Operational Exhaustion

You've seen pictures of the most beautiful glacial lake in the most beautiful valley you can imagine. No, more beautiful than your imagination was capable of. You've talked to people who have been there and they've said the experience changed them forever. So you decide to go. You make the choice to buy and gather up supplies, pack it all up, and strap it to your back. And you go.

The hike is easy enough at first and you're excited to go. There are minor annoyances - you get a rock in your shoe, you get some mosquito bites - but you know it's oh so worth it. Your excitement builds as you climb into the crisp mountain air. You see stunning waterfalls that take your breath away.

But the annoyances keep coming. You get blisters on your feet and every step starts to hurt. You get more and more mosquito bites. Then you encounter a rattlesnake. You get past it, but it reminds you that people warned you about dangers along the way - mountain lions and spiders and bears. You knew about those, but it didn't really register. Now you worry that every step into the unknown could be your last.

Your backpack seems to get heavier and heavier. The sights and smells are incredible, but it's getting harder and harder to take each step. You have to stop and take a break. You have to tend to your blisters and put on bug spray. You have to catch your breath and eat a good meal. You can't keep hiking non-stop.

That's where I feel I am right now. I need to take a breather. Not a long one, just this weekend, but I'm exhausted. All the little irritations have accumulated, all the exertion has gotten to be too much.

So fuck it. I'm not bothering with makeup, I'm not bothering to look good, I'm not trying to pass, and I'm not interacting with people in real life, I'm not practicing my voice. I need to sit by the side of the trail and catch my breath.

I can still see the beautiful sights where I sit, smell the smells, hear the sounds. I can still play with my boobs. I still got called ma'am while wearing a T-shirt, shorts, no bra, and no makeup. But I need a breather from time to time.

The "sir"s, the looks, the goddamn shaving, the straining my voice, the personal care, they're all little things, but they build up. I just need time to de-stress.

At times like this, I wonder why I inflicted the journey on myself. I wonder why I decided to strap that backpack on and do this climb. And here's where the analogy fails. I was miserable and despairing before I took this journey. As much work as it is, it's less terrible than sitting stagnant, denying who I am, and dying with terrible regret. I have to take this journey. That lake is where I belong and I can't be whole until I reach it.

I just get exhausted sometimes.

Mommy Issues

A question came up recently, about something I considered a moot point. But maybe it isn't so moot. The answer seems fairly obvious, at least to my rational mind, but my feels taunt me with doubts. 

This is the question: Do I come out to my mother?

This would be through a proxy, naturally. Either my father or brother. My rational thinking and all my feels are on the same page about doing it directly: I'm never speaking to her again. Well, there is a tiny part of me that wants to directly tell her off about how she interfered with my discovery of myself. Tell her off about a lot of things, actually.

I have a lot of history with my mother. Most people do, but by history I mean history. She has many guises, she's had many more, and I have dramatic history with all of them.

Sex Drive, Orgasms, and Playing on Nightmare Difficulty

Everyone loves the Orgasm Game. You win, you get an orgasm. Usually it's one or two player, though it can be however damn many you can cram into a bed. It's a great game, but there are two snags: not everyone plays on the same difficulty, and not everyone gets the same prize.

Now I am Going to Get Into That Weird Ambivalence

I'm referring, of course, to "the weird interplay between physical stimulation, gender dysphoria, intrusive thoughts, and intoxication" referenced in Public Indecency. Because it was weird.

One thing that's critical to know about this is that my genitals have always felt somewhat alien to me. Either dissociated or like they had to be something they weren't. So I never fapped imagining something happening with my dick; I fapped imagining it was a vagina and the stroking was the feeling of being penetrated.

I'd tried sex with prostitutes twice, and I failed miserably both times. The feeling of penetrating felt wrong, just wrong. And it didn't do anything for me. I knew these women were beautiful. I wanted to kiss them and play with their nipples and go down on them, but penetrating... I just couldn't do it.

So this is what I was going into the blowjob with in terms of relationship with my dick. 

