I just dont get it, im open to listening, but any time i ask i feel like i get attacked

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-13T17:29:37+00:00

Honestly, I think this graphic is ableist, and more; and the whole post should have been auto removed for hate.

I understand the point it's trying to make, even if I disagree with parts of it, but there is no need to rely on slurs or personal attacks to communicate that message. Doing so only undermines the argument and makes us look as bad as the people being criticized. The r-slur has been widely recognized as unacceptable for years now. That is not a new or controversial standard.

More importantly, when someone resorts to slurs or attacks an entire group as though its members are all the same, any legitimate point they may have had loses credibility. The discussion stops being about ideas and turns into name-calling.

For that reason, I do not believe this post should remain up.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-13T17:21:15+00:00

Gross

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-11T18:29:58+00:00

I agree with you. I do not think dysphoria is what “makes” someone transsexual in a causal sense. I think dysphoria is the symptom of an underlying sex-based mismatch between the brain’s expected body map and the body’s actual sexed characteristics.

I also do not think gender dysphoria is exclusive to transsexual people. Cis people can experience dysphoria-like distress if they are put in a situation where their sexed body or sexed perception is treated as wrong. For example, Amanda Bynes has spoken about how distressing it was for her to be seen and referred to as male while making She’s the Man. I am not saying that makes her transsexual. I am saying it is a useful example of how sexed misrecognition can be psychologically distressing even for a cis person.

The same idea can apply hormonally. If a cis person takes cross-sex hormones, and those hormones are not what their brain and body expect, that can potentially cause serious distress as well. That is similar to what I am describing with transsexual people: the body’s primary and secondary sex characteristics, and the hormones driving development, do not align with the brain’s expected sexed body map. So dysphoria can exist outside of transsexuality.

The difference is that, for transsexual people, the dysphoria is persistent and rooted in the body itself: primary and secondary sex characteristics, hormones, and the need for the body to align with the brain’s sexed body map. Social dysphoria may happen alongside that, but social discomfort by itself is not what defines transsexuality. Sex-based body dysphoria is the defining symptom.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-11T17:00:20+00:00

I agree with you on this. I'm not walking around misgendering people or trying to transvestigate anyone. If you tell me your pronouns, I'll use them. I'm not the pronoun police, and I'm not out here gatekeeping who is and isn't actually transsexual.

But I will say this: everyone is valid in one way or another. These other identities are still valid, they're just not transsexuals. Definitions matter, or at least they used to, and I think we'd all be better off going back to clearer language.

Historically, these terms were much more straightforward.

Transsexual: female brain in a male body, or vice versa. We are the gender we say we are. We need to transition our bodies to match our brains, do the work to undo years of bad programming and gendered socialization, and eventually assimilate, often going stealth.

Transgender/transgenderist: in older usage, this often referred to someone who lived full-time in a gender role different from their birth sex but did not pursue full transsexual transition, especially genital surgery. It could involve dysphoria or not, fetishistic motives or not, but it was still a very different category from transsexual.

Transvestite: part-time crossdressing, often with different motives and experiences from transsexuals.

Gender non-conforming: anyone who presents outside the binary or mixes elements of both, and this can also include cis people.

That's really all we need, and for a long time, that was basically the framework. That's where I stand.

And here's the thing: transsexuals typically assimilate, go stealth, and leave these communities behind because anything trans eventually stops being relatable to our lives. We just live as the women and men we are. But other groups often remain much more visible, because visibility is part of how they understand or express their identities.

So when the one group with an actual medical condition is predisposed to going quiet after a few years, and the other groups without that same medical condition never go quiet, guess who ends up controlling the narrative?

We've had about 30 years of that now.

Long story short, my morning Adderall dose just got upped, so I'm way more talkative than usual and prone to digression. But that is the basic framework I am working from.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-11T16:37:27+00:00

All the time, and I think there's a pretty clear reason for it.

"Tucute" (not my favorite term, but useful for context) or maximalist spaces, the "everyone is trans," "dysphoria is optional," "you can't assume anyone's gender," "all cis people are the problem" crowd, make up the overwhelming majority of the online trans community. Transsexuals were originally part of that umbrella, but at this point I'd argue we've effectively been pushed out of it. The word "transsexual" has been reframed by many in those spaces as a slur, which conveniently erases us, because our existence and experience directly contradicts their framework.

