imogen Binnie and Kurt" />](/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/alana-rant.png)

So now when I hear someone bring up every transfem’s favorite speculative history - “what if Kurt Cobain had come out as trans?” Or someone asks “why didn’t the Wachowskis transition sooner if they were making movies like *Bound* in the 90s?” - I feel like I have a definitive answer. TV/TS culture was an evolutionary dead-end. While there’s credit to be given for some of the activism of the late 90s, that culture held little regard for breaking taboos, for embracing queerness, for going against the grain. It was largely conservative and there was no room for radical elements. Our modern transness seems to have come largely from elsewhere.

In some ways, this has been a relief to discover. While people talk about the long history of transgender people, to know that the modern understanding of transness is less than 20 years old means that in many ways the trans people of today are pioneering the interaction between society and ourselves in venues that our predecessors did not. When I feel like I’m struggling against oppressive systems, confused authorities and well-meaning but often clueless community members, I can put that in the context of a lack of understanding in most cases as opposed to outright transphobia. It means that the exhaustion that I and my peers face when furthering our transitions is often new inroads for everyone involved. We are defining processes for coming out at work, we are educating our healthcare workers, we are being visible on our own terms and setting expectations for how trans people should be treated. We struggle not because we’re incapable, but because we are early in the history of integration of trans people into our current society and every day we each blaze a new trail.

### Finding Elders

[<img src="/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/tgforum-ladies.png" alt="A number of member photos from TGForum"  />](/post-media/cant-stop-thinking/tgforum-ladies.png)

I first became interested in trans aging several months ago when I watched the documentary *[The Stroll](https://www.hbo.com/movies/the-stroll)* by filmmaker Kristen Lovell. Lovell is a trans woman of color who worked as a sex worker in the meatpacking district of NYC in the 1980s. Lovell’s documentary focuses on her and her peers’ experiences in sex work, encounters with the law, and evolving NYC culture, combining footage from TV and films of the time with animations and present-day interviews to paint a picture of how life in the district changed radically over the past 40 years. Many of the women and people who were interviewed are now in their 60s, and to see and hear them describe the arcs of their lives was incredible. I haven’t crossed paths with many trans women much older than me, most events I’ve attended seem to be comprised of millennials and boomers. Watching *The Stroll* made me curious about what my life might look like 40 years down the road, and what kind of old woman I will be. 

As I combed through the TGForum archive, I began looking online for members who provided a full name, because I wanted to see where their lives had led them. Most of the time I was unsuccessful, but sometimes I’d turn up a retiree on Facebook or a LinkedIn profile without a photo. Seeing these aging trans women, their RLTs and awkward crossdressing phases far in the past, warmed my heart. Some of the forum members turned out to double down on the gatekeeping standards that they struggled against in their early transitions, advocating for vetting to make sure only “true transsexuals” were receiving HRT and other care. Others grew beyond communities like TGForum, and became activists and educators. I found the website Outwords, an archive of recent interviews with LGBTQ+ historical and cultural figures, and I tracked down interviews with some amazing women connected to TGForum like [Nancy Nangeroni](https://theoutwordsarchive.org/interview/nangeroni-nancy/) and [Jessica Xavier](https://theoutwordsarchive.org/interview/jessica-xavier/). Hearing these women in their 70s talk about their experiences mobilizing community and demonstrate a keen understanding of contemporary gender politics and how it relates to their own self-concepts frankly blew me away. I feel like for the first time in my life I have role models. 

A couple of weeks after our first deep dive, Alana and I decided to join the [Northwest Gender Alliance](https://www.nwgenderalliance.org/about-us) (NWGA) for one of their monthly dinners. The NWGA started out in 1980 as a crossdresser organization that admitted transsexuals, but since then many of the members went on to transition. The NWGA folks that we met at dinner were in their late 60s to late 70s, and I spent the evening listening to these women tell stories about their lives before and after coming out, how they’ve conceptualized themselves over time, and what transition has meant for them.

In the same way that my first in-person support group put me immediately at ease, my initial nerves about meeting trans women 30+ years my senior were calmed as quickly as we sat down to eat. It may sound trite, but: *old trans women are old women*. That’s it. They were funny, and sharp witted, and thoughtful about their feelings and experiences, and even got a little flirty with me! Although some of the women there might not have liked the label, they were also queer in a very queer magnetism way. One gal said that she was 77, had a lesbian daughter and daughter-in-law living with her, 3 girlfriends to go on dates with over the next weekend, and oh yeah, her unsupportive wife lived out back in a shed. She was *beaming* telling me about her queer little family, and I felt such a connection to her. I heard so many phrases that have bubbled out of my peers’ mouths before, like “I threw myself into working out and grew a beard to hide my face,” and “I joined the Navy hoping it would make a man out of me,” and “I thought I was an introvert, but since transition I’ve turned into a social butterfly.” We have always been here and will always exist.

### Conclusions

I have a lot more reading to do on transgender history, and thankfully Christmas brought me quite a few books to work through. Although I have so many more questions about the culture shift of the past 20 years in trans communities, I’m feeling so empowered about what the future might bring for me personally and for trans people as a whole. I realize that I live in a little bubble of liberal safety in Portland, and that things are dire for many trans people in the US right now, but I believe that we will persist and someday thrive. Our culture is young, we are each blazing so many new trails, and we are so capable and strong. Let’s plan to grow old together.

I Can’t Stop Thinking About Transness!!!

My Dolls


I have a recurring nightmare that I am visiting my parents, staying in my old room in a childhood home. While I am occupied with something, they steal my clothes and rental car, leaving me stranded and with only my old boy clothes for me to wear. They misgender me and called me by my deadname, pretending like nothing has changed. I feel helpless and afraid, with no recourse to get myself to safety.

My actual relationship with my parents is this: my mother badgers me to call once a month, and we have a quick chat about my wife’s career, what my sister’s kids are doing, and any notable good deeds my parents have done for my relatives or their church. They don’t ask, “Erin, what’s new in your life?” unless it pertains to my job. My parents think of themselves as supportive of my transition - when I first came out I directed them to find a local PFLAG group, which they attended for a bit. This gave them an opening to be interviewed for a TV spot on pride month, where my father proceeded to talk on statewide television about the grief he experienced when I came out from “losing a son.” He had shared none of this with me. He uses the wrong pronouns on the phone when I call, and the only questions my parents ask about transition are from my mother, in the form of “Are you really happy?” Yes, Mom. I’m really happy.

Something that helped me early in transition that didn’t really apply to me directly but bolstered me a bit were Daniel Lavery’s “Let Me Save You Some Time” essays ([1](https://www.thechatner.com/p/let-me-save-you-some-time-a-field), [2](https://www.thechatner.com/p/let-me-save-you-some-time-on-transitioning)), brief pieces on common antipatterns trans people encounter with their families when coming out. As far as I know he hasn’t written about the phenomenon of “supportive in word but actually just tolerant.” This thing where family members pat themselves on the back for checking the boxes of being good little progressives, but fail to acknowledge the humanity of the transitioner and instead treat them as an abstraction. It’s not about caring for the trans person in their life, it’s about getting brownie points and not being seen as a “bad person.”

I think this scenario runs adjacent to a phenomenon a friend of mine has termed “the Void.” Here’s the setup: a trans person is out with cis friends or family members, and everyone is talking about their lives. The trans person mentions something about their transness or transition, hoping to be a little bit vulnerable and get some empathy for what they’re going through. Instead the group goes silent, and then proceeds as if the trans person had said nothing. That’s the Void, and practically everyone I know who is trans has experienced it. One time I had several neighbors over for cocktails, and when the conversation turned to extended family I brought up my aforementioned struggles with my parents. There was a brief pause, and then the woman who was speaking before me went right back to bitching about her mom as if I hadn’t said anything. The Void made me feel like I wasn’t there, but hey, everyone in the group had plausible deniability: they didn’t say anything transphobic!

Hearkening back to my post [Between Two Worlds](/posts/between-two-worlds), spending considerable time in groups of people who are majority not-queer becomes more and more difficult for me because of my growing awareness of phenomena like the Void. When talking to my parents, the Void is the region of conversation that they will not cross into or draw attention to, despite my past efforts and willingness to open up. The Void reinforces that by talking about my transness, I’ve done something wrong, and it generates feelings of shame and disgust inside myself. I think the fear in my nightmare is an insecurity I hold that there’s validity to the Void, that I deserve to be ignored. My waking mind knows I deserve better.

Parents and The Void


When you spotted me and my wife entering your store, were you afraid? Or maybe just annoyed? I’m sure you know I wasn’t there to make your life any harder, we were just another pair of out-of-towners looking for deals. But you clocked me for sure, and I you soon after, and then it was clear that you weren’t going to acknowledge me in any way. In fact, my wife and I found ourselves sitting in need of assistance for quite some time while you found other things to do, until one of your colleagues noticed and took pity on us. As we went to check out it became increasingly apparent the exaggerated degree to which you were trying to avoid me, down to darting around me with your gaze averted and making up an excuse to ditch the register as soon as we reached the end of the line. I wouldn’t have noticed or cared at all if we had made quick eye contact, like people normally do when passing close by each other, but the effort you were putting in to avoid looking in my general direction bordered on ludicrous.

How many times has this scenario played out for you? You find yourself suddenly in the presence of another trans woman, and feel the need to put as much distance between you and her as possible? Had something happened in the past that embarrassed or threatened you in front of your customers to provoke this kind of behavior? I’m reflecting on the old advice given to trans women in the 20th century: leave your family, skip town, start fresh in stealth. You looked to be at least 50, is that something you had to do? Was I risking your cover, drawing comparison by standing next to you?

Or maybe it was more my appearance that was the problem - very tall, clocky face, purple hair. Feminine, queer, obviously trans. So many women your age were exposed to ideas about “true transsexuals” - straight, gender stereotype conforming, always knew from the moment they put on mommy’s high heels. Did you see me as just some AGP scum, a fetishistic pervert, while you, a real woman, were “doing transition right”? Our encounter left me feeling fearful that you were disgusted by me.

I have to admit, I found you really striking. Once you caught my attention, I saw how good of a salesperson you were with the other customers. You clearly excelled at your job, and looked good while doing it. Despite living in the big city, I don’t cross paths with older trans women usually. I’m so curious about what it must have been like to come out and transition 15, 20 years ago or more, and would relish the opportunity to sit down for tea with someone with your experience. I wonder about what it feels like to you now, now that our world is both more accepting and tinged with overt hate. Is life better or worse for you? When you started, did you have anyone more experienced to talk with?

I hope you know that I would never want to out you against your will, and that I know stealth is for many trans women a guarantee of safety. I can see how if you had been stealth for a long time, getting clocked might feel like a threat to guard against. But after the way you treated me in your store, I feel a little hurt, and wonder if it was necessary that you acted the way you did. Would it surprise you to know that of all of the people I interacted with in your town during the few days my wife and I visited, the one most cold towards me was you, another trans woman?

I hope you’re not lonely.

Erin


Open Letter to a Stealth Trans Woman


This morning I woke up with a whopping headache. Once I had become more conscious, I realized it was from a migraine I had in my sleep. Most of the time I get them during the day, but sometimes they happen while I'm dreaming, and I see the jagged aura flashing in my dream vision.

Before a migraine hits is a stage called the “prodrome,” and different people have different tells that they are experiencing prodrome. For me, prodrome can be either A. a day of exaggerated grumpiness beforehand or B. a day of exaggerated creativity. Yesterday I designed 2 stickers, wrote a short comic, photoshopped memes for friends, and did some fancy Minecraft footwork (oh yeah and did my job somewhere in there). By about the afternoon I was pretty sure that I was in prodrome and wondered when the migraine would hit.

I used to get very down on myself about not taking care enough to avoid triggering a migraine, and I was very anxious about doing things that I thought might cause them. Once I learned about prodrome and started to see my pattern, I realized that my migraines were beyond my control. There are a couple things I can do, like getting enough sleep and not using certain drugs frequently, but past that they're totally random and usually are lined up a day in advance.

Finding acceptance for pain is hard to do. I want to feel like my pain is my fault because that means that I can control it. But after years of trying, I've come to the conclusion that I can't, and I have to live with this totally random thing coming in and periodically fucking up my days and nights. But on the other hand there's some relief from anxiety that comes from realizing that it's not my fault, it's not something I have much control over and therefore not something I should feel guilty for. It's a hard freedom to sit with.

Similarly, coming to terms with my transness has been like making peace with my migraines in some ways. Since I first came out and accepted myself I’ve occasionally struggled with self-doubt because at the time it felt like I was making a choice. However, the more I examine my past and present, the more obvious it becomes to me that I had no choice, it was only a matter of time before I either embraced being trans or imploded. I even tried initially to reject my feelings and barely made it three weeks before I realized I was kidding myself. My brain was very good at keeping me safe by preventing me from knowing about my transness, and it did just that until it was no longer necessary. In order to move on with my life, I have had to relinquish what I thought was control - choice in the matter of being trans.

That said I’m still working on letting go of the guilt I carry for my time in the closet. My wife and I have been in couples therapy for the past few months, and one of the elements of our relationship that we’ve discovered is the degree of trauma that we’ve both incurred because of my latent transness. For much of our relationship I rejected most forms of affection, especially touch. I wasn’t ok with PDA, and while I desired sex, in practice I found it frustrating and dissociative. I know now that I walled myself off from these things unconsciously in order to protect myself from an awareness of my body. In doing so, I hurt myself by denying my needs, and I hurt Lindsey in the process. Now that I can identify these old patterns that I no longer need to protect me, I’m trying to change my behavior in order to dissolve that emotional scar tissue.

It’s funny, while I was writing this Lindsey sent me some photos from about four years ago and I barely recognize the person in them as myself anymore. Like, I have some of the memories, but my initial response to seeing the pictures was “oh yeah, that guy.” So I find myself in this state where I carry memories of choices made and regret for those choices, but I realize that my regret comes from hindsight. I’m working towards finding forgiveness for myself, and that starts with patience.

A Hard Freedom


Today I had what will most likely be my last phone call with my grandmother. She’s nearly 93 years old, dying from a metastasized tumor from lung cancer, and within the last couple of weeks has experienced significant cognitive decline. We didn’t talk on the phone for very long, I’m not sure she knew who I was. I told her goodbye and that I loved her, and after I hung up I cried. I had been afraid to call, but I’m glad that I did because even a little small talk seemed to give me some closure with her.

“Fraught” might be a good word for my relationship with my grandmother. I can't really give any examples of happy memories with her, she was a very critical woman with a sharp tongue. Talking to her on the phone and hearing her say how happy she was to be surrounded by her family was honestly deeply disturbing. She was an incredibly ambitious woman, with a career that ran the span of her adult life - especially a hard thing to do having 4 kids in the 50s-70s. She made the choice to further her ambition over having a meaningful relationship with her family, and now at the end of her life it's really obvious what that wrought with her kids' relationships. But I don't know if she even wanted to have children in the first place, so much of her time and place denied her agency and I can empathize with scrabbling for anything she could get. 

I was so afraid to come out to my grandmother, she was a dyed-in-the-wool Barry Goldwater conservative with Fox News constantly on TV any time my family visited. But amazingly the few times we've talked since were seamless, she used my name and pronouns and made no fuss at all, even seemed positive. I guess she really surprised me in that way, and I'm thankful for that. So I guess to put it all together - personally we didn't connect, and I question some of her choices in life, but at the same time I have some respect for her drive given her life circumstances. I think we have a lot in common personality-wise, and there wasn't ever going to be a moment of recognition between us on that.

Also - she was a terminal internet head. Got her first ThinkPad in the mid-90s and was up smoking and browsing the net til 2am most nights until this year. Ridiculous, unrelatable. 🙃

Speaking with my grandmother today made me remember when her husband died 20 years ago. I was 14 and had just arrived back home from an evening bike ride to find a house of crying family members. I was stunned, and went into my room and felt… nothing. I felt the absence of something, like there was an emotion I couldn’t quite experience. I remember worrying that I was some sort of sociopath because I couldn’t seem to access the grief that I knew was in me for a man who had meant a lot to me. Something was in the way.

I finished my second read through Imogen Binnie’s *Nevada* this weekend, and there’s a part at the end where the protagonist Maria is reflecting out loud on the bravado that trans people have to put on when they come out in order to assert their gender to the people around them. Maria wonders if needing to act so sure of oneself might become a roadblock for the transitioner, because it could keep them from continuing to evolve as a person. I think Binnie is burying a lede here, which is: trans people experience a lot of doubt about their transitions. The doubt is not because we’re not trans, it’s the messaging we receive from the world all our lives that tries to convince us of the impossibility of our existences. Accepting oneself marks the start of unlearning these messages. It’s why we joke about childhood or “egg” signs so much, we’re looking for something in our past that reminds us of who we are.