On top of that, I had terrible intrusive sexual thoughts at the time. Violent, horrific stuff. My faplife revolved around these. It was downright compulsive. And it created a dynamic where that's all I was used to getting off to. But I couldn't think that about a real person other than myself - the very notion of that repulsed and disgusted me. 

So on top of the dysphoria, I had this hangup about arousal being coupled to revulsion.

However, physical stimulation goes a long way, especially with male arousal. (It's a bit trickier now that my arousal and orgasms are estrogen-based.) The kissing and the nipples put my mind at ease, but it was the physical stimulation that got the actual it's-40-degrees-out boner going. It didn't matter how I felt about my dick or what I was thinking, that physical touch got it going on its own.

So a little dick licking woke it up regardless of anything else.

Finally, there was the booze. Normally, booze inhibits performance by making erections more difficult. This was far outweighed by making it too hard to think any of the intrusive thoughts. And it was outweighed even further by numbing my dysphoria. I was crosseyed and painless, so I managed to become dissociated from the dissociation of my dysphoria, if that makes any sense. It's like I was too out of it to feel the wrongness anymore.

So I was numb to most of those bad feels.

Ultimately, it was a pleasant experience in the moment, although an anxiety-wracked one. But that pleasure was mostly the kissing and nipple play in the end. The raw physical pleasure was like a base reptilian reflex - I reacted to it with pleasure, but it was on the level of tapping my knee with one of those doctor's mallets. 

But afterward, I felt... off. I couldn't get the feeling of the sucking off and it was... not completely wrong, but certainly not right. The shaft was all wrong but the head was pretty good I guess (big surprise there - the head is what becomes the clit in SRS), But still, the overall feeling - things felt extra alien.

In the end, I wanted - wished for - more, since the kissing and nipple sucking was so good. But I really didn't want to have to use by dick for anything real and an orgasm with someone else was a terrifying prospect, and probably would have required just as much booze at that point in my life.

Harassment

This is what online harassment looks like. Based on the choice of photo to spuriously report for "graphic violence," I suspect I'm being harassed for being trans.

Facebook actively encourages this kind of harassment. Someone can report the same image over, and over, and over, ad infinitum, in the hopes that eventually, just once, the censors will ban it. There is no accountability for bogus reports. You can make a dozen bogus reports and there is no consequence - they don't even give a time-out from reporting, apparently. You are not permitted to comment on the report, such as to point out that the image has already passed muster (something they could easily check automatically), or to report the reporter for obvious harassment, as above.

I have tried, and failed, to find some way of contacting Facebook directly - they appear to make that deliberately impossible.

So there is nothing I can do. At this point I can only assume that I will be harassed until my harasser gets bored, which may be quite a while. And as I said above, Facebook encourages this sort of behavior with their reckless reporting policies.

I think this relates in a non-trivial way to the harassment transgender people and drag performers face over the name policy. Like I said, the fact that my ancient picture of hormone pills, and not the more recent mountain of pills, was reported for graphic violence tells me they have something against teh trans. And they have nothing better to do than to be a pain in my ass for it.

I guess achievement unlocked, guys. bleep-bloop Face Trans Hate 75G

Tits and GTFO

In at least five cases, these very nipples have been deemed safe for work by Facebook's censors. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the decisions. My nipples at 2 months of HRT, when they were clearly masculine (and, in fact, I was legally male) were removed for nudity. Male nipples. Conversely, my nipples at 8 months of HRT, barely 2 months ago, were allowed to stay. Apparently the A cup boobs of someone legally female are okay, but only in some arbitrary cases. Other times the same nipples have gotten me outright banned.

Is it the lighting? Just a different boob inspector examining with comparison photos? What is it, Facebook?

It's incoherent nonsense meant to enforce a societal double standard. Men's nips? Even moobs? Even pinching it and making a sexy face? A-OK. Completely tasteful display or rendition of feminine beauty? A documentary about experiencing female puberty late in life? Breastfeeding? Naughty, naughty.

So let me ask you: does this picture turn you on so much you just *have* to fap? Will it scar children for life if they see it? Is there a single offensive thing about this picture (other than the fact that I appear in it)? Is there anything not PG in this entire post?

Or is it just a picture of me, honestly showing myself as I am?

