Mailing psychotherapists to try to secure recommendation letters for bottom surgery forces me to “officially” say I plan it. In some regard I worry I may be going too fast, should I actually make sure to wait before I do anything like this?

At the same time, what would I wait for? Deciding I somehow want _not_ to be a woman? I cannot see this happening. Deciding I prefer to be non-op? I also sort of cannot see it. I fear bad outcomes but that fear will be as valid no matter when I risk it. So more to the point, the mental work I have to do is to become deeply and fully intimate with the fear and with the cumber that will come with recovery and surrounding logistics. As I did with other transition steps, I need to deeply familiarize myself with realistic issues and pains along this route, so that I know that I can cope with them. It’s a matter of preparation.

Is a year enough for that, given everything else? Shorter than a year would not be. But a year might well be. I have to inspect these fears and worries while creating the opportunity. Thereafter I can decide.

Of course I am driven by the want to be able to have at least a little youth in a body like I want it. And that may make me quick and eager. I must be careful with that, but also cannot deny the legitimacy of that wish, if that path is anyway where I would end up. I’ll set things in motion and see what I can learn from my emotions along the way.

Learning to love myself better is probably why I crush on >50% of all trans women I befriend these days. Choosing to become and stay authentic in more areas of life is probably why I now tell ~40% of my crushes rather than <5% as in the past.

I don’t necessarily know what I am doing, but that gets me into friendships where I essentially present a “girlfriend interface” for the taking; even when not accepted, so long as friendship is not rejected, I am happier being the person I am then. Very Maiden mode, and perhaps risky, I should make sure as a crypto-Wiccan that I do no harm except consensually. I learn. That is one thing Maidens do.

Also I procrastinate by planning surgery. I boiled down the experiences of this weekend to sort of, I clock myself whenever naked or sexual, and that gets me dysphoric. It’s possible for very gentle lovers to mask this for me, but I would rather not have to use workarounds all the time. That means I really have to seriously, strongly, get going with the weight loss and the voice training. Not to forget the money. If taxed favourably, and planned wisely, then perhaps having SRS a year from now is not impossible. I’d need to cover the surgeon I want (in all likelihood, Dr Chettawut), travel to Thailand for myself and whoever comes with me, hotel stay for a month there, then margins of 10%-15% for unforeseen issues.

Is that even possible mentally though? So scary. It’s the quickest I can safely and comfortably and carefully get it done. It would leave me healed (inshallah!) by my 40th birthday, I could celebrate that in a naked body. But it’s so short. I would be concerned of getting own scientific projects underway, and of preparing my family for the idea.

The latter actually does scare and impact. So that means I should begin to broach the subject already now during the holidays, to put the fear out there. Stay on the bleeding edge of momentum (by which I mean my vagina…).

I suppose I should also now start getting documentation. I’ll contact the therapist I was diagnosed by to prepare for having a consultation sometime next year so she can write a recommendation, and I’ll need a second letter as well.

Beyond weight and voice and ensuring optimal cardiovascular health (need to start exercising), this is another reason to make sure I have no unsafe sex, as HIV not only would be absolutely horrible but also an exclusion criterion. But I am not planning on getting that anyway. But I should make sure to be in absolutely perfect health a year from now.

Still don’t know if I am doing this. Beginning to feel it’s hypocritical to say that I do not know that I want it. I think it seems credible to say that I want it.

EDIT: Oh, and must also prepare my apartment (fix shower and bathroom, get bidet stuff in place, hope/ensure elevator goes in) so that living here during recovery won’t be such an issue. Lots of things anyway necessary thus motivated.

Even more cruddy, dirty NSFW for no reason except it somehow feels meaningful how I evolve. After going to sleep, I had a rare erotic dream continuing from the evening. I was with a man who may have been Stiff from the club; he was in boxers and I in panties. I asked if I could come, hoping for a yes, and he gave some answer. Dream me considered it enough. I was on top of him, and rubbed myself through underwear against his muscled warm torso until I came; I was midway between dream and wakefulness when that happened, and then I awoke. There is still fluid when this sort of thing happens, clear fluid, and the mess of that and the violence of the contractions detract from pleasure for me. I wish I could come without any fluids, and without the focus and attention cold and wetness and contractions bring to my current anatomy. I wish I could gain or receive pleasure and stay relaxed. Under the right circumstances I sort of can, somewhat. A lot of sexual wishes, and growing obstacles to their realization. Need to work to go forward.

This will be both NSFW and emotional, you have been warned. Also I know I am privileged in so many ways, everything that bothers me bother various other people worse. But this is what I feel.

Whatever. No censoring. From some angles, with makeup, I actually look good, my body even looks good. I get sad and jealous from seeing most cis girls’ breasts but I like what little I do have. I’ll get more, I’m sure. Women in my family are not huge but not minimal either. I dressed up in corset and striped stockings and miniskirt and goggles and boots, aiming for the club theme of apocalypse/asylum. They let me in without question and that felt good.

Some guy named Stiff hit on me and I liked it, sort of, he was muscled and bearded and it felt good when he touched me and kissing felt good despite messing up my lipstick. Communication was not perfect. I’m sure he knew I was trans because he touched my parts, I told him he could only go outside, not inside. I thought for some time he clocked me and was shocked, but probably he was just not that picky. He was going somewhere and I waited for him in playspace and he didn’t come back and I felt ambiguous again. It just does not feel safe with strange men. Men I trust or strange women, that feels safe. This does not. He came back to the playspace but did not see me.

Another guy sat next to me, he was fairly hot too and he touched my breasts and that felt amazing. He asked for a blowjob, I declined but took my gloves on and offered touch. He seemed unimpressed and when the floorshow started just then he left to watch it. I followed. Stiff found me again and we danced more. Being touched and handled like that was awesome, but he kept pressing his dick against me and trying to touch between my buttcheeks and that simply does not feel safe, I kept navigating so he’d instead touch the cheek or the small of my back. Still was hypochondric and worrying, but liked the sexual attention too much to stop.

