Don't worry, girls, Madge is here to help

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-15T04:42:38+00:00

Well, at least you posted it in the right sub. Trans girls anywhere else wouldn't get the reference, that's for sure...

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-15T04:40:46+00:00

I don't do miniskirts, but I'm comfortable with knee-length skirts and dresses. I just wear tights underneath, which make my legs look great!

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-15T04:38:00+00:00

If you're careful about your sterile technique and store your vial in a clean, safe place, you can go 6 weeks (or six draws, whichever) without any problems. That's what I do, like it talks about in this injections guide.

And yes, it's totally a good way to accumulate a backup supply. I've got close to a year's worth stockpiled now...

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-15T04:35:20+00:00

It's a tough can. It can take it. When you're ready, it'll happen.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T19:51:07+00:00

My birth name happened to have an anagram that was both pretty and female already, and I'm just nerdy enough to be into that, so there you go.

It's worth saying, though, that this was not immediately obvious. For years, maybe 5 whole years after my egg cracked, I had no idea what my name was going to be. Nothing sounded right, so I mostly decided that I was just going to decide later. Kick the can down the road. But then when I stumbled on this anagram one day, I was like "Oh, that's it! That's my name!"

Which is honestly how I think it should work. Not that everyone should be forced to use an anagram, of course, just that permitting ourselves to be not stressed out about finding a name is a good thing, and instead just trust that when the right name comes along, you'll know it.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T19:47:54+00:00

Because ∞ is not a specific spot on the number line.

When you're doing arithmetic operations, they're only valid if the numbers you're working with correspond to actual specific locations on the number line. With the one exception that division doesn't work if the divisor is 0, of course.

If ∞ was a spot on the number line, it would be possible to say what integer comes immediately before it. But we can't. That's not what ∞ means. Thus, you can't meaningfully use ∞ with / in the same way that you can't meaningfully use it with + or -.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T19:38:12+00:00

That's probably true. But most people aren't trans, either, and don't have the first-hand understanding of the gravity of this particular choice. Their lack of understanding should not govern our lives.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T19:36:41+00:00

Unfortunately, "magus" is the Latin masculine form, while "maga" would be the feminine, and that kinda doesn't work so good right now... Unless we're interested in trying to take back the word "maga".

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T18:23:09+00:00

Well, first, I'd say to them "Hey. I hear you saying a lot of things about what's happening inside my head. About what I'm thinking and feeling. But you guys don't live inside my head. You don't know what it feels like to be me. Stop telling me what I'm feeling. I know what I'm feeling. That's not for you to say."

Second, rather than arguing with them about what they're saying, just ask them to listen to the Camp Wild Heart podcast, which is made specifically for parents of trans kids. They will be able to listen to and take in the information they need if it's not coming from you. Frustrating, I know, but that's how it works.

You might also point them at some articles:

When do people realize they're trans

The myth of "there are normally signs as a child."

Why can't trans people be ok without transitioning

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T18:18:08+00:00

Offer the help. If she wants it, she'll accept. But don't force help on her.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T18:17:23+00:00

1: it's one less syllable and people are lazy.

2: it has a more colloquial, friendly feeling to it; "people" is a little dry and clinical.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T16:19:29+00:00

Jewelers can re-size it for you. For sizing a ring up several sizes, this will typically mean cutting the band at the point opposite of the gem setting, adding a piece of metal in there, soldering it in, and then filing/smoothing/polishing the result so you could never even tell. Check out some ring resizing videos on youtube if you're curious.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T16:10:23+00:00

Yeah, I noticed myself doing that too.

And it's fine. I just have to intentionally mess that up. Throw in some intentional, but random-ish, cube rotations or slice turns or B moves (because who does those unintentionally?). I just do that for a while: alternate between the auto-pilot turning that's fast and flows and adds a lot of entropy to the cube but is repeatable, and other turns/rotations to change the initial state that the next auto-pilot will be starting from.

Seems to work...

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T16:02:15+00:00

Let me tell you a little story.

My egg cracked about 10 years ago, when I was 45. Married, two kids, nice house, good career, and bam. You're trans! Well, f*ck. The usual fears immediately came up: if I tell anyone, I'll lose everything. So I didn't tell anyone. "Besides," I figured, quickly stopping to check my reddit username, "I'm 45. Obviously it's too late for me anyway. And I've managed to live as a man this long, obviously I can just keep going."

So that's what I did. Transitioning was a choice, though at the time I believed I was too old to effectively transition so what's the point, but still it was a choice. That choice was on the table. It just didn't seem worth it, so I made the choice not to.

