my friends tend to fall into the category of “really nice but have never met a trans person before in their life” and this has resulted on at least 2 occasions with someone being like “it seems like you really, really hate binding, why don’t you just get top surgery?” like they just have NO concept of what a long and expensive process that is and it’s a very nice comment to hear in a way because it expresses that they’re trusting me and listening when I talk about my identity, but in another way it’s so crushing it’s just like YEAH I WONDER

Im like pretty committed to being open about being trans @ school because there aren’t too many of us and I think it’s important, but people were asking me abt my transition yesterday and it was really hard to talk about and I was saying how I’d definitely be talking to a counselor about going on T, but I’m in choir and I really can’t threaten that support network rn, and one of the ppl was very sincerely like, “Oh no, I’m so sorry” and it just sounds kind of minor but it felt like being stabbed it was like YEAH UR RIGHT IT SUCKS I REMEMBER WHY IM IN DEEP DENIAL NOW

the worst thing that I do to myself is when I see like a single dark hair on my chin/upper lip/belly/leg and my instinctual first thought is “oh, im finally going to grow a beard/happy trail/what-have-you!” and then it’s like. no. that actually is not going to happen for the next several years at least. gg no re except there actually will be re because i have this thought like twice a week

On the other (mall) hand (mall hand) (that’s funny so I’m leaving it) I am actually for the first time in my life starting to find menswear that actually fits me, as a combination of having a LOT of experience w/ buying stuff that’s actually too large, and learning about how men’s clothes are even supposed to fit (and also probably having a slightly larger frame than when I was 15 although im still a skinny nerd type tbh)

Getting to this point has been really frustrating and literally took me like four years but it felt so good to know what to look for, put it on in the dressing room, and see myself looking butch af in the mirror. It makes me feel so much better about my body to know that I can find menswear that fits well and actually flatters me and that i don’t have to settle for trying to hide the way my body is with no hope of actually looking good in what I wear

Now im like I wanna buy all the things!!! Turn over the whole frkking wardrobe!!! but Im trying to chill because financial resources are unfortunately finite

Rather than focusing on getting my pronouns/name right every single time, 100% of the time, the better thing to do if you want to be a good ally and to effectively communicate your respect for me is to learn to see me as my true gender. Take the time to challenge the little tiny shortcuts you take in your mind, like breasts = woman or hips = woman. When I have a friend who transitions while I know them, I take the time to just look at them, listen to their voice, and say, those are girls’ clothes, that’s a girl’s voice, that’s a girl, over and over again. 

This becomes automatic surprisingly quickly, and if you do this and start seeing me as genderqueer/agender, that makes it infinitely easier for me to be around you. Because you’ll no longer be catching yourself and correcting yourself all the time in a way that feels unintuitive or mismatched.

It does come across in behavior and language, even if you gender me correctly all the time in conversation, if you think of me as cis. on the contrary I feel so much better supported and respected by people who think of me as non-binary, even if those are people who don’t always get my pronouns right. 

Stop thinking of me as an exception to the binary, stop seeing me as somewhere on the binary and then covering this perception up with gender neutral language. Yes, the language often comes first. But don’t fight your perception with the language, dont’ cover up your perception of me as cis with gender-neutral pronouns. Let the pronouns guide you to seeing me as agender. I promise that if you do this, that’s when you’ll understand that trans people really are just people… that’s when you’ll understand that we really are girls/boys/nonbinary, that’s it’s not a facade, when your language stops being a facade over a false perception, when your language and perception agree on who I am

Idgi why my mom is so preoccupied with picking apart my actions and preferences to try and figure out my gender… she’s all like “well when you were little you liked the color red……. but now you spend a lot of time doing math…. and you play the video game” it’s like mom I’m an adult and I’m literally telling you what my gender is all the time you don’t have to sleuth it out ok

The other ironic thing about it is that I’ve read that a lot of trans people become really uncomfortable with intimacy, esp. physical intimacy, if they’re not allowed to transition, and become basically celibate and refuse to explore that until transition happens – but that this is a problem that transition solves.

It’s ironic because my mom takes issue with the fact that I haven’t dated anyone lately and she basically wishes I’d be physically more comfortable with people, and she thinks that physical transition will bring me farther from this goal and that I want to do it as a way to distance myself from others. To her, my chest is inherently sexual, and contouring into pecs means throwing away the potential for that kind of intimacy. But to me, my chest is a stumbling block in the way of intimacy, a distraction and a discomfort that makes it very, very difficult to get close to people in that way because of the persistent feelings of shame and dysphoria I have to juggle even if I’m just trying to spoon with someone in a completely nonsexual situation.

It clicks with me, the idea that I might be avoiding physical intimacy because of my deep dysphoria about my body. I certainly feel extremely uncomfortable if I’m like, cuddling with someone in pajamas or something. It makes me extremely aware of my body. One of my goals in the pursuit specifically of top surgery is that I cannot put my life on hold because I don’t feel like I’m who I really am. But it’s a hugely difficult feeling to work through, and it’s hard because it saps meaning and comfort from life. Yes, I’m in school, but none of my professors really know me, so how can I feel that my education is meaningful or worthwhile? My friends don’t really know me. It’s literally like I’m some kind of an imposter who’s eventually going to be exposed. Why bother getting close to people if they’re seeing this mask, instead of my actual self? It makes the relationship completely meaningless. It feels like everything will be meaningless until my body matches my mind. If that day never comes, then my life is meaningless.

Obviously those are somewhat distorted thoughts, but I’m just trying to report here without judging them too much.

