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Puberty the Second
Oct. 2nd, 2024 03:11 pmThe night before cohost went read-only I got one last ask:
The site was still fully up when I woke up, I answered with
And then a couple hours later added a comment
and pinned the post, and a few minutes later the site went read-only. (link to post)
Maybe just about the best ending possible.
Earlier in September, after the closing was announced, I posted that come to think of it, I started HRT about two months after joining cohost. I got this comment:
I replied
(link to post)
Cohost was a very queer and very trans site generally but I really had some great experiences there. I figured out I was some sort of trans back in 2015 and spent years doing a sort of slow experimentation with gradually presenting myself in a more feminine manner, but not doing anything medical, leading to eventually going about life typically wearing skirts or dresses while still having a beard. It went shockingly well! My online community in those early days was Tumblr and it was not super helpful to me. I had imagined learning from the more experienced people but no one would say anything but vague platitudes about being ✨valid✨ and while at the time I figured everyone was very concerned about privacy and thus reluctant to share any actual experiences, in retrospect I think everyone was totally closeted and also mostly children and they didn't have any experiences. It wasn't until summer of 2019 I found the trans women on Twitter who were shockingly open about their transition experiences (and actually were transitioning and had experiences).
A lot of people figured out they were trans after the pandemic started, the experience I had after years of being visibly genderqueer was going out with my face covered, and suddenly things worked differently, I went from being that one very visible person everyone remembered everywhere I went to apparently being just a random woman. My old name would come up and instead of that being the clue that made people realize I was trans, they'd assume it was in my husband's name, or they looked up the wrong account by mistake, or they'd express surprise at my very unusual name, or maybe just be confused. I was confused the first few times, not expecting this!
So, between the Twitter trans women on estrogen all constantly talking about how much they liked their breasts (in contrast to the Tumblr enbies who were nearly all assigned female and talked constantly about binders) and discovering how nice it was to have people take me seriously as just actually being a woman and saying "ma'am" and then just sticking with it, not, as before, apologizing and saying "sir" a lot as soon as they actually looked at me, I really started thinking about trying some medical things. Maybe a bit of body modification would be nice.
Of course the earliest pandemic years were not a good time for elective medical things. But by late 2022 things were more possible. I was only on cohost two weeks when I posted that maybe I should look into HRT, and it was not two months later I took my first estrogen dose.
There were tons of trans women on cohost, doing all sorts of different things in transition, but including some also starting HRT about then. Some of us sort of went through puberty 2 together. Back when I was a kid doing puberty 1, I remember one guy one time saying something about the first hints of pubic hair growing, and that one little comment was literally all I ever heard from anyone about puberty. Second go at it, we were talking about it together!
And there was a good bit of talking about it. You could write a big chunk of text about your complicated feelings. People could write comments that were long, paragraphs even. I actually had a little conversation in comments with a cohost friend about the very personal topic of sexual responses changing on HRT. I gave a bit of advice about what had worked for me. I can't imagine anything like that happening back in my Tumblr days with everyone there earnestly repeating that it's ✨valid✨ for a trans person to wear dresses. I don't think that would have been a discussion to have 200 letters at a time on Twitter with drive-by abuse interspersed.
There are a lot of trans woman on fedi, and some bloggers out there I've read, and I've learned a lot from them too, but with a lot less of the both-directions mutual communication, less sense of anyone out there following what I post, remembering me.
But what a thing doing second puberty among all the others talking about it and above all joking about it was. It's a weird silly thing to go through puberty at, in my case, around 50, let's go ahead and joke and be silly! Very different from my first four years of transition trial-and-erroring everything on my own in a community that was really only helpful by showing that lots of other trans people exist. No one was going to describe their experiences or have anything helpful in a practical sense to say. Mostly they liked to argue about the exact right words to use, it was not a group that was going to make a soil triangle joke out of slurs.
hillexed asked:
it was really nice seeing you get much more happy over the course of time
The site was still fully up when I woke up, I answered with
Thanks!
It's been so nice!
(last post!!!)