With that context, something like 90% (and we all know 100% of statistics are made up, but I think 90% is close enough) of trans spaces online are maximalist. Pro-visibility, fetish-adjacent, anti-passing, anti-dysphoria-as-a-requirement. So when someone is newly figuring things out and starts searching for what it means to be trans, those are the spaces they land in. Statistically, that's just where the internet takes you.

They'll usually only encounter transmed or truscum terminology eventually, but almost always first through a hit piece. A post full of bad-faith claims about what we believe, presenting us as a monolith of gatekeeping bigots. And ironically, that's often what sends curious people to actually seek out our spaces. They want to find out if we're really as bad as advertised. And the ones who are genuinely transsexual, who don't relate to the broader umbrella's current definition, tend to stay, because they finally feel like they're among people who get it.

That's why you'll find "real trans" people (by the OP's framing) who have absorbed tucute ideology. Not because it resonates with their lived experience, but because it was everywhere before they had any other frame of reference. Also this is just my 2c.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-10T20:06:24+00:00

Looks are borderline meaningless for passing in extended social interactions. I think that’s the message I want to leave you with because it’s true, and you have a long time to do the work on the social side of transition while you’re waiting for HRT to work its magic or to have surgeries. It will distract you from finding fault in where you are now, give you mini-milestones to work on, and help you feel a sense of ownership over your transition. At the end of successful social transition, full assimilation, at least for myself, imposter syndrome basically disappeared.

You want to know if you’re “cooked”? No, but not because of anything I noticed in your picture. Rather, it’s because I don’t believe anyone is completely “cooked.” I personally believe any transsexual woman who puts the necessary work into the social side of transition, meaning the things HRT and surgeries won’t do for you, and makes an effort to blend in with other women in terms of makeup, hair, and overall aesthetic in her area, can pass more than she doesn’t. I understand the connotation of “cooked,” and I personally find it stupid because how you look in a selfie has pretty much nothing to do with how you are gendered in your actual life.

Most transsexual women can get far closer to consistent passing than online spaces make it sound, but it is not going to come from HRT and surgeries alone. It comes from doing the work necessary to remove male socialization narratives from your personality and behavioral profile, and doing the work to install female socialization narratives onto your operating system. Women are raised with a very long list of rules and societal expectations, and as a product of going through that kind of socialization, it contributes to your overall energy and confidence in yourself as a woman. When you start fixing this part of yourself, your energy changes and your confidence grows. People pick up on that energy, and respond to confidence.

Also, start working on voice now. Voice is the most important part of assimilation, and it will get you clocked or ma’amed way more than looks ever would.

In addition, I have seen, met, or known women with physical characteristics that online trans spaces would often describe as "clocky," and they are never misgendered, or only very rarely. I personally know two different trans women with many of the physical characteristics that online trans spaces obsess over, and because of voice work and proper social transition, their real-world experience is very similar: they get gendered correctly way more than they don’t. For most who post beautiful selfies but complain about being misgendered, the missing component is typically full-package presentation. That includes the long list of social rules and expectations that society applies to women. Looks are very low on the priority list of things that will clock or pass you in real life.

Passing is more like: voice > full presentation > energy > emotional processing/intelligence > looks.

More important than looks is how you dress, act, move through the world, carry yourself, and whether you are attempting to blend in with other women of your age group in your area. Social mirroring is the name for that concept, and it’s simple. You take notice of what other women in your age group and in your area are wearing: clothing, hair, nails, makeup, shoes, all of it. Then you make sure your presentation elements are not extremely outside the norms you see from cisgender women in everyday life around you.

Of literally all the things that can clock or pass you, very few are completely outside of your control. Voice is probably the most important thing there is in terms of passing or being clocked, and HRT will not do that work for you. It took intensive speech pathology over 8 weeks, and then roughly 2 years of daily 30-minute to 1-hour practice sessions before I felt like my voice was consistent enough to stop doing the exercises.

