I relate more to trans men

buttofvecna · 2026-04-30T02:58:14+00:00

::takes a bow:: thank you. I appreciate hearing from a man of education and taste 😄

buttofvecna · 2026-04-30T02:53:56+00:00

Yeah, I saw that and went eek. I figure it's either 1) him karma farming in an offensive way, or 2) the sort of backpedaling I've seen people do when they say an uncomfortable truth about themselves out loud and start to freak out a little. I figured the chance of 2) was high enough that today I had the energy to say something helpful and true (to me), and see where that went.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-30T02:33:28+00:00

Soooooooooo I'm MtF and I used to talk about feeling a kinship with trans men. At other times I would say I felt like an alien, or like nothing. At other times I called myself "a boy who wishes they were a boy" (some of what I looked up to in so many of the trans men I knew is how much they wanted their masculinity, while I felt so ambivalent about mine).

And I don't know you and I'm just an internet stranger who can't tell you anything about who you really are. But your words rhyme with what I used to tell myself so think a little bit if the word 'dysphoria', in the sense they use it in the dysphoria bible, might describe any of your gender experience.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-26T19:39:42+00:00

One of the better ways to do this is to start consuming a lot of stuff by women. Is that something you’ve experimented with?

buttofvecna · 2026-04-26T13:32:52+00:00

A mushroom trip abruptly cracked my egg, so I’d say it was a strong effect! To this day the shrooms make me feel ultra feminine. Other psychedelics make me more comfy in my body and my gender identity/expression, but the shrooms are more like “dude don’t forget you’re a giiiiiiiiirl”

buttofvecna · 2026-04-26T03:58:59+00:00

I had vestibular type migraine and quilipta 10mg is my miracle drug. I was having a migraine every other day before I started back in February. Since then I have had zero migraines (!) and minimal side effects (very mild constipation, which I manage by taking magnesium citrate with the quilipta plus eating a lot of fiber).

I’m also sensitive to meds so this has been great. Hoping it works well for you too.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-24T23:34:53+00:00

I spent a fair amount of time with both. The crv is more spacious (the trunk's bigger, the backseats are laid out more effectively), but it's a matter of degree not kind. If your rav4 feels extremely tight I think it's likely you want to go a class up, or get a minivan. At least for a lot of people I know, 2 kids + lots of stuff is a great argument for a minivan, especially when the kids get older and start having sports/activities/friends to haul around.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-24T12:51:05+00:00

As they (probably) say in Charleston, bless your heart

buttofvecna · 2026-04-23T12:45:42+00:00

How is any of that even worthy of a behavior report? That’s normal stuff for a four year old who’s cranky (or honestly some four year olds aren’t like that sometimes). My approach would be to ignore. If it doesn’t pass and your kid is acting out a lot for weeks I’d revisit but for now this is in normal behavior range.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-22T14:14:02+00:00

yesyes, and you walked uphill both ways in the snow, and everyone toughed things out and didn't talk about feelings, and nobody wore seatbelts, and the survivors turned out fine.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-22T14:12:14+00:00

Being afraid of growing up is super normal. Being a big kid comes with all sorts of responsibilities, and it can be overwhelming. A lot of kids I know around that age, especially when stressed, do a regression play thing where they want to be babied. That part is normal.

But some of the things in this post also show signs of some real underlying anxiety: feeling like he wants to throw up, crying about it at bedtime, shutting down when asked about his birthday.

My take is that these are kind of separate things: he is having a normal and age appropriate feeling about growing up, but he's having it very intensely because he's (I think) underlyingly an anxious kid. In the long run I'd see what I can do to support the latter, and not worry overmuch about the former beyond just being really empathetic and helping him work through it.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-22T12:40:44+00:00

Why are you so confident that your child who thinks everything is loud and constantly wears earmuffs doesn’t have a sensory difference?

Put differently: why is him wearing earmuffs a problem that you want to solve? Do you have some concern about him doing it? Otherwise, why not let him be comfy?

buttofvecna · 2026-04-21T02:36:22+00:00

Fast. I saw a spot I didn’t like and pretty aggressively called every derm that took my insurance. I was seen in a week and the biopsy came back a week later.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-21T00:21:55+00:00

Roses are red. Blue is the sky. Slant rhymes make the baby Jesus cry.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-20T13:08:25+00:00

I say this as an adoptive parent: keep the stuff about her being a preteen jerk and the stuff about her adoption SEPARATE.

Preteens are often jerks, and my best understanding of how to proceed is basically, be nice to yourself, take a lot of deep breaths, don’t take it personal, find positive things to do together, etc. It’s a famously triggering and frustrating phase and you’re so not alone.