Maybe there’s room for signs in the present, too. My grandmother isn’t dead yet, but she is gone. I cried when I heard about her rapid decline, and when I got off the phone this afternoon I sat with my grief and let it roll over me until eventually felt a bit better. I could not have done that before transition, it just wouldn’t have happened. I needed transition to access my emotions. It’s so much better to feel grief and experience that hurt than to feel cut off from emotion altogether. I made the right choice to accept myself. Hard moments like these remind me of it.

Signs Present


I had a really interesting conversation with a friend of mine yesterday about what “women’s spaces” mean for transfeminine people. Fae were explaining to me about faer recent involvement in faer work’s women’s employee resource group, and how fae felt conflicted because while fae are transfeminine and often present as quite traditionally feminine, fae truly do not embrace the term “woman” when self-describing. However, it’s a lot easier for fem to say to cis people “nonbinary trans woman” because it gets the point across as to how fae expect to be interacted with. We talked about the intention of the ERG in the first place, and I argued that ultimately a women’s ERG exists to address gender gaps in leadership and opportunity, so faer presence as a person with an underrepresented gender would seem to be desirable from a position of solidarity. Fae raised that the tenor of the group often leaned more individualistic, ie. more “girlboss” than feminist, and additionally that fae were nervous about speaking up for fear of being viewed as an interloper by TERFs or TERF-inclined members. The conversation left me wondering how effective ERG-pushed policies like gender ratio quotas for leadership could actually be if the sexist policies that led to board rooms filling up with white cis men are never dismantled.

 When I was first coming to terms with my need to transition, I hoped that I would find more solidarity with cis women. Having been a good little feminist scholar in college and after, I guess my dream was that through my words and actions it would be apparent that I knew how to shirk my previously-afforded male privilege and find connection with other women through our common struggles. I think I also hoped some cis women would take pity on me and help me learn the lessons of girlhood that I wasn’t afforded before. Instead, I’ve found myself caught in this feedback loop. When I’m in women’s spaces, femme spaces, I don’t know who I can trust because you can’t spot the TERFs. All it takes is one dirty look from someone and suddenly I feel afraid for my safety. It’s like a kid peed in the pool, the water is tainted. And then I don’t want to be in that space. I go to another event for femmes and wonder, “where are the other transfems?” and I get looks again and I’m out. It’s a politics of hatred and exclusion, and it seems to be working. I don’t get the impression that most cis women (or nonbinary AFABs and transmascs) are even aware that these are the waters they’re swimming in.

One-on-one, I have a lot of insecurities about doing womanhood “right”, and so I can sometimes be closed off with cis friends and acquaintances. It’s really rare that anyone sees how I’m at a disadvantage and makes me feel welcome. I have a couple of cis friends who are phenomenal at this and I’m very thankful to know them, but they’re definitely the exception. What seems to be the common thread with these women is they’ve had to grapple with gender more than the average person, maybe through their work or with a trans or non-gender-conforming partner. I feel like most people take their relationship with gender for granted, and that everyone - cis and trans - stands to gain from some deliberation with themselves about their whereabouts in the gender landscape. For example, this past year my wife had an epiphany about her own cis gender performance, and has absolutely blossomed in her embrace of dykeness since. She cleaned out her closet and dumped out all of her skirts and dresses once she realized - and this will be familiar to most trans readers - she wanted to be *with* women who dressed femme, not *be* one of them. It’s been kind of amazing to watch, and it’s instilled in me a dream of a future where cis and trans people alike are empowered to find their own gender euphoria. I think in a world like that I could find the sisterhood I want so badly.

I’ve been rereading Imogen Binnie’s first book *Nevada* over the past couple of weeks, and it continues to surprise me how much my second pass through differs from my first. I read *Nevada* about a month before I came out to myself as trans, and I credit it for showing me what an egg I was and how I was repressing my need to transition. On this second pass it’s been really startling to me how much my opinion of the protagonist Maria Griffiths has changed. Last year she struck me as a somewhat messy, somewhat tragic figure - I think I was carrying a lot more of the “sad pathetic transsexual” stereotype in my brain at the time, and Maria fostered some pathos along those lines. This time though, I’m just like “girl, take your shot.” Maria is irresponsible, hurtful to the people in her life, rationalizes as many bad decisions as she can, and intellectualizes anything that tries to poke at her true feelings. She’s proud and won’t ask others for help, and part of that is because she’s been hurt before but another part of that is she’s just not willing to sit with her feelings. Binnie has created a really interesting character that subverts the transnormative narrative: Maria Griffiths has not grown substantially as a person from her transition. 

I’m bringing up Maria and *Nevada* in the context of women’s spaces because at one point early in the book she functions as a mouthpiece for Binnie by writing an interesting blogpost about trans women stereotypes. To quote some:

> There is a stereotype that trans women get all this male privilege all their lives, and then they transition and take up too much space and are overly assertive and, y’know, stuff like that. And it’s true, sometimes folks transition and are jerks; the flip side is that there are a lot of cis women who are jerks, too, and those trans women just join the general population of women who are jerks.

> What’s a lot more common, a million times more common, and what nobody ever seems to talk about, is this thing where trans women are given male privilege all their lives before transition but they don’t know what to do with it so it kind of stunts them socially.

> …

> I don’t think I’ve ever met a trans woman in the process of transition who was comfortable taking up, like, any goddam space at all, you know? You have to actively look at the women around you, if you’re lucky enough to be close to any women, to figure out that women take up tons of space, however much they want, all the time—they just tend to do it differently than men.

I don’t think what Binnie-by-way-of-Maria is gesturing at here in terms of how to occupy space has clicked for me yet. I know what she’s talking about, I’ve seen it before, and I’m just not there yet. My mantra this week has been “this is where I am *right now*.” Transition is slow, personal growth is slow, and I’m often impatient to get to the part where I feel like I can take up space, where I feel more comfortable being myself around cis women, where I can go further and assert myself in feminist solidarity. I’m not Maria Griffiths because I *am* willing to reflect on my feelings and try to change my behavior, but it’s a struggle to keep moving forward when it can feel unsafe to be present and active in the sort of spaces that ostensibly should be helping me towards that growth.

Feeling Welcome


Something that’s been on my mind a lot lately has been a type of knowledge that I’ve been calling “girl lore.” Girl lore is tricks of the trade for feminine gender expression, social customs, and an understanding of one’s body beyond health class. Having access to girl lore gives one grace in their performance of gender, makes things go a little bit more smoothly. When someone doesn’t have access to girl lore, their attempts at gender can seem misguided or cringe. Some examples of girl lore might include knowing how to work with hair products, understanding how clothes fit, navigating certain currents of feminine conversation (like false praise), and aspects of hygiene.

Everyone has some girl lore internalized, but some people have access to more than others. Having a “cool mom” or older sister goes a long way, and if one is transfem sometimes coming from living as a gay man prior can mean access to feminine circles that straight eggs could not enter. Sometimes cis women miss out on girl lore in their upbringing due to repressive parents or poverty, and some girl lore circulates in ways more specific to socioeconomic status. Girl lore is not without bias - it can be repressive, it can reinforce patriarchy - but the important thing about it is it lends to how well one “fits in.”

Early in transition I was hungry for girl lore. I was trying to come off as more feminine and kept running into barriers where I felt like the knowledge I needed was just out of reach. I felt cringey because while I was technically checking the boxes - changing my body, affecting a new voice, wearing feminine clothes - I could tell I didn’t have finesse. I had taste enough to detect the problem but not yet the skills to address it, and so I had to go out and very deliberately hunt for those skills. One respite I’ve found is that ally cis women are often willing to share lore, but the trick is knowing what to ask for, and that requires vulnerability. While there’s still a lot I feel cringey about with myself these days, I can tell my skills at “girl” are improving and I’m slowly gaining the lore I need to present myself how I want. It takes intention, curiosity, and time. It also takes a good deal of self forgiveness, which is much harder.

The other day I read the satirical sci-fi novel *Future Feeling* by Joss Lake, which is told from the perspective of Penfield, a young trans man living at the end of the century who struggles with gender envy around Instagram celebrities. Due to shenanigans, he runs afoul of the Rhiz (long-I, short for rhizome), an international queer shadow government/mutual aid network, and is tasked by the organization to set things right. During his quest we see Penfield at one point pining to enter the men’s sauna at a NYC bathhouse, but the secret society of cis men who possess the room are unimpressed by Pen’s (very trans) proposed demonstration of his masculinity. Pen is caught intellectualizing in lieu of applying the lore he needs to read and enter the room. Later in the novel Pen receives an offer to enter the sauna brotherhood, but he rejects it because he’s grown past the need for masc acceptance on cis terms. He’s found a greater masculinity, one that is big enough to encompass the uniqueness of his transmasculinity and the queerness therein.

I’ve started to encounter what I would call trans girl lore, though I’m finding a lot of what deserves that title is just not well-circulated. Something increasingly palpable to me in American transfem community is a void in our history, the lack of continuity between the transfem culture of the 20th century and that of young transfems like myself in the present. I blame this void on the genocide of trans people by the institutions that refused to prevent the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s, and also on transnormative oppression that forced those who desired to transition to break away from their communities and go stealth. Because we lack these femmes in community, there’s been a lot of what seems to be rediscovery of lore going on in terms of transfem gender expression, understanding sex, and nuances of the physical changes that come with transition.

In 2010, trans activist Mira Bellwether wrote the zine *Fucking Trans Women* (issue #0), intending for the publication to start a dialogue about what I would call trans girl lore around sex. Before her death in 2023 Bellwether expressed frustration with how one topic - muffing - seemed to be the only takeaway that many readers had from the zine, and also that there never were enough subsequent contributions to release an issue #1. Discovering and sharing lore means being real and vulnerable, reflecting on one’s experiences and giving them form. That’s a lot to ask of people, especially as a stranger.

I feel like being part of a community means we have a responsibility to share lore each other, and so I’m trying to do what I can to open up. At the personal and social level, this looks like being a lot more frank about my personal experiences and showing curiosity towards others. I’ve made some attempts to organize and disseminate lore and resources in my local transfem groups, but last time I got ambitious about it I was left feeling dissuaded. With all that’s been going through my head about girl lore lately I’m starting to get the itch again, and I think I can learn from my mistakes. We’ll see what comes of it.


Lore Drop



I increasingly feel like a woman torn between two worlds, Cis World and Transfem World. Cis World is where I live and work but also where I am threatened by society for my nonconformity. Transfem World feels safer, but it’s far away from my cis friends and family and not a place I can stay long-term. I cling as best as I can to my connections to Cis World as it pushes me away, while Transfem World pulls me in the same direction with utopian promises. I feel like I need to be able to travel between the two in order to hold everything in my life together, but it increasingly feels harder to do that.

Cis World is the world of jobs and property, of life milestones and families of origin. Cis World tolerates queerness and transness that is legible under the lens of patriarchy. Because transfemininity embodies a rejection of the superiority of masculinity, Cis World distrusts trans women and paints us as both sad amusements and dangerous predators. Cis World bartenders pretend I’m not there when I try to order something. Older men in Cis World stare at me on the sidewalk, full head rotation and slack-jawed. There are “sapphic night” or “femme affinity” events in Cis World, but they’re not for anyone who was born with a penis. Leaving town puts me on guard, I feel pressed to evaluate everyone in my vicinity as a threat. 

At the same time, I feel this incredible growing joy in transness that I want to share with everyone around me through surreal jokes and incredible outfits and heart-wrenching music. I feel sustained by art by and about other trans people, about the potential that so many of us carry in secret until one day it arcs across us in a bright and colorful flash. Then I attend Cis World parties ostensibly fundraising for trans causes where I’m met with side-eyes and false flattery. I feel like it’s a joke, “inclusivity” for the social credit. My life is not a goddamn plywood cutout to peek through and pose with.

Transfem World is a place where I can catch my breath and get a reprieve from the trauma and grind of microaggressions in Cis World. When I’m in Transfem World I don’t have to deal with people questioning my validity (unless I’ve lost the good graces of some clique). It’s a lot easier to talk with the folks there about bodies, emotions, memories, sex, queer joy. That said, it’s hard to stay there without inviting consequences from Cis World. Cis people aren’t welcome there (for good reason), and so the longer I stay in Transfem World the weaker I feel like my ties are to cis people that I care about and to society as a whole. I worry that a full-time stay in Transfem world would alienate me from loved ones and the powers-that-be that I need access to in order to sustain myself.

 I’ve spoken to many transfems who have felt the push out of Cis World and start talking about founding their own rural communes, healthcare systems, bathtub yam-based estradiol, prepper arsenals. This often gets lumped under Torrey Peters’ definition of “T4T,” as an ethos of selfless trans-supportive mutual aid to the bitter end as put forth in her book *Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones*. But separatism is a utopian dream that leaves the disadvantaged - like trans kids - out in the cold. Additionally much of what passes for Transfem World institution is propped up by individual goodwill and circumstance, and so I doubt the ability for such projects to come to fruition. I’ve been accused of being an assimilationist for my skepticism around this, but I think assimilation looks more like valorizing passing and stealth as opposed to continuing to live visibly with cis people. To be clear, T4T is a much bigger concept than just Peters’ ethos but that’s another blogpost.

Ultimately, I feel like the struggle to move between Cis World and Transfem world comes down to my ability - and willingness - to tolerate the shit I have to put up with. I have the distinct advantage at this moment in my life to handle more bullshit than most because I have privilege, specifically economic privilege. Having a job that pays well means I can appear more or less the way I want, get most of the medical care I need, clear transition hurdles more easily. And this initially gave me the impression that I can use my privilege to buy my legibility to cis people. If I do all the transnormative things and get really good at doing “woman” in a societally acceptable way it’s bound to get better, right?

But the degree to which I bend to fit into society really doesn’t matter when I’m encountering a transphobe or a transphobic institution. If society wants me dead because of what I am, trying to fit in better isn’t going to change that. As I fearfully try to preserve what balance I have, I'm having to come to terms with the fact that my agency matters much less than I am willing to admit.

Between Two Worlds


<p class="caption"><i>Host</i>, 2009
</p>

## Introduction

About a year ago I took down most of my art from the internet. I had maintained an online art practice since 2009, but with my transition came a deep distrust of my previous creative work. As I found myself deepening my ability to feel emotion, my earlier art felt extremely flat and muted to me. It embarrassed me to have it still visible online, as it felt unrepresentative of my current understanding of myself, so I decided to take it down until I had time to sort things out. Now it’s been a year and I’m starting to feel like I have a way to talk about that art.

But before I do that, I need to talk about eggs. For those unfamiliar with the term, an egg is someone who has not realized that they are trans. One cannot identify as an egg, either you are living in ignorance - maybe “gender questioning” - or you know you are trans. So “egg” is a label applied to one’s past but not an identity actively lived. Theorist fave Grace Lavery writes in [*Pleasure and Efficacy*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691243931/pleasure-and-efficacy) about a concept she calls “egg theory,” a way of understanding egg reasoning, and by consequence art production. She describes egg theory as being defined by two forces: one, the impossibility of transition for the egg in question, and two that this transition is prevented by what she calls “desire… aerosolized into a fine spray… all that is required is that its ontology be virtual and plastic.”

In other words, an egg has unexpressed desires to transition and live as their proper gender. Those desires meet the egg's perception of the impossibility of transition, and through a twisted logic of self preservation become abstracted into other forms. These other forms look like repression, weird rules one has for oneself, projection. As desire persists and grows, so does this transmutation of desire into a protective mass. This is the shell of the egg.

## Examining my Eggshell

My first tip-off that I needed to reexamine my art from an egg theory perspective came when I was walking up the stairs one day and took a long, deep look into a painting I had made in college called “Host.” I didn’t remember my original intentions behind Host, just that I had pulled images out of my folder of random pics I saved from the internet and collaged them together into a composition. As I looked at the painting, I could see that all of my selections had something to do with embodiment - cringey masculine figures in crushed velvet suits, sexy punk girls with bright red hair, a woman with a joyous expression that I had covered in a blot of green. Alien forms with twisted bodies, an Evangelion EVA suit, a space station given a tribal mask for a face. A study of a bust literally titled "Ideal Head of a Woman." The figure in the lower right with the glasses is a self portrait, I'm wearing my wife's invisibility cloak to hide my face. All undergirded by a field of bright pink. I realized, in viewing my painting with fresh eyes, that it was an expression of gender envy, of my struggles with my body at the time, a 20 year old hiding behind a shaggy haircut and nondescript baggy clothes.

I discussed my moment of recognition with an artist friend who is also trans and had been going through the same struggle with her older work, and so we compared notes. We started finding curious tendencies in our art that seemed to be indicative of a need for deflection, abstraction, and also secret desire. In looking back and trying to remember my feeling around art production, I believe that these tendencies were protective, stemming from repression of my transness, and therefore pieces of my egg shell. I want to outline the tendencies I found in my art here, in case other people can relate.

