Michaela Sue

On Rereading the Morgaine Stories

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 17:07:10 GMT

After reading Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing and realizing that reading novels feels different to me now, I pulled my very yellowed copy of C.J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel off the shelf just to see what I thought of it now.

I feel emotions now, on estrogen, in a way I never did before in my life, so that’s one thing that makes reading stories feel very different from before. Also, it’s been probably near 35 years since I’d read Gate of Ivrel and it’s interesting how while I remember the general concept of the series I remember very very little of the specifics after all these years! And now I’m part way into Well of Shiuan.

I remember liking the Morgaine stories, but I think now I’m realizing why in a way I did not understand as a teen.

Vanye did not exactly have a happy childhood, did not get along well with people generally, and ends up forced out entirely alone, where he meets Morgaine, who is completely alone. They end up setting off together and barely talk to each other, and Morgaine pretty well never explains anything to him, he can only obey whatever scattered instructions she gives him. Along the way here and there they’ll meet someone whose life is going downhill so fast they feel that joining this pair is their best option, going on some painful, frightening mission that they don’t understand.

That is to say, it felt very realistic! Just like real life! The usual story always had all these people constantly talking to the protagonist, telling them stuff. Totally unlike how real life worked for me. I assumed it was a story-telling thing, you have this very unrealistic thing of everyone talking to the main character constantly, and maybe all the characters always talking to each other, so that the reader has something to read.

Now, as a woman, people actually do talk to me, tell me what’s going on. It’s very strange to suddenly realize that maybe the part of the story where people are telling each other what’s going on was not meant to be basically like the part of the story with the dragons, as far as how similar to the reader’s real life it is.

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Trip Thoughts

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 17:22:36 GMT

Last week I drove around an hour and a half into the suburbs of the city just over the state line for a work thing. Back pre-COVID I drove into and through that area all the time, but since early 2020 I’ve only been around there once in summer and this second time now. It’s funny driving the very very familiar highways again after all this time.

The last time I did a work trip of this sort was pre-COVID, something like six plus years ago, and it’s interesting to think about how things have changed. I was well into transition then, but I had not done any sort of body modification so I had a weird honorary-woman status that went really well for me but was always a bit unpredictable and I was always nervous about how people might react to me. So I remember deciding what to wear for one event, wanting to be nicely dressed up like some sort of serious professional, but also wanting to be careful to not be too weirdly visible, avoid attracting too much attention. I was never very good at estimating how that might work out. I certainly could see how women dress for such things, but there were not exactly examples of professional dress, feminine version, but for people with beards. That was just me.

So I decided that I’m not obligated to be maximally bold at all times, I wore pants instead of a dress, tried to be a little less visible. And then in typical fashion for trying to be less conspicuous, had a relatively baffling encounter with the cleaning guy apparently being very surprised to see me washing my hands in the men’s room. And then two women organizing the event would be on stage wearing bright floral-print dresses and I felt like maybe I was drabber than I needed to be, although again aware that it worked differently for them.

These days picking out clothes feels a lot easier. It feels amazing to be able to just do the usual things other people do and have that seen as just totally ordinary.

I’m also gradually unlearning the lifetime of social anxiety now that interacting with people goes so nicely and so easily. Everything is nicer but traveling to some event and meeting people is just so much easier now. I’m also starting to understand how now as a woman I’m usually much more an actual part of a group discussion, get real turns to speak, am no longer trying to slip in a few words here and there in gaps hoping I won’t be too disruptive but trying to at least participate in some way.

Have to wonder what it would have been like to live all these last decades like this.

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Wrath Goddess Sing, and books in general now

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:35:08 GMT

I finished reading Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing and it’s a heck of book, loved it, can’t recommend it enough.

I think this is the first novel I’ve read in a long time. I’ve got shelves full of the usual fantasy and sci-fi novels I read in the late eighties and early nineties. Looking through them now, quite a few written by women, for some reason (some reason) I guess their books appealed to me back then.

I didn’t get to talk to people a lot earlier in life. It was hard to pretend to be a boy, and I wasn’t very good at it. (I had no idea how bad at it I was until now looking back!) I suppose I always sort of assumed the novel thing where everyone is always talking to the protagonist, telling them stuff, was just a writing trope. Gives the reader something to read. It’s how you write a story. But really the part of the fantasy novel where the protagonist is talking to other people was similar to the part with the dragons or the time travel gates or whatever, depending on the story.

