Gender dysphoria pro tip: no one can focus on your chest if they're completely traumatized by your shirt.

Reposted from marbear

The barber who does my fade is about the best quiet ally I need in my life.

I've never come out to him, because the owner of the shop is always low-key transphobic, so he calls me by my old name but.. dude knows... and always tries to affirm me with small gestures. One of them being that lately he has started - entirely of his own accord - to give me a receding hairline xD I thought I was imagining it at first, but I paid attention yesterday and sure enough - just as we were done he took one critical look and surreptitiously shaved off a bit of my temples and my forehead to give me a widow's peak and male pattern baldness xD Read More »

Did a thing, did a thing, did a thing!

that I've been planning to do for 5-6 months now, which is to join a trans gym. Had my first training today and it was so. nice. to do physical things with people like me, with bodies, and stories like mine. To be asked immediately what pronouns and forms of address I use To .not. have to correct people every 5 seconds.

Meanwhile, at the usual training yesterday... After last time I corrected him about 20 times for calling me "she", the instructor has put it into his head that he won't use a. single. pronoun. when referring to me anymore. Not a single one. XD Not he, not they, not any of the Dutch options. Just my name. Which is fine!! You do you, buddy! Way better than "she/her" and I honestly do appreciate the effort. Only, he and I were demonstrating a technique and he literally had to use my name five times in a single sentence XD "So, we begin with Marbear standing in a low stance with Marbear's right leg leading and Marbear's left leg carrying 40% of the weight, while Marbear's plam is facing outward and then Marbear..." You get the picture. If someone didn't know my name before the exercise, now they definitely do 😂 Read More »

Went to a concert last night (my first in 2+ years). Met an ex of mine there, who proceeded to get totally smashed, hit on me the entire evening, and get physical. Made a big show of talking how accepting he was of my transness though lol.

*sigh* Serves me right for leaving the house and trying to have a life.

I was going through my clothes, trying to figure out what to donate, what to sell, and what to upcycle, and I came across my wedding dress. I don't know what to do with it. Clearly I'm never going to wear it again. Part of me wants to get rid of it. This marriage is falling apart by the second, and it hurts to see it.

Part of me can still relive the joy and excitement of that day. We didn't have any money then. He was working 80 hours a week on a traineeship and the only place that would hire me with my two MSc degrees was the thrift shop. So we went for the 10 min free ceremony at 8 am on a Thursday morning, both in thrifted clothes, no rings, no witnesses, just two ladies from the minicipality. But we were so excited and so serious about those vows! The ladies thought we were so cute that they still played Mendelssohn's Wedding March on the city hall bells for us. Read More »

I went to the sports camp after all, but decided to stay only one day. Both good decisions, even though being there felt like swimming through an oil slick. I felt as if I was drowning the entire time, could barely follow instructions at the workshops, and didn't spar at all because I was so out of it.

Funny thing, most women immediately read me as female, but men largely couldn't quite figure me out. It was only toward the end of the day when I had to put on a chest protector that it got gnarly. The men's chest protectors hinder my range of motion, so I use a women's one which is...uh... two clearly separated perky molded boobs *headdesk* The reaction was spectacular. You could literally see the lightbulbs going on on people's faces, and suddenly it was a very confident "she does this", "hold her there" etc. Kill me. Read More »

I am having a distinct "what the fuck am I doing?" moment.

So, a month ago a signed up for a weekend-long martial arts training and sparring event. That would be my first such event since coming out. When I signed up I was finally feeling very secure and completely in state to handle all the surrounding BS like changing rooms, toilets, interactions and introductions to some notable people in the sport, not to mention the actual "contact" aspect of contact sports.

Since shit went down with my partner last Saturday, I've been in a tailspin. Two nights of no sleep and wanting to end it, followed by several days of divorce talk, and it hit me last night that the only reason why I'm still functioning is because I'm dissociating as if my life depends on it (come to think of it, it probably kinda does). I am completely checked out of my body, of my feelings, of my thoughts, of my entire existence. My being is somewhere else, outside my life. Read More »

Today I was feeling good about myself. One of those rare days when I was pure confidence, all day. Unbreakable.

And then it happened. My partner looked at the photo and told me that [edit: I'm deleting that part. It's just shitty and triggering and who wants that.] Not so unbreakable now, are we?