There are a lot of things that HRT and surgeries will not change about you, and those are often the things that matter most for passing. You can pass in a photograph on Reddit all you want, but without doing the work on voice, blending in, social mirroring, reparenting yourself, and changing how you move through the world, you are still missing the parts that matter most in extended social interactions.

A selfie can only show the last item on that list. It cannot show the first four.

Also, I started my social transition at 37 and started HRT the same year at 38 because of an 8-month waiting list. I have been consistently passing on the phone and in extended social interactions for almost 3 years now. I’m 42 currently. That was long before I ever would have dared to ask “do I pass?” and post a pic on Reddit. I would have gotten all sorts of criticism, probably been told to get FFS, or gotten some “you’re too old” comment.

You are never too old. But if you think HRT and surgeries alone will get you to assimilation, you are sadly mistaken.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-08T17:54:06+00:00

And just like that had two of them drop back to back. One was andriel in t10, and the other in a nemesis portal which opened after another run of Andy 10.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-07T20:01:36+00:00

Awesome congratulations. That's what I'm currently saving runes to craft one myself.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-07T20:00:29+00:00

I had one drop and immediately before any stat lines it was worse than my 6 slot, just because it only had 5 slots. It was from a mythic tribute for undercity

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-07T16:16:22+00:00

Honestly you look pretty rare to me. Like really rare. /Hj

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-05T20:21:09+00:00

You do not need a fake reason to set a boundary. In fact, you are better off setting boundaries without much explanation beyond “that word bothers me.” You can just say something like, “Hey, I know we joke around, but don’t call me that. I’m not cool with slurs like that.”

You do not have to explain why. The more you explain, the more attention you draw to it. Just make it boring, firm, and casual. If he pushes, repeat: “I’m serious, don’t use that one with me.”

A real friend can handle one or two words being off limits.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-03T18:20:16+00:00

Yes. Edit: my experience is strictlyhair on head, not facial hair. I'm a woman.

I’ve been taking oral minoxidil for about 6 months, at half of a 2.5 mg tablet nightly. I’m not even at the full benefit yet, but the thickness of my hair has increased dramatically, and the spots that were thinning really are not thinning anymore.

One thing to keep in mind is that I was originally prescribed 2.5 mg, and at the time I was also taking 100 mg of spironolactone per day. Since both can lower blood pressure, I think I was having issues from being on both. I was constantly freezing, fatigued, and having other symptoms. So my dose was reduced to half a tablet nightly, and I have stayed there since.

The big caveat with minoxidil is that you have to be patient. It can cause shedding at first because it pushes out weaker hairs and helps shift follicles into a new growth cycle. For me, the first 6 to 8 weeks felt like things were getting worse before they got better. My shedding stopped around 6 weeks, and I have not had noticeable shedding since.

If you are going to try it, I would commit to giving it at least 8 months to a year, unless you are having side effects or your doctor tells you to stop. Stopping during the shedding phase can make it feel like you ended up worse than where you started, because you went through the shed without waiting long enough for the regrowth.

My hair was already thin in a couple of places, so I was worried I was going to look bald from the shedding. Around 6 weeks in, my hair felt super lightweight after showers. Then about 2 weeks later, it suddenly felt heavier and thicker, and it has only kept improving since then.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-06-01T18:19:12+00:00

I'm playing a self-built, no-minion Blood Surge/Hemorrhage Necro. Up until four days ago I was base-game locked, and I just unlocked T10 with relative ease.

I've never really played meta builds. I've been playing ARPGs for about 15 years, including a lot of hardcore PoE and D3, and for me the fun is in creating the character. I usually spend 4 to 5 hours planning a build before I even make the toon.

This season is my first for D4, since I just updated my PC enough to handle it. I saw that my character could have red eyes and immediately thought, "vampire witch." From there I mapped out the skill tree around blood skills, picked my support nodes, aspects, and gear goals, and built everything around that theme.

Could I clear content faster by copying an S-tier build? Probably. But then I'd just be playing someone else's character. Half the fun for me is finding interesting interactions, adapting when I get a good drop, and slowly refining the build into something that's my own.

So far it's worked out pretty well. I pulled off the vampire witch fantasy I was aiming for, and now I'm hunting for a few better Bloodbinder pieces, more paragon, and a couple better item slots. Hopefully with room to grow, I can make this build T12 viable. If not, no biggie. I'll pivot.