Now, as a woman, I actually talk with people. All the time. It’s weirdly easy. People at work keep me informed, tell me stuff, seek out my input, credit me for my contributions, and just hang out and chat with me sometimes. Women just…say things to me these days, since I’m a woman too. And I can just…respond, it’s weirdly easy now that I can just relax and ‘be myself’ and somehow as a girl being myself goes over well.

So, that part of the story feels so much more realistic now! Like maybe that talking to each other thing wasn’t really meant to be part of the “fantasy” part of the fantasy novel!

Also, I have emotions now, on estrogen. Like, yeah, I always had emotions, to a degree, sometimes. I could sure as hell feel anger and people made goddamn sure I felt fear sometimes. But I wasn’t reading a novel, or looking at a painting at the art museum, and feeling strong emotions. If I was feeling strong emotions it was because something fucking bad was happening to me. It is such a different experience. I had all these feelings reading this book. And now curious, I found my old, very yellowing copy of C. J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel and now forty-odd pages into rereading it I’m pretty sure it did not fucking feel like this reading it the first time decades ago. Did cis people feel emotions reading novels when they were teens?

The general concept of Wrath Goddess Sing is it is a story set in the world of the Iliad, the Trojan War. Our protagonist, Achilles, is a trans woman in this story. For me, as a trans woman, this is an extremely interesting story, and Maya Deane is a trans woman, this was written by one of us. And wow does it show.

And so Odysseus tracks her down and finds out she’s a girl now, and drags her off to war as in the older story. Honestly the reactions people have to her being a girl now in the book feel so much like the reactions I get, people vary, but, mostly, people have heard of this, oh, one of those people.

She meets a ton of people in the run-up to the war, and, again, now that I talk to people, feels pretty realistic. And, yes, the thing where she’s trans and meets so many people who knew her in the old days, I am old and have a long history full of people who knew me in my old days, and her meetings feel not just possible but entirely realistic, relatable, even familiar. There’s the people who were terrible to her. A lot of us, we were bad a pretending to be boys, and there were guys around us who were downright eager to volunteer to take on the task of making sure we knew, good and hard, that we were not doing it right. And others who were not terrible. Maybe you wish they could have actually defended you, but at least they didn’t join in on calling you slurs, better than the rest anyway. People who didn’t know her. People who didn’t know her back in the old days and honestly she’s not sure if anyone at some point mentioned her past to them or not. That’s an interesting situation, when you don’t know if someone you are getting to know better knows. Should you mention it? Is it better not to? It’s not at all clear what the best choice is sometimes. There’s the guy who fucking wants to talk about genitals. I’m going to remember her response to that, I might use it someday. Make them regret bringing it up! Somewhere in there was a scene in which someone said, I don’t remember exactly what it was, ’that thing,’ to her, I’ve been there, someone said exactly that thing to me, I too had to decide what to say in response, and now the demigoddess Achilles also has to pick from the range of possible responses! The fun knowing jokes with real friends, about how you somehow happen to know certain things, or your abilities as a shape-shifter. (Back at one time I was not much of a shape-shifter at all, and then, somehow, I suddenly became a very good one, I have no idea how to express how weird and amazing that is. Achilles had a goddess help her out in the story, I mostly had my electrologist, it’s not the same magic but it’s magic all the same.)

This novel is very fantasy, very supernatural. It is not at all a sort of lightly fictionalized memoir of growing up in Joliet, Illinois in the late nineteen-eighties. And yet, for all the gods and goddesses showing up in this story, it’s the first one I’ve ever read where I’ve been thinking, oh, I’ve been there! I know what that fucking feels like! I’ve had to come up with a response to that, what response is our protagonist going to have! It’s genuinely weird for such a very fantasy story to be by far the most specifically familiar, relatable one I’ve ever read in my life.

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Remembering seven years ago

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 02:22:43 GMT

I saw a Facebook memory from seven years ago about my trip to Arizona to take care of things when my mother died. By then I was far enough into transition to be wearing dresses at work and so I had decisions to make about how visible I was going to while traveling and in unfamiliar places, and I figured it would be easier to dial back on the femininity and attract less attention.

