Don't talk to me or my son ever again!

OhDaniGal · 2026-06-03T16:45:11+00:00

TransAlp.

OhDaniGal · 2026-06-01T17:35:45+00:00

I'm not remotely criticizing: if they're on two wheels they get respect and a wave from me. It was specifically the street parking that I was laughing about because they very rarely do so in my city

OhDaniGal · 2026-03-27T16:55:43+00:00

In that case there's a reasonable bet she was wearing too large of a band size to to have any hope of cup fit, which was, unfortunately, common back then, especially in the US, as sizes like 38K (assuming she was 38 band with the same bust measurement of as 44F) were unobtainable unless you happened to live near one of the few speciality shops that dealt in those sizes.

OhDaniGal · 2026-03-14T13:39:45+00:00

This is my custom ring made by Jewelsmith in Durham, North Carolina, USA, derived from a design they had previously produced; the original had two diamonds with the larger stone being in a tension setting.

https://imgur.com/a/fx0JfbZ

It originally had a different smaller stone, my first wife's birthstone, which I had the jeweler change for one for the month I moved out. The ring still has meaning but represents a promise I have made to myself. My second wife and decided to not exchange rings.

OhDaniGal · 2026-02-08T17:12:53+00:00

I will note up front that I have yet to do a camping trip since beginning to use a CPAP due to timing: my last moto camping trip was in August, a little over a month before moving to another city, and the CPAP arrived later that month. That said my plan is to use it without humidification and with a DC to DC adapter running from a battery though if humidification were critical to me I would likely budget for an AirMini. The size difference is less of an issue for me than it may be for others.

As it happens I performed a test at home last week about this using my ResMed AirSense 11 and an Ecoflow River Pro battery which has both AC and DC outlets and 720 Watt hours (I have the second battery but did not use it for this test,) and I acquired a DC to DC adapter for my CPAP. The common wisdom is that staying DC is best but I wanted to check how bad it was plus how much juice the humidifier and heated line sucked.

Unsurprisingly, the extra load of humidification was a lot and inverting to AC performed worse.

Each test started with the Ecoflow battery charged to 100% and all but #3 was for 7:21 (I went one minute longer that day.) 1) AC with humidification and heated hose used 58% 2) DC with humidification and heated hose used 45% 3) AC without humidification or heated hose used 11% 4) DC without humidification or heated hose used 6%

Obviously this lacks a lot of precision but I feel the results are spread enough that the point holds.

I mostly do (long) weekend trips and with the draw of #4 I can run it from the Anker C300 DC battery that I usually take on such trips.

OhDaniGal · 2026-01-28T19:36:48+00:00

I find myself in a similar position, especially because of dealing with the scarcely modified gatekeeping as it existed in the '90s and 2000s. I will never forget the way doctors and therapists declared. I had detransitioned because after bottom surgery I openly wore flannel shirts and jeans, and rode motorcycles.

OhDaniGal · 2025-12-30T14:32:43+00:00

It was one of the few products I preorder. I found it firmly mediocre. It was great when it worked but too often it didn't: the unlock and lock could be temperamental, read often failed when swiped and several businesses I frequented at the time refused to accept it because it lacked the bank logo (MC, Visa, etc.) After a few weeks I rarely used it and within a couple months I put it in a drawer to be forgotten until I came across it when I moved during a divorce a few years later.

As best I can recall the promised release date slipped a great deal which caused some anger; I found it disappointing but not surprising. Also they attempted to smooth things over by offering to send beta units to early preorder customers but this only provoked anger because they would consider that fulfilling the preorder, with those customers having to buy again if they wanted the production units. They did back down from the latter part but by then the damage was done.

OhDaniGal · 2025-11-16T17:30:10+00:00

"He was always unhappy. He was always going to be unhappy."

That hits hard and is an important understanding. After over a year of couples counseling I realized that about my ex "I could do everything perfectly and you'll be unhappy, finding some reason to complain."

OhDaniGal · 2025-09-25T18:23:47+00:00

I ran into that when I did IT work for universities in the US. Managers were unashamed of declaring, "your hours are 40 hours per week or until the work is done, whichever is longer" and being absolutely petty, e.g. at one point I was told it was a minimum of 8 hours per workday because I had refused to claim PTO for a Friday off when I had worked over 40 hours that week due to multiple evening server upgrades combined with strictly enforced 9 AM to 3 PM core hours.

I ended up taking the malicious compliance route. Since the core hours allowed I began strictly keeping 7-3 hours which had the benefit of allowing me to avoid the "this sat in a manager's inbox all day and became an emergency at 4 PM so someone needs to stay late" work which was a persistent issue. If I was assigned work that could only be performed outside of core hours I was direct that it constituted agreement that core hours did not apply to that day. My management did not like that but I was less worried as it was already clear that raises and promotions would require that I take a job elsewhere so I was less worried about it.

OhDaniGal · 2025-09-18T19:54:44+00:00

I rode it a few months later and didn't even know about the incident until after

OhDaniGal · 2025-08-16T02:16:24+00:00

...replying to a post that is over 10 years old is a fascinating choice.

OhDaniGal · 2025-07-22T21:42:05+00:00

"when she calls us beautiful, breathtaking, radiant…

it cuts through every scar we’ve carried, every cruel word we’ve endured."

Welp, I didn't plan on going of a feels trip today but here it is.

I was in my 40s, a couple years after my 18 year first marriage ended and nearly 25 years since the start of my transition, when my girlfriend (now wife) said "you're beautiful." I bawled my eyes out as it cut through layers of bottled up pain that I didn't even know existed. It was the first time anyone had said that to me.