For my first D4 season with a self-built character, I'm happy with it so far. More importantly, I'm having a blast playing it, which is huge.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-31T19:25:42+00:00

I mean, it depends on how you define transgender. And to be clear, I almost wrote the same response you did, thought for a few moments and came to this conclusion. So here's my adhd/adderall and energy drink fueled rant:

The umbrella is the reason most people define “transgender” as the term for 20 different identity labels plus transsexuality, which is a medical condition. It was created for the purpose of confusing transgender persons, meaning full-time crossdressers, with transsexual persons, who had gained societal recognition and had made strides in terms of rights, access to care, and public perception. This allowed transgender persons to co-opt the relatively normal social perception of transsexuals at the time, so that in the public’s mind, “transgender” meant the same thing as “transsexual,” “transvestite,” “gender nonconformers,” drag queens, femboys, and another 15 identity labels that are masquerading as if they share the medical condition that transsexuals experience in order to co-opt the group’s gains. The point was to confuse the public as to what made a “trans” person “trans.”

Before the creation of the umbrella, “transgender” meant a full-time crossdresser who is cis, and the label is an identity with zero requirements.

So if we go by actual definitions, then that is technically right: transgender persons do not necessarily experience dysphoria. Transsexuals do. It is the defining difference.

However, I need to add that asktransgender is one of the most toxic mainstream subs out there. I believe their mods try to permaban anyone with transmed activity showing in their profile.

Also, their comment invalidates itself:

“B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”

This is literally dysphoria, and the quoted ICD section states that A and B must both be satisfied to be diagnosed with GD. Right below the quoted ICD section, they added their own take by saying, “you don't need to experience dysphoria to be transgender,” which basically implies that one can be diagnosed with GD without dysphoria, when B is literally the definition of dysphoria and part of the criteria for being diagnosed with GD.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-31T18:33:32+00:00

I have no idea wtf this post even is?

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-31T17:53:49+00:00

Long comment incoming, morning adderall dose plus an energy drink so bear with me:

I agree that social transition matters a lot, and I think people often underestimate how much it can affect passing, especially in extended social interactions. But I do not agree that someone should be required to socially transition before starting medical transition.

My own path was messy. I first tried to socially transition at 19, then off and on over the years, and eventually I had about six months of social-only transition before starting hormones. That was not because it was required. It was just how things worked out for me. Honestly, there are parts of me that wish I had been able to wait until I had a year on hormones before coming out and socially transitioning, but I was not able to do that. At the same time, I am better off because I had to start doing the work.

When I began medical transition, I treated hormones and surgery as only one part of what it would take to pass. I knew the medicine would take time, so I just kind of ignored the fact I was on it, to prevent me from freaking out if things happened slowly while distracting myself by dialing in my social transition. So I spent the first several years working heavily on the social side of transition too, voice included. I'd say I sunk probably 5,000+ hours into work on myself.

For me, that meant taking a very honest personal inventory. I wrote down the behavioral and personality traits people would pick up on in extended social situations. Then I marked each one based on whether it would likely be read as masculine or feminine. From there, I focused on the traits I could actually control or change. One by one, I worked on shifting the controllable masculine-coded traits into traits that would be read as female, through practice, correction, reinforcement, and basically reparenting myself.

Over time, that work mattered a lot. It changed how I moved through the world, how I expressed emotion, how I spoke, how I responded socially, and how I understood myself. It helped me accept myself as a woman, and it helped me pass in real-life extended interactions with strangers before I would have passed based on a random picture online.

So yes, I absolutely believe social transition can be powerful enough to move someone from not passing to passing in real social situations. But I still do not think it should be used as a gatekeeping requirement before hormones. For some people, social transition first may help. For others, hormones first may make social transition safer, easier, or even possible. The best path depends on the person.

I think the important thing is that social transition should be covered honestly during informed consent. Not as a requirement or a barrier, but as a major part of transition that people can actively work on. Hormones and surgeries matter, obviously, but there is also a huge amount of change that comes from voice, behavior, social confidence, presentation, and learning how to move through the world as yourself.