He kept touching my front too. In the wrong way, grabbing, I could sense he sensed erection, I became aware I could be grabbed, tried to tell him not to. He asked for a break and we sat down. Then he asked if I would stay while he got a drink and he left. It took him way too long to come back. I think he found someone else, but really that rejection does not matter so much.

What matters so much was sitting there and dancing and watching all the beautitful people, comparing myself to them, and realizing how much I can’t be sexual, how much I have to keep back just to be able to forget my genitalia; how that becomes a focus in a sexual setting like this, how I hate not being able to be naked, how I hate being forced to become erect and to manage that, how I hate my squarish frame and the smallness of my breasts.

I may not want to have casual sex with men at all, really. Or I do but it does not matter. More likely, I need a connection there to feel safe. But to have sex with anyone I now need all sorts of juggling, for the other to not actualize the wrongness of my genitals. I can’t even type them out. I hate it so much. It hurts.

Being touched and handled and held and kissed and groped felt amazing, having breasts and butt fondled is amazing, it makes me hot, makes me horny, makes me sexual. Then unless so much care is taken to hide it, genitals get in the way. I don’t think I even care much about orgasm any longer. I don’t care about others’ bodies. But as mine gets mostly more tolerable, by bottom does not. I hate those parts. They’re not part of a me that can be me. They’re like a growth, like an alienness.

Hurting and crying. Could I have surgery a year from now? Could I make it happen? Get the money and documentation, lose the remaining weight, prepare my lab so they they can deal with me being away for a few months? It will be challenging if so. And almost certainly mean being legally male while having a vagina, because that will take fucking longer. But even then, I’d have a year to heal up and I would be able to function freely by my 40th birthday.

Fuck all this so much. Fuck this body. Literally and figuratively. I am now beyond politeness, hipness, style, humour. I just feel so sad about being hindered like this, I feel disgusted and pained and sad about the ways my body are wrong. I want it changed. Probably I will make it so. Possibly as soon as I can.

EDIT: Just to clarify. I can get sex, obviously so. But it’s really hard to enjoy it as I am now. It’s not about how others react at all. It’s about how I react to becoming aware of myself. Just to make that clear.

For today had planned to meet a cis guy from fetlife for potential hookup. He didn’t show up. I went home through the rain and will drink some wine and program, then go out to one of Babylon’s kink parties instead. I don’t expect to interact with anyone there, just to dance, but that’s fine too.

My response to this is telling, I suppose. I was full of uncertainty on whether I wanted this date, because while Fuckboy was pretty as all hell, his conversation itself left my panties pretty dry. I figured I should give it a chance after he wrote to me, as in, see what it can feel like for me to be wanted by a cis man, plus I have wanted to play with such genitals for some time and not gotten the chance.

But the days before I’ve not felt a lot of libido, and I was sort of hoping to just stay in and work on our manuscript, and I was very worried about where my skin was dry – what if I could catch something from him coming on me, should that happen? And more to the point, what if he would force himself beyond my safety requirements?

Fine, I now don’t have to bother, and the evening ends up much better anyway. Possibly I should accept that my attraction to men is nothing that can be guaranteed or that I can seek out, that I should let it come to me, and if it does not, I’m fairly satisfied with my lesbian relationships.

Meh.

This is the first post on wordpress rather than tumblr, after migrating – lost tags and comments, but kept content. My tumblr is not yet removed but given their policy changes I fear an NSFW transition blog may not be welcome much longer.

I’ll be brief. Stress levels are high, social evolution is high. What feels relevant is that the past 10 days on estrogen only, no progesterone, have felt fairly bleak; I’ve been worried more easily, more dysphoric over my body, more prone to feeling unanchored socially and dissociating, feeling on edge. It may not be the same as pre-HRT entirely but I feel that the changes that happened early on with HRT are exactly those that are subdued now. I really hope that going back on progesterone on Monday will return me to the last blogged state, even if that mean being more tired.

I can only speculate on mechanisms behind this anecdata. Clearly not just levels -> mood. Perhaps relative changes building up secondary effectors at different time windows. Right now there is a feeling of unsafety at the microlevel and I want that changed. Should progesterone reliably keep that away (though I did not feel it in the intervening months) I might just stay on it rather than cycle. Perhaps a _drop_ in progesterone is the relevant thing, that such a drop causes something to be the case for a time thereafter that was also the case pre-HRT. It also resembles those states when my levels were low due to dosage, but of course I cannot know this.

May all just be stress too. Which will be dealt with.

On things which scare me, delving deeper now on that research discussed with me and it seems some metabolic and immune sex differences really are due to X-inactivation escape. That’s very very hard to fix without advanced genetic engineering. Again I’d take solace that in these regards I’m at least as alike to XX women as an XY CAIS woman is, she too has no X-inactivation and no XX karyotype.

Will still continue this research and noting it is a fine line to walk – I want to research hormonal impacts because I hope it will show as many regards as possible where my HRT makes me grow closer to XX women in terms of body and brain function. There will be cases like this where I am wrong and the differential has non-hormonal, non-intervenable origin, and there will be cases like with post-natal hormonal surges and developmental windows where I will have missed my developmental chance anyway. Those insights will always make me dysphoric, though I hope I will continue to cope well.

Is it weird or wrong to steer my research based on my wish to prove to myself that I at least am moving to be biologically female in as many ways as I can? Not sure, but I probably will do it anyway, and I think I will always aim to increase our powers of transition. Of course, we are no less our genders or sexes (as the word is used) even without medical transition. But I need it and I need the knowledge of my trajectory.