Trans Megathread from January 13th, 2024 to January 19th, 2024
Trans Megathread from January 13th, 2024 to January 19th, 2024
"Nearly every social event I have attended with [communists] has inevitably had some conversation about linux, furry culture, obscure leftist history, tabletop games, or other equally nerdy subjects"
Join our public Matrix server! https://matrix.to/#/#traacha:transfem.dev
As a reminder, please do not discuss current struggle sessions in the mega. We want this to be a little oasis for all of us and the best way to do that is not to feed into existing conflict on the site.
Also, be sure to properly give content warnings and put sensitive subjects behind proper spoiler tags. It's for the mental health of not just your comrades, but yourself as well.
Here is a screenshot of where to find the spoiler button.
My shit has definitely atrophied on hrt.
Not that I was very strong before.8 months HRT and I can start to feel my body weight center shift down from my waist to my ass and thighs and it feels great
One more 11 hour shift today, then a 3 day weekend
god damn that girl in the mirror is finally starting to just look like a clocky ass trans femme and not just some kind of soft faced guy now this is really nice
No pain, no gain
my little pony is now a ceefax exclusive
Every month or so on Sonic Twitter someone will make a post going “woah, you gotta check out THIS voice clip of Roger! See he can cook it’s just bad direction!”
…and it’s always literally ass.mental health, family shit, trauma but like, turning a corner and optimistic
Had an awful day and a really ugly family blowup
Thought I might actually lose it
Made it through the day with no incidents
Even did my gym sets and got girl scout cookies ordered from (former) crush (they're apparently a troupe leader and have been since they were a kid? Anyways yay cookies, they're nice and I think I'm mostly over my emo shit about that but w/e)
Anyways despite having been really tempted to commit (several) felonies and barely preventing myself from that, I decided after that to find a therapist again and work on CPTSD shit
I may not be able to fully get my shit together yet, but I'm now open to consulting with a shit-cartographer to at least map out where my shit isn't together
cw for depression but this is a positive story. This is basically just me journaling but also you get to read it
So about five years ago I was an extremely depressed teenager. I remember crying for hours on hours one night, and then after that, I kind of turned off my intense emotions as a defense mechanism. I could still laugh or be annoyed, but I couldn't cry or see beauty or be angry at the world.
This winter was the most difficult of my life. I've messed up, I've lost friendships, I've failed in college, I've been addicted to weed, I've not been the person I want to be. But I was also able to cry for the first time in five years. Not just sniffles and a tear, proper bawling my head off ugly crying. And since then, I have been able to cry at bad things and good things. I got rejected by someone I liked and I cried - last time that happened, and the time before, I felt nothing. I watched the final episode of Mob Psycho and I cried a lot. I didn't cry when it first came out, and I already knew what was going to happen. I'd seen it before, but I cried this time. I also sat on a bench with my friends and looked at the Irish coast and saw the light and the colours and movement and it was beautiful.
Growing is hard and painful. Its one thing to know this intellectually, and another entirely to experience it. You also don't get to choose when you grow. It just happens out of necessity. I'm about to turn 22 and I've only just realized how much time I could have ahead of me, and I need to decide how I'm going to live.
I like analyzing media and looking at characters. I criticize bad character arcs and appreciate strong characterisation. But I've just begun trying in earnest to write a novel, and I've realized how little I actually understand about the human experience. How can I write about things I've never gone through? I don't know, but I'll try.
I'm becoming an adult, for real, actually this time. When I started college I was only an adult in technicality. Now I'm soon leaving college and I've been forced to change. It makes me want to change myself on purpose, and control who I am. When I started college I felt sad, because I felt like I was closing the chapter of my life that was childhood, which I never wanted to end. Now I'm leaving college and I feel like the training wheels have come off, and I can be so much faster and freer. Living is a strange thing, and I'd like to find out more about it.
hi, does anyone wanna make the mega in the upcoming weeks? if so, reply to this post and i'll add you to the list!