## Tendencies

### Systematization

[![Perlin Flow Playground, 2017](/post-media/egg-art/systematization/marbled.png)](/post-media/egg-art/systematization/marbled.png)

<p class="caption"><i>Perlin Flow Playground</i>, 2017<br>WebGL app for drawing using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise" target="_blank">Perlin Noise</a></p>

[![Procedural Metaphor Generator, 2018](/post-media/egg-art/systematization/proc-metaphors.PNG)](/post-media/egg-art/systematization/proc-metaphors.PNG)

<p class="caption"><i>Procedural Metaphor Generator</i>, 2018<br>Command line tool that generates metaphors from templates and lists of common words</p>

By treating art-making as a series of operations or set of instructions to follow, I couched my expression safely in the constraints of rigorous systems. Some constraint is good for creativity, it lends to solving problems of expression in novel ways. But too much constraint and art becomes repetitive or tepid. This is exactly what I wanted as an egg, because it protected my choices (and therefore my inner being) from too much scrutiny. I justified this creative approach by relating it back to conceptual artists like [Sol LeWitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_LeWitt), but the difference was that LeWitt and others were using systems as a way of engaging with others in the creative process.

### Imitation

[![Landscape, 2009](/post-media/egg-art/imitation/landscapepaintingsm.png)](/post-media/egg-art/imitation/landscapepaintingsm.png)

<p class="caption"><i>Landscape</i>, 2009<br>Acrylic on MDF, composition made from map tiles from <i>Pokémon Red</i></p>

[![Time, 2010](/post-media/egg-art/imitation/vector-dali.PNG)](/post-media/egg-art/imitation/vector-dali.PNG)

<p class="caption"><i>Time</i>, 2010<br>A vector art pastiche of Salvador Dali's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persistence_of_Memory" target="_blank"><i>The Persistence of Memory</i></a></p>

Ironic distance served me by allowing for the feeling of artistic expression without the challenges of self awareness and emotional connection. There’s something eggy about trying on other artists in the manner of clothing, as well. I've written a little bit more about this tendency with regard to wordplay in the post [Learning to Trust](/posts/learning-to-trust/).

### Technical mastery

[![Game Boy Assembly Experiment, 2019](/post-media/egg-art/technical-mastery/helloworld-gbasm.jpg)](/post-media/egg-art/technical-mastery/helloworld-gbasm.jpg)

<p class="caption"><i>Game Boy Assembly Experiment</i>, 2019<br>Setup for a custom Game Boy cartridge</p>

[![WebGPU Sketch, 2022](/post-media/egg-art/technical-mastery/suzanne-backface.png)](/post-media/egg-art/technical-mastery/suzanne-backface.png)

<p class="caption"><i>WebGPU Sketch</i>, 2022<br>A raytracer that runs in the browser</p>

In order to systematize and imitate more effectively, one needs to increase their technical ability. For my egg self, this looked like deep diving into the specifics of a medium only to lose sight of my original reason for mastering that medium, leading to outcomes closer to “programmer art.” I was fleeing from the challenge of subject matter, of investigating my feelings around a composition, and so I spent time getting really good at certain media and techniques that I would undoubtedly *eventually* use for expression. Someday.

### Tools over expression

[![Teensy TV, 2020](/post-media/egg-art/tools-over-expression/teapot.jpg)](/post-media/egg-art/tools-over-expression/teapot.jpg)

<p class="caption"><i>Teensy TV</i>, 2020<br>A microcontroller for generating composite video signals</p>

[![GIF Brushes, 2013](/post-media/egg-art/tools-over-expression/brushes-example.PNG)](/post-media/egg-art/tools-over-expression/brushes-example.PNG)

<p class="caption"><i>GIF Brushes</i>, 2013<br>A website in which users could use GIFs as animated brushes on the page</p>

Similarly, I found myself often building tools and inventing media formats ostensibly to enable art production for myself and unnamed others. I failed to actually *use* these tools, and no one else used them, because they were built to keep me away from creativity, not to enable it.

### Stoned shit

[![Hallucination 2, 2008](/post-media/egg-art/stoned-shit/hallucination2.gif)](/post-media/egg-art/stoned-shit/hallucination2.gif)

<p class="caption"><i>Hallucination 2</i>, 2008<br>Animated GIF</p>

[![THOMASALVIA.GIF, 2010](/post-media/egg-art/stoned-shit/THOMASALVIA.GIF)](/post-media/egg-art/stoned-shit/THOMASALVIA.GIF)

<p class="caption"><i>THOMASALVIA.GIF</i>, 2010<br>Animated GIF</p>

We’ve all heard the cliche about drug use enabling artists to access their subconscious and enable further expression. I think a lot of people repeating this fail to recognize how often artists - people in general - eggs, especially - use drugs to get away from their feelings. The art I made with drug use manifested as feedback, repetition or deformation of form until obliteration, turning up the gain until the speakers blew. I didn't have to sit with my inner voice if it was drowned out.

### Gender envy and dysphoria

[![Woman, 2010](/post-media/egg-art/gender-envy/GIRL.png)](/post-media/egg-art/gender-envy/GIRL.png)

<p class="caption">
  <i>Woman</i>, 2010
  <br>
  Vector art study. Final image on the left, source image (found in the same folder) on the right.
  <br/>Yes, that is Ash Ketchum. All I can say is: <i>GIRL.</i>
  </i>
</p>

[![13_going_on_30.jpg from the Broad Abstractions series, 2010](/post-media/egg-art/gender-envy/13_going_on_30.jpg)](/post-media/egg-art/gender-envy/13_going_on_30.jpg)

<p class="caption"><i>13_going_on_30.jpg</i>, 2010
<br>
JPG from the <i>Broad Abstractions</i> series (2009-11)
</p>

[![Oranges, 2009](/post-media/egg-art/gender-envy/oranges.gif)](/post-media/egg-art/gender-envy/oranges.gif)

<p class="caption"><i>Oranges</i>, 2009<br>Static GIF</p>

I found myself toying with gender in what I thought were "safe" or appropriate ways, but as a whole my choices reveal certain desires and emotions. A face swap or body swap may look harmless or funny, but add enough of them up and a picture of incongruity starts to form. Related to the “stoned shit” tendency I see a repeated motif of bodily obliteration in my work, splitting apart and breaking down bodies to constituent parts. These especially crop up in images of women, but also occur in my selfies. The images are usually humorous and never abject or visceral, but they're certainly weird. Also some of my drawings of women beg the question “is that a self portrait?”.

I made collages that first appear to be sexualized or objectifying, but the egginess comes through in the lack of male gaze - there are mixed messages as to *why* I am centering these bodies or disassembled body parts. I now read these images as built upon the interplay of my desire to have a female body with the confusion of testosterone-driven libido and repressed lesbian identity.

## Closing thoughts

I wouldn't want to give the impression that there weren't things I learned or grew from in this art making period of my life. Looking back, my old art reminds me of how a seedling twists itself as it hunts for light, it grows but with constraints. I'm beating myself up a lot less than I used to over my art practice because I can see how much of it was a struggle for me, how contorted I got when trying to approach my own feelings or certain subjects. I'm not sure yet how I want to rebuild my online art practice or to what degree beyond this blogpost I even want to represent my egg art online, but with understanding comes forgiveness and that feels like a good start to me. If you're a transgender person with an art practice and you've recognized egg tendencies in your art (similar to mine or not), I'd love to hear from you.

Egg Art


> Who a hotter B? Who got a lot of D?<br/>
> Who poppin' like a P when he be hoppin' out the V? (Brr)<br/>
> And who gon' tell him that my bitch is getting her degree?<br/>
> And when we say it's Hot Girl Summer, we ain't talkin' 'bout degrees<br/><br/>
> *— Megan Thee Stallion,* *[Hot Girl Summer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbcLcSY2au4)*

Sometimes I joke that I'm in a ["clutch"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutch_(eggs)) with my other transfem friends because most of us began transition around the same time. The truth is that we connected at support group because of our similar timelines, so it's self-selection bias. One of our running jokes has been that this summer was going to be our Hot Girl Summer, and honestly for me I think it's come true. Last summer I was only a few months into transition and didn't want to be perceived; I hid inside and ran a Minecraft server for friends while starting to learn about feminine gender expression and penning (SO MANY) coming out letters. This year I'm feeling more aligned with my emotions and my body, and so I'm spending most of my time with others out in [the real world](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOi-zV5rer0). Plus with Portland winters the way they are, and feeling the need to make up for lost time, I really want to make this summer COUNT.

Here's a sample of what I've been doing since the last blog post:

* Organized picnics and tea times with friends
* Attended trans and queer events in town, like lit readings and affinity jogs
* Went to the Oregon Country Fair and danced around in giant, shimmery fairy wings (highly recommend, very gender affirming)
* Blasted my eardrums out at a transfem indie rock show
* Marched and partied at Portland Pride - my first Pride!!!
* Went to the Barbie movie with friends - twice 💅

While summer of year 2 feels much more stable, I wouldn't want to give the impression that I have my shit entirely figured out. There's still a lot I'm learning about myself and personal work that I'm doing. Being out in public brings its own challenges, and I'm working on some writing that will dig into that more. But... I won't make any promises on how soon that gets posted as long as the sun is out. 😎

Hot Girl Summer


When I was in my early teens, the combination of being trans without knowing, puberty, religion, and my family dynamic led me to develop what I now recognize as a dismissive attachment style in my adult relationships. I was taught that the feelings that I was experiencing were to be disregarded, and that the changes my body was going through were repulsive, and so I felt a constant intense shame. Expressing my feelings to my family usually led to mockery instead of validation, so I looked for ways to protect myself. The method I settled on was to conceal, to hide everything inside of me to the best degree that I could.

This manifested in different ways. I tried to be sneaky about things that I was curious about, like my confusion around what puberty was doing to me. I disappeared on library trips to look at anatomy books in secret. I covered the crack of my bedroom door so that no one could see my light on late at night, and read about sexual experiences online.  I became master of the “minimize” shortcut, which is a bit of a metaphor in and of itself. Something seemed wrong to me about my experience of my body and my desires, but the only category I had to put those feelings in was that of my “sinful nature,” so that translated to concealment of my activities and deep religious guilt.

My dismissive attachment also manifested as a chilling effect in my self expression. I experienced paralyzing doubt because of the fear I had of mockery from my family, and so visual art and writing became an exercise in second-guessing. Showing vulnerability meant being told that my feelings were invalid or childish, or that because I was “gifted” that the alienation I was experiencing could not be relieved by anyone or anything around me until I was older and lived elsewhere. I suspected that I was a faker about something too (spoiler: not a boy), and so in my self-doubt I dismissed my need to access my emotions through art. I learned how to be funny in benign ways, through wordplay, juxtaposition and puns. I chose safe subjects for my image-making and received praise for it.

If I stayed in my room reading my books (usually horribly sexist science fiction from the 1970s) or lived inside of my computer (playing video games, learning to code, not feeling my body), I was “the good kid” that didn’t cause any trouble, and nobody bothered to look any deeper. I could feel self-contained and secure inside of my box. I still dream about living in that room sometimes. I recently dreamed that I was naked in there and could only find boy clothes to wear.

What developing these habits has led to in my adult life is a struggle to trust and be vulnerable with others in the ways that I need. I find myself trying to anticipate what other people will do in order to protect myself, and I have a tendency to withdraw or shut down instead of acknowledging my emotions. I can be excessively judgmental towards others because of the degree of criticism I’ve become accustomed to from the inner voice I cultivated. This also displays as a deep fear of rejection, that if I do anything slightly wrong at all and misread someone’s unvoiced intentions that my mistake will lead to humiliation.

A confluence of personal interactions and learning has recently brought this dismissive attachment style into light for me, and now that I understand myself better I’m realizing two things. First, I need to notice and communicate my own needs. By downplaying my needs like I’m still a helpless teenager, I’m setting myself up to be resentful when they aren’t met. Second, I need to trust the people around me to lovingly communicate their needs too, rather than try and get ahead of them. I’m not a mind reader, and trying to anticipate what other people need from me has increasingly become a road to hurt feelings. 

Writing this blog continues to be an enormous exercise in vulnerability for me, but there’s long-form vulnerability like this, and short-form in daily interactions with others. Transition has given me a way back to the emotions that I repressed in myself to survive, but it hasn’t dismantled all of my defense mechanisms and trauma responses. I still need to name them and determine what’s useful and what gets discarded so that I can reintegrate all of the parts of myself again. I feel like this is the only way that I can grow my compassion for myself and others so that I can have meaningful and authentic relationships.

Learning to Trust


This evening I’m sitting in my living room with my cats, sipping Earl Grey tea and listening to a [record by Roberta Flack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyg4lA7lUcI). My wife and I had plans to meet up with some friends for dinner and board games, but as we left the house I was struggling with anxiety about being perceived as woman and got hit by a migraine while on the highway. Historically I’ve found myself to be angry when a migraine has scrambled my plans - how dare my body wreck this for me! - but this time I cried as we drove back home. I had put a lot of importance on this evening because I wanted to really represent myself well as a woman in the company of some of the cis women attending, and had worked hard to put my best foot forward. To add insult to injury, after Lindsey had dropped me off at home and departed again, I got posted up in our bedroom with painkillers and my Cefaly only for the migraine aura to dissipate, and I was left with no headache. I let the Cefaly run its course just in case as I listened to an episode of the Gender Reveal podcast, and afterwards made an undignified sandwich for dinner.

There are some cis women in my life that I seem to value excessively for validation of my womanhood, and this habit is proving to be a big source of stress for me. I’m weighing a lot of factors in my head when I spend time with groups of cis women. Am I talking too loud or too deeply, or talking over them? Am I dressed appropriately or too young or old or out of style? Am I taking up too much space or am I positioned in a masculine way? Am I coming off as performative as a “woman,” or just as a woman? Basically, how’s my driving? Some cis women are fantastic at putting me at ease and my mental checklist disappears into the background quickly. Others seem to bring it front and center. I think the difference might be related to both how these women present themselves in their gender and how they reflect my gender back to me. Musing on it some more, the cis women I struggle the most around are those who lean into being feminine in the way that I want to as well. I’m trying to catch up in a lot of ways and want to hear that I’m on the right track from someone who seems more experienced.

At least one cis friend I’ve discussed my problem with has suggested that the stress of unfulfilled validation as a woman is often part of the experience of being a woman, whether trans or cis. She shared with me her frustrations around growing up with a mother that struggled to recognize her daughter’s growth in adolescence, failing to provide instruction around typical milestones of cis girlhood like owning a purse and leg shaving. She grew up having to navigate things on her own only to be mocked by her peers, and later recognized the emotional rift between her and her mother in adulthood stemmed from the unwillingness of her mother to see her as she was. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that the lack of validation my cis friend experienced as she watched her peers enter womanhood led to persisting gender envy, something I can relate to strongly.

I was recently thinking back to my own adolescence, inspecting my relationships with other girls on the “be with her/be her” dynamic so common for eggs. There was a girl I knew because our moms were friends who was kind of my e-penpal for a while in the early 2000s. As young teens we went out on a couple of pseudo-dates and were just really sweaty and nervous around each other. I liked her vibe though, she was very feminine and collected and had a truly wicked wit. But something that really bugged me about her was her absolute adoration for Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote. She worshipped Lansbury and tried to mirror Lansbury’s old lady affectations, and I just didn’t get it. I suspected that my friend had some self-deprecating notions about her own appearance and youth, and was kind of like settling for Lansbury as a role model? Maybe she was pioneering cottage-detectivecore in 2003, but to me it seemed like rejecting the “obviously superior” option of existing as a teenage girl in favor of being an old woman. Now I realize that this was gender envy; I wanted to be what I thought my friend was squandering. Besides my general teenage awkwardness, my gender envy led me to be indecisive about how *I* wanted my friend to perceive *me* - certainly not as a teenage boy. I tried for a long time to look appropriate to other people but otherwise blank and just check the boxes. There’s no way to seek validation when you’re doing your best to be invisible.

Two hannah baer quotes from *Trans Girl Suicide Museum*: “your gender is not something you experience only in isolation, but something that is reflected back to you by other people…” and “if someone tries to talk to you about your transness by asking what gender you would have on a desert island, you can tell them you wouldn’t have a gender in the same way because gender is inextricably relational, not merely individual.” I think that there’s a struggle for trans people in how we balance acknowledging the relational nature of gender and resisting an external locus of control. On the one hand, giving in fully to gender as relational ignores our intrinsic desires toward the embodiment of our genders. On the other hand, a complete rejection of the gender we experience reflected back to us can lead to anomie for the individual and inscrutability by others. I suspect that this struggle exacerbates the degree of learned helplessness many trans people develop from constant exposure to transphobia.

