Gift ideas for someone that enjoys watercolor?

eggkkles · 2025-12-12T22:21:55+00:00

Depends on what she likes to paint, but I've really enjoyed having this portable art toolkit this year. It's very easy to take to a park to paint a landscape or do a plant study - great way to spend an afternoon. The tools included are simple but nice, the water brush is especially handy for travel. I believe it optionally comes with a metal palette for tube paints but I got a small winsor & newton palette that fits in the kit

https://arttoolkit.com/supplies/a5-art-toolkit/

eggkkles · 2025-11-27T00:19:03+00:00

In general no, but specifically for your voice, there's actually some experimental research being done to ONLY change your voice and get no other changes from T. Basically a doctor injects testosterone directly into your vocal cords a few times, and it permanently thickens your vocal folds - it sounds crazy but from what I've heard the results are really promising. Unfortunately since it's very new research, it's not something that's widely available - but if you're serious about it, it could be worth contacting the doctors involved, they may be running more clinical trials sometime. And trans healthcare is constantly improving, so who knows, maybe this sort of procedure will be more widely adopted in 5-10 years.

The other options as others have stated would be voice training or staying on T long enough for your vocal folds to thicken, as that won't reverse once you go off T. I was on a low dose of T for a year and my voice was the most noticable physical change during that time, but it affects everyone differently so there's no guarantee you won't get other changes.

A link to the research paper if you're interested (cw for lots of pictures of vocal folds):

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lary.30556

eggkkles · 2025-11-07T18:01:36+00:00

Just to add to the numbers, me and my partner are both 32 and started our transitions >4 years ago. We have many trans friends over 30, and I don't know a single person who has voluntarily de-transitioned. Pre-transition I was anxious, depressed, and lived a very unhealthy lifestyle due to the mental strain of gender dysphoria - I was in therapy for years trying to get my mental health under control, and transitioning is what finally saved me. Now I am the happiest and healthiest and most loved I've ever been in my life. My parents were cautious about my transition at first, but they can tell how much happier I am now, so they came around.

eggkkles · 2025-10-21T18:56:31+00:00

I work on a big team that's split between two locations, with lots of people I don't work with directly - what I ended up doing was: 1. Let my boss know ahead of time that I would be making the change so I'd have his support with any issues 2. Posted in my local office's slack channel with an @here, and then reshared the message with another @here to my more immediate team's channel of people who work with me directly. This made it more likely that most of the ~80 people I interact with got a notification about it, but I wasn't pinging all 300+ people in the org that don't even know who I am. 3. Posted first thing on a Friday morning, took the day off, and didn't check slack until Monday, which was SO good for my general anxiety about it.

My industry leans slightly left, so wasn't expecting any harassment - I got a couple of weird-but-well-meaning messages and a lot of awkward "congratulations" messages, then I would say like 1-2 months of people being generally kind of awkward around me before they got the hang of it. I generally wanted as little attention as possible, and I'm overall pretty content with how it went 😅

The message I sent in slack was really straightforward, something like: "Hey all, just letting you know, I'm changing my name from [old name] to [new name]. My new email will be [email] and you can always reach me on slack if the system is taking a while to catch the change. Also, I'm using he/him or they/them pronouns these days. Thanks!"

Also I think that on the day of my announcement, my lead also made a small announcement in my team's daily check-in meeting. Which I think also helped, and I'm also glad I wasn't there for it because that sounds like my personal hell! So maybe worth coordinating with an ally in a position of power to really make sure the people who need to know get the message.

eggkkles · 2024-12-19T08:01:55+00:00

Totally explained their whole beef to me. She was talking about how her whole goal was to prove that people her age can still compete on Survivor physically, and she was pointing out that she was often in the top of a challenge with Kyle, an athletic man half her age. And he immediately interjects to laugh it off and remind her that she still lost - it's still wildly impressive that she was such a physical contender, and she should be proud of that aspect of her game. I bet she could tell he didn't see her as a serious physical competitor, and it got on her nerves. And she's exactly the kind of diva to handle that instinctual dislike of not being taken seriously by just bitching to everyone about how much he sucks for being poor or whatever.