the list as it stands:
SwitchyandWitchy* (1/20 (The darkest day in the history of our democracy.) - 1/26) SILLY BEAN@lemmygrad.ml* (1/27 - 2/2) AshenWolf* (2/3 - 2/9) GayTuckerCarlson* (2/10 - 2/16) EstraDoll (3/2 - 3/8) * after name denotes someone who has posted before and will be skipped by first-time posters
The more I think about it, the less I care about changing all my documents and shit. The name I use for paperwork basically never comes up in normal interactions, and when it does I genuinely just find it funny. Like, a security guard one time who said "huh, thats a weird name to give to a girl, what was your mom thinking!!" or an old ass man who looked at me like Im an alien when
and he looked up my registration. Maybe I'm stupid cuz it might put me in danger or something, but after 4 ish years of being stealth, I don't even care about being outed anymore. Actually, I kinda wish I was more visually trans sometimes, because I know for a fact some of the people I work with and see every day don't know any trans people (or at least don't know that they know) and only hear about them on fox news and shit. Anyways... Ramble over, thanks for reading it :DReminder to join our group chat :D We had a name change
mention of transphobic "friends"
I expressed frustration that some people I used to associate myself with cared more about the shape of my hardware than me as a person and was told that a big problem in left wing circles is ascribing malicious intent to people with good intentions.
I'm sorry but what good intentions can I ascribe to transphobes? I have explicitly told every person who had a bad reaction to me coming out to them that if they asked me why I'd chosen to transition I'd tell them, and not one of them have asked. They objectively do not care to understand me. What good intentions can I possibly ascribe to a person who intentionally invalidates me knowing it hurts me?
religious transphobia
"God doesn't make mistakes"
I'm not religious anymore but I've never understood this one. It argues the exact opposite conclusion than it's traditionally used to argue.
It's a fact that trans people exist. If God exists and doesn't make mistakes, he made trans people, and therefore transness can't be a mistake. If God doesn't make mistakes, trans people are beautiful. I don't understand how this could possibly be argued any other way
I think one of the main reasons why trans rights are such a common litmus test is because it demonstrates how easily someone is willing to live-and-let-live, and to have space for others.
The reality is literally the other way around of
reactionary talking point
"forcing their way of life onto us".
If someone says "I am a X" and a dweller responds with "no, you are not a X, and here's why I am so certain about that as a third party", that is an act of forcing their worldview/lifestyle onto other people.
bit idea: t4t straight couple where the boyfriend is complaining that his GF keeps leaving the toilet seat up
The new Worst of All Possible Worlds is really good
Actually lol'd several times
my own maladaptive processes
I hate my brain sometimes. I tried to express to someone who called me pretty that they were also attractive and was hit with overwhelming waves of feeling predatory for even finding someone attractive. I hate my brain. Idk if i even want to fuck this person, i think i just want to be their friend, but i still feel predatory for even finding them attractive in the first place, let alone that i expressed that to them.
I hate my internalized transphobia.
She judge my slop too harshly
I love winter, had such a nice soft blue morning glow with a gentle snowfall while I was walking to school today. Just wish I had more fem winter clothes to wear so I can be as pretty as everything else.
Upsides of wearing a dress: looking and feeling cute
Downside: I now want to get ripped so I can have giant arms
Upvote to put me back to sleep
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CfTWj6-o-OU&pp=ygUYbS1mbG8gdHJpcG9kIGJhYnkgc2hhZG93 It's shadow the hedgehog baby
I never used tiktok before but some of these gals on 小红书 have really cool winter outfits and now I wanna up my fashion game.
My metabolic panel results are back and everything is within “normal” range (except CO2 which was low? IDK what that’s supposed to mean). AST and chloride are also kinda high but still within normal range
Honestly the most shocking thing is that my glucose level is 84 even though my diet is painfully amerikkkan and I come from a family (extended, not just immediate) of diabetics
I finally got back on HRT last week lesgooo
Just took my morning meds and it's almost 8pm, powerful
CW mild NSFW. This is wild. So Facetune has an AI for roasting your outfits. There appears to be some guardrails around nudity but not for...