The psychologist Martin Seligman who first described learned helplessness went on to found a branch of his field called positive psychology, which studies the behaviors that lead to more adaptability and happiness in people. Going through the exercise of describing my issues around validation of my womanhood in this post has brought me to the point where I feel like I can examine my feelings more specifically through the the “3 P’s” methodology as proposed by Seligman. The 3 P’s are personalization, permanence, and pervasiveness, and users of the methodology reframe their feelings in opposition to each P in order to practice a more optimistic and resilient outlook.

* Personalization: There is nothing problematic about how I specifically live as a trans woman. It is normal to be both trans and a woman, and there are a lot of ways to do both.
* Permanence: As I’ve written about many times, my experience of womanhood and transness is constantly changing, and I’m growing in new ways every day. If I’m not as “put together” as I’d like to be one day, that doesn’t mean it will always be the case, or that other people will always view me as being that way.
* Pervasiveness: My stress was focused around looking feminine enough around cis women I see as fulfilling the femininity I would like to exhibit. I can identify that trigger point and examine my response to it to try a different approach next time.

Working my way through this blog post has been incredibly therapeutic. I feel like taking things apart like this will put me at a little more ease next time I feel stressed about validation as a woman around cis women. I hope sharing my thought process here proves helpful for any readers of the blog who find themselves caught in the same struggle.

On Validation


It's been a real past few weeks, so I want to throw some updates about my personal situation on here that are important for understanding [exactly where I’m at](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FEFClgA37E).

I had a second, non-trans-related surgery at the start of May. Healing from my orchi continues, but recovery from this other surgery has gone a lot faster. My mood was extremely low from mid-April to mid-May as I was stuck in my house for most of the time and couldn’t get out or see people as easily as I’d liked. My body is finally at the point where I can do things like jog again, which I’m especially thankful for because of how much exercise improves my mood and general well-being. I’ve been catching up with a number of friends IRL this past week which has been reinvigorating.

That said, I managed to flush a big part of my social life down the toilet last weekend. Long story short, I ended up leaving the Discord server I had been an admin on for the past seven months. I had initially posted this with more detail on the situation, but reflecting further I don't want to go into it because it's too complicated personally. The Pollyanna in me wants to treat this as a blessing in disguise - I’ve been wanting to explore more queer spaces and change things up, so now life has lit a fire under my ass - but I'm also sad about making my decision.

At least I’m getting some good blog time in. After changing the blog name I got on a give-a-mouse-a-cookie kick and made a number of UI improvements that have been on my mental to-do list. Who knows if I have any readers at this point, but the writing still feels meaningful to me.

Oh hey, and I sold my soul to Instagram finally! I joined because I needed the memes, but now I'm posting selfies on the regular like the basic white girl I am. Follow me: [instagram.com/erinholographic](https://www.instagram.com/erinholographic/)

Housekeeping


This blog was originally named in an FPO-sorta-way "Transition Blog." Now that I no longer agree with the concept of a transition in favor of a journey through the gender landscape, I think it's time to make an update.

I Need to Rename My Blog


*Editor’s Note - this is a 4AM rant that I’ve been trying out on friends for the past couple of weeks. I wrote it initially as the underlying concept behind the Gender Transition Strategy Guide, but before taking it that far I want to first see if it can stand on its own.*

In his [*Side Affects*](https://upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/side-affects) essay “Future Fatigue,” Hil Malatino extrapolates on gender as a landscape of self-perception and presentation that everyone inhabits. Cisgender people tend to stay close to the places we refer to as “male” or “female”, occasionally wandering around but generally remaining nearby. These well-known locales are not entirely fixed, and have their own sprawl. Transgender people in this conceptualization are the pioneers who strike out into the broader space, sometimes moving from one named locale to another, or inhabiting spots of their own choice, and oftentimes living nomadic lives without any fixed destination.

Gender transition is often described as a linear process trans people undertake to move from living as one gender to another. While many trans people do seek to move between the well-known locales of female and male, there’s no fixed path or direct bus line, everyone’s journey takes them in unexpected directions over indeterminate amounts of time. Many adventurers make it out into the wilderness and find areas of natural beauty that suit them better than they thought. Some find that they love the journey and spend their lives seeking new territory. Some strike out, run into inclement weather, and hike back the way they came, oftentimes to try again another day. Almost everyone finds themselves pausing and reflecting at some point, saying “am I sure I want to head this way? Because *that way* seems so much better,” and changing direction. Transition, then, might really be the wrong word to use to describe this journey.

A term that encompasses the linear transition fairytale that many of us were raised with is *transnormativity*. Transnormativity refers to the hallmarks of transitioning the “right” way, ie. the way that institutional gatekeepers have laid out. The transnormative narrative of transition is a nice, tidy, and very wrong story that has been compiled and iterated upon by figures of the establishment who have sought to protect the greater cis public from the implications of the malleability of gender and the destruction of the binary. If there is no gender binary, then there can be no justification for forms of oppression like institutional sexism. In order to rationalize some form of treatment for the obviously real existence of trans people, gatekeepers concocted a story of a route between the well-known genders and forced trans people to stick to this story for fear of losing access to gender-affirming care.

We’ve come a long way from the transnormativity practiced in the mid-20th century, but there are still many holdovers that we’re still shedding culturally. One example of this might be the idea of gender as a sliding scale between two points, and being non-binary as being a third point somewhere in between. When someone says that they are non-binary, it doesn’t mean that they are at some percentage between male and female, rather it means that their transition has led them to areas of the greater space.

An idea that might not obviously derive from transnormativity is the perceived lack of “trans elders.” I should be clear that I mean this in the sense of trail guides, people who could help one successfully “complete” transition. Because everyone’s path is different and the territory shifts in uncanny ways, no one particular person can function as a guide through the gender landscape. Transnormativity suggests the possibility of guru-like figures who could help shuttle new transitioners between the poles with their applied wisdom, but there are no clearly defined poles and there is no bus line. Experience in transition is a complex thing, and because of this we have terms like “trans time” to differentiate time spent exploring the gender landscape from chronological age. But even then, since everyone’s paths are so different, someone with more trans time under their belt hasn't necessarily earned more credence.

The author Torrey Peters lays out in her book *Detransition, Baby* a framing she calls the “juvenile elephants” problem, in which she describes newly-out trans women as often volatile and poorly socialized, and are therefore in need of a parent figure, an “elder” to guide them through self-discovery in transition. The older transitioners who Peters frames as “elders” rarely stick around in trans communities due to a number of pressures, leading to the juveniles continuing to act out in an unrestrained manner with no accrual of collective wisdom. This framing fails to take into account two considerations.

First, the juvenile elephants problem takes for granted a transnormative view of transition, in that there are people “further along” who can serve as guides. This structure is reinforced by gatekeeping - if transness is a traversal of a landscape, the only reason we might think someone brings more “trans experience” outside of their own life experience and personal growth is because they’ve cleared hurdles that are often kept in a particular order by transnormative policy. For instance, most insurance guidelines for gender affirming care in the US are based off of the WPATH standard, which requires being on hormone replacement therapy for a particular amount of time before gender affirming surgeries can happen. This isn’t a medical requirement, it’s a form of gatekeeping to ostensibly make sure someone who wants one of those surgeries is “really sure” they know what they’re doing. This minimizes the lived experience of trans people who have not opted for HRT and who may or may not want to undergo these surgeries, for instance. Institutional transnormativity bars us from free movement across the gender landscape and tells us that it was never possible in the first place.

Second is the issue of “socialization”. A common transphobic critique is that trans people are “socialized female” or “socialized male” and are therefore unable to truly mesh with their cisgendered peers. The author Devon Price has [three excellent rebuttals](https://devonprice.medium.com/gender-socialization-is-real-complex-348f56146925) to this myth. First, scrutiny of what it might mean to be socialized in a particular gender shows that there are no core elements that make someone socialized one way or another. Second, children and adults are constantly exposed to all gender norms and therefore internalize them all to some degree. Third, many trans people speak about painful life experiences stemming from the dissonance they experienced trying to navigate their own gender expression in spite of the norms forced upon them *without even their own awareness of being trans*. If newly out trans people need socialization, and the concept of gender socialization is a transphobic red herring, then at best what Peters is describing is something merely tangential to transness, and at worst her critique carries a transmisogynistic veneer.

So if there are no trans elders, then who should people new to the journey look to for guidance? Maybe the real trans elders are the friends we make along the way - fellow travelers with whom we share our stories and campfires as we cross our winding paths. I recognize that this is the hottest of takes - our peers help us grow as we congregate and share our experiences with each other - but if we acknowledge the harm of transnormativity and discard the myth of transition, we can more clearly view living-while-trans as a great exploration of gendered experience, a ramble, free from notions of correctness. We can relax and find pleasure in the journey wherever it takes us.

Roaming the Gender Landscape


*2024-09-01 Update: I wrote a followup on my year of post-orchi life: [The Jewel Heist Part 2](/posts/jewel-heist-pt-2/)*

I’m sitting on my living room couch today with a blanket over my legs and a cat keeping my feet warm. After several months of planning and effort, I had my testicles surgically removed this week in an operation called a simple bilateral orchiectomy. I spent the past few days with an ice pack on my crotch and tight fitting underwear holding gauze in place over an incision.  I’m feeling a lot of emotions right now: relief, accomplishment, and also loneliness. Overall it’s been a positive experience, but I don’t want to downplay how difficult it’s been as well.

I’ve been trying to write about my orchi for over a month, but until now my attempts have focused on the logistics. Navigating the lead-up wasn’t easy - I had to first find a provider that could operate in a reasonable timeframe, then collect letters from therapists, and deal with insurance shenanigans. I joined a group of trans women and nonbinary people, the “Ball-Free Bitches,” who all scheduled our orchis at similar times and are now sharing tips and supplies for recovery. Now that my day has come and gone I realize that I was struggling to get my thoughts down because what I wanted most was to capture the emotional experience surrounding the surgery. There are some [really great descriptions](https://wordsmith.social/elilla/whats-it-like-to-be-a-post-orchiectomy-non-op-trans-woman) of orchiectomies online, but I wanted this to be first and foremost about my feelings.

Despite knowing for a long time - longer than I knew I was trans - that I despised my testicles and wanted them gone, I found myself getting cold feet as my surgery date approached. The idea of removing body parts scared me, and especially undertaking surgery that would be irreversible, making me dependent on an external source of hormones for the rest of my life. I was also afraid of developing something like phantom limb syndrome, painful ghost balls. I laid in bed at night during the lead-up to my surgery and performed many times the classic trans ritual of imagining different parts below, the radar ping of nerve endings returning in a different form. A friend who had gone through a similar gender-affirming surgery suggested having a conversation with my unwanted guests to find some closure, an agreement with the boys on how we got here and what parting ways would look like, so that maybe there would be no hard feelings. Late one night I checked in, and I found them to be stubbornly silent. I got the impression that they resented me for what I was going to do.

The procedure was easy. Sign the papers, put on a gown, pop the IV in, roll me back. Wake up an hour later. Make sure I can pee, and homeward bound. I napped on and off over the day, and a friend stayed with me in the evening while Lindsey taught her class. I peeked into my gauze jockstrap at the results. Not pretty, but could be much worse - one friend developed a hematoma, a dangerous condition (and what a word, google at your own risk). I had some minor bleeding from the incision for a few days but that was to be expected.

Proprioception turned out to be pretty great, actually. There is a new flatness to my labia/scrotum, but otherwise everything still feels in place. I’m calling it my labia/scrotum because the skin’s appearance and texture has changed significantly over the past year of HRT. I learned that my sensation in the area comes almost entirely from the skin and muscle, so no phantom balls to worry about. I still experience the regular scrotal undulations that were there before, now uselessly regulating temperature.

The surgery left me feeling more emotionally muted than I had hoped. A number of friends who have had orchiectomies described tears of relief upon waking from their anesthesia. I initially just felt glad it was over, a formality. After a rough first night (no side sleeping) I spent the next day throwing myself into distractions - admin work on Discord, an early outline of subjects for the Gender Transition Strategy Guide. I’ve been reading *Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis* by Grace Lavery, which is a hilarious romp of a transition memoir with a [fun soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfMcKI1ZRhQH6JxT52RRRAEWGrAAiSOR9). At some point that afternoon though the dam finally broke, and I found myself ugly crying and needing to be held (Lindsey took care of me). I realized that the surgery had been a real personal accomplishment months in the making, but there’s so much about having one’s testicles removed that’s just really hard to share. I was proud of myself for making a decision from which there was no turning back, and at the same time I had to accept that most of the people in my life could never really know or understand what this meant to me. I felt very alone suddenly in how far I had come.

I’m proud of being trans, and I also know it’s normal to be trans. Transgender people are part of the human experience. It can still feel lonely because the path forward can seem utterly bizarre at times, and so many steps are predicated on a leap of faith. How do you explain to someone what it’s like to experience a gradually encroaching, deep-seated need to remove part of your anatomy in order to feel more embodied in your gender? The stresses can get to be very individualized. And on top of that there are so many forces in the world that want to amplify that loneliness in order to destroy us. I’m privileged to be in a place where I can skirt much of that hatred, and my network of trans friends sustains me in so many ways, but the personal experience can still be a lot to bear sometimes.

Transition is not about rectification though, or reaching a destination, it’s ultimately about the pursuit of joy. Milestones help us recognize incremental progress on a journey, but the path itself is continuous. The experience of surgery doesn’t end when you wake up from the anesthesia, there’s time spent healing and adjusting as well. I may feel lonely passing this milestone, but I have further to go. The heist isn't over yet.


The Jewel Heist


I’ve been on a crusade this week. There’s a meme that’s been circulating on some of the trans Discords that pisses me off every time I see it, and so I decided that I was going to do something about it. I feel like it promotes a lot of bad ideas about being a trans woman, history, and self-concept all in one cutesy package.

First off, here’s the meme:

[<img src="/post-media/catgirl-crusade/catgirl-meme.png" alt="A meme about trans women always being catgirls"  />](/post-media/catgirl-crusade/catgirl-meme.png)

Let’s start with an overview of what’s happening in the image. We see the caption “trans women in the fifties. we’ve always been here.” Then, a three-up of black and white photos of group shots of women, all with cat ears on. Finally in a different font below, we see the words “its all catgirl? always has been.”

The second caption at the bottom is a reference to the [It’s All Ohio? meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-has-been), where two astronauts are looking down at the Earth, which is apparently all Ohio, and one astronaut (“always has been”) is holding a gun to the back of the questioner's head, presumably to keep the terrible secret of Ohio. So this meme is about hidden history of the world. By repurposing the meme here, the meme author is asserting that it is a secret truth that trans women have always been catgirls.

Except that this just isn’t true. The bulk of the meme, sans ears and lower caption, is from a [now-deleted tweet](https://web.archive.org/web/20191112172539/https://twitter.com/magsvisaggs/status/1025590255733366784?s=21) written in 2019 by [Magdalene Visaggio](https://magsvisaggio.com/), a well-known artist and influencer. Someone took Visaggio’s tweet and added the cat ears and meme text. Visaggio also got her dates wrong, none of the photos are from the 1950s, all are from at least 1960.

[<img src="/post-media/catgirl-crusade/carrousel-1960-1.jpeg" alt="The performers of Le Carrousel in a group photo from 1960"  />](/post-media/catgirl-crusade/carrousel-1960-1.jpeg)

When I first saw the meme I instantly recognized the top left photo as a group shot of the performers of Le Carrousel, a short-lived club in Paris in the late 50s and early 60s. I had been exploring the [Digital Transgender Archive](https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/gq67jr38r) the week beforehand, and was struck by the beauty and energy of the original photo. The women in the photo are drag queens and trans women and all sorts of flavors in between, the boundary being blurred quite a bit more in their time.

[<img src="/post-media/catgirl-crusade/finocchios-1961.jpg" alt="The performers of Finocchios in New York City at a table with contemporary musicians and artists in 1961"  />](/post-media/catgirl-crusade/finocchios-1961.jpg)

After some sleuthing, I was able to determine that the top-right photo was of a group of [famous actors and musicians](https://queermusicheritage.com/drag.html) visiting the performers at a well-known club in New York City called [Finocchio’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finocchio%27s_Club) in 1961. Finocchio’s was often home to “female impersonator” acts, and the infamous Harry Benjamin wrote about the sex work happening there performed by some of his clients, early recipients of Hormone Replacement Therapy.

