I guess this is “coming out day.” It’s a funny thing for me to think about now, after years of being very visible and now not being so visible. Now and then I think about how these days there are people I work with who may or may not know that I’m trans, I honestly don’t know if they know. That didn’t used to be a thing! I was that person with a beard who wore dresses, everyone, you know, noticed that.
I think it was last year that for the first time I consciously made the decision to go ahead and out myself to someone selling things at an art fest in order to make a comment about a trans interpretation of their items. It didn’t used to be a decision like that!
It’s also been recently dawning on me that mentioning my girlfriend now constitutes outing myself as a lesbian, which is not at all how that used to work!
I had some really fun experiences being very visible—little kids said the cutest things sometimes—but it was also stressful at times and being, as far as I can tell, basically invisible is just amazing. Even if it does lead to me pondering whether I really want to mention something to someone now and then.
In recent years of course I haven’t done many of the things I’ve usually done in the past due to the ongoing pandemic. I’d been imagining that the situation would improve in time as measures to control the disaster would be taken. Yeah, that’s sure as hell not happening. It can easily get even worse though! There’s mask bans being passed, so far I’m able to protect myself with the respirators but that might not last. Plus other diseases are taking off. May be far more dangerous to go out in the near future. I got out some this summer because who knows if there will be more chances to go out anytime soon.
This new dress is very green and has a lot of loose fabric.1 It makes me feel like some sort of woodland spirit who somehow ended up in the basement working on a mass spectrometer…
I didn’t roll the office chair wheels over it but did sometimes step on it while getting up out of the chair. Also, the kind of dress such that when you go to the toilet there’s just all this fabric to pull up out of the way! ↩︎
I do my estrogen injections on Thursdays, and I was not making regular Thursday estrogen injection update posts but I mentioned it now and then, and it’s the last cohost Thursday, so, it’s estrogen injection Thursday!
Today is 90 weeks on HRT. (I have notes in a spreadsheet, totaling it up that’s 662 milligrams of estradiol valerate. It does not take much!) Aside from transition in general, starting HRT is one of the best things I’ve done in my life. My dysphoria has always been mostly subtle and non-obvious, and only becomes apparent when I try something and realize how very nice it is, how much I actually didn’t like how it was before. At the start the clothing envy was the most obvious. I started out transition with trying out more feminine clothing, and it felt great, and I ended up spending a few years living as a person with a beard who usually wore dresses, and it went well far beyond my dreams, getting shockingly little harassment and tending to get treated as a sort of honorary woman, always going to be called “sir” or he/him, but somehow getting treated much as a woman.
On the first day of my camping vacation, after setting up in the afternoon, I ended up with a sweaty sports bra under my tank top and decided I really did not need to be wearing it, and, since I was pretty out of sight in my campsite and there was pretty well no one around on a Monday in mid-September, I decided to do the top swapping outside instead of awkwardly in the tent. In a certain, very significant sense, this was the first time in my life I was “topless” outdoors. Wasn’t at all the same in the past as a dude with a beard and no breasts!
I’ve talked about my vacation with some (cis) women I know and I’ve told this little story because it’s funny, and everyone giggles because it’s funny little thing. A few also commented to the effect that now I have to be careful about that, can no longer take my shirt off randomly, and generally welcome to yet another thing women have to deal with. And, sure, I get it. But my feelings about it are more complicated.
When I was a kid I was very uncomfortable with having my shirt off in public. Thinking back now, of course I was really a little girl and it’s not surprising I’d have picked up that that wasn’t something I was supposed to do. But I didn’t understand that and neither did anyone else, and since I was supposed to be a boy and boys are not supposed to be uncomfortable being shirtless, how I actually felt about it was of no concern, so it was something I was going to have to do now and then. Now that I’m thinking about this I remember one experience and have some vague memories of some others. I don’t want to sound like this was too terribly distressing, really my childhood trauma wasn’t any particular awful events, just the endless experiences of an unknowing, unsupported trans kid. On the other hand, I was a kid being made to partly undress in ways I was very uncomfortable with, that does sound like a known category of unpleasant experiences.
As I got older, people could no longer make me take my shirt off, and I did get more comfortable with it, at least under certain circumstances. I think that was mostly a matter of becoming more comfortable with nudity in general. Once I figured out I was trans I understood my feelings a lot better. And I started wearing a tank top while swimming because that felt better, really.
So now, having very real breasts, it doesn’t feel like a loss. It feels like at long last everyone else agrees that I ought to be modest about it, having at times in the past not even allowed it! Now, it went from mandatory to forbidden never stopping to ask how I actually feel, society sucks, but my experience wasn’t really the same as the cis women’s.
Along the lines as this thought from five years ago, lately I’ve been thinking about what I had always considered to be one of the most common of fictional tropes, the thing where the other characters are always telling the protagonist things. Indeed, the character are always talking to each other. It makes the story something interesting to read, if this was more like real life, the audience (and the characters) would have no idea what’s going on. Which is how real life works, but who wants to read that story? (I get that there are stories with unreliable narrators and complicated puzzles of narrative structure and some great classics of literature are like that but your typical TV show or fantasy novel trilogy not so much.)
