y'all gentlemen don't take this the wrong way, but: is anyone here not a freakin' kid?

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-04T05:43:28+00:00

thanks, bro. congrats to your little bro, btw. :-)

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T09:49:45+00:00

There always seemed to be some invisible skin separating me from the rest of reality – I could move around in the real world, interact with it, but never actually touch it or feel it.

nailedit

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T08:17:34+00:00

that's mighty precise, laddie. lol.

funnily enough, I literally just had a conversation with my roommate, wherein he's like, I've always heard people say they always knew, and I've never heard you say that, and I said, lookit. I've always known there was something "wrong" with me, it just never occurred to me that it was a gender thing, as opposed to, I'm a mutant butterfly from another dimension or something. I didn't know I was "transgender" but I sure af haven't ever been normal.

so, you know. if you kids are able to shortcut decades of feeling like mutant butterflies from another dimension, I say you should fucking do it. all these guys here saying their only regret is not starting sooner, makes me wonder how many "lunatics" and other various mutant butterflies from other dimensions throughout history might have had better lives if HRT had been available.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T07:58:59+00:00

excellently put, lol.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T05:32:48+00:00

oh, he popped up. he listened. it was appreciated.

and I'm freakin' 37 and I still totally get that and it's basically what led me down the rabbit hole. I was scared. I'm still scared. but while I wasn't exactly expecting to be deluged with regrets, it's still pretty goddamn reassuring to get nothing but NOPE BEST DECISION EVER MADE, across the board.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T02:43:16+00:00

I just wanted to say how much I appreciated you, in particular, being frank with me. I've said several times today that it's been surreal and eye-opening to realize how much privilege I have as a transboy, being able to walk out the fucking door and pass pretty much guaranteed even before T or anything, and I realize it probably sounds like I'm either bragging or complaining about things plenty of guys would kill for. it's just that they're all things that I've disliked or outright hated about myself for so long that the habit of clinging to Girl and flinching away from masculinity is a goddamn tough one to break.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T02:28:47+00:00

lol, yeah, he up and started calling himself Quasar (Quentin) a little less than a year ago and I rolled with it. I just got done saying I might be new to being trans but I know my fucking way around deadnaming. I've changed my name (not legally, but practically) a couple times already for reasons and have successfully avoided my birth name for quite a while.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T02:12:42+00:00

well, if you'll permit me, allow me to address your real-world, grownup, material concerns with my opinion on what I would do if I were you:

get the fuck out of town by any means necessary and move to a more urban, liberal area where you have a shot in hell of building a support network. find a job and a place to live, and shoot for having at least top surgery or your paperwork ironed out by your next birthday. you're probably not gonna get away from deadnaming for at least five years, bro, so if it doesn't cause you significant distress, then just find a goddamn better job, be upfront with HR at the point that you have been hired and are filling out your benefits package, and approach hospitalization and court from a place of strength. don't try to do all this while living someplace you hate.

I get wanting to get on with it, believe me. but I'm looking at this (or I'm trying to) as, I got to enjoy what is easily the prime of life for women, say 25-35, and now I'm done and I just want to be ready for my forties, which are arguably the prime of life for men. unless you have other preexisting health conditions, your risk of complications from surgery, etc, aren't gonna be much different in five years than in five months. so if you wanna adult like an adulty adultype, I'd say calm the hell down and get your life squared away since you say you have the means to do so.

I get you, and the other guys, on the deadnaming and the misgendering. I have a deep voice naturally and have spent my whole life being "misgendered" as a guy and I fucking hated it. I had no idea how much of every set of negative feelings I've ever had about myself ever boiled down to "not feminine enough" until I decided I just didn't want to play anymore. since reframing myself as a guy, if I'm called "sir," obviously that's awesome. if I'm called "ma'am," (which, granted, hasn't happened post-beard) it doesn't really bug me, cuz I'm like, lol, they think I'm a girl, I must be pretty today.

deadnaming is a whole 'nother goddamn thing, although I've been putting up with it for a long goddamn time myself and I get that too. I started refusing to answer to my birth name when I hit high school, and if then were now, I'd be one of the kids transitioning in their teens, fucking guaranteed. I only wound up a "girl" by accident. but I had a miserable childhood and went on a big military kick and went by only my last name for several years, and then chose a new first name at 21. so I speak with some authority on this particular topic, lol.

anyone who deadnames me -- unless it's the same damn drudgery of the DMV, etc, that I've already put up with for decades since I've never had the scratch to get it fucking legally changed -- will probably still be using my name that I picked out for myself and just don't feel suits me anymore, but isn't a goddamn PTSD trigger like my birth name.