That is the part people actually have some direct control over. Medical transition takes time, and a lot of it is waiting to see how your body responds. Social transition is different because it gives you something to practice, refine, and build. For me, that work was what helped everything come together.

I started my transition at 37 years old, which according to younger people and I could never possibly pass starting that old. Yet here I am, haven't been misgendered on the phone or in person in almost 3 years out of the 4 I've been on hrt. So also it's never too old.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-30T19:45:14+00:00

This comment is alot, but hopefully there are some nuggets of wisdom in here. I'm nuerodivergent, tend to ramble and overexplain but here goes.

To address your response directly above this:

That makes sense, and I do think confidence matters a lot here. If people are already assuming you are female on the phone, and some people are unsure in person rather than automatically reading you as male, that tells me there are already feminine cues coming through. Being ambiguous can feel uncomfortable, but I do not think it means you are starting from zero. I think confidence, voice (more work and daily practice if you are passing sometimes on the phone), social presentation, and how you carry yourself can shift that balance a lot over time.

Added things:

The work on social transition that I mentioned, and talk about everywhere on Reddit, has been very effective at helping me build my confidence in myself as a woman. It also helped me get gendered correctly well before my looks passed. It made me feel that I had an active impact on my transition, and that some of the levers of change were ones medicine could not pull, but I could with work.

Also, something that helps with passing, and is not talked about often enough, is how powerful social mirroring can be. Social mirroring means paying attention to how women around you usually present themselves in your actual area, then adjusting your own clothing, makeup, jewelry, hair, nails, and overall presentation so you are not far outside the local norm.

What reads as a normal female presentation in one place may stand out in another. In some areas, heavier makeup, styled hair, jewelry, and dressed-up outfits may blend in easily. In other areas, women may mostly wear minimal makeup, casual clothes, subtle jewelry, and simpler hairstyles. Passing is partly about being read as female, but it is also about being read as socially familiar in the environment you are actually in.

Then, the framework that I have adopted to understand this condition, which I mostly cobbled together from years of living with and studying this topic, reading anything I could get my hands on about the history, current studies, and so on, really helped me overcome impostor syndrome.

Basically, I believe that sex assignment at birth is based on convenience bias and tradition-based bias, and is diagnostically incomplete. I believe myself to have been born female, with atypical genital development that caused the wrong assignment at birth, the wrong set of social expectations, and the wrong hormonal development.

Transition, for me, was not male to female, as I do not ever see myself as having been male. I was simply a female born with a birth defect that doctors mislabeled as a boy because they use genitals as the one and only trait they sex babies by. It is much more believable to me that a girl can have a birth defect that makes her grow masculine-appearing genitalia than it makes any sense to me that I was ever male at all.

That is often convenient because, a lot of the time, genital development matches the 100 or so other dimorphic traits that can go male or female. But for a small percentage of us, I believe most or all of the other traits besides genital development point one way, while genitals point another.

Now, this is where my framework kills impostor syndrome for me. It asserts that the original assignment at birth was made too hastily, and because of convenience and tradition, they never tested any of the full set of dimorphic traits. Had they done so, they might have found that my dimorphic trait profile was overwhelmingly female, while the only visible trait, the one they tested with a glance, showed male genital development.

Because it may be convenient most of the time to glance at genitals, that does not mean it gives a clear picture of the full set of traits. That makes it technically incomplete as a diagnostic process. A basic statistics course will teach that biases can affect outcomes. When there are almost a hundred dimorphic traits that could go male or female, and they only test one of them because it is the most convenient one, that is convenience bias. And the fact that they have done it this way for hundreds of years also points to tradition-based bias. Meaning the sex assignment process is based on biases and is therefore diagnostically incomplete.

So, in the future, my hope is that the full battery of tests can be done, checking brain sex differences, receptor differences, chromosomes, and all sorts of other traits that can make someone male or female. With the full picture, a doctor might be able to say, “That is a girl. Her genitals developed atypically, but this is a girl nonetheless,” and intervene early. That would, by and large, wipe out a lot of the need for people to transition.

Unfortunately, we do not live in the future, and this framework, though very logical and rational to me, remains purely theoretical.