And then I had a series of mostly basically nice, occasionally confusing, sometimes baffling, experiences in which I was clearly getting noticed. I was not very good at boy mode, and honestly had rather little idea how people perceived me. I guess if you have long hair, wear a floral print shirt and bright colored pants, carry a purse, and have a beard, you still get noticed, even if back at work I’d probably be wearing a dress and compared to that I felt like I was being much more careful. I figured wearing a dress at the airport would be taunting the TSA! But I still got a comment expressing some sort of surprise (though no actual problems going through).

I’d look at the other women around me and not really know what to expect my experiences might be like. As much as the Tumblr enbies wanted to insist that “passing” is bullshit, and as complicated a thing as it is, it still is really a thing. The cis women around me overwhelmingly got seen differently from me, that one guy who was so feminine he was more-or-less an honorary woman. And now that as far as I can tell I’m nearly always seen as an actual woman rather than a man who is sort of an honorary woman, I can tell you, it really is a different experience. As well as the honorary woman experience went for me, it’s a different experience.

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Thinking about my reactions to movies and books

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:58:24 GMT

I’ve long had a bunch of unwatched or just very partly watched DVDs and Blurays and I’ve been thinking about what I find uncomfortable about watching movies, but I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked because I finished I Saw the TV Glow and that’s a heck of an emotional experience for a trans person. I’ve also started reading Wrath Goddess Sing.

I keep saying it’s an amazing joy to be able to feel emotions now, on HRT, in a way I never did before in my life, and I am still getting used to it. Something I noticed fairly early on was having very strong feelings listening to songs that have long been familiar. That’s now become a familiar and treasured thing. But I think it’s one thing to have these feelings listening to a four-minute song with lyrics I memorized decades ago, now experiencing an hour-and-twenty minute movie by a trans woman telling a trans story and just designed to induce strong feelings in trans viewers, this is a different thing. I’m not used to this. It’s an intense experience. And similarly now about 50 pages into a 450 page trans story by a trans author.

Really in the previous decades of my life, I only felt this sort of emotional intensity when something bad was happening to me, or something dangerous, or at the least frightening. I’m still learning to understand the feelings. It’s still new to me. It’s amazing, it’s so amazing, things I never experienced, never imagined earlier in my life.

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Thinking about growing up unknowingly trans

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:22:49 GMT

One of the things about transitioning has been feeling things I didn’t expect, didn’t previously understand. Learning about myself.

It was so amazing when I first started expressing any sort of femininity how it felt like I was, somehow, finally, doing the same things as the other people around me always had been, as if somehow I was allowed to be ’normal,’ too. I started to realize how much I really somehow felt the (other) women around me were somehow ‘my group’ that I was supposed to be part of. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be, really, earlier in life. More recently on HRT and having gotten near the end of electrolysis on my face, again it’s amazing how much I feel like I just sort of look ’normal’ like the other people (women) do. I did look ’normal’ as a guy, I understood that thinking about it, but only now do I really understand how I didn’t feel that at all. Only now that I do feel it do I even know what it is to feel it. I never knew you could feel it like this.

I remember lots of things from high school, I have some memories of the middle school years, 6th through 8th grade, when I was, well, the only way I even know is I was 17 when I graduated high school, so (I had three years in high school for reasons) 14 at the end of 8th grade, so 11 when I entered the new school in 6th grade. And here and there just scattered fragments of memories from earlier.

I wonder now what some of those early experiences were. The ones outside of memory.

Thinking about it now it seems like I must have tried joining in on whatever the other kids, meaning the other girls of course, were doing and that didn’t make people happy. If I was many decades younger, a kid now, probably people around me would recognize what was going on, for better or for worse, but in nineteen-seventy-something probably no one had a clue, and certainly no one told me anything I was able to understand in any useful way. So I guess what I learned was not really so much that I was looking to the wrong people as much as that I shouldn’t look to other people at all, that I was supposed to do what I was told to do and ignore the other people doing their other-people things for whatever mysterious other-people reasons they had. It’s not like anyone was going to explain what they were doing or why, it was all just an unknowable mystery. And I imagine the adults were not unhappy with me coming to the conclusion that the one key to getting along in life was to do whatever they told me to do.

I switched schools going from 5th to 6th grade. I didn’t have great expectations for how things might go in the longer term, but I really wondered what the short term would hold, what it would be like to be a new kid who no one knew. Would people talk to me? At first at least? Maybe in time they’d decide they didn’t want to anymore, but surely the first few weeks or maybe months would be different from before, with people not knowing me yet, not having an opinion about me yet.