... softcore Bdsm photos. So it's generating responses to some pics I submitted like
"this look says 'kidnapped tourist' chic meets ultimate basement lounging disaster, the gag is the only accessory, and it's a choice"
Obviously AI bad. But it can be funny when these cracks gets exploited.
Bif of a mixed bag on Xiaohongshu regarding trans people. I see a lot of "Don't ask don't tell" sort of responses, including some "We don't care, but it's not for kids" type talk. When it comes to non-binary, there are a lot of "we don't have 96 genders in China" type responses.
On posts by trans and gnc people, I don't really see any negative comments.
Comment thread and top liked replies:
My department is renovating my department's building and apparently one of the changes they're making is turning our gender neutral restrooms into larger gendered restrooms even though literally no one asked for that. Their rationale is "none of the other departments have gender neutral restrooms" 😞
CW: Transphobia, identification documents, health insurance, forced outing
More fuckery with my passport application. After sending it in for a correction after they failed to put the correct gender marker on it, they now sent me a letter (which took a week to arrive) that I need to send in my birth certificate. As far as I can tell from the state department website, there is no requirement to send in proof of citizenship with a DS-5504, so I am annoyed and nervous. I am including another letter with the relevant web pages about the data correction and gender marker change policies, but I am beginning to despair. I am now worried that the policy could change before the processing of the passport is complete.
Health insurance at work is also starting to be a nightmare. The HR system allows you not to disclose gender/sex, but that's fake because you have to pick a binary sex for the health insurance. The HR representative also used transphobic language in the email letting me know about this, so that's pretty bad as well. I put it down as female, and then updated my gender identity info as well to make it clear. Not adding pronouns yet since that pops up without digging into the profile, so at least I can avoid that involuntary outing, but it really sucks overall.
I am now worried that the insurance company is going to ask for proof of sex at some point, and until I get my passport I don't have any IDs that have the correct gender marker (updating state ID is out of the question).
Once nice thing about RedNote is I have a place to post self pics that have an effectively 0% chance of being seen by my (anti-China) family.
dysphoria
"self care" actually sucks ass and I remember why I neglect myself. Holy shit I never want to shave again. Fucking awful. Now that my clothes are back on I think I'm stabilizing but I went from "okay" to very much not okay.
Didn't even get half done
god I have to force myself to do that again don't I. And soon all that work will be gone.I feel so cool for having broken the chains of enforced traditional gender and choosing my own now. It makes me way cooler than most other people and my community is the greatest. Can’t imagine living life without the freedom of choosing one’s own gender and some understanding of what gender means to oneself. Must be pretty boring!
Feelin' tired and sad today
Keep thinking about a stranger I ran into yesterday and wish I had been more outgoing and friendly, they seemed cool but I was stressed out and probably seemed bitchy and not very approachable
I feel like such a fuckin' goober a lot of the time in public but worry that I come across as intimidating or something
Been watching apothecary diaries and this is so my jam, Mao Mao is such a mood
she's so 
white boy shocks everyone in the restaurant by touching a live wire
facebook ceo, mark dinkleberg
Well, I placed high enough on my language placement test that I can take the class I need without having to do an extra semester. It was a close one, what I remembered about grammar had to have carried the score because I am absolute garbage at anything that isn't basic vocab. Feels really good to have that done
.Fact: the freckles on my arm are infinitely cuter when they're not under arm hair
im overwhelmed
My friend has been so fucking weird with me and needing constant unending intense emotional support around her life and specifically around her jealousy of myself and one of our friends fucking. I keep trying to tell her that i cant be a suppirt person in this for her, but nothing changes, and i keep having the same conversation over and over and its fucking exhausting and i just want it to end. The convo isnt productive, and its sole purpose is for her to get reassurance that we wont fuck when im clear and adamant that that us stopping wont happen, because us fucking is none of her business. We all live together and she wants me to text her any time we are gonna fuck but also doesnt ever want to know about it and i keep telling her that its not appropriate or healthy for us to have that depth and style of communication and she agrees with me and then a couple days later asks for it again and we have the exact same convo all over again
Anyway i keep asking for space and she doesnt give it to me and she gets upset and feels like im "leaving her" when i go to my room for distance and space. Im so done with this.