Facebook doesn't care what it is. They have their muddled policies. But it makes absolutely zero sense for the same nipples to both be offensive and inoffensive. This double standard has to end.

#FreeTheNipple

Did I ever mention how I realized I was trans?

I know this has occasionally come up so some readers are certainly aware of at least the rough outline. But seeing that it's nowhere on the blog, I figure I should put it here for the posterity and the benefit lulz of others.

May 10^th, 2013, I had the first date of my life. It went well, to say the least. You know the joke "what does a lesbian bring to a second date? A moving truck"? Well, that pretty much happened. And all of a sudden I had a girlfriend.

I can't remember if it came up on my screensaver or if she found it on Facebook (probably the former), but a week or so later she saw a picture of me that caught her attention.

Pre-alpha Rachel prototype

I was horribly embarrassed that she saw that. "Is that you," she incredulously asked. I turned bright red. "Uh... yeah," I stammered. "It was a thing they did, up at my last college," I hastened to add, "Dragfest, everyone dressed in drag and got wasted." Yeah, that justified it.

May 24^th, two weeks after our first date: she's sitting on the couch out front and I'm in the kitchen for some reason. She calls to me. "So, uhm... those pictures of you in drag."

I freeze. "Yeah..."

"Well, you know I'm bi. And... I like having a girlfriend."

'Is she asking for this relationship to be open,' I'm wondering, 'and what does that have to do with those embarrassing pictures?' "Okay..."

"So I was wondering if you might be willing to dress up and be my girlfriend sometimes."

Time stopped. My heart pounded in my ears and my temperature shot up a few degrees. This couldn't be happening, but it was. That's it, now or never. This is my one and only chance. "Can I be your girlfriend all the time?"

My mind was so reeling I don't even remember quite what she said next. But she quickly got to asking me if I was trans. "Yeah... I'm sorry." I couldn't help but apologize.

Her response, in effect? "Well that explains a lot." I was confused by that; I asked what she meant. She told me I kissed and made love like a girl, that it explained my 'issues' with using my hardware in bed, that it explained some of my quirks and anxieties, why she was attracted to me after having written off guys and decided she was a lesbian. Less seriously, she joked about how I and our relationship were conforming to lesbian stereotypes.

She said if I wanted to be her girlfriend all the time, I could be. She loved me as her boyfriend and she'd love me as her girlfriend.

And that's how I realized I was really trans, that it wasn't just idle ideation. I had my chance to make it happen, and I took it. And for giving me that chance (and for helping me start to transition, and teaching me how to be a girl, and helping name me, and...) I am eternally grateful.

Expectations, Excitement, and Disappointment (pointless ramblings)

I have some bad habits. Things that aren't good for my mental health. I won't get into all of them; the relevant ones here:

• I look at /r/transtimelines
• I look at /r/transpassing
• I read other MtF girls' accounts of their progress
• I let myself get excited about every little bit of my own progress

These habits conspire to set me up for guaranteed disappointment. I've been on hormone therapy for 6 months now; my boobs are AA (yes, it's a real size, smaller than A) and show no signs of continuing to grow. The fat distribution on my face and in my body is still fairly masculine - especially in my body. 

Don't get me wrong, I've made a lot of progress. But sometimes it doesn't feel that way. When my nipples started to grow, I jumped with joy; that just prepared me to despair when they stopped. Same with my boobs, which I'm now despairing over for their lack of soreness, a sure sign of growth. I was just so excited when I could say "I have boobs," it never occurred to me that it wouldn't be constant growth. Even though I know it's in fits and starts, I'm constantly afraid this is as big as they'll get. I can see changes to my face when I compare pictures, but when I look in the mirror I still see a man. My belly flab isn't going much of anywhere, least of all to my hips. Even though I've seen tables and graphs of normally expected timelines, and I see that I'm basically within normal range (though these expected values put hormone changes as happening for 4 years - I want to be ready for SRS long before that, dammit!), I despair.

My other bad habits get in the way of feeling good about that sometimes. I see timelines and read about progress where girls are looking totally female at 6 months, or have B cup breasts before this point. I look down at my AA's and I'm not a happy girl. I see timelines where 2 months of progress puts my 6 months to shame. I rationally know these are outliers, but inside they hurt.