And then a couple hours later added a comment
Best post was last post!
and pinned the post, and a few minutes later the site went read-only. (link to post)
Maybe just about the best ending possible.
Earlier in September, after the closing was announced, I posted that come to think of it, I started HRT about two months after joining cohost. I got this comment:
AndreL
Thanks for your posts sharing your HRT journey! I've never experienced gender dysphoria and was utterly baffled why anyone would transition. The bad parts are obvious: the pain of electrolysis/surgery, the expense, the legal issues, being part of an oppressed group, etc. But the good parts? I learned about those from Cohost, and especially from you. And it turns out I really need to hear about that.
I replied
Awwww! Wonderful! Glad to have been informative!
(link to post)
Cohost was a very queer and very trans site generally but I really had some great experiences there. I figured out I was some sort of trans back in 2015 and spent years doing a sort of slow experimentation with gradually presenting myself in a more feminine manner, but not doing anything medical, leading to eventually going about life typically wearing skirts or dresses while still having a beard. It went shockingly well! My online community in those early days was Tumblr and it was not super helpful to me. I had imagined learning from the more experienced people but no one would say anything but vague platitudes about being ✨valid✨ and while at the time I figured everyone was very concerned about privacy and thus reluctant to share any actual experiences, in retrospect I think everyone was totally closeted and also mostly children and they didn't have any experiences. It wasn't until summer of 2019 I found the trans women on Twitter who were shockingly open about their transition experiences (and actually were transitioning and had experiences).
A lot of people figured out they were trans after the pandemic started, the experience I had after years of being visibly genderqueer was going out with my face covered, and suddenly things worked differently, I went from being that one very visible person everyone remembered everywhere I went to apparently being just a random woman. My old name would come up and instead of that being the clue that made people realize I was trans, they'd assume it was in my husband's name, or they looked up the wrong account by mistake, or they'd express surprise at my very unusual name, or maybe just be confused. I was confused the first few times, not expecting this!
So, between the Twitter trans women on estrogen all constantly talking about how much they liked their breasts (in contrast to the Tumblr enbies who were nearly all assigned female and talked constantly about binders) and discovering how nice it was to have people take me seriously as just actually being a woman and saying "ma'am" and then just sticking with it, not, as before, apologizing and saying "sir" a lot as soon as they actually looked at me, I really started thinking about trying some medical things. Maybe a bit of body modification would be nice.
Of course the earliest pandemic years were not a good time for elective medical things. But by late 2022 things were more possible. I was only on cohost two weeks when I posted that maybe I should look into HRT, and it was not two months later I took my first estrogen dose.
There were tons of trans women on cohost, doing all sorts of different things in transition, but including some also starting HRT about then. Some of us sort of went through puberty 2 together. Back when I was a kid doing puberty 1, I remember one guy one time saying something about the first hints of pubic hair growing, and that one little comment was literally all I ever heard from anyone about puberty. Second go at it, we were talking about it together!
And there was a good bit of talking about it. You could write a big chunk of text about your complicated feelings. People could write comments that were long, paragraphs even. I actually had a little conversation in comments with a cohost friend about the very personal topic of sexual responses changing on HRT. I gave a bit of advice about what had worked for me. I can't imagine anything like that happening back in my Tumblr days with everyone there earnestly repeating that it's ✨valid✨ for a trans person to wear dresses. I don't think that would have been a discussion to have 200 letters at a time on Twitter with drive-by abuse interspersed.
There are a lot of trans woman on fedi, and some bloggers out there I've read, and I've learned a lot from them too, but with a lot less of the both-directions mutual communication, less sense of anyone out there following what I post, remembering me.
But what a thing doing second puberty among all the others talking about it and above all joking about it was. It's a weird silly thing to go through puberty at, in my case, around 50, let's go ahead and joke and be silly! Very different from my first four years of transition trial-and-erroring everything on my own in a community that was really only helpful by showing that lots of other trans people exist. No one was going to describe their experiences or have anything helpful in a practical sense to say. Mostly they liked to argue about the exact right words to use, it was not a group that was going to make a soil triangle joke out of slurs.
