Brief spelldump. Came across person commenting on my forum posts elsewhere (detransitioner referencing attack helicopters, so may not be wholly in good faith); I am stressed and have no spoons, so just blocked and ignored, even if he may have been trying to be helpful by trying to convince the person I in turn was commenting on not to act rashly. Some of his thought stuck in my sleep-deprived head though, and I need now that head for analysis, it is time to pay the piper, so to speed up the process I codify the dysphoric fears into text and place hear. This is the process that, in related form but liquid, in my mind, used to eat so much of my life and make me so unhappy.

Mr Helicopter says that it is not useful to see if the world comes across as easier to cope with if one sees oneself fully and truly as the non-assigned sex, as the fact that one does not see oneself so is unchangeable. I differ, the thought experiment was highly useful to me. Everything about transition is to be able to fully and truly see ourselves as our true sex/gender, all else works towards that goal. So while getting there is neither guaranteed nor trivial, it is possible, and a partial projection of that state was helpful for me in order to see that it most likely was dysphoria fuelling my angsts, later made clearer still by demonstration. Experimentation and projection of self-image I do claim is possible and useful.

Mr Helicopter says that transition lets AMABs live as trans women, but not as women, that these lived experiences are not the same, that there is a discrepancy no matter how far you get, that passing as cis is crucial and no-one gets there. I differ. This is up to demonstration, obviously I am not where I want to be, and work will be required to get there, work I will do. I will never be cis. But to say that the lived experiences always are qualitatively the same is both wrong and highly dysphoria-inducing, no wonder I reacted to this. Rather it is a thing of context and partiality and mixture. I move asymptotically towards living a life like that of any other woman who is unique in the non-trans ways I am unique.

Mr Helicopter says that the gender questioning eating life and time does not stop, it is merely replaced with transition as a quest/effort/novelty/challenge/project, which then takes up as much of your life. This I was vulnerable to because I always feared early on it was somehow just the new cool thing, or the thing to spice up my life. And of course so much of my life now is trans-related. But my solution at the time was to note how, if this was only a distraction or getting reborn like into a religion, it should eventually fade and I would be unhappy again. Thus it was another thing I needed time to evaluate, which I took. And now? It is only rare moments like these of dysphoria triggers when I feel like I did. The other transition related parts of my life generally do not feel draining, and I don’t think they take up more time than I once lost, though truly I do need more time in the morning. More to the point, the part of my mind working on my femininity as part of everyday interactions, I don’t think this is a trans obsession, I think it is a conscious version of what cis girls and women do growing up and living; we perform femininity. The fact that I introspect this performance makes it no more artificial, and I don’t think it loses me time or life.

Thus all in all, while perhaps the experiences of the detransitioning attack helicopter are true for him, I remain on the track which gave me back my life. Having codified this as a spell, I will let it go and do what I must.

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Also if I am sad over being rejected? That will go into fiction some day, because there it is beautiful.