[<img src="/post-media/catgirl-crusade/carrousel-1960-2.png" alt="Another group photo purportedly from Le Carrousel in 1960"  />](/post-media/catgirl-crusade/carrousel-1960-2.png)

While I have been unable to locate a primary source of the bottom-right photo, a number of drag, transvestite, and [“femulator”](http://www.femulate.org/2013/10/looking-for-answers-on-14th-street.html) websites have it labeled as also coming from Le Carrousel in 1960. Most of the women in the photo are identified and can be located in other female impersonator material, like the profiles in [Female Mimics 1963](https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/7w62f8323). One woman I want to call out in the photo is [Marie-Pierre Pruvot](http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/Bambi.html), aka. Bambi, a performer who went on to become a college professor. Bambi was [one of the first women](https://magazineantidote.com/culture/the-life-of-bambi/) to have Gender Reassignment Surgery performed by [Dr. Georges Burou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Burou), inventor of penile inversion vaginoplasty. 

Seeing these photos made a huge impression on me because a part of transition that I continue to experience has been the development of what I want to call a spiritual connection to my “trancestors”. I was raised in a protestant salad with some evangelical bacon bits thrown in, and eventually decided I was an atheist when I was about 15 or 16. While I remain an atheist today, something that changed for me in transition starting with my mirror moment was a growing sense of the spiritual that was never present for me during my religious upbringing. When I look at these photos my heart feels pulled to these women in a deeply personal and transcendent way. I feel a connection to the past like I have never felt before when I look at photos like these or read transition accounts. My spiritual connection to my trans ancestors is one of the biggest motivating factors for why I write this blog, because I feel like I have a responsibility to be another link in the chain.

This week I’ve been reading and re-reading the book [Trans Girl Suicide Museum](https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781948434065/trans-girl-suicide-museum.aspx) by hannah baer, author and incredible [meme artist](https://www.instagram.com/malefragility). I was so struck by her book after my first read through on an eBook that I bought a physical copy and did a second pass with a highlighter. I think I’ve highlighted something on every fourth page. Here’s baer on her connection to the past and also what it means to impose present identity constructions on the history of transness:

> Like, I actually do believe in my spiritual connection to a legacy of gender variant people (in part because of the emotions I felt in my childhood and adolescence reading and hearing about queer and gender variant people in all different contexts). I also believe trans women have always existed in some way, because I can feel it in my body. I can feel a sense of ancestry. This idea of gender-variant time travel is a construction too, of course, but it’s one that gives me life.

> I also feel like it’s important to be careful about mapping contemporary definitions of transness onto historical peoples, partly because it’s a. little boring and b. kind of imperialist. So I don’t go around saying “trans women have always experienced themselves as spiritually connected to each other in a legacy.”

> …having solidarity with trans people involves not imposing a universal idea of what transness is on anyone, while at the same time also staying suspicious of trans narratives that give power over to cis doctors, cis law makers, cis media moguls… (p.130-131)

baer is explicitly calling out here the dangerous tendency to project modern constructions of identity into historical contexts because it redefines the past based on present sensibilities an a way that takes agency away from older, more ambiguous narratives. The eponymous Suicide Museum that baer spends the book visiting and describing is a metaphor for how categorization of gender, rule construction and enforcement, gender sensitivity training, having everyone go around the room and say their pronouns, etc. etc. is a way for broader society to encapsulate and protect itself from facing the ambiguities of transness without having to address the actual problem of having to respect trans people. Society is willing to measure and stuff and preserve in formaldehyde its trans members, destroying their private complex experiences of gender, in the guise of protecting them. To slap pairs of cat ears on these women depicted in the photos in order to make them conform to modern ideas about transness seems not only deeply disrespectful to me, it’s a colonization of the past that declaws it and sticks it in a museum exhibit. It’s historical revisionism in the name of a lame joke. And I haven’t even written about the whole trans-catgirl-thing yet.

I’m deeply suspicious of “trans women are catgirls” memes. The catgirl trope - outside of transness - is about cuteness and heightened femininity, softness, sexualization, and emotional volatility. I can understand the appeal to trans women in embracing this trope as part of their identity because so much of transfem transition involves reexamining one’s relationship to all of these concepts. One trans author who I believe has done a good job of using the catgirl trope as a metaphor in this way is Xanthippe (Xan) Hutcheon in her comic series [Pandora’s Tale](https://comicsbyxan.com/pandoras-tale/). For the most part though the memes I see around trans women as catgirls often mask elements of sexism, sexual objectification, misogyny, and more than anything infantilization, a being less-than-human, “just a little helpless kitty cat”.

Having come from a place where I was very uncomfortable initally with describing myself as a woman I get the hesitation around claiming that descriptor and why some might find “catgirl” as a safe place to dwell. But to paint with a broad brush on other people - to say “this is how trans girls talk - meow meow meow” - is stereotyping. And to replace the complex past of bold and multifaceted femininity exhibited by our ancestors with “always was catgirl” takes away power, humanity, our ancestors’ agency as women and trans people. To neuter the past in this way reminds me of the [weaponized fragility](/posts/weaponized-fragility/) I’ve written about before - at worst promoting ideas of helplessness in trans people is a way for the transphobic culture to grind down the will to live, to form community and organize, to love with each other as full humans.

It’s important to recognize the often messy histories of those who went before in gender-diverse lives because they remind us trans people of the present to be bold like they were, to continue to act with conviction and to reject boundaries as is necessary in order to exist. Our ancestors do not deserve to be treated like taxidermied animals in a museum diorama. Their complexity and their inability to be categorized was their power and it is ours as well.

Catgirl Crusade


I feel like I turned a corner in my physical transition a couple of weeks ago, and since then it’s been a lot easier to see the girl in the mirror. The sort of attention I’ve been getting lately has been shifting as well. It’s hard exactly to quantify, but I feel like people are starting to treat me more like a woman at my work and when I’m out and about.

There’s been ups and downs. Yay experiences reinforcing my pronouns! I was on a business trip recently, and listening to people talk about me in the third person (“*she’s* been collecting requirements for the documentation”) was capital-E Empowering. Boo getting talked over or patronized - and it’s been shocking how many people who didn’t talk to me that way before now do. And some of it’s been just plain weird. One evening I thought was making friendly banter with a stranger at a bar, and later in the night one of her friends brought me a piece of paper with her number on it. I proceeded to spend the next half hour with my friends trying to work out why she would do this, as they all laughed at my fulfillment of the Clueless Lesbian meme.

Last night at a local queer bar I was approached by my first chaser. I was on the dance floor with a number of other trans women, and this young cis woman was making the rounds between us. She and I eventually danced a bit together, and she started to get a bit flirty. She said to me things like, “You’re so pretty, you look like Aldous Harding,” and “I looove trans girls,’ and “I’m… a bit gay.” Which putting together now, I’m reading as: you look pretty but clocky, I fetishize trans girls, I’m in it for the girldick. Once I said I was in a committed relationship but was enjoying the dancing she left me alone.

“I looove trans girls” was just inappropriate. Why are you calling out our differences and making me feel othered? And “a bit gay,” like, are you into girls? Or into guys but make exceptions for girls with dicks? While it was intoxicating to receive compliments and that kind of attention - and she was attractive - she was giving off total fetishist vibes and made me feel like a body. I felt gross afterwards.

This isn't the first time I've experienced a shift in transition. When I started changing my gender expression to be more feminine in public, I experienced after a few months an inflection point like this where I went from the invisibility of masculinity to being *SEEN*. Suddenly people were either staring at me, or staring at my body, or very aggressively *not* looking at me, which continues to be a vaguely gaslight-y part of the trans experience for me. The switchover wasn’t instantaneous, but there was definitely a threshold that I crossed.

I’m honestly grateful that these inflection points haven’t all hit at once, that I have had time to adapt to one normal before the next one comes along. I guess that this further reinforces the “onion peel” theory of transition - your internal experience changes, there are external ramifications, you have to recalibrate your internal experience and discover new things in the process, back and forth.

Inflection Point


I've been wanting to do a post detailing how I apply estradiol patches for some time, and the opportunity presented itself today. When I first started on patches I screwed a lot of this up, so I'm hoping the pictures and descriptions here can save somebody the effort.

Mild NSFW warning: I'm showing some skin and you can see my out-of-focus panties in a couple of photos. Don't get too excited.

**3/24/24 Edit: Skip the alcohol step! It can make contact dermatitis worse! Just make sure your skin is clean with soap and water. I have made edits to this guide leaving but striking through the relatesd steps and supplies.**

### Step 1

First, wash your hands and gather your supplies:

* ~~Cotton rounds~~
* ~~Rubbing alcohol~~
* A pair of scissors
* A water-resistant marker (I use an ultrafine felt tipped Sharpie)
* A roll of Tegaderm (this roll is 3 inches wide)
* An 0.1mg estradiol patch

__5/22/23 Edit: Make sure it's real Tegaderm, not some knock off! I had issues with peeling and patch failure (rashes) that were largely solved when I switched to the real thing. It's worth it!__

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-0.jpg" alt="Supplies for applying an estradiol patch"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-0.jpg)

### Step 2

Remove your oldest patch, and ~~wipe down the area with rubbing alcohol and a cotton round. Also wipe down the new patch site and let it dry.~~ clean the old and new sites with soap and water. Usually it's a good idea to apply the new patch in a different place so that your skin can recover from the last patch.

When it comes to choosing a place for your patch, the closer you can get it to the center of your body and the thinner the skin underneath it, the better. I put my patches on my lower abdomen and upper buttocks, but I've also heard of people using their upper arms as patch sites too.

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-1.jpg" alt="Cleaning up with rubbing alcohol in a cotton round, do not do this use soap and water instead"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-1.jpg)

### Step 3

Get your new patch out of its packaging and locate which side has the two plastic sheets protecting the sticky side of the patch. Peel off the smaller of the two sheets so that a small amount of the sticky side of the patch is exposed.


[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-2.jpg" alt="An estradiol patch held up to show the 2 layers of plastic it rests on"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-2.jpg)

## Step 4

Carefully stick the patch to your chosen patch site and roll the rest of the patch off of its plastic sheet and onto your body by kind of making a "U" with the patch. This ensures you don't have to touch the patch as you apply it, which would compromise its hold and make things dirty underneath.

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-3.jpg" alt="Rolling the patch onto my abdomen"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-3.jpg)

### Step 5

With your scissors, cut a length of Tegaderm. Tegaderm is a breathable plastic sheeting used for wound care and protecting new tattoos. Estradiol patches don't stick amazingly well, so the Tegaderm is used to hold them on better and protect skin on the patch edges from irritation.

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-4.jpg" alt="A roll of Tegaderm and a 3 inch length cut"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-4.jpg)

### Step 6

Throw a scrunchie around the Tegaderm roll before you put it away. This stuff does not want to stay wound and has exploded like a watch spring in my bathroom drawer before.

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-5.jpg" alt="Tegarderm roll saely secured with a scrunchie"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-5.jpg)

### Step 7

Like the estradiol patch, there's a small strip and big strip of wax paper on the back of the Tegaderm. Peel the small strip off.

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-6.jpg" alt="The backside of the Tegaderm sheet with the wax paper seam visible"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-6.jpg)

### Step 8

Again like the estradiol patch, first stick the exposed end of the Tegaderm to your body, and roll on the rest of the sheet by folding it and carefully unpeeling the remaining wax paper. This should form a smooth layer on top of the patch with no wrinkles or air pockets. Be sure to leave an even margin around the patch so that if any of the Tegaderm does get peeled or rolled up, the patch should remain mostly unaffected.

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-7.jpg" alt="Rolling the Tegaderm over top of the estradiol patch"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-7.jpg)

### Step 9

The Tegaderm has an upper layer of plastic sheeting on top with a seam in the middle. Once you're confident that the sheet has been applied well, pinch the patch and sheet so that the seam tents. Then you can peel back the two pieces of the upper layer, fully exposing the the Tegaderm.

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-8.jpg" alt="Squeeze the Tegaderm to remove the upper protective layer"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-8.jpg)

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-9.jpg" alt="Squeeze the Tegaderm to remove the upper protective layer"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-9.jpg)

### Step 10

Using the marker, write the date of application on your patch. I believe this is reasonably safe, these [nurses in an old forum thread](https://allnurses.com/sharpie-tegaderm-t593596/) seem to think so and the [Sharpie MSDS](https://www.msdsdigital.com/sharpie-markers-msds) backs them up. I've found keeping track this way to be wholly invaluable for [staggering patches](/posts/patch-simulator), especially.

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-10.jpg" alt="Writing the date on top of the Tegaderm"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-10.jpg)

### Step 11

You're done! Go forth and live life as a more estrogenated being!

[<img src="/post-media/patch-notes/patch-11.jpg" alt="Supplies for applying an estradiol patch"  />](/post-media/patch-notes/patch-11.jpg)



Patch Notes


I'm a very silly person with a love of puns and an art degree, so once in a while I'll need to make A Thing out of some joke that amuses me. As of this week I have two designs for sale as T-shirts on Zazzle that may appeal to people who understand my alignment. I'm not really trying to make money at all off of these, I just wanted them to exist as something I could wear.

[__Prog Rocks! T-shirt__](https://www.zazzle.com/prog_rocks_t_shirt-256168143123758506)

[<img src="/post-media/swag-swag-swag/prog-rocks-small.png" alt="A logo that says Prog Rocks! in swirly progressive rock lettering" width="400" />](/post-media/swag-swag-swag/prog-rocks-small.png)

I grew up as a fan of progressive rock, so when I started to hear prog jokes about taking progesterone I knew I had to do something. I was trying to capture the logo styling of Yes ala Roger Dean.

[__F64.0 T-shirt__](https://www.zazzle.com/f64_0_diagnosis_shirt-256061940520673721)

[<img src="/post-media/swag-swag-swag/f64-logo.png" alt="A logo that says F64.0 and looks like the Nintendo 64 logo in trans colors" width="400" />](/post-media/swag-swag-swag/f64-logo.png)

__Edit 5/23/2023: Here's a selfie with the F64.0 shirt:__

[<img src="/post-media/swag-swag-swag/f64-selfie.jpg" alt="Photo of Erin wearing the F64.0 shirt" width="400" />](/post-media/swag-swag-swag/f64-selfie.jpg)

Here I'm riffing off the Nintendo 64 logo and the US medical diagnosis code "F64.0: Transsexualism" that so many of us have in our charts. There's also a [racerback version](https://www.zazzle.com/f64_0_diagnosis_racerback_tank_top-256014771005048629) for if you want to make yourself a crop top.

Swag Swag Swag


*Editor's note: These are snippets from journal entries written by [deadname] in 2022. As it's been exactly a year since I first acknowledged being a transgender woman I wanted to share a snapshot of what was going on in my head at the time that everything really started for me.*

*Revisiting these entries, I'm surprised at the level of conviction in my writing in who I was about to become. My memories are full of a lot more hesitation and fear at this point in my gender questioning. Not long after the mirror moment of seeing myself for the first time, I went through a period of deep self-doubt and shame. I guess it goes to show that you shouldn't underestimate the subconscious.*

---

#### 2/26

Hi, and welcome to My Gender Workbook, volume 2. Haha, jk. Except kinda. It’s on my mind today, that’s what I’m here to write about. I read a blogpost titled [The Null HypotheCis](https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null-hypothecis/) that examines the question, “how do you know if you’re trans?” by flipping it on its head, “how do you know if you’re cis?” The author Natalie Reed ultimately concludes “You’re never going to get any certainty beyond the certainty _you yourself assert_ (emphasis mine) or any assurance beyond the sense of _I am. This is who I am._” I was planning on listing out “tells” in this journal entry, datapoints that I feel like point to the trans hypothesis. But I think Reed has a good point, we’re ultimately looking at subjective experience here, how I feel. But right now I’m not feeling properly, you know? I think that’s ultimately what the gamble is.

Since I was a teen, I’ve felt a mental block in my way, like an invisible obstacle keeping me from true expression that my spirit would find… relieving? Honest? And so I have mastered all sorts of artifice in order to work around the obstacle, but I’m constantly stubbing my toe or breaking my nose against it. And I don’t think that a lifetime of emotional intelligence training or leadership or tech mastery or regular therapy is going to cut it. I need to feel out this obstacle, learn its crevices and the space it occupies, Right now, gender identity investigation feels like the way to do this.


#### 3/3

I posed the Button Question to Lindsey, and she was emphatic that she wouldn’t press it. WHAT. I thought this was a cute stupid hypothetical, but similarly she was floored that I would press it! Another thing - I told her that I want to go on HRT. We talked a lot about dysphoria and shame, and learning to be another gender.

…

I am so relieved that she is supportive, but even more relieved that I don’t sound crazy to her!!!


#### 3/6

Dear Erin,
I’m so glad that you came to visit yesterday. I was worried for a bit there that I wouldn’t get a chance to see you, but when you arrived you made such an impression on me. I have to tell you, you looked cute and hot and amazingly confident. I don’t think I’ve seen any of this in you before, and it really suits you.