I guess it’s dawning on me that people talk to each other a lot more than I’m used to being a part of, and more recently I’ve found talking with people to be a lot easier than when I was trying to be a man, even in my genderqueer weirdo days, which I sure did not expect, and now easier still as a woman.
Maybe some of that ‘protagonist of the fictional story’ interaction isn’t meant to be so totally unrealistic? I’ve been wondering while watching some things which parts the writers thought of as the really properly fictional parts of the story and which things they figured people might actually say to each other in real life. Sure, the dialog is polished up, the timing just so, everything is a bit neater than reality, but intended to look vaguely familiar to the viewer rather than just being the protagonist off having fictional protagonist adventures.
I got my annual flu vaccine from Occupational Health, conveniently done in the space outside the cafeteria. Since I work in a medical school, it’s mandatory. There was a very brief interval years ago when they also did COVID vaccination but the vibes of doing anything at all about a much more severe ongoing disease disaster are bad, so we’re exclusively worrying about a less-severe problem now and completely ignoring the bigger one.
Anyway, they have to keep records both in the usual anything medical gets documented sense and also since it’s mandatory for employees they have to record that so they know I’m in compliance. This year was special compared to recent years, because now my formal name on the ID badge and in the records system “looks like” a name someone who “looks like” me might likely have. So we just went through the process straight through from the start with no interval of confusion assuming that something must have gotten looked up incorrectly because the name seems obviously wrong!
One of the things about camping is sometimes you wear some pretty random clothing while hanging around the campsite. It was nice to spend some time just sitting around, having a drink, reading a good old style printed-on-paper book, and in the warm weather wearing just a bra and maybe a skirt or shorts or whatever on the bottom. I have a couple racer-back bras made of stretchy cotton-blend and they way they fit, now at least, is at the top there’s a bit of a gap in the center between the fabric and my skin. So I could look downward and look down my own top. You know, the space between my breasts, the two breasts rising up to meet the fabric that then covered them. This is not an unfamiliar view, I’ve been on very friendly terms with a few women over the decades who would let me look down their tops like this.
I sure as fuck never saw it on myself, though!
I liked seeing it on myself a lot. But also, got to thinking about just what I thought when seeing this view on my partners over the years. Because I always figured it was just sexual attraction, and certainly that was one of the feelings. But also, there were a lot of other things I’d thought, sometimes explicitly thought, sometimes was more trying not to think. Like, just that it felt so very obvious that ideally I’d be able to offer my partner the same sort of look down my shirt, that’s obviously the proper fair thing to do. Except, just kinda sorta couldn’t. Not the same. Surely all the cis-het dudes wished they could do the obvious lesbian same-thing-in-response thing!
Or just wondering what it would be like to get to be a good-looking person like that. Or what would it even feel like to actually have breasts?
There’s lots of beauty standards imposed on women, lots of them basically unrealistic, and I’ve been long aware of that. It’s sort of weird to just now discover that the entirely impossible beyond-the-realm-of-dreams ideals I always tried not to even think about were for me really mostly just having breasts at all, having little-enough facial hair that someone can come up behind me and say “ma’am” and I can turn around and we can talk without them feeling the need to “apologize” and start saying “sir” a lot. I get that not all cis women experience this, but, still, it is pretty common. Honestly having breasts has been weirdly easy, at least I’ve been fortunate enough that getting the prescription for estrogen wasn’t hard (my doctor is, herself, trans!) and electrolysis sucks a lot and takes forever and costs a lot but if you do it, it does work.
A long long time ago, I read in a printed-on-paper magazine, a review of the Luna Bars. It might have been Bicycling Magazine, or, as we called it, Buy-Cycling, since it was mostly stuff to buy. But the thing I remember is the writer saying, to the effect, that they were being marketed to women, and so they named it “Luna,” apparently on the assumption that women are suckers for anything the evokes the monthly cycle…
This, somehow, stuck with me all these years. So, anyway, yeah, I’ve bought some Luna bars, and, yeah, I thought about this old thing about the monthly cycle. I think it’s likely that as someone who didn’t have a discernible cycle until I was fifty-one years old I’m a bit more excited about it than is typical, but, still….
It’s a somewhat overcomplicated bar, with like layers and stuff. Very sweet. Depends on what you are in the mood for, I guess.
(Yeah, I’ve long felt like some things seemed to have some sort of cycle and at one point started keeping a spreadsheet with notes about mood and ran it through some mathematical periodicity-finding algorithms but couldn’t find any pattern. (This is a very cis guy thing to do!) Until I saw a trans doctor (she does my trans health care (and also other general doctoring) and also, is, herself, trans) and started injecting estradiol valerate and then yeah the hypothalamus suddenly knew what to do with the gonadotropin releasing hormone and suddenly I had a whole new appreciation for weirdly-predictable hormonal mood swings!)