I get frustrated. Girls talk about their endocrinologists giving them 8mg of estradiol a day; mine won't let me go higher than 4mg and I worry what I'm missing out on, how much better my progress could be. Mine started me at 50mg of spironolactone; 100mg sounds like it's a more typical starting dose. And again, I wonder what I missed out on in those first months with all that testosterone still afflicting me.

Of course, the second my boobs start hurting again, the second my nipples become tender again, I will light up in incandescent optimism. And when it stagnates, just look at a few timelines and I'm back to despair. That's how I'm feeling down after all the excitement at 6 months. And again, excited going to 200mg of the spiro, feeling my boobs get a little soreness, now down again after it goes away.

I get excited and it sets me up for disappointment. I see better-than-average timelines and it sets me up for disappointment. I hope too hard and it sets me up for disappointment. 

I should learn to expect nothing, and then be happy (not excited) with everything I get.

/angst

Half a Year

This is a milestone. Half a year since I began hormones.

This update won't be like the others. It won't be an itemized list of the minutiae of the past month. Instead, prepare for some rambling musings on the whole experience, where I started, where I'm going, and what it all means.

Beginnings

Wednesday, February 26ᵗʰ. I put on my skirt, my frilly top, my high-heeled boots, and way too much makeup. I gobbled some of my anti-anxiety medication, paced around, and finally got in my car. My appointment was right behind the physics building, where I spent all my time at UNM; I parked right next to the LIDAR array our research group is working on. I don't pray, but I certainly hoped to myself, “oh please don't step outside to work on the damn thing now” (re: my boss). My heart was pounding the whole way to the clinic; I scrupulously avoided eye contact.

I checked in, a truly cringeworthy experience. Internally I had a bitter chuckle at the irony: I was there as Rachel, to see a doctor about being Rachel, and I had to check in and interact with everyone as Ryan (because paperwork). I was so nervous waiting in the exam room for the doctor. When he got there he started asking me questions about what I expected from the hormones. No, I’m not expecting it to get rid of my facial or body hair. Yes, I know there’s only so much it can do for appearance with immutable bone structure. No, I don’t expect it to change my voice. He suggested I might want to get a laser ablation procedure done on my vocal folds to undo some of the damage wrought by testosterone during puberty. Basically, he wanted to make sure my expectations were realistic.

I was afraid I might answer something wrong and he wouldn’t give me the hormones. But 15 minutes later I walked out of there with two prescriptions – spironolactone to get rid of my testosterone, and estradiol to replace it with estrogen – and a spring in my step (yes, even in heels). I went home, switched to boy mode, and went straight to the pharmacy. That Wednesday afternoon, I took my first doses, and my first step toward physically becoming Rachel.

Retcon

Comic book fans will be familiar with the term 'retcon' in layman's terms means that the writer waves his hand and tells you 'Remember when we said this? We screwed up, forget about that.' 

 Retroactive Continuity: rewriting past events to be consistent with the new present.

My brain is doing this to me now and it's a very strange experience. Some of my memories are being amended to be consistent with the present. The memories stay almost completely the same, except one or two things are different. The other day something reminded me of walking around the neighborhood in high school. It was a vivid memory, as my random memories tend to be.

Two things were retconned, though. First, my CRPS has been written out of existence in that memory. Gone, entirely. Like it was never there. I see this as consistency with the fact that it's been in remission for a decade. It's no longer really a part of my life, so why would it be there in a memory that had nothing to do with it?

Second, I've been rewritten as a girl. Not a trans girl in transition or anything. I was a girl and always had been. This is incredibly detailed retconning, too. I "remember" what I was wearing; I "remember" my sense of what I looked like; I "remember" my stride, completely different from how I actually walked at the time.

So now I'm remembering my life as it wasn't, subconsciously replacing the actual me with an alternate me more consistent with my present self-image. It's almost like I don't actually remember me in any of those memories - I remember my interactions with the world around me, then insert myself into it.