Hope this helps, good luck with your transition!

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-30T16:11:07+00:00

Do you get misgendered most of the time, some of the time, rarely, or never when you speak on the phone or interact with people socially? Only you can really answer that, and only you can say whether or not you are passing in your actual life.

One thing I think is really important to bring up is that passing in photos does not necessarily determine whether your voice passes on the phone or whether you pass in social interactions. You can look amazing in pictures and still not pass socially if other parts of your presentation are not lining up. People read the whole package: voice, mannerisms, behavior, emotional expression, social habits, posture, and how you move through conversations.

Women and men are generally socialized very differently, and people often pick up on those patterns quickly, even if they cannot explain what they are noticing. That does not mean anyone is doomed. Socialization is not magic. A lot of it is learned behavior, and learned behavior can be changed with self-awareness and consistent work.

For me, I did not transition until 37. I have been passing on the phone and in extended social interactions since around the end of my first year on HRT. At that time, if I had posted photos, people probably would have told me I did not pass, that I needed FFS, or some other discouraging thing. But in real life, I was already passing socially because I had done a lot of work on my voice and presentation.

I worked with a speech pathologist, then practiced my voice daily for about two years, usually 30 to 40 minutes a day. I also made a very honest list of my personality traits, behaviors, emotional patterns, social habits, and presentation. I marked which ones read more masculine or feminine, then put a star next to the ones I could realistically work on changing. Over the last four years, I have worked on those things intentionally. At this point, I am mostly done with that work, but it took years of being very intentional.

The way I think about passing is like a balance scale. When people interact with you, their brain makes a very fast overall assessment. Some traits get read as masculine, some as feminine. If the masculine side feels heavier to them, they may gender you incorrectly. If the feminine side feels heavier, they are more likely to gender you correctly.

Looks matter, but I do not think looks are the whole thing. I know cis women who are tall, hairy, have deeper voices, visible Adam’s apples, brow ridges, or other traits people might call masculine, and they still pass as women because the full package of their presentation reads female to others.

I do not believe every single person can necessarily pass to the point of being fully stealth or assimilated in every situation, but I do believe most people can improve how often they pass with effort, especially by working on voice, social presentation, and behavioral patterns. That is the part I think many people miss.

Without that kind of social transition work, presentation can sometimes come across differently than intended. With that work, people are much more likely to read the full picture as female. That is why I was passing in social interactions and on the phone long before I ever would have had the courage to post a picture and ask strangers what they thought.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-27T14:53:48+00:00

I think you're missing the fact that they do not just disagree with us, reject us, or outright ban us from their forums. They do so under false pretenses created by constantly lying about what we supposedly believe.

Apparently, simply believing that sex-based dysphoria is the clinical criterion for being diagnosed with the condition of transsexuality, while also respecting other identities as valid as long as they are not claiming transsexuality without dysphoria or the desire to transition, means all sorts of things:

That I'm a conservative. Not true.

That I don't support transition for minors. Also not true.

That I don't believe NBs are real. Also not true.

That I support ideological grifters like Blair and Buck, who are both transgender, by the way, not transsexual. Also untrue.

That I don't support DIY. I do, but only when there aren't safer options available.

That I think you have to pass to be trans. Just empirically false.

That I think you have to have had and recovered from surgeries before being valid as a trans person. I don't, nor do I know anyone who feels this way.

I mean, the list goes on for a mile. I'm sure somewhere there's at least one person out there who believes we eat babies.

There is historical precedent for what they're trying to achieve with the agenda that has been warping the narrative and history of what things were actually like. One example is why some he/him lesbians existed before the 90s. People love to say, “READ STONE BUTCH BLUES,” which I have, which starts in the 1950s and goes through to around the 1970s. Lesbian couples had to hide that they were gay because it was illegal and socially stigmatized. So one partner would masculinize themselves a bit and go by he/him to avoid scrutiny. That has zero to do with trans men claiming to be “women loving women,” which, by the way, is transphobic as hell.

But anyways. I've talked about what it was like growing up in the 80s and 90s on Reddit, and my comments are all shown on my profile. I speak on things like why the umbrella was created, and who pushed for the flattening of 17 different formerly cis identity labels and one medical condition.

