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 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, a short online quiz derived from survey data. Here’s the paper 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).
I’m having a great time reading “Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender” 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.