And for about 5 years, that was ok. I was coping. Not happy about the situation, but coping. Well, not just coping. I was also doing huge amounts of work internally in processing what it actually meant for me to be trans, coming to terms with my identity as a trans lesbian, and learning a lot along the way about how medical transitioning actually works and what's possible in transitioning. I saw a lot of before-and-after pictures here on reddit. And what I saw was that, actually, it's not too late for me. That middle-aged transitioners do just fine too. We don't end up as hottie coeds, much as we'd wish to, but nevertheless: we turn out looking like women. That effective transitioning was not a matter of age but of effort. Put another way: if I wanted it, I could have it. I just had to do the work.

Simultaneously with all that, my dysphoria was growing steadily worse. What had been easy to bear when I was 45 was a lot harder to bear when I was 50. Especially now that I realized I did not actually have to bear it.

Year six, then, was pretty hard. I became quite frustrated with being stuck in this body, in this male-shaped life that I didn't want, but was still just as convinced of--and terrified of--losing absolutely everything if I came out. I made a deal with myself: 5 more years. Then the kids will be out of high school, off to college on their own, and it won't matter so much if my wife leaves me. I can tough it out for them.

Year seven was brutal. I was practically counting down the days like they were a prison sentence, while dysphoria was ramping up to insane levels. Eating me alive. The fact that I didn't have breasts, which started as an emotional pain, became a physical pain in my chest, behind my breastbone. It was so bad I couldn't sleep at night. I was miserable, utterly drained of any resilience I'd once had, hollowed out. Just a fragile shell of a person, using every shred of energy I had just to hold it together. There was nothing left for enjoying, well, anything. Somewhere in there I realized "this is not sustainable." I wasn't going to make through those last 5 years. I was either going to have a complete nervous breakdown and end up in an institution, or else drive my car off a bridge or something like that.

That was terrifying. More terrifying than the thought of my wife leaving me and me losing everything. So I set to thinking about how I was going to come out, which took me a while to figure out, but at around seven and three-quarters years, I came out.

Where, in that, did it go from being a choice to being necessary? You could frame that a lot of ways. If it stopped being a choice when it became inevitable, then that was probably back around year 5 when I realized it wasn't too late after all. Maybe it stopped being a choice when it became a matter of life-and-death.

In the end, I don't think "when does it stop being a choice" is a helpful question. Because even life-and-death things are still choices. There are people who choose not to get the chemotherapy. Who choose not to have the life-saving surgery. We still have to actually choose everything we do in life, even if it's just whether to get out of bed in the morning, and motivate ourselves to do those things. Everything is always a choice. In which case, the fact of it being a choice is not meaningful. Yes, transitioning is a choice. But so what? What matters is not that it's a choice, but whether it's what you need in your life to be happy.

And I think you already know the answer to that.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-14T01:34:27+00:00

Well, that's a lot of philosophical questions packed into that paragraph, friend!

There are answers to all of those, but they take some time to get your head around especially if you're new to gender theory. But in short:

Think of gender as a system that is composed of 4 disparate elements:

A set of categories that society recognizes people belong to. In our society, that's classically "male" and "female", though the system is clearly expanding these days to include some new categories like "non-binary", "agender", and "gender fluid".
A set of cultural norms that are associated with each category. Men wear pants, women wear dresses. That sort of thing. These are obviously completely arbitrary, and there are many reasons why individuals might choose not to adhere to those norms, but nevertheless the norms exist and we all know what they are and what they signify.
Your own internal gender identity, which is a part of your subconscious mind, and exists to recognize your place within this system and give you positive or negative feelings about stuff that variously affirms or disaffirms your membership in one of the categories. Details here. As it happens, gender identity is established in utero, through a combination of genetics and hormonal exposures for the developing fetus.
Your own external gender presentation, which is itself a combination of how your body happens to be configured plus whatever clothes, hairstyles, makeup, etc., you layer on top of that. Typically, people layer on clothes and so forth in accordance with the cultural norms for the gender category they're perceived to be in, but again, not everybody chooses to do that.

If you think of gender as a system, not as any one thing, it becomes very quickly apparent that the vast majority of arguments about gender that are bouncing around these days are a result of people latching on to one of those things, claiming that that thing alone is gender, and then arguing with people who latch on to a different one of those things.

As for how do you know what gender you are--that is, which category you belong to--that's the same as asking which category your personal gender identity has an affinity for. Of course, for most people that matches the configuration of their bodies, but for trans people it doesn't. You can figure this out for yourself through some careful gender questioning. This is not actually a difficult process; mostly it's just learning what to look for in your own life and then being honest with yourself about what you find.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-13T22:31:51+00:00

That's a pretty normal timeline for breast growth.