I'm not completely sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I hate the failure of memory and the fundamental dishonesty of my brain. What I consider fantasy is replacing reality. But is it really? The only thing that seems changed is me - the rest of the memory seems intact. And is a change of "me" to maintain better coherence with the present me really so bad? Besides, it feels really good.

Regardless of the merits of the confabulation, my brain is being pretty clear about things:

Remember when you were a boy? That was a mistake, forget about that.

Identity Crisis

Warning: Wangst ahead

tl;dr: Suddenly having trouble calling myself female instead of transfemale.

*sigh* I'm having an identity crisis. I choose to identify as just plain female, not transfemale, But now I'm not sure I can do that. I want to be just female, but wanting doesn't make it so. I was never socialized as a girl, I didn't have the experience of growing up as a girl or of living my adult life as one. The maleness of that is a part of me, however much I wish I didn't have it or wish I could jettison it.

Can I ever legitimately claim to just be female, not specifically transfemale? My therapist assures me that after 7-10 years or so (so when I'm 40, ugh) I'll reach a "post-trans" state where it doesn't even occur to me that I'm trans. I have my doubts about that; we'll see. For now, I just don't know that I can claim to actually be what I merely want to be.

This didn't quite come out of nowhere. I've been having crazy dreams this week. Some of them really drove this home for me, either because someone rejected my femininity and insisted I was male (which robbed me of my female voice and features - them saying it made them correct), or because I dreamed I was a cis woman and waking up felt like being snapped out of a happy delusion.

Still, as a transwoman, I'm a subcategory of just plain woman, not something separate and distinct. I just feel now like "female" carries too strong a connotation of cis or at least early transition. Not being either, having lived my whole life male, I feel like it's a lie, or at least misleading.

Not changing it on Facebook, though. I have to cling to the hope and desire to one day not be 'that trans girl' (which probably says more about my own insecurities than anyone's perception of me). *sigh*

Annals of Puberty 2.0: 5 months, Oh How the Time Flies

Boobies!

5 months. It seems like yesterday I walked into the doctor's office, nervous as hell, seeking medication (spiro and estrogen). Where has all the time gone?

So what's been going on with my transition, and what have the hormones changed? Well, for starters, I have boobs now. They're small and my nipples are still horribly male in appearance, but these are definitely boobs - they're starting to get shape, and they have completely the right texture. I spent, let's call it half an hour straight, playing with them yesterday - because I can - and discovered they also now make me feel funny in my tummy when they're adequately stimulated. Yay, boobies!

My body hair growth has been changing, too. The hairs on my arms are now about half very fine blond hair, not the coarse black it used to be (and half still is). Body hair grows slower, too. It now takes 3 or 4 days for my leg hair to grow in to the point it used to in just one day. I absolutely love this "never shave your arms and shave your legs twice a week" situation and can't wait for it to really get where it's going. It's nice when my transition lines up with my laziness.

I've been taking care of more things related to my name change. Wait, have I even posted since that happened? I don't think so. So I legally changed my name. For all official purposes, my name is no longer Ryan Patrick; now it's Rachel Lindsey. I also got a new driver's license to reflect that. Totally awesomesauce: my new license also correctly identifies me as female.

I got my new Social Security card and, much to my surprise, the wait at the SSA was short and they were helpful and efficient about it. I couldn't believe it. The biggest hassle was the security at the entrance. I then finally changed my name with UNM, which actually confused the hell out of me. I got a message at my Gmail account forwarded from my school account, listed as from Rachel Lindsey. I did a double take, like, wait, what?

I did give myself a little setback a week-and-a-half-ish ago. I became a bit of a shut-in and didn't speak for a whole week. I didn't speak at all. And when I decided to rejoin the world, I tried to warm up my voice before leaving and found I had completely lost it. My feminized voice was just gone. I found it again over the next few days, but it really drove home the fact that I need to keep practicing and keep doing in order to transition.

Something it's good I lost is the feeling that I'm "presenting" in public. I still get that feeling when I directly interact with people I don't know, but just out doing my thing? I'm just out doing my thing. I'm not all self-conscious about my clothes or makeup or (fake, bigger) boobs or mannerisms. I think I'm becoming more secure in my femininity. I'm not constantly plagued by fears and self-loathing: "tranny", "shemale", "pretending", "drag", "disguise", "transvestite", "autogynephilia"... These thoughts aren't gone, per se, but my brain now mostly reserves them for times of acute failure. Dresses, as much as I like them, still make me self-conscious, though.