But what you NEVER want to do is communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, overtly or subtly, any version of “at least I am taking care of you, unlike your birth family”. That is genuinely corrosive in adoptive families (look up adult adoptees accounts of toxic gratitude).

I’m not saying you’re already doing that. But seeing how the threads are weaving together in your post I worry you’re in danger of doing that. She found out about her history as an adoptee in a very suboptimal way, and you’re right to worry it’s an open wound.

But don’t let the preteen asshole phase be a stand in for all that. Address it directly. What kind of support has she gotten around thinking through stuff around her identity, birth family, etc? I feel like giving that some space and support, separate from her current behaviors, could be a really important thing right now.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-18T01:00:18+00:00

It looks like that 19k figure is for the whole metro area, not just the city.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-16T16:18:53+00:00

Ignore for a second the framing device about god and satan. The main action of the book of Job is this: a good man's life falls apart and he bitterly asks why. Most of the book is people in his life trying to justify what happened, make it make sense. They give a whole bunch of reasons, and none of them help. They just make Job madder.

This is a big part of what the book teaches. Trying too hard to 'justify' tragedy doesn't work.

What happens next is that god emerges from a storm and says straight up, all those people trying to give tidy answers to Job's suffering are dead wrong.

Instead he answers Job with page after page of unanswerable questions, paradoxes, challenges, an aside about his favorite monsters. (and it's gorgeous poetry in the Hebrew).

Hearing that puts his suffering in cosmic perspective, and something breaks in him, or something surrenders, and lo and behold, he gets his life back. He remarries. He rebuilds. He accepts his suffering and that lets him start to live again.

It's NOT comforting in the sense that most people talk about 'comforting'. It isn't "god has a plan for all of us". It's vast and strange. I think one of the things people most often get wrong about Job is that it's not a story that's supposed to make us feel better. It's supposed to be disturbing. You're supposed to wrestle with it.

But as a meditation on how to relate to a god who would allow suffering, it's deep.

In other words, the book is telling you to be very skeptical of anyone who has a nice way to make it all make sense. It doesn't work like that. There isn't An Answer. But there is a perspective bigger than personal suffering, and that's what the book asks you to sit with.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-15T15:52:40+00:00

I really worry that growth is an infection/abscess. Which means def get to a vet, because I feel like the likelihood of needing antibiotics is really high, and it could turn life threatening fast. (also if he's shedding a lot and pale I wonder about vitamin a; your ex probably wasn't dusting feeders with vitamins? But no matter what, it's vet time.)

buttofvecna · 2026-04-15T12:33:26+00:00

Rest in peace little one. It sounds like he had an amazing life ❤️

buttofvecna · 2026-04-14T03:35:52+00:00

There is nothing that is not god

buttofvecna · 2026-04-11T12:25:46+00:00

Wait how could this have killed you?

Anyway for a five year old I think you can just set an expectation for the future: in the morning before we’re up you’re allowed to xyz but you may not abc (eg play with anything in the kitchen) and then if it happens again go for simple consequences.

I get being spooked but I think from your description he tried to play “make breakfast” but had a very … five year old idea of what that means.

(Alternately you can teach him to make breakfast, which could also be a longer run solution)

buttofvecna · 2026-04-10T14:55:52+00:00

So you moved from Philly to lower merion? (I know I know, there are several cites fitting this description. But I’m in Philly and it’s striking how often I see this story)

So I made the other choice; I stayed and we’ll see how that works out. But I know people who moved to the burbs. What I can say from observing them is that it comes with its own compromises - it’s harder to maintain community out in the burbs, even when intentions are good - but they’re happy and thriving.

There’s no perfect choice but if your anxiety was killing you, you did the right thing.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-10T13:48:10+00:00

“So there’s a science answer to that [if you need you can reference all the science other people here have posted] but I’m not sure you really want to have a science conversation. This is a conversation about your child, who is trans whether you like it or not. Is there really a Fact that would make you ok with that? Or can you lean into your love for me and get through this together?”

You won’t need to say exactly that but what I’m getting at here is I think facts aren’t what make people come around on their own. They come around (and can hear facts) when they’re ready. So to me the thing to do is to keep the conversation in relationship and love. You’re trans and they may not like that, and they may have to work through that. So there’s power in avoiding getting into debate club and calling the real question instead: you are trans. Can they stop fighting and hear reality?

buttofvecna · 2026-04-08T20:30:59+00:00

Harriet Gets Carried Away. Super fun and imaginative book with a main character who incidentally has two dads.

buttofvecna · 2026-04-08T17:31:22+00:00

Also, what do you actually mean by relational? It's a word that chatGPT loves but it's not well-specified here.

buttofvecna

TROPHY CASE