You’ve been on my mind so often lately. I’ve been wondering what kind of person you’ve become, and if we still have things in common. But now I realize that I didn’t have anything to worry about. It makes me so happy that we had the chance to meet.

See you again soon. Love,
[deadname]


#### 3/11

Since my last journal entry, I’ve been through all sorts of highs and lows of euphoria and dysphoria. I should say that I thought that the label “euphoria” seemed hyperbolic until I experienced it on the 5th and again to a lesser degree on the 7th. Whatever is happening to me, I have had new emotional experiences without prior comparison.

…

Lindsey has been helping me in my gender exploration. I’ve been trying on clothes, doing makeup, playing around with my (unfortunate) hair, and generally trying out the visual parts of being a woman. I told Lindsey my other name - Erin - and then on the 5th in one of our experimenting sessions I _saw_ Erin in the mirror. I’ve seen her once since then. I am not sure how to rectify me and her yet, but right now she’s the best argument I have for transitioning.

That initial encounter was unquestionably euphoria. I experienced a synaesthetic joy - I saw shattered golden panes of reality, heard the rush of blood in my head. I was flooded with emotions that I could not identify. I cried hard with Lindsey holding me. The next day I think I cried on and off for about 4 hours. By the end of the night my face was so swollen and puffy that my teeth hurt. I kept thinking about seeing Erin and all of the great things that she could go on to do if I were to become her.

And then of course the day after that was a dark pit of doubt. Basically I’ve been vacillating like that since last Saturday. But I’ve continued to experiment with my appearance and voice and self concept.

Journal Entries from Deadname (my first Tranniversary)


I don’t think I’ve written before about my voice therapy work as part of transition, but I hit a milestone this week that I want to talk about, so I need to share some context.

Voice dysphoria was one of the first forms of my dysphoria I could clearly identify, so in July 2022 I started feminizing voice therapy with a speech pathology group in town. After a few months of weekly virtual sessions I started to feel frustrated by how slowly we were covering material, so I ended our sessions. I was also experiencing a big uptick in my migraines at the time, which was strange since summer has historically been my low point for seasonal migraines. After taking a break from my voice work the migraine uptick went away, so I concluded that some strain from my therapy was causing the migraines.

Later in September I received a call from the OHSU voice therapy program about availability for appointments. I had joined their waitlist at the beginning of the summer, so I saw this as an opportunity to change things up and address the strain I was experiencing. I started appointments in person with one of the pathologists there who turned out to be a way better fit for my learning style. We had regular appointments every week for two months with noticeable improvement, and the migraine increase did not return.

I went back to practicing my new voice at all times. After a couple of months my pathologist told me that I was making excellent progress, and that we should start spacing out our appointments so I could work on identifying issues as they came up. This past week I attended our first follow-up, and the main concern that I brought to the appointment was a persistent hoarseness that seemed to get worse over the course of each day.

My pathologist scoped me through my nose down my throat to observe my larynx and vocal folds. It really wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be! Basically you take a nasal spray of numbing Afrin and they slide a thin fiber optic camera up your nose and down around the bend. We did some vocal exercises once the camera was in place to watch the goings-on in my vocal tract on a monitor. My pathologist was able to diagnose the cause of my hoarseness, and I have a few fundamentals I’m returning to practicing as a part of my morning warmups. I’m really glad we took a look because I was worried it might be something worse, like an injury or chronic damage.

So here’s the milestone I mentioned at the beginning. As part of the diagnostic my pathologist asked me to say a few things in my old voice, and... I couldn't. When I tried, it sounded really forced or fake. Since starting voice therapy I had wondered if I would ever get to this point, and I guess I made it some time ago. I wouldn't say I'm happy that I can't do my old voice - I come from a family of mimics, so losing a voice feels like losing a little bit of my ability to express myself. I am pleased though that my current voice has become natural for me. I don’t feel like I’m at a stopping point yet with voice work, but I like where things are heading.

I want to share a story from a book I recently read, [Gender Euphoria](https://unbound.com/books/gender-euphoria/). It’s a collection of short testimonies by several trans authors about moments of gender euphoria that they have experienced. The editor Laura Kate Dale has a number of essays in the book, but one that stood out to me was “Loving My Deep Voice As Performance Rather Than Default.” Dale writes about how after years of work to develop a feminine voice she would occasionally amuse herself by reaching back into her deep range as a party trick. Some people told Dale that they found it uncomfortable to hear because it didn’t sound like her, and reflecting on this she realized that she felt the same way, that her deepened voice felt more thrust upon her at puberty than reflective of her. Embarrassed, she distanced herself from her deep range for some time, until goofing around with her partner one morning she started developing character voices that used her lower register. Finding a way to access that part of her voice without having to feel like it was reflective of her personality allowed her to be freed from the shame she felt. Dale continues to come up with voices of all sorts in her podcasts and video streams.

Stories like this one inspire me to keep working on my voice. It can be difficult work, often unflattering, tiring, or silly feeling, but I want to find myself where Laura Kate Dale found herself. I want a daily voice that feels comfortable and reflective of me, that’s read properly by others, and that doesn’t prevent me from being the expressive person I am with the entirety of my range.

Crossing the Rainbow Passage


I recently added progesterone to my hormone therapy regimen, and let me tell you, the dreams have been *wild*. I woke up this morning from a particularly disturbing dream in which I was dying from an incurable illness that was reducing me to a living skeleton, [Ray Harryhausen-style](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqRjDGAJ5dc). At first I felt just gaunt, but as time went by I grew nervous as my body became more fragile and desiccated. My friends and family were disturbed by my presence, and seeing myself in the mirror was nauseating. Any attempts to touch me or show me affection were painful and risked breaking me apart. Eventually even walking or moving my limbs became dangerous as I stiffened, and I awoke as I finally collapsed into a dusty pile of bones.

I think turning into a skeleton in my dream was a metaphor for insecurities around my growing emotional awareness. Now that I’m transitioning, the veil that clouded my awareness of my emotions for most of my life has been removed. What I used to perceive as anxiety or anger comes in much richer flavors now: sadness, resentment, longing. Positive emotions have become more nuanced as well - I found myself crying yesterday over a particularly touching [Regina Spektor song](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Piea7u87Gmc&feature=share) about learning to love. I’m slowly allowing myself to feel these emotions that I protected myself from before, but it’s scary. It makes me feel exposed, fragile, and self-conscious, especially around other people.

This new emotional awareness has revealed to me two fronts for growth. The first is being more vulnerable and authentic with people I’m close to in my life. It scares me to trust others with my difficult feelings - I often feel the need to be outgoing at all costs, subtly directing and managing conversations in order to avoid being perceived. I now want to be more deliberate about sitting with pauses in conversation, and honest about feelings I’m experiencing rather than bottle them up.

The second front is accepting that some of my relationships will never foster the kind of vulnerability I desire, and that I will have to renegotiate my boundaries. There are people in my life who demand vulnerability from me but are unwilling to give back. I’m harming myself by being vulnerable in these relationships, and so in order to care for myself I have to acknowledge the truth and find healthier boundaries for interaction.

My dream revealed that I have been making a mistake conflating vulnerability with fragility. I know I’m a stronger person now because I’m capable of feeling more feelings than ever before. I may not be very good at sitting with them yet, but with effort and time I think I can get there. I had no idea going into transition that my emotional capacity was going to change this much, that I would find this level of self awareness. It can hurt sometimes, but I wouldn't ever want to go back.

Osteology


I was checking Reddit the other morning when I saw a post in r/mtf with an odd title: “Does anyone else refuse to socialize due to being trans?” I wasn’t surprised to see several affirmative responses, but I hardly saw anyone saying that they did not feel that way. Ever the contrarian, I fired off a response about how my experience has been the opposite: I’ve made friendships and joined social groups due to my newfound trans identity, and spending time with more trans people has given me a confidence boost when it comes to existing in public spaces. I wanted to give this transitioner and other readers some hope and encouragement to find their peers so that they wouldn’t feel so alone.

I was not expecting the back-and-forth that followed. The OP responded, “I don’t enjoy the company of trans people\[.\]”

“Why is that?”

“I am not very fond of progressives or the LGBT community, of which most trans people identify as one or the other. I’ve had nothing but terrible experiences with both.”

…I’m not going to even try to explain here why it might be that trans people “identify with the LGBT community.” I started looking into the post history of the OP - which I should have done at the outset - and got the distinct impression that this user might not be trans at all, but was instead some sort of agent provocateur. Their post history showed them playing different sides of the political coin, and stirring the pot in LGBT subreddits as well as political subreddits. It didn’t seem like this person held any values strongly other than their personal need to depress mood and start shit. They were spreading FUD - [fear, uncertainty, and doubt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt).

I was pissed to realize this. I had been duped. But why would anyone post such a thing in r/mtf? What could they possibly gain from starting a discussion about refusing to socialize due to being trans?

I think that these bigots are encouraging others to dwell on those feelings in order to bolster them in already vulnerable trans people. It looks innocuous enough - like a form of vulnerability - but by encouraging trans people to double down on feeling fragile and isolated, and painting a picture of spending time with other trans and queer people as “terrible experiences,” it makes it less likely that those people will come out of the closet, or find resources that they need to transition. It keeps them feeling scared, alone, and helpless. More permanent options start to look appealing. The bigots are weaponizing fragility in order to destroy trans lives.

Since this incident, I’ve spent some time looking for other writing on the subject. I read a blogpost titled [Fatalism, Anomie, and LGBTQ Youth](http://uicsocialtheory.weebly.com/durkheim/fatalism-anomie-and-lgbtq-youth). The author posits two negative outcomes for LGBTQ youth faced by bigotry: fatalism, a feeling of asphyxiating constraint and lack of agency within society, and anomie, a feeling of aimlessness and exclusion from society. I also happened to take a [research-driven](https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/lgbt.2018.0265) internalized [transphobia test](https://www.idrlabs.com/internalized-transphobia/test.php) around the same time, which (though problematic for a number of reasons, IMO) identifies four dimensions of internalized transphobia: “\[lack of\] pride in transgender identity, investment in passing as a cisgender person, alienation from other transgender people, and shame.” These are weak points that bigots exploit to subtly guide vulnerable people into fatalism: feeling trapped and resigned about their trans status, delaying their transition or detransitioning or worse - and anomie: feeling too isolated or unique to connect with others, rejecting society as a whole and becoming detached from community.

Pushing trans people in either of these directions prevents them from growing, finding friends and allies, and organizing. It’s a classic maneuver: divide and conquer. By normalizing the idea that trans people are fragile and helpless, our enemies quietly guide their victims down a lonely path of hopelessness, and it looks to the undiscerning eye like a natural outcome of being trans.

*This disgusts me.*

It is imperative that we as trans people form communities together. Real, flesh and blood communities, not quasi-social anonymous spaces like Reddit. When we come together, we are powerful and we give each other strength. We perform gender labor for each other and collectively grow together. We share love with each other. Internalized transphobia tries to undermine us, so it’s important that we find ways to spot it and call it out. And when we’re in community with each other and learn to be truly vulnerable with those who care for us, transphobia dissolves and we build each other up. It’s what the bigots are afraid of, and if anyone deserves to be afraid it’s them. So be vigilant, join together, keep fighting. You are stronger than you think.

Weaponized Fragility


It’s been a rough month for me health-wise, and as such I haven’t been able to get much writing done. One of the other admins on the trans Discord I help with has been posting weekly writing prompts about the positive aspects of transition, and so I’ve been easing myself back in by working on responses. Here’s what I wrote about the aspects of transition I wasn’t expecting when I started.

---

I had heard that transition would bring more emotional depth, but the unexpected breadth of emotions has proven to be more important for me. I’ve been able to better identify what I’m feeling rather than assign it to a limited palette. I was so frustrated about my inability to articulate what emotions I was experiencing pre-transition, and the only times I could bring them to the forefront before were occasionally when I was intoxicated. Now I can understand the nuance of my emotions more in my day-to-day and it’s massively eased my anger and anxiety. It’s not that I see the world in loud technicolor now, it’s that I can describe differences that weren’t apparent to me before.

I didn’t expect as much happiness about the changes HRT has brought to my body in transition. More than anything I wanted to see if starting hormones would change how my mind works. I felt weird about how many discussions on trans subreddits were like “when boobies,” as if that was the point, or as if that was what made someone a woman. But now that I’m here it’s apparent to me that parts of me were missing, and other parts not so much, and some parts of me have changed in terms of their importance to me. I didn’t realize how alienated I had been from my body as a whole.

Before transition I had searched for a long time for “my people.” I remember crying in my bedroom as a teenager, feeling isolated, unsure how to connect with anyone, and my mother telling me “\[deadname\], you have to find your people.” I felt like I made some headway in college pulling together a friend group (never mind that 99% of them turned out to be queer). After graduating I spent so much time looking for my people in meetups, chatrooms, hobby spaces, innovative startups, whatever. But things never seemed to stick. When I started transition and began attending trans spaces, I unexpectedly felt a pull and a sense of kinship for other trans folks so strong and so quick that I had never felt elsewhere. It was like being struck by lightning, and I’ve been charged ever since.

Unexpected Changes


As an update to [Choppy Waters](/posts/choppy-waters), Lindsey (who has way more experience doing stats stuff) and I have put together an [Estradiol Patch Simulator](https://hypothete.github.io/e2-patch-simulator/) in order to figure out my dosage schedule. Like I said in the original post, my body is very sensitive to spikes and drops in estradiol, and so my first few days on patches hasn't gone great because the typical regimen is a bit spiky. I'm hoping also that I can get more out of my patches by using this model because it takes into account the actual long tail of patch efficacy. Lots of caveats around using this for your own HRT, neither of us are medical doctors, pharmacologists, or statisticians.

Choppy Waters 2 - Patch Simulator


I’ve been meaning to publish at least three blogposts I’ve had in drafts this month, but I ran into an unexpected transition roadblock that has, frankly, fucked up my headspace for writing. At the end of November I started on antibiotics to treat some really bad acne that showed up around the start of my transition. Usually dropping testosterone coincides with clearer skin, but that unfortunately wasn’t the case for me, and I spent several months trying increasingly strong topicals until finally I was referred to a dermatologist.

December seemed to start off fine - the antibiotics were helping my skin clear up a little - but after a couple of weeks I began to notice things. I was struggling with concentration at work, I was misgendering myself a lot in my head, and certain male physical responses that had gone away months ago began happening again like clockwork. But more than any other symptom I was experiencing, **I was being a huge bitch**. Just snippy and angry and unpleasant about everything.

Eventually I became conscious of my mental shift and started counting down the days until my next hormone labs, suspecting off-kilter hormones as the culprit. Then I woke up one morning with the thought in my head that I might be experiencing a drug interaction with the acne meds. My doctor had already put in for my labs even though our appointment was weeks away, so I held off on my pills that morning and popped in for a blood draw. Sure enough, my testosterone was no longer being suppressed via monotherapy, and my estradiol had dropped.

Digging into the literature a bit, there have been some connections made with doxycycline interfering with oral E2 via changes in metabolism - or changes to gut bacteria - it’s not really clear or well studied, and everything out there pertains to oral contraceptives. I know, shocking that trans healthcare is not well researched. I convinced my doctor to switch me to estradiol patches so I can stay on the antibiotics, and I’ve been trying out my first set over the past few days. It’s hard to tell if things are working yet, and I still have some logistical hurdles to clear (stupid insurance), but I at least was able to write this much!

I should be ending the antibiotic course in about a month, so if the patches don’t work out I can switch back to oral E2 no problem. You might be wondering, why not just do injections like most transfems on HRT? Well, I’m a woman who gets regular migraines (a _migraineur_, if you want to be fancy), and something I figured out early on in my HRT is that my brain is very sensitive to estrogen spikes, like most other women who suffer from migraines on their periods. This means that certain administration methods are unavailable to me: injections, sublingual, buccal. That leaves me with oral, transdermal, and pellets as possible administration methods. It’s a difficult constraint, but I’m glad that I have at least some wiggle room.

I want to close this post out with gratitude for the other transfems in my community who helped me figure out the problem and assisted with solutions. I’m lucky to have friends and acquaintances who [read and collect papers on HRT](https://transfemscience.org/), discuss dosages and treatment regimens, and share supplies with each other when the healthcare system fails at its responsibilities, as it so often does for trans people. We survive because we care for each other.

Choppy Waters


I want to share an amazing moment from this week. My wife Lindsey and I celebrated 15 years together as a couple on Thursday. We dressed up nicely - I was in my favorite dress and heels, which I never get a chance to wear -  and went out for dinner and cocktails at a fancy restaurant. At the end of our meal. Lindsey surprised me by getting down on one knee and proposing with a short speech she had prepared. (She told me later that my replacement wedding ring we had picked out a couple of months ago had shown up in the mail the day before, so she had to take the opportunity.) The words that echo in my head the most were when she said “I didn’t think I could love you more… but then I met Erin.” I melted right there. We cried tears of happiness all the way home, and then some after that.