DICTATORSHIP OF THE QUEER
One hour on xiaohongshu and I’m already submerged under a deluge of murder drones posts lol
Had to get some government stuff updated.
Thank god this trans guy is here to get my stuff squared away, every time I gotta do something government for my gender or name it's always like pulling teeth and "eh I dunno if we can do that..." until eventually I get someone who half asses it and I have to get whatever else fixed. Also, used my pronouns right keep on rocking 👍
aww yis first, morning
CW SA:SV So uh I read the vulture article about Neil Gaiman
I've got 4.5 Neil Gaiman books/comics I've taken off from my shelf.
Sometimes I separate the art from the artist like I have a cheap copy of the road and Cormac Mccarthy is dead, so him being a nonce as we found out last year feels different.
But Neil Gaiman is alive and his crimes are pretty bad. I don't really feel I could ever read these again and enjoy them. Or recommend them.
Also the specific details of his abuse are very similar to a case I dealt with years ago in my old work and it's brought up some bad memories there.
I probably should donate them but I'm tempted to toss them. The 0.5 is good omens but I'm sure Terry Pratchett would be fine with my fisbee-ing it into a skip if he was alive.
How many here know of Butterfly Soup (the games)?
I remembered the new mega this week. You all should be proud
yknow changing my outfit every time i lost in mahjong soul was getting me a great winning record but it is just super not working this morning ._.
depression
It's been so bad recently. I've barely gotten out of bed. I got some legos I wanted to put together. They sit, partially built on my table. Haven't touched it in like a week. My head hurts from the depression.
People keep telling me it will get better and it just gets worse. I can't do anything. I can't take care of myself. How will it get better. Most of what I'm depressed about won't change.
I'm still suffering. Why can't it stop. Why can't I just be happy. Why is this how I work.
I feel completely consumed by it. I can't stop, I can't escape. Why am I trapped like this. Why do I have to be this way.
Why is everyone else so different from me.
my meds are here! now i can go back to being anxious about... everything else
Every once in a while, we get an adult patient off serviced to my unit (there are some caveats, nobody with complex hip repairs, nobody with stroke, nobody with complicated mental health needs, etc).
I have to give them an IV or a shot of some kind every once in a while, like SQ morphine or heparin or sometimes some grody IM shot. And, without fail, I will say "good job" or "good girl" or "good boy" 🤦♀️ after the shot/IV start is over. I try not to, I really do, some of em get a kick out of it, some are stoically silent and I apologize - I swear its just because I work mostly with kids and that's what I do after they're done the tough painful brave thing. I'm not trying to infantalize, I've taken to warning them now because even when I was trying my hardest not to I'd still slip up lol
Hello dears I love you all so much. Thank you for helping me find my true self and for helping me learn how to live my life for me, fearlessly, happy at last. ❤️
i finally finished children of memory and came to report it, just to find out that it's no longer my megathread :cri:
spoiler
i get why this book is kinda divisive - it breaks from the format of the first two heavily - but i loved it, though i'll admit i'm still processing the final 100 or so pages. the idea of the machine itself being sentient (or as sentient as anything can be) is a pretty fascinating question though
ICYMI I canceled your mother's insurance
I'm finally not coughing sideways and I'm generally feeling a lot better, so I have that going for me.
Need to figure out what to do with my sideburns this year, I grow them out to mutton chop grade and eventually insta-remove them soon as someone mentions
. Apparently no matter how hard I try it will not be in fashion, also I can't believe how popular that game is.Also lots of very
feelings today 
Hi again everyone. So I sorta kinda had a mental breakdown.
CW: Dysphoria, mental health stuff
I already wasn’t doing great over the holidays break and then I just sort of went off the rails and spent like a solid day or two crying or trying not to cry. I wrote down a bunch of stuff to try to process it, which was a VERY good idea in hindsight. There’s a lot I want to say about it but I maybe need to collect my thoughts a bit better before giving the full version.