Didn’t work that way, was exactly as always right from the first instant. Looking back, I’m sure I wasn’t any good at talking to people, I’d never had any practice, after all. And I wonder what sort of a weird mix of personality I might have had. I probably knew a few dozen things I was supposed to do, knew of a dozen things that I shouldn’t do because they were ‘girl things,’ and then had a million other things I was entirely unaware of, that I would have picked up unconsciously from the girls, but of course not as part of friendships with other girls but only what I noticed from a distance. I’m sure it was special.

I went to a residential nerd high school (the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy) and I actually talked to people, had friends, and even dated. We didn’t describe ourselves as autistic back in the late eighties, but I think it’s fair to suggest it was not uncommon. It was a very different environment from when I was younger, and I probably changed a lot, and similarly in college, and things seemed to be going fine for me as an adult.

When I began experimenting with a social transition, wearing ever more overtly feminine clothing while not changing anything about my body other than letting my hair grow long, eventually typically wearing dresses while still having a beard, I was of course surprised to not really get any harassment. But I was more surprised that what I really experienced, on the whole, was people being friendlier, nicer, and politer to me as as an obviously genderqueer person than they were when I was ostensibly a straight dude. I’d have all these nice little social interactions with women, I’d get those little compliments women give each other, about my hair or clothes. Aside from the constant worry that at some point I’d run into someone overtly hostile (which happened an amazingly small number of times, but more than zero) I worried that even if someone wasn’t overtly hostile they’d maybe ignore me, not help me, not take me seriously, but, again, honestly it felt like people treated me better than I’d been used to. People noticed me, everywhere I went people remembered me, but it never felt like it was in a bad way.

I’ve become a great deal less visible, a great deal less memorable, since the start of the pandemic, when, with my face covered, people just switched from “sir” to “ma’am.” It’s taken a long time for me to really get used to it, to really believe it. It’s weirdly comfortable. I get to just be like the other people, as if I’m allowed to be normal, too, and to go almost unnoticed as some ordinary person, no longer noticed everywhere as someone boldly doing ‘other-person things.’ It’s been hard to get over the lifetime of anxiety about talking with people even as I discover it’s weirdly easy now. It’s amazing to realize I can relax and act natural and people around me are not just willing to tolerate that but it goes much better than anything before.

The real mystery to me is that everyone knows men get taken more seriously than women. And yet, things are going great for me at work, first as by far the most visible gender weirdo around, and even more now, as a woman who is widely known to be trans since so many people know me from the old days. I’m being kept informed about stuff, I’m being asked for my input. I do science, and in the core lab mostly we do fairly routine work. Now and then I’ve been named in the little acknowledgments bit at the end of a paper. From time to time I’m more involved in a project and am one of the coauthors. That is a far more significant credit. When I look at how many papers I’m a coauthor on under my new name, which I only started using professionally early last year, and under my old name, which I used the previous 27 years I’ve been working in the labs, it sure doesn’t look like I’m not getting taken seriously or given credit. If anything, I’m getting taken more seriously, getting more credit.

So, what did people see me as in the old days? I suspect it was pretty variable, and people who actually knew me might have had different impressions from first impressions. People who knew me at work maybe different from people who knew me outside of work. Some of the weirder or more frightening experiences in life might have been from people who saw me as some sort of queer, with me having had no idea that might be a thing. I understood myself as shy and awkward, but maybe I was a lot more awkward than I realized. Probably you don’t get great results if your big lesson from childhood was that you shouldn’t look at how other people act, shouldn’t imagine you can do as they do. And if you’ve learned not to look to the examples of others then whatever you experience is what it is, nothing to meaningfully compare it to.

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All quiet in the mass spectrometry lab

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 18:54:01 GMT

They are shutting the power down briefly in the building my lab is in early tomorrow morning for work related to the new building construction. In preparation we have shut down and vented all the mass spectrometers. It is so weird for the mass spectrometry lab to be quiet! No vacuum pumps! No fans! No recirculating chillers! Very weird!

Hopefully everything powers back up successfully tomorrow morning!

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The waning egg days

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 23:53:31 GMT

I had a Facebook “memory” from ten years ago in which I described joking about business casual dress saying I’d wear a skirt, but probably people would have a problem with that, too.