From what I can tell, few relationships survive a partner transitioning. I won the jackpot, because Lindsey has been my champion since day one. She was the first person I could talk with about questioning my gender, she was there for my first girl-in-the-mirror moment, and she started using my name as soon as I realized that I knew it. I wouldn’t be where I am today without her, and I love her so much.

I Said Yes


I’ve been kicking this idea around for the past couple of months called the Gender Transition Strategy Guide. The Guide would be a webzine that focuses on the many decisions faced by people in transition, and address them using the language and visual style of video game strategy guides.  The idea came to me the first time I heard someone say that transition “is not a linear process.”  I immediately imagined a [tech tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_tree), a concept familiar to strategy gamers where investments into particular technologies in a game unlock the potential for new research in a branching structure. I think that using terms and representations from gaming in the context of explaining transition could be a rewarding way to both help transition be a little less daunting for those starting out, and disrupt the dominant linear narrative pushed by cis culture.

Contributions to the Guide would be structured around five aspects of transition: social, medical, legal, cultural, and self-concept. I’m imagining writing and artwork taking the form of screenshots, level maps, FAQs, “Pro tips,” and the like. I would want to emphasize that the aspects do not form a linear path, but instead compliment each other at different times. Also it would be beneficial to include some history to show how the “game” has changed over time. Overall I would want the Guide to give readers a sense of confidence in their undertaking, and remind them that they are not going through transition alone. At the end of the Guide I would want to encourage readers to submit their own contributions to the zine, so that it could be a living document as the definition of transition shifts.

What would set the Guide apart from previous attempts to provide similar guidebooks would be its focus on high level solves to expand transitioner agency, rather than getting lost in details that might not hit the mark or age well. To give an example of what I mean, when I was first starting to rebuild my wardrobe I came across all of these tutorials on shopping as a transgender woman that recommended this kind of neck cut on shirts, or that combination of colors and patterns, ostensibly to better flatter a body that had been previously shaped by testosterone. I can tell you right now that so much of that advice turned out to be dead wrong for me, and that the best way to pick out clothes has been to _try stuff on_.

Crazy, I know, and scary for the early transitioner. But the truth is our bodies are unique and styles are broad, and so you just have to go out and see how things look on you. Go with a friend, keep an open mind (I never thought I would own this many floral prints!), and use the trip as an opportunity to gain comfort in unfamiliar spaces. Harness the euphoria that can come from exploring clothes to sustain you. And if you run out of steam, just call it and go home. Even getting out there and trying to shop is an accomplishment to be proud of. Experiences like clothes shopping are opportunities to stack transition milestones — c-c-c-combos, if you will! 🙃

I’m not ready quite yet to start collecting submissions for the Gender Transition Strategy Guide, but I wanted to share my idea in the hopes that anyone reading this might find themselves struck with inspiration and join my brainstorm. I would love to hear your thoughts, so send me an email if you’re so moved: eris@humankibble.com.


Gender Transition Strategy Guide


This is your first bath with a bath bomb. It’s pink and yellow and shaped like either a Mickey Mouse head or water molecule, you’re not sure which. Your wife won it in some contest and she doesn’t like them, so it’s yours now. You fill the tub and get in. You drop in the bath bomb, which starts to fizz.

The water is almost hot. You are much too big to be fully immersed in the tub, so you slide down and bend your knees as best you can to stay warm. You can’t remember the last time you took a bath. Someone once described bathing to you as marinating in your own filth. You notice particulate in the tub and hope that the bath bomb does its magic quickly. And it is working, fizzing and throwing small plumes of color out into the bath. The water is turning a deep rosy pink.

Your fingernail and toenail polish has also turned hot pink. Earlier it was a deep, sparkly burgundy. The nail polish is heat reactive, like one of those Barbies your sister always brought to the pool in the 90s. You think about what it would have been like to own a Barbie. You probably would have liked the heat reactive ones.

You look down at your body and strategically cover yourself with a couple of washcloths. One to keep the new parts out of the bath warm, another to cover up the old parts so you don’t have to look at them. You don’t even know what to call those old parts anymore. The word “prolapsed” comes to mind. You think about surgeries, about all the reading you have been doing, the pictures you have been looking at. You think about the person who called from your new insurance who started the conversation by asking what surgeries you wanted.

_“…\[she\] is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”_

You learned phrases like this when you were a… little girl? It still doesn’t feel right. It feels like most people who believe those words wish you were dead. They can’t seem to comprehend that there are people becoming new creations every day in their midst.

You think about the friends that you saw at the queer bar event last night. You reflect on how you probably inadvertently cockblocked a few hookups. Gockblocked. Whatever. You think about how so many of your friends are losing their families as they become new creations. You think about the other friends who seem to be remade at this point, who are restless and want to move on. You fear that all of these friends will abandon you. Time for a deep, diaphragmatic breath.

_Hooooooooo_

_Mmmmmmm_

_Mmmmmmmone two three_

_Mmmmmmmonday morning? Mmmmmmonday morning?_

_Mmmmmmmhiii, how are you?_

_MmmmmmmI like your haaaaat_

You’ve been crying since you got into the tub, by the way. You woke up crying and decided to call in sick to work. You’re tired of pretending to care about software. You’re tired of tangling with health insurance. You’re tired of banks, of government offices, of doctor’s offices, of phone calls. You’re tired of researching standards of care, of drug administration methods, of bad studies with poor sample sizes. You’re tired of hearing about the people who want to kill you. You’re tired of waitlists. You’re tired of side-eyes. You’re tired of men. You’re tired of “so, how _are_ you?” But there’s always crying. Crying is a form of grace. You feel selfish to cry, but it’s something you can really do well now, so you’re gonna do it anyway. There isn’t a kleenex box in reach, so you blow your nose into the bath bomb wrapper, a pile of tulle with a hemp drawtie.

The swirls of suds around your thighs that reminded you of the clouds of Jupiter have dwindled to spotty floes. The water is cold, and your nails are turning burgundy again, so it’s time to get out. You pull the plug and watch a whirlpool dance as the bath bomb drains away.

Bath Bomb


Here's a concept that I have been excitedly ranting to friends about for the past month or so. I recently read Dr. Jane Ward’s 2010 essay [“Gender Labor: Transmen, Femmes, and the Collective Work of Transgression.”](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1363460709359114?casa_token=8nqN0j2nFAEAAAAA:TrRTgVz285ZBd9_ny3XMRQKXU0mBSNNxrtbC3gRWXrbUH1SyVMaLlqQZL6pPoRMb-MnFcsuTsw) While the essay is very 2010 in its terminology and depictions of gender, it posits an interesting framing of the collective work necessary for the perpetuation of gender. Ward draws on interviews, documentaries, and representations in media of relationships between transmascs and their femme partners in order to locate commonalities in gender role dynamics. She investigates how these femmes “validate and celebrate their partners’ masculinity and[…] suppress the complexity of their own gender and sexual subjectivity in the service of this goal.“ Ward writes about the importance of external feminine validation to the subject transmascs in order to maintain their masculinity, how their partners build them up and support them through their specifically gendered words and actions. Ward calls this practice “gender labor,” and says that it is a collective effort shared by everyone, but that there are power imbalances at play like any other form of labor:

> “As I will demonstrate, all genders demand work, and therefore all people both give and require gender labor. However, some genders, principally those that are masculine and especially those that intersect with other forms of power (such as wealth and whiteness), make their demands less visible and more legitimate, or deliver them with more coercive force.”

Also:

> “To the extent that gender is always a shortcoming or never-achieved ideal, I want to suggest that gender is always already bound up with the search for people and things that will offer relief, compensate for failure, enhance dignity, and create moments of realness. In this sense, gender labor is the act of giving gender to others in an attempt to fulfill these needs.“

Ward is especially interested in the intimate labor provided by those with feminine genders, and the burden therein in the context of misogynistic culture. This is absolutely a worthwhile investigation and I would encourage you to read the rest of her essay, but I want to take a different tack with the concept of gender labor, and instead look at the possibility of _gender labor automation_.

Workforce automation has been a hot topic for years, as improvements in computing and increased centralization of capital have led to businesses to look for ways to shed their employees. Most people think of fancy machine learning taking on these roles, but in my own experience workforce automation had looked more like building a website to replace a mailed form, and then suddenly 30 people in Tennessee who had been turning forms into database entries by hand end up in the unemployment line. But automation can be used for positive purposes as well. A small company can provide services to millions of people with merely some servers in the cloud and a skeleton crew of employees.

In a transphobic society, you could say that transgender people experience a shortage of gender, while cisgender people seem to have a surplus. Transphobic behavior such as deliberate misgendering when viewed through the lens of gender labor can be interpreted as a form of [Luddism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite), as it is not merely a willful refusal but is instead actual sabotage of the performance of gender labor. In struggling for societal acceptance we fight for our “gender labor rights,” and that shift of the balance of power demands that privileged individuals perform their fair share of labor. As we continue the work of broader trans acceptance, I believe that there are ways for us to harness automation to both shift the balance of labor and also produce gender for trans consumption. 

I’m personally less interested in the question of shifting the balance of labor, as answers seem pretty straightforward to me: increased community for transgender people, better communication for coordination of solidarity, efforts around visibility to sway cis perceptions. I try to do some of this work myself by using social media to nurture local trans spaces and coordinate events. As a friend reminded me recently, “building trans community is praxis.” But for the purpose of this blog entry, I’m more interested in the fun stuff. How would you go about automating production of gender to help address the gender shortage trans people experience?

One of the first examples that came to mind when I started pondering this question was an amazing website I discovered during my gender questioning phase, [Turn Me Into a Girl!](https://turnmeintoagirl.com/). Turn Me Into A Girl! has one premise: clicking a button on the website will definitively turn you into a girl. If a visitor clicks a button at the top of the site, they are asked to confirm their choice. After confirmation, a loading screen appears for a few seconds with a small cancel link below, and then the visitor is taken to a landing page that says: congratulations, you are now a girl! Cue confetti animations. It seems silly, but there’s some interesting psychology at play here. The website is testing the visitor’s implicit preferences, how comfortable they feel with becoming a girl, by providing a frictionless path to that self-concept. There are routes to bail out of the visitor feels wrong or uncomfortable during the “loading” phase, allowing for some internal questioning of the feelings that come up. And finally on the landing screen, the visitor’s gender is validated and celebrated in a nurturing way. This is gender labor coming from an automated source! 

Another set of apps that I might call a form of gender labor automation are face generation and editing apps like FaceApp and Snapchat filters. By providing contexts in which users can envision themselves as particular genders, the apps perform a kind of validation and “moments of realness,” in Ward’s words. But this “gender technology” can come from unintentional sources, too - look at [Picrew](https://picrew.me/), or character creation screens in videogames. How many trans people have written about their early gender exploration starting in places like these? I know I have. Playgrounds for self-concept are sources of gender validation, and as forms of technology can reach other people at scale.

I want to challenge creative coders and artists who read this to experiment with what other forms of gender labor automation could look like. I think that with intentionality around the idea of performing gender labor, some really interesting hardware and software could be created. If this writing helps inspire work on this front, [I would love to hear about it](mailto:eris@humankibble.com)!


Gender Labor Automation


Before the start of the year, I watched this video that recommended dropping New Year’s resolutions in favor of “themes.” A theme would guide your decision making over the course of the year, because any time you came to a decision you could weigh the choices against the theme and pick the most consistent one. I picked kindness - I said “2022 will be my year of kindness.” This  small choice has led to such a great shift in the trajectory of my life that I never could have predicted.

The first person I had to be kind to was myself, which turned out to have some interesting repercussions! From there I tried to reevaluate my relationship with my spouse, my work, and further out in my social circle, through the lens of kindness. It hasn’t been easy, but I’m proud of the small changes that have started to add up. My theme has also given me the ability to better perceive the kindness I receive from others. The gratitude I experienced reading the supportive responses from family and friends as I came out this spring was the most intense that I ever felt.

When I joined my trans support group in May, I learned that their guiding principle was to be kind. This group gave me the chance to practice kindness on a regular basis with full intention. So much has followed from my time in the surrounding community, because I’ve been spending most of my time with people who value being kind.

Now that I’m helping moderate a large online space for trans people, I’m learning how communities must learn to be kind at scale. Sometimes kindness means confrontation, or clearly setting boundaries, even though it can be painful to talk through. It’s hard work looking for ways to propagate forward that value, but it’s so valuable for a space that values kindness to exist even for a tenuous second.

For the past week, I’ve felt like I’m failing to be a woman. I’m starting to look like a woman, and sound like a woman, but I have been worried that my behavior hasn’t changed significantly since starting transition. I know, “👏 all 👏 women 👏 are 👏 valid” but I haven’t felt valid, I’ve felt indistinct. Writing down this reflection on my year so far has reminded me of my theme, and of what I need to do in this situation. I need to be kind to myself again, be patient with myself and continue to pick kindness at the coming forks in the road. I can’t forget that the amount of kindness I have been able to muster in myself both ignited and sustains that pilot light of femininity burning inside of me. Choosing kindness is a small change to make in the moment, but it’s gotten me this far.

My Year of Kindness


It’s only Tuesday, and the vibes are fucked this week. Through my trans community, I’ve been very active since June on a Discord server of trans and gender-diverse people in the area. Since I joined, the server has swelled in population, from about 50 members to nearly 250. I was recently added to the moderator team, and have been doing my best to provide feedback on decisions and suggest improvements for the server. But I feel like I jumped in at a bad time, because like I said, the vibes are fucked.

One of the reasons that I think I was tapped for joining the mods was my involvement in some delicate situations involving safety of the other server members at public gatherings. Safety has begun to be more of a concern as since there is so little oversight of members of the Discord at this point (despite being invite-only), some less than savory members have joined and subsequently been expelled, stirring up a lot of shared stress in the process. I think some of the mods and admins have since been on higher alert for dangerous behavior from the other members, and that this has been burning people out. There’s high alert and then there’s triggers from trauma, and when you have a trans community there’s no way for trauma to not be involved.

People are down, the mood is down. Maybe it’s partially a seasonal thing. There are a lot of people in this community with relationship stressors that have been festering and seem to have hit the fan this week. I know there’s some statistics around the holiday season being correlated with violence or divorces or something, and I feel like I’m watching something to that degree play out across a population. It’s brutal.

On top of that there are a lot of newer members who, despite not breaking the rules, tend to bring a lot of negativity without growth. Lots of complaining and worrying self-talk and misery. And you want to feel for these people, and you want to help set them on the right path, but that’s not what they’re here for, and it drains energy from well-meaning folks. I’m not the most well-meaning, I don’t think of myself as being very good at talking people off the ledge, but I’m watching it all happen and it’s stressing me out, too. Again I think this has a big link to trauma, and the stuck points that traumatized people tend to repeat to themselves that keep them from growing. Sometimes people need a place where they can be heard, like a support group, but the difference between a support group and a large Discord server is shared values and intention.

When I attend my weekly support group, I agree to share certain values and provide support to others as best I can, even if that just means listening to them talk. Everyone agrees to be kind. Everyone agrees to protect each other by maintaining confidentiality. But we agree to more than that. We hauled our asses to a community center, or emailed someone and got a Zoom link, because we were willing to actively participate in receiving and sharing support. We have to sit with each other, look each other in the eye, be physically present with each other’s pain. In a Discord of 250 people, that social contract barely exists - you get a link and here’s a chatroom to do whatever in. There are rules for conduct, but rules are not shared values, rules are a blunt tool used for removing the worst offenders. I think when the server was only 100 people or so and most were coming from said support group things were pretty smooth sailing because we carried those values forward with our fellow participants. But the server has grown beyond that and our group cohesion is being tested.

I’ve been rereading this week a famous feminist essay from 1970 titled [The Tyranny of Structurelessness](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm). The author Joreen writes about the problems she was facing when trying to turn 1960s feminist consciousness-raising circles into activist spaces capable of organization. She talks about a lot of struggles that groups of any form face, like informal power through friendship networks as a pitfall, celebrities and big personalities undermining message cohesion, and the impotence of different scales of groups due to lack of structure and shared goals. She talks about learned helplessness that a lot of group members brought to feminist spaces since they were new to thinking outside misogyny and didn’t realize their own potential.

I think where I’m at reading this essay and comparing it to the server’s current state is that a line was crossed and a scaling problem has begun snowballing. Where informal friendships and shared values once dictated the vibe, a sense of aimlessness now pervades just because there are so many new members present who outnumber those initial networks. And so of course individuals feel hit harder by their problems, their support network has been diluted and stretched thin. Finally add on top of this the burden of internalized transphobia and transmisogyny that tells participants that they are less-than and unable to act in the face of bigotry, that their problems are individual. All this combined keeps people from organizing and taking decisive action, which would in turn provide structure and shared values for the group.