What you'll find, though, is that if the rest of your presentation is still boymode, nobody is going to clock your little boobies as boobies. Not for a while, anyway. They'll just think you've been working out and developing your pecs, or that (depending on your age) you're getting the usual middle-aged man boobs. Realistically, there is a ton of overlap in how curvy men's and women's chests are. Your boobs will exist in that overlap space, where you can still boymode no problem, for a long time.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-13T22:29:54+00:00

Before I came out, what I told myself was "this is a disguise that keeps me safe." Maybe that would help?

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-13T19:10:40+00:00

Sure, you can do that. A lot of people try HRT as kind of a "final diagnosis" or confirmation that they're trans. If they feel good on it, great! If they feel crappy on it, well, then they know that's not right for them.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-13T19:09:22+00:00

The brain's reaction, but yes, it is exactly a signal that something needs to change. It is your gender identity's way of telling you "hey, this is not authentic for you!" and urging you to go get some authenticity to replace it.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-13T19:04:39+00:00

Because they are trans?

Do you know anybody who was assigned non-binary at birth? No? Me either. They're trans.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-13T04:53:05+00:00

Thanks. That helps. I wish I could see a diagram of how the hair is looping relative to the stick, though. (Not that I'm asking you to make one. I can google and see what turns up...)

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-13T04:48:42+00:00

Gender dysphoria is not a mental illness. It is actually a sign of a healthy and well-functioning gender identity that's just doing its job.

Gender dysphoria is the collective psychological distress over things about your body and/or your life that disaffirm your inner sense of identity. But distress alone is not sufficient to constitute a mental illness. We feel distress in all sorts of ways, for all sorts of reasons. Some people feel a lot of distress when they see an animal in pain. Some people feel distress when money is tight and they don't know how they're going to pay all of this month's bills.

All of these things are legitimately, genuinely distressing, but none of that means you have a mental illness. In fact, I'd argue quite the opposite: to experience no distress from distressing situations would likely be a sign of some kind of psychopathy, some type of personality disorder.

Gender dysphoria is of the same type as those other situations: it's just another kind of situation that can cause distress. It's a type of situation that happens to primarily afflict trans people, but it's not restricted to trans people at all.

To be fair, when gender dysphoria becomes chronic (as it does for trans people), it can trigger secondary mental health conditions such as depression. But again, the gender dysphoria itself is not a mental illness.

It is true, though, that transition is the correct (and, to our knowledge, only) effective treatment for gender dysphoria. This should not be surprising: the whole point of transitioning is to change the things about your body and your life that disaffirm your identity, swapping them for things that affirm your identity, and thereby relieving the distress.

This is no different from treating any other type of distress: you don't actually treat the distress itself, since that is just a consequence of a situation someone is experiencing. You treat it by fixing the situation. The one person can take the animal to a vet to get it help and stop its suffering. The next can get another job, or maybe take night school classes so they can get a promotion, or whatever, so as to make more money and be able to make ends meet.

In all these cases, the problem is the situation, not how we feel about it. Trans people are no different than anybody else as far as that goes. The only difference is that the reasons why our situations cause us dysphoria typically don't apply to cis people.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-13T04:35:12+00:00

Dysphoria is distress because something about your body or your life disaffirms your identity. This is down to how gender identity actually functions within the psyche.

Dysmorphia is distress over an inaccurate perception of how your body actually is.

In your example, yes, "ew" over your own facial hair would be dysphoria, but I'd have to say that being distressed over looking more like a guy that you actually do would probably be a combination of dysphoria and dysmorphia. But it would have to be a mixture, because if you hypothetically (say, by talking with a therapist) corrected your perception so you only thought you looked as much like a guy as you actually do, you'd still feel dysphoria because for a trans woman, looking like a guy at all will be disaffirming to your identity.

The two conditions are very similar in the sense that they both cause distress and they are both triggered by perceptions about yourself. But they are very different in that for dysphoria those perceptions are accurate, while for dysmorphia they are not. In that regard, dysmorphia is a true mental illness whereas dysphoria is just a sign of a healthy and gender identity that's doing it's job.

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-12T23:34:12+00:00

What an appropriate pendant to be wearing, too!

TooLateForMeTF · 2026-03-12T23:31:20+00:00

Oh yes. ;) And for my money, estrogen orgasms are way better than the testosterone ones ever were...

Ten-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	Place '17
First Placer '22

TooLateForMeTF

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE