empty

My parents were gracious enough but kept using my deadname by mistake, especially my father. I feel tired and empty and felt distant and as though I was enduring some boring social game which me as a mask was pretending to participate in. I still feel empty. But I don’t know if these are connected. They probably are but I might also feel empty and cold and sad and distant and as though I sit in on some uninteresting class in a topic I don’t care about for some unrelated reason.

Or maybe this is how repeat deadnaming feels now.

splt

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.

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

cracks

Sad and painful reminder. While most people seemed to gender me correctly so far at the airport, the security check people were surprised at my surprise at asking me to be checked by the male attendant (I then said I was trans and the woman checked me instead), and some other person seemed basically not to like me.

Checking by mirror reveals why; having had laser in the morning I have mottled skin, no foundation, only eye and lip and eyebrow makeup. Clearly it is not sufficient, it’s not just stubble, I really do need the smoothness of foundation to look reasonably like the woman I am.

This saddens me. I hope at some point somehow the changes from HRT will let me get past the need of that Gaussian sub-layer.

Feeling sad but not catastrophically so. Just the average dysphoria-trigger living-in-a-graveyard downs.

spinnerettes

Was a little rabbit-hole triggered again, by the whole cis “I don’t feel gender and would not mind if mine was flipped“ idea. Wherein I’d reiterate, it’s about growing up. Trans alignment means on some level our socialization into our assigned gender cannot be completed. This does not mean crippling dysphoria from day one, only enough that our hearts are not in what we are becoming. This compounds over a childhood and teenagehood into being distanced from ourselves in a way which cis people are not. A flip of sexed body would not come with the results of a long process of socialization failure like this, but one being flipped at birth (as opposed to the putative trans brain flip before birth) probably would. And some fraction of people would be fine either way.

Took the progesterone. Sleep may have been better, felt somehow my body is a whole rather than parts throughout but thinking this is indirect. Observations continue.

loathing

After a few days of unconditional acceptance at the conference with no issues at all I was sir:d by the lady selling me coffee, despite expressing femme. I tried to speak up but I mumbled and she did not here. Next time I must be harsh and ask until a get a response what the person says. I will do this, will spellbound myself to it. That is a Crone act too. It’s impolite and hurtful but revenge and sharp response is of the Crone.

It must be because the last few days were so good that this hurts now so much. One person did misgender me back then but for her I can think it was habit. Not so here. What’s wrong with my despicable corpse of a body? Holding back tears. Is it the face? The forehead? Probably face length and jaw. Is that even possible to fix? Can more years of hormones do anything? Can surgery? Obsessing, spiraling, hurting deeply. Reached out on instagram. Blogging. Reaching out to loved ones. Disproportionate response. In pain.

What is wrong? How do I find out what is wrong? How do I fix it? For the first time I’m seriously considering facial surgeries. It really is true, the better things get for baseline, the more vulnerable I am.

I hate my form and my features right now, at this minute. Loathing this corpse. Wanting to cry but I don’t have the time.

S

For some reason I am sweating, and my armpits smell, my deodorant may be of poor quality and I hate it and it is awful. It’s probably just bad luck with the deodorant make but I feel so disgusting and it makes me feel dysphorically masculine. Need to cope, need to improve, will do so.

escape

Lots of people tweet a cool talk about X-inactivation and genes escaping from it. The thought makes me dysphoric; those would be genes with potentially karyotype-based dosage effects regardless of sex hormones. It’s only about 1% of human genes, but still. And many of them may still be hormone regulated etc. I wish I was a calico though. I am dysphoric about my non-mosaic status, and that is hard to fix. Meh.

If only I was Klinefelter. But there is some solace in the fact that in terms of X-inactivation escape, I am no less a woman than a Turner girl is. That does help.

blackness

Another trans person wrote, in a secret forum, so as to vent:

“I can’t say I *am* a woman. Simone de Beauvoir said in her treatise ‘Second Sex’ "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Without having all the biology (a lot of it surgically removed) or growing up as a girl, or having society classify me as a woman (and deny me male privileges and access and power), or have any of the experiences of motherhood, or been in a relationship (of any significance) with a man… nope, not really a woman. I wish it was otherwise, if nothing else than to make life easier, but I’m just gender-queer as F*ck.“

Reading this I feel like drowning, like my lungs fill up with cold water and as though I am blanking out. I go back to that state which used to be so common, when all my attention focuses on the fear and the words like on a serpent threatening me, I set aside the wants of life and survival and achievement and of social bonds and pleasures, all that remains is to defend from the nothingness which is my dysphoria. I feel tears coming up in my eyes. I feel weight closing in from every side. I stare at the screen and my body freezes up as the world continue around me without me, because I’m not a person who can be present in it.