Something that's helped is that I've been getting "ma'am"ed and "miss"ed more - as long as they see me before they hear my voice. (It may be back, but it still needs a lot of work.) "Miss" is pretty rare - it's usually "ma'am", but it's nice when I do get it. I'm not sure what the difference is that's caused this. Maybe it's the other way around and my security causes people to read me as more feminine / not an imposter.

NSFW change: My libido has been steadily climbing. At first it dropped when I started the hormones, but now I feel like I really am going through puberty again. I'm drooling over every remotely attractive woman I see. But I have no outlet for it, no relief. Masturbation is an iffy proposition. Thanks to the spironolactone, I don't have to worry about - and can't really get - erections. And I haven't figured out quite how to get myself off without one (yes, it is possible). I'm like a horny teenage girl who hasn't figured out how to operate her cooter yet. Now if I could just chow down on some pussy, the problem would be solved...

In summary:

• Boobies! have a discernible shape.
• My body hair is thinning out and slowing down.
• Boobies! have the right texture.
• I changed my name, officially and for pretty much everything that matters.
• Boobies! hang down when I lean forward.
• I changed my gender on my state ID.
• Boobies! make me feel happy and weird inside when I play with them.
• Oops, I accidentally my voice. But it's all better now - I just need to remember not to be a hermit.
• Boobies! have nipples less sensitive than their max sensitivity (i.e., the shower doesn't hurt), but still sensitive.
• I'm becoming more secure in my femininity.
• Boobies! are one of the greatest things ever.
• Holy hell have I been getting horny lately, and I have no outlet for it.
• Tits.

Full-Time

This is it. It's like my bat mitzvah or something. I am, as of yesterday, officially "full-time." After coming out to my boss, there's no one left in my life who doesn't know, so I no longer have any reason to present as Ryan to anyone, ever. The legalities of that will have to wait a few weeks, but now I can already be Rachel whenever, wherever, and to whomever, I want.

It snuck up on me, to be honest. I wasn't planning to start full-time until the fall semester, but with no one left to come out to, there's no reason not to start now. No more "boy mode" and "girl mode," just "me mode." Mind you, "me mode" (f.k.a. "girl mode") is a lot of work - a solid 2 hours every morning. You might even call this a full-time job now. But it's rewarding work, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. Well, except getting the results without having to do the work. But I'm *ahem* working on that.

So I guess this is farewell to an old friend. Let's pour one out for my main man Ryan - RIP, buddy. Your work is done here.

Annals of Puberty 2.0: Month 2

This month brings less physical changes - those are mostly incremental - and more emotional changes. In a word, I feel: normal. But also:

• Watch out, Facebook censors! My nipples have been getting softer. They feel less like they used to and more like female nipples. One of these days one of you will have to report my #NipsOfFreedom
• There are times when my whole... I won't call them breasts yet, but my circumnipple regions, are sensitive to pressure. Like, scrubbing them with soap in the shower is like scrubbing a bruise.
• My appetite is up, and it's pissing me off. I know a growing girl needs her lunch, but dammit, there's plenty to repurpose hanging out around my gut already.
• I'm far less anxious, ridiculously so. I'm taking maybe 10% as much of my anti-anxiety meds compared to when I started. Used to be 3 pills a day on most days, now it's one maybe twice a week, if that. It's not like I'm anxiety-free, but it's reduced and easier to deal with. At least in spitting distance of normal-ish.
• What are these emotions I'm feeling? Is this was it is to be "normal"? I get excited without trembling and sweating, I get upset without flipping out, I get happy without feeling like an idiot. WTF? I mean, I can't convey just how much of a change this is. My computer blew up with sparks and smoke, then later that day I got a test back with a D on it, and though I was upset, sure, I wasn't anywhere near the end of my rope. I just dealt with it as best I could, moved on, and maybe grumbled a little. Apparently I'm a more normal, well-adjusted girl than I ever was a guy.
• Sleep is no longer alternating bouts of pathological insomnia and hypersomnia. It's not perfectly consistent, but it's whatever I make of it. "Wake up early, go to bed early"/"sleep in late, have trouble falling asleep" stuff. Normal.
• Intrusive thoughts I used to have are entirely gone. This is a welcome respite from their awful content (no details; you'd need a week on /r/aww do bleach your brain). I'm free of these disturbing and overwhelming thoughts for the first time since... geez, at least 6th grade. I feel normal for once, not all sick and broken inside.