I was really getting like that, around then. It was only a few months later I decided I really was trans enough to try some transition things.

Also, turned out I could just show up at work wearing skirts and dresses and such an everyone was fine with it. I was not expecting it to go like that!

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toot toot-toot-toot-toot ... toot-toot

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 13:30:46 GMT

I'm a bit of a train person but no expert, so while I'm not certain, I'm fairly sure that the Shave and a Haircut rhythm is not a Federal Railroad Administration-approved whistle signal, so props to the engineer who uses it anyway, I hear it in Tosa occasionally as they pass by.

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Sat, 12 Oct 2024 15:52:40 GMT

Last night I dreamed that I was in some sort of mass spectrometry lab and was telling others how I got my start in protein analysis, doing protein sequencing by Edman Degradation and got into an explanation of how it works, the phenyl isothiocyanate reacting with the N-terminal amino group, cleaving off the modified amino acid with trifluroacetic acid, which leaves a fresh N-terminal amine for the next cycle and the freed derivatized amino acid is then sent to an HLPC where they separate under pretty normal reverse phase conditions and show up on UV detection.

I haven't done this in a long time now, but a girl never forgets her first protein analysis method!

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looking back at summer

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 02:31:38 GMT

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.

Also, I'm getting into a surprisingly comfortable phase of transition where I'm no longer the very memorable genderqueer person everyone remembers, as far as I can tell I'm pretty invisible. It feels more comfortable going random places as a woman. I'm so invisible I can use public toilets without it being an adventure, which also makes going places a great deal easier! I've gotten the formal name change things done, I have a driver's license and passport with photos that look like me now and a name that doesn't surprise people now. Who knows if I'll still have documents in the future though, given what Florida and Texas are already doing. Again, maybe should travel while it's only as dangerous as it is now.

So, while I still can, I did go to some fun places. I went to Illinois to my high school reunion plus a walk around my childhood neighborhood. First trip to Illinois since the very start of the pandemic.

I went to Bastille Days here in town, which I have done before these last few years. I went to Illinois again to the Illinois Railway Museum for Diesel Days, which I last did in 2019. I went up to Baraboo for the Badger Steam and Gas Engine Show, which again I last went to in 2019. This time with a Flo Mask no problems from breathing the dust around the threshing machine demonstrations!

I went to the Make Art MKE event in Wauwatosa again, and this year for my first time up to the Holy Hill Arts and Crafts Fair, and saw the Basilica inside for the first time, plus the climb up the tower.

I have been getting out to some of the nearby state parks in recent years, but this year made it up to Harrington Beach twice to swim in Lake Michigan and hang out on the beach and walk around the trails. And to generally get to enjoy being a girl in a bikini at the beach. I did three trail runs up at Pike Lake plus swimming in the lake, as well as one more visit to swim and to just walk up to the tower. I went to my most local state park, Havenwoods, a number of times.

And also something I enjoyed a lot, my first camping at a state park in nine years. Pre-pandemic I'd camp at Oshkosh for the show, but that's a very different style of camping. Taking a week off and hanging out in a very quiet park in the northern Kettle Moraine and going hiking and swimming every day was a wonderful time. As a very outdoors and mostly alone thing it feels pretty safe. It was also really nice to do this for the first time while living comfortably as a woman. Even though it was mostly a quiet alone time every social interaction I had was the easy comfortable sort they are now. I've been taking estrogen long enough and am close enough to the end of electrolysis that I'd crawl out of the sleeping bag at sunrise, put on a old fleece top I bought when I assumed I was a man that's ugly and won't be missed if damaged while camping, and then feel my smooth face and look down and see the shape of my breasts, and realize that I really do just look like this all the time now.

In early pandemic days when the advice switched to wearing any mask you could improvise, I went out with my face covered and discovered that people would actually just say "ma'am" and then...stick with it. Didn't apologize and start saying "sir" a lot the moment they actually looked at me. I liked that a lot and it was a bit frustrating to experience it while mostly not being able to be out and around people much at all. I wondered how this would work out in the longer term.

Honestly it was a long process to get used to it really working reliably, even though it was reliable right from the start. And at the time I thought electrolysis would be primarily to make this "passing" work even if someday masks were no longer going to be necessary (imagining not needing masks was optimistic!) and at least to a degree hormone therapy as well. I really had to experience it to understand how much I like this, how happy it makes me when I'm all alone seeing my reflection or just looking down or just feeling my smooth face. There are some very very nice social interaction advantages to just looking like this now, but a big part of the joy really is just for me. I used to think I was just the usual amount of unhappy with my body, but that was actually dysphoria.