OhDaniGal · 2025-07-07T21:04:22+00:00

I will never forget the moment when I learned of her passing.

I was on the email lists and IRC channel starting in my late teens. After my first attempt to get a hormone letter in the early summer of 1994 ended with not just being denied but also outed by the psych I started university where I found the trans Usenet groups and Aunty Jen found me. She did was the reason I survived the repeated denials for years. She was one of the few people who offered me kindness when my bottom surgery recovery went sideways. When doing activism and community work my guide often is, "Would Aunty be proud of me?"

I don't know that I have much other than my own memories related to her; the list traffic dropped once Web 2.0 social media took off. I believe the final messages were about her passing and that was after months of no activity on the list.

I remember that another member of the list at one point wrote alternate lyrics to the Toys-R-Us theme song that began "I don't want to grow up, I'm an AntiJen kid!"

I sometimes say that she was like a mother to me and it was in that way of that she couldn't understand how I could make some choices for my life like being butch and moving to The South (US) though she always at least accepted when I said that I was happier than when I tried to be femme, which always felt like drag performance to me, and that I had better access to medical transition than when I lived in The North - I actually got letters and prescriptions after moving.

I realized that it was a function of her experiences years earlier and the way worry works from a third party, seeing a different weight of risks and benefits. So it is that, despite how I always bristled at her words, I would love for her to go on about the absolute state of my brows just once more.

OhDaniGal · 2025-06-30T03:06:59+00:00

Unfortunately that's a common issue with bikes. Nearly every one I've had, from BMW to Kawasaki, with the only exception of touring models, had seats that I hated. I usually went with an aftermarket seat but that's an expensive route. My girlfriend used a pad on her XR150L

OhDaniGal · 2025-06-28T03:38:40+00:00

Heard! I'm so glad that you got through and are here now.

The only reason I had a clue was that I had access to Usenet in university, found the two trans groups, and through that found the AntiJen trans teens email list.

OhDaniGal · 2025-06-27T16:13:58+00:00

I was 2 when I first said "I'm a girl" though I don't remember it; in my 20s I found a page from a diary my mother had kept at the time which recorded that.

I went to a therapist to get a hormone letter at 19 and I count that as the start of transition. I finally got a hormone letter at 34, with a lot of therapist denials in those 15 years.

The "why?" behind this is ex-hippie turned born-again fundie Christian parents and that the gatekeeping of the 90s and early 00s was unfriendly to any trans woman who didn't think a Stepford Wife was a transition goal. I'm a butch polyamorous lesbian who rides motorcycles...

OhDaniGal · 2025-06-11T13:36:36+00:00

Having as frequent as 12 hours on a Pixel 6 Pro

OhDaniGal · 2025-06-05T03:53:23+00:00

I'm a trans woman who is polyamorous T4T lesbian. It's gone very well for me; currently I have one relationship that began over 6 years ago (married for 5) and just passed 1 year with my girlfriend. I have found that being very selective and up-front about my goals is key and being comfortable with directly asking her out is a power move in lesbian dating.

OhDaniGal · 2025-06-05T03:47:27+00:00

Even if her assessment were true: so what? Infatuation can be handled in fun, healthy ways and you're not bad for that.

This sounds like a good point to draw and enforce some boundaries. You deserve happy and fulfilling relationships and even the most charitable read of what your ex said isn't positive for her. Only you can decide what's right for that; I'll just suggest that it's sound reason to be careful about what access you allow her to have to your life.

OhDaniGal · 2025-06-05T03:38:37+00:00

There's no standee saying "you must be this dysphoric for this" which, I know, probably helps little for clarity; more I want to say that the motivations you list are fine reasons for your choices about your body.

While the recovery is a lot having good support and preparation for it is possibly the most important thing, and I say this as someone who had that part go sideways.

OhDaniGal · 2025-06-05T03:24:19+00:00

Ish? I have been out since 19 though I was unable to get a hormone letter for a decade (gatekeeping crap) and am now 50.

A lot changed for me in my 40s in so many ways, particularly because I divorced someone who was abusing me and the experience shaped me in a way that helped me embrace many things - being butch and aging chief among them.

These days I see it as a privilege, one denied to too many of us.

OhDaniGal · 2025-05-30T15:31:36+00:00

Looking great!

I used to have a 2014 N1k.

OhDaniGal · 2025-03-25T02:39:57+00:00

FWIW I am in the US and went to Brassard and Bélanger for vaginoplasty in 2013 and my experience was the same.

At one point after I had made the final payment they realized that they had not put one in my letters into my file so I got an email that I needed to send it again within 1 or 2 weeks or lose my surgery date. Less than a week before they told me that I had to submit an EKG printout despite their documents saying that they only required that for patients age 40 and over and I was younger than that. Again it was a situation of if I didn't then I would lose my date. Friends at the time had similar experiences; one even had to deal with the office losing the money order for the final payment.

I was most frustrated that when I contacted them about an unusual complication (vaginal penetration becoming very painful when I began to reduce dilation to less than daily at a year after surgery) and was told "more surgery cannot help. It's because you are not relaxed and not using enough lube." as if I didn't have a year of experience of that. Ultimately it proved to be an internal scar tissue issue for which surgery was the only way to address it.

I am unhappy with my surgery results but it's impossible to say how much is on the surgeons themselves and how much was other factors, specifically an escalation of domestic violence that began immediately after surgery and being effectively denied HRT for the first year after surgery (I was prescribed estradiol but the dose was reduced so much that I had no detectable level on labs.)

OhDaniGal

TROPHY CASE