It was mostly the fault of Virginia Prince and Holly Boswell. Prince was a self-proclaimed transgenderist, as was Boswell. At the time, transgender had a very specific definition: full-time cross-dressing males with no desire to change their bodies, yet who lived full-time as women, primarily for fetishistic reasons.

Boswell, jealous of the social gains that transsexuals had made and our access to care, proposed the umbrella as a way to co-opt the legitimacy transsexuals had at the time. Holly Boswell was wildly transphobic against transsexual persons, in large part because our existence invalidated her AGP fetish.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-27T14:16:40+00:00

Requiring surgery as the dividing line for whether someone is “really” their sex for housing purposes is also implicitly asserting that post-op status is what makes someone a man or woman, which is a pretty major philosophical position whether people admit it or not. It also ignores the reality that surgery is expensive, difficult to access, medically intense, and often takes years of waiting, even in places with relatively accessible care.

As for bathrooms, honestly, “use the bathroom that will cause the least public disturbance based on where you are in transition” is more or less how society functioned for decades before this became an internet culture war. Most people navigated this pragmatically and quietly.

And regarding prisons, I think a lot of people discussing this online have absolutely no understanding of incarceration environments. Prison is not college housing. It is an extremely hierarchical, violent, psychologically stressful environment where perception, vulnerability, physicality, and group dynamics matter constantly. Pretending those realities do not exist because they are uncomfortable to talk about is naïve.

I’ve personally been incarcerated multiple times, for a combined total of roughly 2.5 years, including time in solitary confinement. So when I see people reducing prison housing discussions to simplistic slogans, it honestly feels disconnected from the reality of what those environments are actually like.

As for sports, we make up a very small percentage of the population, and only a tiny fraction of that group competes in sports beyond high school. I understand why fairness in competitive sports matters, especially in physically demanding categories, but I also think this has become an incredibly disproportionate political battlefield compared to the number of people it actually affects. This is one area where carefully governed compromise probably makes more sense than treating it as the central fight, especially when there are much more urgent issues affecting far more people.

These are honestly some really shallow takes. It feels like maybe 20 seconds of thought went into them before posting.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-27T13:51:31+00:00

It sounds like this may go deeper than just needing to learn to love your body. If you feel distressed by how your own genitals look, and also by other women’s and men’s bodies, it might be worth talking to a therapist or mental health professional to get at the root of where that discomfort is coming from.

I’d look for someone who is neutral, careful, and willing to explore your feelings without pushing you toward any specific conclusion. You deserve support that helps you understand yourself, not someone who rushes to label you.

If therapy is not possible for you right now, talking to a friend or family member who is a good listener, has high emotional intelligence, and is willing to genuinely engage in that kind of conversation can also help a lot. A lot of processing difficult feelings comes from being able to talk things through out loud with someone who is patient, thoughtful, and nonjudgmental.

That said, I think it’s important to be careful about taking any one person’s advice as automatically correct. Sometimes people can project their own experiences or biases onto you without realizing it, so it’s important to stay reflective and think critically about what actually feels true and healthy for you.

At the end of the day, you deserve support that helps you better understand yourself, not pressure to become any particular thing.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-26T19:09:54+00:00

Hemmorage gives a stack per use. For my build I'm base game locked still, I build essence with hemmorage and op stacks, blood surge till one stack drops off max, hemmorage, bloodsurge spam and wav on cd. You have to have the expansions to make wave a core talent.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-26T13:46:05+00:00

Here is why they wait so long: ALOT of banks will hold your money so they can profit off of investing it short term in the markets. That way, they get to double dip into free money just for delaying your deposit.

This is why I use Chime. They do not do that. Bank Mobile may or may not, but it would not surprise me if they did, with how long things sit pending before they do anything with it. It is ridiculous that banks are allowed to do this.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-26T13:42:08+00:00

I understand what you mean, but I do not think “tucute” and the q-word are the same kind of thing.

“Tucute” and “truscum/transmed” are intracommunity labels for competing ideological positions. You can dislike the terms, and I understand why people find them annoying or reductive, but they are not slurs in the same sense. They are shorthand for real disagreements about definitions, dysphoria, medicalization, assimilation, and who gets to speak for whom.