The short version is that over the years I’ve learned to disassociate as a coping mechanism, and once I realized I was trans I wanted to move away from that, which is a good thing, of course. The catch though is that, given I have a long time before being able to fully transition, my identity and sense of self is propped up by the ideal version of myself that I’m trying to become. Something I was reading got me thinking back again on how I’d previously experience the world as an egg. Knowing what I know now, however, I was no longer able to disassociate from my current or past reality and just started to spiral.
On a positive note, I was able to identify a lot of thoughts and feelings that went previously unexplored. I also realize much more how important it is our identities (including terms and categories we fit into) really match our personal experience. Very relevant to this, in my free time away from most of the internet ended up finally reading Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue which was better than I expected. One thing that really made an impact on me is how focused on people’s real feelings and experiences it was. I was expecting something more academic, but it was very personal. I also felt it was much more radically inclusive of trans experiences than modern discourse usually allows. I knew before that Feinberg defined “trans” as a broad umbrella, but it was still interesting to see hir reasoning explained further. Here’s a great example from the book:
CW, because it briefly mentions SA
We are a movement of masculine females and feminine males, cross-dressers, transsexual men and women, intersexuals born on the anatomical sweep between female and male, gender-blenders, many other sex and gender-variant people, and our significant oth-ers. All told, we expand understanding of how many ways there are to be a human being. Our lives are proof that sex and gender are much more complex than a delivery room doctor's glance at genitals can determine, more variegated than pink or blue birth caps. We are oppressed for not fitting those narrow social norms. We are fighting back. Our struggle will also help expose some of the harmful myths about what it means to be a woman or a man that have compart-mentalized and distorted your life, as well as mine. Trans liberation has meaning for you — no matter how you define or express your sex or your gender. If you are a trans person, you face horrendous social punishments - from institutionalization to gangremoved, from beatings to denial of child visitation. This oppression is faced, in varying degrees, by all who march under the banner of trans liberation. This brutalization and degradation strips us of what we could achieve with our individual lifetimes. And if you do not identify as transgender or transsexual or in-tersexual, your life is diminished by our oppression as well. Your own choices as a man or a woman are sharply curtailed. Your individual journey to express yourself is shunted into one of two deeply carved ruts, and the social baggage you are handed is already packed. So the defense of each individual's right to control their own body, and to explore the path of self-expression, enhances your own freedom to discover more about yourself and your potentialities. This movement will give you more room to breathe — to be your-self. To discover on a deeper level what it means to be your self.
I thought this passage in particular was fantastic, but the rest has been great too. I do still have one final chapter to read, which I’m going to do right after posting this. :)
I’d love to hear your opinions if you’ve read it already. If you haven’t read it, you should. Could it maybe be a good candidate for a book club type thing?
I'm still thinking about what I'm going to be doing shortly after I'm done the 2 year return to service agreement up here in my home town
Long term, I do want to get something called an NP (masters degree, nurse practitioner, you get to prescribe with doctors supervision, they end up taking on a lot of care on more remote and rural areas cause we just don't have enough family GPs so it's like an NP is in town and a GP helps remotely that one and a few others). I do want to get into family medicine - it's a specific stream: neonate, family, adults - and I was hoping to focus on trans healthcare in particular up here where there is literally none. The closest is a 5 hour drive and he's retiring in short order but holding on purely for his trans patients...
I think I'd need some mental health nursing practice hours for my long term interests. When we did mental health in nursing school, it was really hard - I ended up identifying a lot with the patients and I'd get pissed we didn't let them smoke when they wanted or let them roam a little more freely, I even yelled at the nursing staff about it lol. I'm not looking forward to inpatient mental health care but I don't know what else to do, I still have like 8 months to think about it and look anyway. Otherwise, I could just keep working with kids. Pediatrics emergency, pediatrics ICU, maybe public health (lots of vaccinations and well baby visits etc).
Page loaded then i got jumpscared by a gateway timeout error
Back on the dating market now that my ex left me, she gave me an ultimatum that either the hawk tuah merch goes or she does.