Annals of Puberty 2.0

I've been on hormones a little over a month now, and though I'm naturally impatient for round two of puberty to get going full force, there have already been some adjustments.

• This spironolactone is making me thirsty. Constantly thirsty. I shouldn't be surprised -- though I take spiro as an anti-androgen (anti-testosterone drug), it's primarily a diuretic. It's still a bit of an adjustment, considering how bad I was about staying hydrated before, even on a medication that gives me the shakes if I don't stay hydrated. 
• My nipples are getting a little nipply. By which I mean, they've gotten quite sensitive, including below the surface, and are erect a large fraction of the time. I'd like to think this means some growth around there is right around the corner, but I know that's still months off. Not complaining in the least, though.
•  ED. I don't get erections anymore, hallelujah. At all. It was very confusing at first and tricked me into thinking I'd lost my libido. One of the things about living my life as a guy is that arousal was inextricably linked to erections and the two weren't fully separate in my mind. So with no physiological aspect to it, it felt cold and abstract, like I was thinking about it without actually thinking or feeling it. Fortunately, my body found a replacement, of a sort.
• I literally drool instead now. I'm not even joking. I salivate until it drips out the corners of my mouth. I don't know how this started happening. I don't know why drooling specifically. But now I actually drool over women I'm attracted to instead of the previous physiological response. It manages to be awkward, amusing, reassuring, and a little guilty all at the same time.
• I can get choked up now. That was previously, outside particularly vulnerable mental states, impossible for me. I'm actually looking forward to more effect in this direction; my near-absolute inability to cry normally kinda sucked.

I've also learned a couple interesting things about how this may affect my eyes, of all things:

• Hormone therapy can alter your retinas. This can cause subtle changes in how colors and depth perception are experienced.
• Hormone therapy can alter eye lens shape (!). So there's a chance my vision won't be 20/15 anymore. I'm fine with that, even if I end up needing mild glasses.

So where does that all put me now? Taking my estrogen and spiro religiously. [actual pre-editing stop to take estrogen and spiro] Also working on including more girl mode features (like voice) when I have to be in boy mode. Though I skipped it this past month due to progress on this front being as slow as expected, #nipsoffreedom will continue as scheduled on April 26th (2 months in), and I'll start doing some photos to document my facial changes.

Hormones (So It Begins)

I really don't know.

So, hormones. Puberty 2.0. This has been an interesting couple weeks changing my hormones around, and I gather it will only get more interesting.

First, a quick technical note on what hormone therapy is. Two things need to happen: I need estrogen, and I need to get rid of testosterone. So twice a day I take estradiol (a form of estrogen I can absorb orally) and spironolactone (a diuretic that eliminates testosterone from my system).

Two weeks on a starting dose isn't going to do much in the grand scheme of things, but it's certainly enough to knock a few things off-kilter. And by "off-kilter," I mean my mood has been wobbling like a broken shopping cart wheel. Let me give an example if what I mean:

I was having a bunch of anxiety about how to write this. More writing anxiety than usual. So I'm pacing around thinking, anxious and a little agitated. Next thing I know I'm grinning so broadly that it's making my face sore and I don't know why. On the flip-side, more than once I've experienced a rush of gender euphoria (more about that some other time), only to crash, in the span of a couple seconds, into an anxiety attack about something like my voice - both mini-moods greatly exaggerated from healthy emotions. Little things might send me shooting off in some direction like that, or it could be nothing at all - that shopping cart wheel just wobbling.

It's a bit like someone turned up the gain on my feels. Not the volume - the gain, so even the noise is strong enough to be amplified into a 10-10,000 second Feel (usually on the shorter end).