So a lot of this summer's travel was some of these formerly familiar trips but now done as a woman. It just feels comfortable. It's so much easier for me to talk with people now. And it feels much more predictable than my high-vis genderqueer days of the few years pre-COVID. But even thinking back to my "boy days," as I call them, it's just so nice now to feel like I know how to talk to people. It turns out I already knew how, I just needed to be seen as a girl for it to work right!

To be determined what the future holds, but honestly it was a nice summer this year.

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Puberty the Second

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 20:18:17 GMT

The night before cohost went read-only I got one last ask:

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.

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Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:07:53 GMT

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.

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HRT thoughts

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 01:11:57 GMT

I do my estrogen injections on Thursdays, and I posted this on cohost on the last Thursday of posting there:

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.

I was more than four years into transition before I found trans women on Twitter and got away from the Tumblr enbies, and started seeing those transition timelines, with a before photo that looked like me and a later photo that looked very very different. That seemed appealing. And I started hearing about the emotional, mental health effects of HRT, that sounded appealing. And then the pandemic started, I went out with my face covered, and somehow had been instantly transformed from That One Guy everyone remembered everywhere I went, a weird sort of honorary woman, to just another random women. I liked that a lot! I started thinking some body modification might be really nice.

It's amazing. For one thing, I feel emotions now. I can cry now. I've never felt emotions anything like this before, it's amazing, this alone is worth everything. I love all the subtle physical changes more than I ever imagined, my skin is softer, my hair is growing longer, I smell different, I'm not as greasy and sticky all the time. I'm just over 63 hours into electrolysis and we're at the final stage of getting the last straggling hairs, my face is a slightly different shape thanks to HRT influencing the fat layer under the skin, I'm so very happy with how I look. Just over a year ago I saw a women in the mirror for the first time, it gradually become more common, and now, I just look like this. There's some less subtle changes, too. Having breasts is fantastic, I cannot get over how happy I am with how I look with them, I love all the sensations of having them, somehow it just feels like they should be there, they should have been there all along, and now I finally have them. I can tell you from experience breasts alone don't necessarily make or break how people see you, but they sure doesn't hurt if you like being seen as a woman. And it's nice just remembering an experience on my recent camping trip, I got up just after sunrise, it was still pretty chilly out, I put on some very random clothing to walk to the toilets including a blue and black fleece pullover I bought ages ago in my boy days, not remotely trying to dress up all nice, and I looked down and saw I obviously have breasts. I just look like this now, all the time, even camping and putting in less than zero effort first thing in the morning I just look like this now. I had no idea how much I'd like it.

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Camping trip

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:45:10 GMT

Negative on a crappy (but free!) rapid antigen test, just to check. Not that a negative on one of those means much.

Again, camping mid-week this time of year, not a lot of people around. But you never know.

The showers were the one-person ungendered style, the building has a bunch of doors on the outside, you go in, lock the door, there's a little changing area and then the shower. How long since the last person was in there? This time of year, probably a while. Don't really know, but every evening when I went into one the shower was dry, clearly it had been a while for the floor even to dry off.

I remember the camping trip nine years ago, when I was just first starting to explore being trans, and the campground at Harrington Beach was still very new. The pit toilets in the campground were ungendered, a locking door to a small room with both seat and urinal to choose from as you will. That felt really nice to me even though back then I was still comfortable just using the men's. The Mauthe Lake site is older and the toilets all the usual gendered pair, but these days that's comfortable to me because I'm a girl. Plus also there was almost nobody around. Although one time using the one in the shower building with flush toilets and hot and cold running water another woman did come in at the same time I was using it.

No one loves the pit toilets but there's electricity, they have electric fans pulling air out of the pit and sending it out the rooftop stack. Sometimes you'd feel a bit of airflow when you sit down. Keeps down the smells and flies and such.