The only way that I can see to turn a vibe shift like this around would be to find ways to establish a culture of shared responsibility and empowerment to take action and form bonds. At some point it’s not simply enough to share space with people, everyone needs to contribute to a vision in order to support the whole. We need to learn from the struggles of our predecessors, because we are neither alone in space nor in time. The vibes are fucked this week, but I’m still hopeful that we can unfuck them.

Fucked Vibes

The author's egg crack, refusal of the call, and subsequent acceptance of self as depicted by GitHub contributions


Something that’s been on my mind lately is how to navigate my relationships with cis people, and especially cis men, that I’ve known since pre-transition. At meals and get togethers with friends and family I keep finding myself in conversation with the men more than the women, and it feels like they’re talking to me man-to-man, and I’m not enjoying it. Some examples of what this looks like include getting cornered when it’s just the two of us in the kitchen, or being at a table with another couple and the conversation splits to cis women / cis guy and me, and never comes back together. I can see a number of factors involved with why this might be happening.

One big part of this is that we had a male relationship before my transition, and so it’s easy to just keep acting like that’s how we relate to each other. Similarly, the women in this scenario don’t have as well defined a relationship with me, so it’s not as easy for us to slip into a comfortable socializing pattern. A lot of cis people seem to have no idea how to talk to people in transition. I know a lot of trans people would rather not get questions or comments from their friends and family, which is understandable in the case of having transphobic people in your life, but in my case I’m supposedly surrounded by allies who don’t seem to notice or want to ask how things have been going for me. I’m willing to have that conversation, transition is so WEIRD and COOL and EMOTIONAL and I want to share! I want to be seen and acknowledged as a woman by my friends and family, and I wish they would show an iota of awareness about it.

I probably look pretty nervous at cis-heavy social gatherings these days. There’s so much that I’m trying to juggle when I’m out with cis people - how’s my appearance? Is my voice too deep? Am I being too loud and obnoxious in a male way? Am I lapsing back into old patterns? How are they perceiving me? I’m extremely self-aware in ways that I’m not around the trans folks in my life. I experience internal transmisogyny around “living up” to being a woman, not wanting to embarrass other women by sharing their pronouns. And so when it comes to being around men, I feel like it’s extra important for them to see me exhibiting these traits so that they won’t keep perceiving me as a man, and sometimes this has been translating into making myself small and quiet to get a handle on the shitstorm of pressures in my head. I think that some of these men are picking up on this, and trying to make me feel more included by engaging me in conversation. There’s like a “chivalry” component to it?

Lastly I’m not forgetting that as a cis man it can be intimidating to be in social situations with a lot of women, and “guys have to stick together” in those sorts of circumstances. One meme of sexism is the mystery of the “fairer sex” - women are supposedly  unpredictable and emotional, and their bodies are weird. You can’t understand them! On the opposite side of the coin, men are, of course, calm, cool and rational. We all know this is a heap of bullshit designed to take away women’s autonomy and give men a free pass for feelings of entitlement. But even the best feminists can internalize this thinking to some degree. Cis men especially seem to struggle with awareness around these stereotypes since they aren’t taught how to relate to their feelings, which means they’re easily scared in non-male settings. So since I’m the closest thing to a man in the room, the cis guys light upon me for companionship. This feels like an additional emotional burden for me to carry. I’ve already talked about my hyperawareness of self, and now unintentionally a guy friend is asking me to soothe his ego and protect him from the icky girls. I absolutely do not want to be in this role, and I have plenty of this crap to work through in my own brain before I can start helping somebody else.

This post really doesn’t have a point or a positive ending, it’s a vent about a common experience in my life right now. It feels good to try and get some of the steps of this dance written down, at least. Just one of the papercuts of transition.


Guys in the Kitchen


Last month I found myself in tears at the grave of my grandparents. I was on a trip with my wife to Raleigh, North Carolina, and through a series of events ended up flying into Charlotte and driving to Raleigh from there. My father had told me that my ancestors were textile workers for over 100 years in a town which happened to be on the route to Raleigh. A last-minute decision to stop off in the town turned into a visit to the family plot, and after some searching I was able to find the headstone of my grandmother and grandfather.

I wasn’t very close with my father’s parents, I got the impression that they were never particularly cut out to be parents and found it difficult to relate to their grandchildren. Their funerals were small and quick, and I didn’t attend for a number of reasons. But sitting at their grave, I found myself wishing that I had been able to know them as an adult, meet them where I was now, and learn about the history that shaped them. There was no possible timeline where this could happen, but I wanted it anyway and felt sad for our unbridgeable distance.

Of course, I also wondered how they would handle their first grandchild turning out to be trans. What if I had grown up and visited them as a cis girl? What would it have been like? A wave of remembered interactions and relationships from my five years in the state rolled over me. I imagined refactoring the friendships I made in school and in my neighborhood. And would I have been shuffled through school in the same way? I was given a lot of praise and opportunity for my intelligence in school, would sexism have denied me those opportunities? Could I even now reconsider my childhood as that of a misunderstood trans girl?

I believe it’s been established that the act of remembering is essentially a rewrite operation, so people’s memories always acquire the stamp of the present, like an increasingly crunchy JPEG being copied and saved over again. I’ve read some interesting discussion in trans circles about how memory relates to past identity in this way. Some people think of themselves as having been a completely separate person and becoming a new one upon acceptance and transition. Others talk about transness as being a form of time travel, where their present identity reworks their past which in turn reinforces their present. I think where I’m at right now is closer to the latter group, and that I’m allowed to try and reconstruct my past. I feel this way because when I return to my memories as a woman or a girl I still feel the smooth snap of puzzle pieces flying together in the same way that I did when I encountered my gender identity. Something is connecting, some truth is quietly assembling itself.

Grief for my Childhood


Yesterday (10/16/2022) marked my six month anniversary on hormone replacement therapy, and although it isn’t exactly accurate I like to think of that date as my start of transition (as opposed to my “egg crack”, 3/5/2022). My body has responded well to estrogen as its main sex hormone - my mental noise, anger, and general anxiety have decreased, and I feel a lot better about my less-compulsive sex drive. I am very pleased with my physical changes, like softer skin, curvaceousness, and breast growth. There are still some physical aspects that I hope will improve later on (Counting on you, smaller feet! You can do it, facial structure!), but truth be told I’m bowled over at how pleasing the changes have been so far.

I’m not the only person that has taken note. Many transfem authors have written in the past about their sudden “visibility” to strangers, which I started experiencing around the month 4 mark. When I was living as a man, people didn’t pay much attention to me as I moved through stores and event spaces or on my regular jogs. Now, I get stares, ranging from quick side glances to big dumb open mouth gapes. Most of this attention is neutral at best - I’m sure I’m eye-catching at 6’3” in a cami and swooshy maxi skirt - but sometimes I get smirks. Lately strange men have been getting a little more aggressive. The other night a drunk guy called me a faggot, and a few weeks ago an older man got right in my face at the grocery store and shouted something incomprehensible at me. I was pretty shaken up by him, and it took me a few hours to come down.

The tough thing about being visible is that it is, in a weird way, affirming. I’m being noticed because I no longer blend in like a man would, and that’s apparently enough license for creeps to start harassing me. I know the two incidents I just mentioned aren’t typically what most people think of as objectification, which is why I said harassing, but I think both objectification and harassment like this stem from feeling licensed to treat other people as less than people, and more like objects to be used for some function. What’s that over there? A woman? Let me dump my random impotent rage on her. What’s that? A woman - no wait, a man? I can’t fuck that, it’s a faggot.

My transfem friends and acquaintances have been very complimentary about my physical changes, and some of that has been good and other parts have been less than desirable as well. I don’t mind so much someone saying “HRT is doing wonderful things for you” because yeah, it is, but talking about my tits with others is objectification, despite however earnest the speaker my be. It smarts to hear, but I honestly believe these transfems mean the best by their comments, and are saying them to both compliment me, and reinforce their own femininity in a way. I read it as learning and practicing the compliments game that cis women play - “I love your necklace!” “Thanks, I got at Kohl’s!” - without a strong grasp on the rules. The number one rule in the game, from what I can tell, is that objectification is a matter of consent. Compare how consent factors in when talking about someone’s bracelet vs someone’s tits. Talking about something worn - deliberately chosen and easily replaced - has better outcomes across the consent scale than talking about body parts:

### “Your bracelet looks amazing” table

| Actor	| Consent	| Outcome |
|-|-|-|
| Lover, partner | Complete |	Positive feelings |
|Close friend |	Moderate | Positive feelings |
| Social acquaintance, sassy | Low | Positive. They’re being funny |
| Social acquaintance, matter-of-fact | Low | Positive, feeling noticed for fashion choices |
| Rando on the street |	None | Neutral to positive, feeling noticed for fashion choices being eye catching |

### “Your tits look amazing” table

| Actor	| Consent	| Outcome |
|-|-|-|
| Lover, partner | Complete | Positive feelings, reinforcing attractiveness and vulnerability |
| Close friend | Moderate | Positive feelings, trust around intent |
| Social acquaintance, sassy (your tits look amaaaaazing) | Low | Fairly positive. They’re being funny |
| Social acquaintance, matter-of-fact | Low | Hesitance, some suspicion. What are their intentions? |
| Rando on the street | None | Negative feelings, disgust and fear |

A special case I want to call out is gay men. I have it on good word from the cis women in my life that gay men generally get a pass for making body-centric comments or unexpectedly touching them, presumably because women are “off the table.”  I’m not currently close to gay men that make these sorts of comments, and so I wasn’t aware of this until recently, and got freaked out by a gay man suddenly massaging my shoulders at a social event last week. Honestly I’m not a fan of this pass because it’s better to err on the side of more consent.

I know that things aren’t going to get easier from here for me. My body is going to continue changing, and I will be more noticeable than ever as I become more feminine in appearance. I wanted to write this out to clarify my thoughts, and to better establish my boundaries for when someone crosses them. Here’s to six months of HRT, I can’t wait for the next six.

Do Not Perceive Me

Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?


Something I’ve been struggling with lately at transfem events is feeling lonely. This is despite being absolutely surrounded by people, people I feel like I know fairly well. When I go out to our weekly bar nights I spend my hours there flitting between conversations, catching up on the news from lots of people, and introducing myself to new folks as they show up. I run my mouth the entire time, but when the bar closes and I hop back into my car I feel only myself again and can’t seem to carry the social charge any further. I feel like a rechargeable battery that has run its course.

I’ve talked to my therapist about this, of course. He thinks that I might be talking with people in a defensive way by constantly redirecting the conversation back to the other person. He’s encouraged me to be more open and vulnerable in all of my conversations, and sit with questions rather than turning them back around, so that people have a chance to get to know me better. I’m trying really hard to do this, but it’s very hard for me to do.

Also I feel like the experience of transition brings its own sort of loneliness despite any community’s best efforts. I’m more aware of the changes to my mind and body than anyone else, and I’m learning to be called by a new name and to take risks as I rediscover my identity. It feels hard to put myself forward when I can struggle at times to know who exactly that is. And social situations can cue up a lot of habitual - often gendered - behaviors, leading to papercuts of dysphoria.

I think the thing that hurts the most about this I am acutely aware of how lucky I am to have a community. I will keep going back every week whether I get over this hump or not because feeling like I’m socializing is better than sitting at home, even if it can leave me feeling empty.

Lonely in a Crowd


The other night I was in an argument with my wife about a miss between us during a shopping trip. Without going into details, I responded harshly to something she did and it hurt her feelings. As we drove home, she told me that it hurt her because I usually choose to be harsh to get her to comply, rather than guiding her with softness. She was right. To me, the ability to gently direct through softness is a hallmark of femininity, and as a transgender woman early in her transition there is nothing that I would like more than to find and express my femininity naturally. Her remark was an arrow to the bullseye, and I spent most of the night crying after that. 

My buildup to transition occurred on a number of fronts, but one important to this discussion was my role as a manager at a small startup. I was responsible for the workload of ten people, assigning tasks, doing daily and weekly checkins, and informing my supervisors of progress on our work. I found myself growing more severe as pressure from my supervisors increased on me and my team. The month I started questioning my gender, I had pushed the team through three weekends of work to deliver a functional MVP for a trade show.  I was stern, cold, and relentless. And it worked, I got results - at the expense of my own self-worth and the confidence of my team. At the same time I was beginning to hate seeing my frown in the mirror and hearing my deep voice on calls.

This is cliche, but I started playing Animal Crossing in my off hours that winter to blow off steam. It was relaxing, beautiful and low-effort. Most importantly, the game’s expectations of me in terms of social interactions were forgiving and based on reciprocity. While making friends with the villagers of my virtual island, I discovered my love for running around the island in dresses they gifted to me. With teal hair, funky sunglasses and a midi dress, I felt like I could take on anything. I got really into experimenting with feminine outfits and so of course I had to try on the real thing from there.

I could see the contrast between my video game island and how I treated my virtual neighbors there, and bringing down the hammer on my staff at work every day. I wanted out. I wanted softness, and I wanted to have it everywhere. I wanted to carry it within myself. I wanted femininity in behavior, in thought, and in form. After a few more months I quit my job to get my head straight, and began a phase of intense gender questioning through learning and experimentation.

Since I first recognized myself as trans, certain social groups and contexts have helped me find my softness in femininity, but I still have a long way to go. I’ve been an active participant in a local transfeminine support group for nearly five months now. At first I was scared of attending - I was worried that I was going to be seen as a fraud, and honestly I had some transphobic feelings of disgust around non-“passing” people that I hadn’t confronted. These feelings vanished the first time I sat in a circle with the other members of the group, and I felt a burden lifted from me. I could sense a palpable charge of femininity in the room, and it was kind and welcoming. It felt easier to be open with my feelings there, and people hugged each other as we concluded. Returning home after the next several meetings became bittersweet, because carrying that softness home and into my daily life has been hard for me to do on my own. I feel a sense of belonging and security when I’m with my support group, and it takes effort to sustain those feelings with confidence when I am without.

It’s been 10 months since I started gender questioning, and 6 months since I made the choice to start my transition. Although these timelines are extremely short, I find myself worrying every day about whether I will succeed in finding and expressing the femininity in myself as my primary way of being. I worry that I have damaged myself - or been coercively damaged - beyond recovery by the masculinity I tried to live for 33 years. But I know that to do the work and attempt that softness every chance I can get is how I’m going to make any progress at confronting that thought, so I’m trying.


I Want to Find My Softness


**Katrina:** “Never really got into PSLs. Lia took me out for them during the initial craze but I wasn’t impressed. It was just like the Cheers nights, we were two “besties” ironically enjoying this Starbucks drink, and it only served to highlight my alienation from my friend group and marriage.”

**Ames:** “Mmm, tasty! You know, Ad Age had a piece a few years back about Starbucks changing the pumpkin spice latte recipe to include actual pumpkin. Shortly after that, Ketel One approached us about following suit with a campaign about their infusion process. We ran a cohort analysis and… why are you getting up? Did I do something wrong?”

**Reese:** “You want me to drink that? Ew no, I would never stoop to something so gauche and basic.” *Downs two while her date is in the bathroom*

How the main characters of Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters would drink a Rontoms Pumpkin Spice Margarita


For 2-6 players

### Setting
Clothing stores are recommended, but any store can be used

### Objective
Build friendship between players by casually exploring a store. Purchasing items is incidental and should not be treated as an objective.

### Setup
The players agree to meet at a store and head to a particular department of the store. Players should stay in close enough proximity of each other to communicate easily.

### How to Play
The players peruse merchandise in the store within a close distance of each other, and take turns in no particular order calling attention to the items that they find. This action constitutes the start of a round. After several rounds, the players may move to another department or part of the store. Players continue initiating rounds and changing locations until the end of the game.

### During the Round
The player who initiated the round must first explain why they called out their particular item as the subject of the round. The other players are encouraged to then provide their input on this judgement and on the item generally. This can take the form of support for purchasing the item, casual dismissal of the item due to absent or present properties, mild ridicule and charades, etc. Players should not feel pressured to treat the item as seriously under consideration for purchase, and should keep their comments light. Humor is encouraged at the expense of the item or store - other players can be lightly ribbed but should not be mocked.

### Store Employees
The size of a store determines how much the humorous aspect of the game should be concealed from store employees. Poking fun at the merchandise is much more acceptable at Target vs a mom-and-pop boutique.

### Extended Play
In the case that the game has been occurring in a small store or the players don’t have anything better to do, the game may continue by the players moving to another store.

### End of the Game
The game is over when the players have finished perusing the store, or the players decide to purchase several things, or the players are tired and want to go home.