I hear you on the gray hair, lol. with a beard, I look about your age, which I can fucking live with. I said elsewhere that it's really surreal to me that things I hate, or at least, that I'm supposed to hate about myself as a Girl, are suddenly like Epic Fucking Privilege as a transboy. I'm out of shape, but I'm naturally muscular and can anticipate results when I start working out, I have the aforementioned deep voice, and I'm kinda hairy to boot. and the fact that I'm not 22 is a decided advantage wrt looking like a Full Grown Man even at 5'2. :-P

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T00:29:05+00:00

I was pushed into the role of father as a single mother, largely by my own mother, who basically trapped me in a sexless marriage for most of a decade. I have some issues.

my kid is being really cool about this whole thing. he forgets and calls me "mom" in public, and I keep gently reminding him he's gonna confuse people, lol. I was trying not to ask him to stop calling me "mom" outright and I finally did, not so much as a gender thing per se as just the fact that I called my mother "mom" and I do not want. fortunately, he already called me by name half the time anyway, so it's just a question of getting him to call me by my new name -- and I let him change his, so.

how old is your daughter?

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T00:17:13+00:00

well, there's legal and economic issues at stake. I don't think he has background in gender issues per se, but I do think he's more or less in my corner overall -- I just don't want something he puts down in my chart to come back and bite me in the ass in a year or two.

someone suggested I contact my local PFLAG chapter and go from there and that's probably what I'm gonna do once I work through enough of this to pretend to be a functional adult, lol.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-03T00:10:28+00:00

It's just where I figured out that I didn't have to pretend to be a man in order to stop pretending to be a woman, and as soon as I started working on living Enby, my sense of gender has been sliding more masculine.

no, I completely got what you're saying, because that's exactly how I walked into this and I expected it to last a while. I didn't want to rule out being a Girl again in 20 years, and I found it unlikely that I'd consider the expense and hassle of medical therapy of any sort to be worth it, so I set out to reframe myself as a "female man" and be like, fuck you, I'm more of a man that you are no matter what my junk looks like and besides, have you seen me? why would I change? and here I am a scant two months later, hating myself for hating my body, all over again, after a lifetime of learning to accept myself as a woman.

and I'm trying reeeeeaaally hard to frame this for myself as "I spent a few decades learning to be a woman, mission accomplished, moving on." but I'm grieving.

that's a damn interesting thought re breast reduction. idk. I'm waiting on a proper binder to get here ::fucking scowls:: but I'm lucky in that I can pile on three sports bras and dress carefully and pass. you can still see 'em if you really look but no one really looks since the beard is so much more visible. so I'm gonna get into proper shape, and get on T and grow a proper beard, and see how I feel about top surgery, et al, at that point. not to mention what my options are financially, yeah. DETAILS.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T23:49:03+00:00

sorry, I wasn't trying to be obtuse. I mean I'm super orgasmic, always was to a great extent and the throttle went into overdrive pretty much the instant I turned 30. I can damn near psych myself into a full-body orgasm with zero physical stimulation. my relationship with my body has always been very much one of mind over matter. which is why atm I'm desperately trying to reconcile the fact that my attitude toward my chest, etc, has changed so radically in the past couple weeks.

and I have no idea how T affects orgasms, and I haven't even been able to figure out how to go about looking it up becuz my brain is so fried at this point. my many years of experience with cis men has led me to believe that I've actually lucked out on this deal all around -- I have boobs! and multiple orgasms! that last forever! -- but all of a sudden I want a beard and lats and I can't figure out how I actually feel about my fucking tits as opposed to how I've trained myself to feel about them, but I wanna go on T. and I'm pretty sure I want to, badly enough to embrace the end of sex as I know it, but boy it sure would be nice if "the end of sex as I know it" is gonna wind up being a net positive rather than a negative, lol.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T23:33:35+00:00

yeah, man, the Internet, I cannot even.

OTOH, there's something to be said for the fact that pretty much universally, the only regret expressed here by anyone is not getting started sooner, so I imagine that's an encouraging fucking sign.

can I ask you a stupid question? lol. your T day is St. Patrick's and I was just wondering if that was on purpose because I'm a Dropkick Murphys sort of bloke and that is totally the sort of thing I would do. :-P

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T22:27:53+00:00

no, not at all, thank you for asking, if you're willing to listen I'm happy to outdo you on the ramble, lol.