Anyway, like I said, I try extremely hard to accept my situation as it is, knowing that my parents may eventually agree to get the procedure done, or I may have to save for it on my own, which will take a number of years. But even in that mindset, it’s really, really hard to get physically close to someone in this circumstance. Like I said, I feel like an imposter, almost like it’s an article of clothing or a mask that I physically want to remove so they can really see me, but I can’t take it off. It makes it really taxing to even hug people, because a part of me is thinking, not only can they see this wrong, out-of-place part of my body, but they can also feel, it, and they don’t know it’s not a part of me. I just want so badly to disown my whole body in those moments. It’s not really conducive to building healthy relationships.

So hopefully getting it done will help with that. And hopefully until the day comes I’ll find ways to work around it and do the best I can in that regard.

I read a couple of books on raising transgender children, in order to vet them to pass them on to my parents. This isn’t the main point of this post but I ended up liking “Gender Born, Gender Made” – there’s a few points I’ll want to explicitly bring up with my parents about it, and I only read the first few tens of pages & from the chapter on medical transition to close to the end, but it seemed to hit the basics like stressing self-determination of identity, touching on genderqueer and nonbinary identities, and consistently using the correct name and pronouns for people mentioned in the book.

Anyway, I was very surprised in reading them by the amount of things I recognized from myself in the books, that I had always passed off as being unrelated to being trans. 

Some of it was stuff that probably should have been obvious to me. I’ve always been pretty uncomfortable with swimsuits of my assigned gender. The discomfort often focuses on characteristics that people associate with my gender assigned at birth. But I always assumed it was a body image issue, probably because of alexithymia. The chest stuff I assumed was discomfort with the idea that my chest could somehow escape the swimsuit and I’d be humiliated. The bottom dysphoria I associated with different things, but often I ended up pinning it on the (fairly faint) scarring on my legs – either that or similar concerns about unexpectedly being exposed.

But one of the books mentioned that trans kids often display persistent discomfort with wearing a swimsuit of their assigned gender, and it just clicked for me that that’s probably a huge part of it. I know that I do have some body image issues (the scarring at least used to be a big issue for me), but for the most part I’m fairly body confident. But even though I’ve gone through about a billion styles of swimsuit & have found the ones that work best for me (short of trunks & no shirt, which who knows how that would feel), I’m still constantly trying to cover up with a towel, especially my lower half. Even if my legs are crossed and I know nobody’s going to see anything… in a way they still are seeing something, and it makes me immensely uncomfortable.

This is frustrating to realize, because I love to swim & hang out in a swimsuit, but if I wear something form-fitting like a one-piece, I’m constantly grappling with dysphoria, whereas if I cover up more, I feel unattractive and like a freak, and I find the extra fabric distracting & unpleasant.

It’s annoying because I know I’ve pretty much never expressed this before, as with so many other transgender things… It just seemed private. My body image stuff has always seemed private, and it’s ended up with me intentionally concealing a lot of dysphoria because I’ve become… comfortable with being secretly uncomfortable all the time. So a lot of it has become totally buried, and then I come across something like this and there’s a moment of “Holy shit, that’s why I’m always desperate to cover up.”

cis people have to understand that dysphoria is really different from straight body hatred

One theory I’ve heard about it is that dysphoria happens when the brain’s perception of a body part doesn’t match up with what he body part is actually like. in other words, my chest dysphoria could be explained by the fact that the part of my brain that says “your chest looks like this” got different hormone levels or something than my actual chest did. as a result, there’s a discrepancy there. That FEELS right to me because when I look down at my chest it’s not like, “oh, this is ugly.” My chest isn’t ugly. The thought is more like “what? that’s not MINE.”

It’s really disconcerting to have this mismatch. it’s the same vein of feeling I get when there’s a tick attached to my body and I look down and it’s like “That should not be there, PLEASE get it off”. 

on the other hand, like, I thought my stomach was ugly when I went thru puberty cause it got a little rounder and fuller and beauty standards blah blah. But I never looked down at it and thought “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT.” I thought “looks like I’ve gained a little weight.” Like, it was still a part of me, even if it was a part I didn’t necessarily love. The base level of “that is my body and it’s intact and correct” was in place. it was only the affective opinion of it that was negative. whereas with my chest, the baseline “that is my body and it is correct and mine” is not really there. It’s like, “Oh, those are definitely… some body parts… but why are they on me…? Are those mine? Are those seriously supposed to be mine? What the hell?”

I mean, it’s lower-key than that most of the time, bc I kind of have to ignore it in order to function, but that’s the basic idea. 

It’s like if you lose a fingernail, you want it back, cause there’s supposed to be a fingernail there. You don’t want it back bc you hate your finger or because society has brainwashed you into thinking your finger should have a fingernail or whatever. You want it to grow back because your brain says “Whoa, looks like we’re missing a fingernail. Better get that checked out.”

That’s why we can love our bodies and be very body-positive and still have dysphoria. For me, I think my body is wonderful, I truly do. I’m at peace with it. I treat it right (whether that means exercising or having a slice of cake at any given moment). I love it unconditionally. But no amount of positive emotions about it will change the fact that my brain-map of my chest and my actual chest do not line up. My body image can be great but the dysphoria will still be there until the brain map & body map line up.

my sister: (plays video games, does some programming, enjoys photography, creates digital art, dresses plainly in mostly neutral colors, used to enjoy sewing)
family: Ive never seen her do a feminine thing. ever!! not ever. 
me: (plays video games, does some programming, enjoys photography, creates digital art, dresses plainly in mostly neutral colors, enjoys knitting and crochet)
family: We dont’ really see u as masculine… ur plain not masculine… ur not masculine just AVERAGE and practicall…