Funny thing, the fan isn't loud but it isn't silent. The campgrounds were quiet, very few people (fun animal fact: The loudest animal is the human!) and depending on how loud the crickets were being, how much the birds were singing, in my camp site, sometimes, I could just faintly hear a sort of hum like some sort of machine. So faint sometimes I couldn't feel sure I was hearing a real sound, it could have been just imagination. I later figured out that the way the sites loop around, back behind my site, on the other side of the valley between, was the loop of the other set of sites, and the pit toilets. About 150 meters away according to my GPS measurements. It was that toilet fan I could just faintly hear!

My bed at home is a lot more comfortable than the little air pad on the ground in the tent (though I have slept on that same pad on the hardwood floor of a friend's place when she was moving and didn't have anything nicer set up yet for a visitor!) but it's weird hearing mostly cars instead of mostly insects! (fun animal fact: The loudest animal is the human!) It felt like the type of sound varied over the course of the night. I don't know if that's actually because of time or because of the temperature dropping with time. Or both. Feels like something that someone has studied in great detail, there's PhD projects in that field. But I'm over at the analytical biochemistry side of the biology field, cricket sounds is a whole different thing!

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Sat, 14 Sep 2024 03:53:34 GMT

Way back in the day I was in touch with a bunch of mostly science fiction fans and filkers I'd met in person at cons on the new-fangled Livejournal. After some years stuff happened and Livejournal got bought by a Russian opration which kinda spooked people. Dreamwidth popped up at some point and I think a bunch of us copied our LJs over, but what actually happened in practice was everyone migrated to the then-stil-newish Facebook.

(And I think some of you have younger and more terminally-online in-person friends and might see them all sorts of places, but all the people I've met in person are on Facebook, all the other sites are all people I've never actually met in person.)

And over the years there have been just a couple people I only knew online who posted on Dreamwidth, I followed a few, for a while.

And now...the cohost people are moving to Dreamwidth! I didn't see that coming! It's gonna be 2005 all over again! Except I get to be a girl now!

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Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:59:35 GMT

One of the things I really liked about cohost was the flexibility to write long posts, use formatting ranging from the mundane (italics!) to the CSS crime level, put in links, photos, whatever. Or write a shitchost in the title in 140 characters or fewer. Whatever.

And every time I think this, I then think, well, is that good? Might it not be more "optimal" to separate different functions? And then I remember what happens in real life. Is twitter great for writing long posts? Very not, but people always tweetstormed up long threads that might or might not be readable in order. Bluesky goes out of its way to make reading long threads harder. Don't allow italics or bold and people will post in weird math symbols, which then provokes the evergreen discourse about how That Is Bad. Just let people fucking use bold!

I'm on a Mastodon instance with a 1000 character limit and oftentimes I can get my whole thought into that, but there's that character counter ticking down, urging me to be a bit less clear, drop that other point because is my other point worth another hundred letters? Why do we do this? I get that the Dril tweets would not be better if they were ten times longer, but two points: One, most of us are not Dril. Two, there's more to life than Dril tweets.

Lots of us loved the really complicated CSS crimes, but what I saw a lot more of was just people getting a bit of whimsy out in rainbow letters or something simple, and you could do that. It was nice. Didn't have to post in math symbols or put text in GIFs.

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Cohost end

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:49:36 GMT

It's sad to see cohost shutting down. Looking back there's lots of people I saw in the past who drifted away as is usual, but having a date when everyone is cut off is different. So many people who were a nice little part of my life with their funny posts or their long thoughtful posts, all the funny interactions some people had with each other, all coming to an end.

I'll see some people elsewhere, I already have for people who have also been active in fediland. But some people are just going to vanish from my life. Which, again, happens, just now a bunch all at once.

Even the end is a cohost end, orderly in a way I don't think I've seen before. A date to go read-only set weeks in advance, an interval to download archives, a plan to make that easier. Time to do some last posts, some goodbyes, to give out contact information, time to set up accounts elsewhere and give out links, if you don't have other places yet.

The great twitter-musking, when for a while it was quite unclear if the site would keep running, was a whole different thing. And of course lots of sites over the years have been just abruptly shut down. Or, everyone I knew on Livejournal back in the day left the site ages ago but the site lingers on, still sending me e-mail reminders now and then.

At some point I'm gonna sit down and cry, now that I'm on estrogen I get to feel emotions. In fact I started estrogen a couple months after joining cohost, it's overlapped a really significant era in my transition.

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This thing is still here

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 02:14:26 GMT

With cohost shutting down and people I know there scattering, there's at least a few maybe moving to dreamwidth, so maybe there will be some activity here!

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