This is largely why I've been on hiatus from Facebook. I know I could be a righteous bitch at any moment and unleash that on someone for no good reason. Or I might be prone to posting really stupid stuff in a fit of irrational exuberance. Basically, I don't trust my emotions.

However...

There has been one focused change that isn't scattershot feels: lots more gender euphoria. What that completely entails is, as I said, for another time, but the short of it is: it's the utterly blissful feeling of fully internalizing my femininity for a moment. It's been happening a lot more since I started hormones - I'd say at least 4x as often as in the 2 weeks before. And it's more intense. I don't know how much of that is purely psychosomatic and how much is my brain reacting to the estrogen, but it's there. Regardless of the origin, that is one emotion I do trust. (Except when I have an anxiety attack, then I don't, because I don't trust any emotion other than anxiety.)

And that's where I am right now. Feeling level, even good, most of the time, but a couple dozen times a day, I have super-feels, even if I don't have a trigger to send me off in some direction. Let's see where this round of puberty takes me next!

Identity, Narratives, and Beer

Narratives are a very efficient way to convey most of a complex topic to your audience - a relatively simple encapsulation of the topic into a standard story that covers the fundamentals. If I wanted to explain how beer was made to someone only aware of beer's existence, I might say:

• You malt barley, then boil it
• You add hops to that mix at the end of boiling
• You ferment that mix with yeast
• Voila! Beer

Of course, this is glossing over a lot and oversimplifying, but it captures the essentials. Or does it? What about hefewizen (wheat beer)? Continuously hopped beers? Unhopped beers? (Gross, I know, but they exist.) Your narrative conveys the basics to a naive audience, but it also may leave them with the impression that some beers are not, in fact, beer.

The consequences of this confusion would be minor at worst, ranging from nothing to mild embarrassment. But other confusions due to simple narratives can be more pernicious. Which brings me to the narrative I really want to talk about: the standard transgender narrative. It goes something like this:

 A young trans* person realizes early in life that they are, or at least feel like they are, the opposite gender¹ from their birth sex. In their teens the body-feeling mismatch grows increasingly distressing. They may repress the feelings, whether due to external pressure or expectations, or due to internalized anti-trans beliefs. Eventually they embrace who they are or the distress exacts its ultimate toll.

It's a fairly straightforward narrative and is completely true for many transfolk. But not all. The knowledge or feeling that one is a gender that doesn't match their body is not at all a necessary part of the trans* experience. Some may conceive of it normatively: I should have been born a different sex but, as much as I wish that were true, I am not.

And then there are those like me who experience the dysphoria as an excruciating longing to be the other gender, combined with the despair that this is never to be. I very rarely thought I should have been born a girl; before coming out and living as a woman I absolutely never felt that I was female. Instead, I wished I had been born a girl and despaired that I hadn't.

Which brings me back to beer and failing to understand that wheat beer is still beer. I was aware of the standard narrative, and based on that I knew I wasn't transgendered. After all, I never felt like I actually was a woman trapped in a man's body; I merely wished I was a woman. Persistently wished for that, to be sure, but it was still a mere wish. The closest thought I could entertain was "transsexual ideation."

I understand the utility of the single, simple narrative. It helps people understand and consequently helps in the push for tolerance and rights. But it can also do a great disservice to those experiencing a struggle that doesn't match the narrative. It can convince us - and make no mistake, there are many of us whose experience is closer to mine than to the standard narrative - that we aren't who we really are and that our experience is invalid. The narrative marks out a space that from outside feels rigid and even exclusionary. "I'm not like that, so clearly I'm not trans."

 The standard narrative isn't a universal. This is pretty much universally true (heh), and sometimes the implicit universality of narratives excludes the complex varieties of human experience. This can hurt our ability to understand both ourselves and others, though I'm not really sure there's a solution which doesn't sacrifice broader empathy.

 tl;dr: I'm a hefewizen.

¹ I am assuming the standard gender binary here. Genderqueer identities are beyond the scope of what I'm discussing and even more complicated AFAICT. I also have minimal knowledge of the genderqueer experience.