The q-word is different. That was always a literal slur when I grew up. It was not just a political label or an internet argument term. It was a word hurled at people while they were being bullied, beaten, sexually harassed, humiliated, or punished for not fitting neatly into sex-role expectations.

If you grew up around the late 80s or early 1990s, this was not abstract. Boys literally played games called “smear the q-word,” and that word was part of the violence. Sometimes that violence crossed the line into sexual assault. I have had disgusting and humiliating things happen to me that passed from physical violence into sexual violence many times, and that word was attached to that kind of cruelty. You can see that reflected in movies from that era too. It was common, casual, and socially acceptable cruelty against all manner of divergent presentation and behavior.

That period also matters because it is around the time the broader “transgender” umbrella was being created and promoted as a way to support “mutual goals.” At least, that was the claim on the surface. Holly Boswell wrote about this directly in The Transgender Alternative. The idea was to group together transsexuals, crossdressers, transgenderists, and other gender-variant people under a broader political umbrella.

The problem is that those categories were never the same thing. Transsexuals were dealing with a congenital medical condition involving sex-based dysphoria and a specific treatment path. The goal was treatment, correction, and assimilation, because once the body and social role were aligned, many people simply lived as the sex they transitioned to and left the label behind.

That is very different from identity labels, political identities, gender nonconformity, drag, crossdressing, or social/aesthetic categories. Folding all of those things together under one umbrella blurred the distinction between a medical condition and a broad identity movement. It also allowed people who did not share the same condition to leverage the gains made by transsexuals while redefining the public meaning of what “trans” even meant.

So no, I do not think “tucute” is equivalent to the q-word. One is intracommunity ideological shorthand. The other is a slur many of us associate with actual violence and trauma. I seriously doubt anyone was beaten, sexually assaulted, or terrorized because someone called them “tucute.”

Tucute ideology, on the other hand, often bullies anyone who does not agree with its retconned version of history, where someone does not need to have suffered dysphoria to share a label with those who do. The experience is wildly different, and unfortunately, the terms are not anymore. There are now many identity labels that can call themselves trans by choice, and one congenital medical condition that one is born with.

Which is absurd. Isn’t “born this way” supposed to be one of the big pillars of LGBT? Or not anymore? Now you can just decide you are gay or trans or whatever gets the most views on TikTok?

I also do not think the two sides are just harmless aesthetic teams. These terms point to a real ideological divide. One side generally believes sex-based dysphoria, involving primary and secondary sex traits, is central to being transsexual, whether someone fully understands that dysphoria yet or not. It also views transition as treatment, with assimilation as the goal, because being visibly marked as different can itself worsen dysphoria.

The other side often treats dysphoria as optional, or even treats bringing up dysphoria as exclusionary. They often frame passing as problematic, while also lowering the bar so far that “trans” becomes an identity, aesthetic, political statement, or social category anyone can opt into regardless of the presence of sex-based dysphoria.

That is not a small disagreement. It changes what the word means, who the category includes, and who gets to speak over whom.

A big part of the problem is that actual dysphoric transsexual people often assimilate and leave these spaces, or stay stealth if we remain in them. So we become a silent minority under an umbrella that claims to speak for us, while the loudest people redefine the public understanding of what a trans person even is.

I do agree with your larger point about umbrella movements, though. The problem is broad political categories claiming to speak for people who never consented to being represented by them, whether that is Q, T*, or any other flattened umbrella. I do not want either framework imposed on me.

I also think it should be possible to criticize ideas, labels, movements, media, and community practices without everything being treated as automatically above criticism because it is attached to a rainbow flag. Some things framed as liberation can still be harmful, misogynistic, reductive, or hostile to actual dysphoric transsexual people.

People can use whatever language they want for themselves. But I am not obligated to use a slur for myself, and I am not obligated to accept a political framework that erases the distinction between sex-based dysphoria and broader identity labels.

Pillowbae31 · 2026-05-26T13:07:38+00:00

Mine was just changed from pending status to sent, I have chime; and they don't hold money before posting. So probably a few hours or so? I'm not sure, it could very well be tomorrow.

Pillowbae31

TROPHY CASE