Then I steel myself and resolve that I must get as close to all of those things as I can, however long it takes. It’s a challenge I will succeed in no matter how hard. Unless I am a woman I cannot be a person. I will work to "become a woman” in the Beauvoirian sense as long as there is any life left in me. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. I will learn to pass if I have to, will do any surgery it takes, will train my responses if I have to. I will make the world classify my correctly and treat me as it treats women if that is what it takes for me to have the experiences a “real” woman should have had.

Because ultimately part of this is a wish to not feel like I don’t belong to a category I should belong to. It’s a social instinct, an ingroup pack instinct. It’s wrong and scary if I am somehow fundamentally unlike other women. And I’ll do whatever it takes not to be.

I will not comment there, I will not go down that rabbit hole. I have a life to live. And if I must be a nothingness until I can be someone, then at least I will be a nothingness that does its best to become real. While there is breath left in my body I will work to realize myself.

I wish I could stop crying.

crystal gens

Aaaaand… I’m returning again to longing for the proper genitals. Is that the word? It feels like what I am saddled with is out of place, meaningless. I’m suspecting the core is, my view of myself changed to one I am happier with, and that changed frames of reference.

(Was thinking of kink events, and how I too would like to feel OK with getting nude, and how I currently am not.)

Next steps in any case, set up perineal laser appointment and slowly save up for SRS. Also stay healthy, get fit exercise-wise and lose some more weight, all to become as ready as I can to undergo a medical procedure like that.

(EDIT: Huh. I literally feel jealous of cis women for something so basal as their intimate parts, for casually having that anatomy and being able to inhabit it in interaction without anyone questioning it. I suppose that is where I am.)

necronomiconda

The other day, was asked my old name. I saw no polite reason not to reveal it, but felt… shocked by it. I guess it is my deadname now and I might politely choose not to reveal it next time someone asks.

Heavy period of stress, plus sleep deprivation and hunger, then got into a somewhat dysphoric worrying mood. Possibly hormonally low from poorly fitting patches too. I realize these things as I write about them are likely founding factors.

There are two things I would like to be true, that quite possibly are, but that I cannot control whether they are, related to my alignment. I cannot control them as they would be facts about the outside world. One being whether my hypothesis on same-vs-opposite-to-self alienation-causing dysphoria-foundational instinct as an actual biological thing is real and something building on mechanisms in trans and cis people both. The other whether the having-hormones-incorrect-to-brain-settings-causes-dysphoria in both trans and cis people hypothesis reflects reality. Both are models that imply a cause for my trans alignment – that is, for my female gender identity, and my dysphoria when not inhabiting it – that is likely inborn or prenatal, and that would be part of my functional brain architecture. Born this way, as Lady Gaga put it.

That in turn would be appealing because it would imply there never was any other option, no set of life circumstances would have made my brain cis, no alternate coping strategy to transition would have helped as well with the dysphoria. This would be an appealing truth even though I don’t really feel my transition has been particularly costly, I don’t feel that it has cost me much or that I have lost anything I cared about as I proceeded with it. I would more often worry about not being valid without it.

These things may well also hold true in the world (it’s one of few scenarios that make sense, after all, in explaining my various experiences and those reported anecdotally by other trans people), but holding on to them as cherished beliefs is still a crutch either way. I cannot control it so it is better – as I actually found quite some time ago too – that I don’t need that crutch in order to feel valid as a woman who transitions. I can’t know that these are the mechanisms behind my alignment, or that there really was no other way. I also cannot know that I fully correctly conceptualize myself. But from my horizon of action, I know I have become clearly happier, and I am accumulating a lot of data points suggesting that is persistent. Ultimately the fact that I really become fulfilled in this manner is sufficient grounds for my choices. My will itself is legitimate grounds.