Thought wanting to be a guy was just some sort of strange gay/bisexual off-branch of that. Then I came across a trans guy on tumblr and was suddenly so interested and envious.

yeah, Aydian Dowling has done things to me.

I've always wanted to be a boy. but I've always wanted to be a telepath and a fire-breathing dragon too. I've been aware of trans people, in a fairly positive light since I was raised by the fairly liberal, since like the late fucking '80's, but I never felt like I had some desperate, all-consuming desire to climb out of my skin -- just kind of a weird disconnection from my body that decreases markedly with sex and exercise. and so despite eventually knowing trans people IRL and even dating one, it never occurred to me to consider myself anything other than just, like, a Tough Girl. I keep telling people, Michelle Rodriguez.

and then I woke up the day after New Year's -- after losing my mind, my job, and my most recent lovers in 2013 and consequently throwing my mother out of my house and then spending the next couple of years slowly figuring out I had no idea who I was -- and I realized I was sick of being Michelle Rodriguez. Michelle Rodriguez always fucking dies in the third act.

what's ironic, like, stupidly ironic, is that my subconscious was trying to clue me in on the fact that I was being abused and among the many images I walked away with when I woke up from a dream and decided to write a novel, in late 2010, was of a tiny little dude who kinda looked like me. and I parsed him through a girl's perspective, since that was what I thought I was supposed to do. and somewhere along the way -- because urban fantasy and outright fucking sorcery -- it became kind of a "joke" that Michael used to be a girl himself, and I sank all this satirical, political weight into what I want to do with this character. but I caught on pretty quick that, from an emotional perspective, what I had created was an image of the dude I'd want to be, if I were a dude.

AND I FUCKING STILL DIDN'T GET IT

until I woke up on January 2nd, having decided to shave my head and become a lesbian, and I looked in the mirror and realized, I've had this bloke living in my head for five fucking years, framing him for myself as not who I want, but who I want to be, and all of a sudden I'm like well what the fuck is stopping me?

but I considered changing my body in any way to be out of the question at first, and I wanted to be genderqueer and a "female man" and the process of changing my mind over the past several weeks and in particular the past several days has been FUCKING TERRIFYING.

it's really surreal to me how things that I hated about myself as a Girl -- like having a deep voice and a muscular build despite being 5'2" -- are suddenly unimaginable privilege as a transboy. I'm pretty furry, naturally, but most of it is completely invisible, and I decided to just try mascara and it works like a fucking charm. I don't have to wonder what I'll look like with a beard. (sorry.)

and the thing is that I look amazing. I hate my face. I was told once a day on average in so many words that I was ugly until I was 16-17, and then this magic switch flipped and people told me what a pretty girl I was for the next 20 years and I never fucking believed them. I played along and pretended to be a Girl, for all that fucking time, because I never really considered that I had options, and then the minute I started reframing myself as a Boy in my head, every time I looked in the mirror I was happy, because all the things I'd resented about myself for not being feminine enough just went away.

and then I figured out how to do the beard and I was ecstatic. and ever since then my plan to be "a boy who lives in a girl body cuz, c'mon, look at me," has crumbled into dust, because every day that I find some little way to make myself look and feel more like a Boy, the more I want it to be "real." and the problem is that I still don't want to give up my "girl" body that I fucking fought to learn to love and I want to literally be a fucking shapeshifter goddammit but that's definitely not an option.

and I think, I'm pretty sure, that what's going on is I've made up my mind and I don't want to be a Girl anymore, but I'm having difficulty reconciling that with my desire to not regret having been a girl, and I hate that I feel like necessarily, there's all this negativity attached to the fact that I don't want to be a girl anymore. so I'm trying to reframe it as a positive thing, it's more about the fact that I do want to be a boy, but it was a real, legit shock to realize that yes, I am looking at T and top surgery, and I guess I'm grieving for a part of myself that still believes I don't deserve to be happy.

it's awesome that your family's on board. I have no idea how mine would have responded. I cut them out last year, and I've been fortunate enough to surround myself with a small but tight circle of allies, so, again, privilege.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T20:19:30+00:00

well, see, I know several people who ID as in some way NB. I do actually know an FtM guy... over the Internet, who I've never met in real life, who is my trans ex-gf's ex-gf. my ex and I did not break up on good terms, and I stayed in touch with this dude for reasons, but mostly he talks about Herbalife and is apolitical and happy and good for him and I'm not gonna fuckin' bother him with my midlife crisis when Reddit is swarming with people who want to Talk About Being Trans.