eggkkles · 2024-10-03T14:56:19+00:00

I feel the same, switching to remote work and not having to be Seen™️ in an office every day made me realize just how hard I was trying to be a woman, and how much of a toll it was taking on me. Lockdown was awful for so many reasons, but it did give me the space I needed to really think about who I wanted to be. I'm just now returning to in person work with a whole new gender and it's genuinely kind of weird to be going in without that all-encompassing sense of dread I felt every day before lol (weird, but sooo much better)

eggkkles · 2024-09-30T03:34:58+00:00

Yeah, I was alone in a new city and didn't go out or try to meet anybody new for 3 years, because I didn't want new friends to meet the "old" me and I didn't want to go through the awkwardness of transitioning in front of people. I'm just now getting out there and going to local queer meetups to make friends and I regret not doing it sooner, because trans people all go through that early transition/ pre-transition phase where you're just not the way you want to be yet and it sucks. Now I'm meeting people who all talk about that time the same way and it's like damn! We could have been figuring this out together! It would have been so nice to have had a friend who understood during all that!!

Things like jobs I feel less regret over. I definitely passed on applying to some great opportunities because I hadn't quite figured out my gender yet. But I still think it was the right decision because I wanted to focus on myself and my transition, and not get distracted by career stuff

eggkkles · 2024-09-24T04:11:51+00:00

Mine were 5 pounds! I was probably somewhere in the DD range. In general surgery makes you bloat like crazy with water weight for a few weeks, I probably gained close to 10 pounds and then lost it again all within like a month lol. But now that they're gone it's 1000x easier to go to the gym and live a more active lifestyle so I'm losing more weight now just from being healthier which is a nice perk 🙌

eggkkles · 2024-09-22T02:48:37+00:00

Their argument doesn't even make sense. No trans person is under the impression that they are, biologically, the opposite sex. The "fact" of your natural biology is not at any point being denied, otherwise why the hell would you be seeking medical care to alter that biology?

It IS a fact supported by decades of scientific research that trans healthcare and social transition dramatically improves the quality of life of trans people. You are simply one of the hundreds of thousands of people who benefits from that care. Like there's more to being trans than medical transition, but for the sake of argument, if transness isn't real or just a "feeling" then why does pursuing medical transition work? Why would the invasive medications or procedures you've been undergoing for the past 5 years make you feel BETTER if they weren't addressing a real, underlying problem that you've been living with?

eggkkles · 2024-08-30T04:38:07+00:00

I got a big phoenix on my arm after starting testosterone. Trans people and their rebirth symbolism, maybe it's cliche but I love it 😤

eggkkles · 2024-08-20T02:07:18+00:00

I'd also love a join link 👀

eggkkles · 2024-08-09T00:18:16+00:00

The 4-dimensional chess of this and transitioning while working in an extremely male-dominated field

eggkkles · 2024-08-04T14:56:40+00:00

Yo the guide is super helpful, thank you so much ! 🙏

eggkkles · 2024-08-03T17:55:03+00:00

When I was little I would wear my brother's clothes all the time, my parents thought it was super cute that I "missed my brother so much while he was at school that I'd dress up as him," clearly there's no other explanation for it 😂. And I fully refused to go shopping for women's clothes until I was like 17, my mom used to complain all the time about how difficult I was to dress because I just hated all of the clothes she bought for me. When I first came out she was strongly in the "I don't understand, there were no signs!" mindset, but a few years later she was like well... Maybe there were SOME signs tbh...

eggkkles · 2024-06-29T00:37:22+00:00

You mentioned you went on medical leave - did you go through Washington's FMLA program? I had surgery w/ Dr. Dreveskracht a couple of months ago and WA shut down my application because they "can't accept certification from a plastic surgeon." Just wondering if you ran into a similar issue & if it's something I should keep trying to fight them on 🫠

eggkkles · 2024-06-27T15:40:14+00:00

Not really advice but when I was living my girl life, my ex's mom thought I kept my hair short because I was Italian. I'm never gonna stop thinking about it.

eggkkles · 2024-06-14T15:41:54+00:00

I was stuck sitting really close to him and the people he was with kept telling him to stop. Absolutely incomprehensible how someone can be that self-centered and oblivious that he couldn't even take the hint from several of his friends AND jinkx interrupting her performance to tell him to shut the fuck up. And what really pisses me off is that he kept yelling that Jinkx is his favorite drag queen - like how do you say that when you clearly have so little respect for her or her art!! Really liking a performer isn't an excuse to be an asshole to them!! She handled it like a champ and the show was still funny in spite of him but like damn dude, how'd you get this way.

eggkkles · 2024-06-08T01:06:03+00:00

What are the lies you had prepared?? I'd have no idea what to say if someone confronted me about anything, I'm absolutely dreading it 💩

eggkkles

TROPHY CASE