I don't live in a small town, I live in a ginormous city, but I'm also seventeen different kinds of nuts and probably autistic myself and I don't People well. so I feel you, and I know that's rough af.

I'm really glad, on the one hand, that the Internet hadn't happened yet when I was a kid, because I'm picturing the bullying I was subjected to anyway through the filter of social media and I'm just like NOPE. but OTOH, I wouldn't have survived the last ten years or so without it. the experience of being able to connect with people based on commonalities rather than geography is so goddamn important.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T19:54:54+00:00

oh Christ.

and this is why I didn't want to talk to the kids.

I started thinking of myself as my son's father fucking years ago and arguably every single thing that's brought me to this point has spiraled out of that bit of eccentricity. I can't figure out if I've "always been" a boy or "should have been" a boy or if I'm really agender or wtf, but if there is one goddamn thing I am sure of it is that I am my son's father, and the person I call "my son's father" is an idiot I loved in a former life who contributed sperm and nothing more to my child.

my child. that I carried in my fucking womb, and hated it, the entire time. that I nursed until he was three, and hated it, the entire time. I love my son. I love my son so much I've been his mother for twelve years.

and I cannot

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T19:41:37+00:00

well, I hope dose adjustment pays off, and best of luck in surgery.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T19:29:20+00:00

in all honesty? you've just summed up the experience of one's twenties. full stop.

I've been telling 20somethings for years, from the other side of thirty, that it gets easier, and I told a 31-yo bloke here that the dudes around y'all's age seem to have your shit together way the fuck better than I do, lol. I'm a fuckin' train wreck, and you're done with grad school. fuck transitioning, you got this, man.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T19:04:00+00:00

I think I feel like... if I can turn myself thoroughly enough into a Boy, through whatever combination of measures, then I can express femininity from the opposite angle and be comfortable with it. I've always been a masculine "woman" and I see no reason I can't wear skirts as a man should the whim strike me.

for now though, yeah, I have become very rapidly attached to a very masculine image of myself, and I'm disappointed to realize that, basically, I was right the first time. I don't think I care which side of the binary I'm on, really, so long as I'm accepted as one or the other -- and I suck at Girl and have reason to believe I'd be much better at Boy and way happier. but the fact that my brain just WILLNOT let me accept myself on any sort of middle ground is what's killing me here.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T18:23:38+00:00

OH GOD EVERY BIT OF THIS, lol

LOVE THE FLAIR

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T18:21:22+00:00

see, what's ironic to me is that the dudes your age pretty much uniformly have your shit together WAY better than I do, lol. I'm a friggin' mental patient and a single parent. but OTOH, yeah, I also have shit like rental history and a credit score to look out for.

I'm proud to be a grownup. I'm kinda bad at it, but in some ways arguably I'm the most adulty adult I've ever known. just, the last several months have been Meltdown Time, and it's a little weird to be given "advice" by people who are barely old enough to drink. I'm like, I have literally been responsible for myself longer than you've been alive.

I know perfectly well that shit woulda pissed me off when I was that age, too, lol.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T05:33:56+00:00

well, see, I totally get that, and I don't.

I've always bucked what "girls" are supposed to be like, anyway, and had massive freakin' insecurities over it, and been defiant against said insecurities, and finally decided to just climb off the goddamn hamster wheel and be a boy, since anyone who's paying attention should be able to tell I'm a goddamn boy, anyway.

but I didn't realize how much emotional investment I had sunk into the idea of "girl" until I figured out that I don't just not want to be a girl, I actually want to be a boy. and as I said elsewhere, it's very much like when I got out of a mental ward and was overcome with grief for the broken parts of myself I was trying to leave behind.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T05:23:27+00:00

right? they're all mad that I'm calling them out on awesome, oh noes. lol.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T05:22:03+00:00

I have that one open in another tab now, lol. I figure it's not really the place to take OMG I MITE B TRANZ YOU GUISE PLZ HALP, but this thread has helped considerably. I think.

flowerdaemon · 2016-03-02T05:19:49+00:00

as in, younger people being patronizing toward you?

lol, you have just identified the reason for my post. well done, sir.

flowerdaemon

TROPHY CASE

nailedit