...I can't actually bring myself to type out the rest. Wrote five drafts and deleted them all, because each was one big trigger warning after the other.

It's okay now. We talked things over. But fuck this emotional shit. I just want my one day of confidence back. I know I sound like an edgelord, but I truly don't know how I'm going to look at myself tomorrow and see the confident person from the photo and not the joke/contemptible person that he saw. Read More »

I did the thing. I stopped being a self-sabotaging little bitch and asked my doctor to move me from the general psychiatric care route to a transgender-specific one. It only took me an entire fucking year of trying to navigate this shit on my own. Now all I have to do is wait for two more years for an intake. Which is fine. If the pandemic is anything to measure things by, two years can go pretty fast. I did the fucking thing.

I'm not above processing my feelings in public (um, hi soup) but on the situation with Ukraine I have so many of them that I can't even get anything out. Not in writing, not in IRL talk. It's just too much. So have an installment of my usual trivial queer quandries instead.

Tonight there is a pride night at the cinema and I want to go. I love going to the movies on my own. But I feel like an impostor and a fraud. Like, I don't have the right to be among the other queer folk, the real queer peeps. Why not? Because 95% of the time I'm read as a woman, even though I'm not, and because I'm in a straight-passing relationship, even though the label straight doesn't apply either to my partner or to me. I feel shame over my complicated relationship with the closet. It's a TARDIS but not a fun one; more Eccleston than Smith. Read More »

I've been sewing for something like 10 years, maybe a bit more. Aside from a couple of corsets, I've never really worn anything I've made. I've got an entire shelf with patterns, drawers full of finished and unfinished skirts, dresses, blouses, tops. No matter how fun the fabric or how well I fitted the garment, I always hated putting them on. There was always something off to irritate me. Maybe a seam wasn't perfectly matching another one, or the colour made my skin look weird, or - despite hours and hours of fitting - it pulled in weird places and I hated seeing the wrinkles. So I just assumed that I'm shit at sewing and have no attention to detail, and kept sewing just because I really like thinking about the math of turning 3D body measurements to 2D patterns to 3D garments again. Read More »

The mind is a weird place.

What I want:
to go on a bender. Spend a week drinking nothing but vodka until I can't walk, can't think, am out of myself. Go on Tinder and fuck five different people on five consecutive days, the more humliating the better. Eat nothing but Oreo ice cake.

What I do instead:
I meditate at least once a day. I eat an entirely reasonable potion of chips instead of faceplanting into the bag. I voluntarily wake up at 5:30 in order to have some quiet time to exercise. I cook reasonably balanced meals for me and my partner, who may or may not divorce me because of my gender, but until that future point I still have vowed in front of four old ladies in a municipality that I would make sure he puts a vegetable in his face at least once a day, until death do us part, because I love him. I listen to music on way higher volume than necessary. Read More »

Well, my year began with the shittiest possible conversation regarding transition with my partner, so I got that going for the trainwreck that I fully expect 2022 to be. ☠️

I wish Loforo allowed for individual privacy settings for posts. I kind of want to talk about it, but I don't want to put that conversation up for every user here. Definitely not after someone commented telling me to die on my last post.

So after the depressive crisis drama of the last few weeks or so, earlier this week I took the executive decision not to wait until I can get a doctors appointment, and to go ahead and temporarily up the dose of antidepressants I take. It was an informed decision - I've been on the higher dose before and for quite a long time too, so I was pretty sure it was unlikely to mess me up. And hallelujah!!! Five blessed days without wild mood swings and I'm actually feeling like a human being who can take direction over their life. I actully have the faculty again to perform preventative self-care as opposed to flapping wildly and drowning in the vortex of my own thoughts and dysphoria. Read More »

I'm really struggling. None of my usual strategies are working and I'm barely coping. That's it. Nothing to add. Can't make this post even remotely entertaining. I just want to sleep for a few months and wake up in a different situation.

Me: I am so lonely. I just want to talk to somebody, because I'm feeling so wretched and I'm in so much pain.

Also me: *sets status to invisible on every single IM channel, because I don't want to be seen or heard, because I'm so stupid/awkward/boring/fake/needy/unnecessary/stupid/shitty person and I don't want anyone to see me and I don't want to pretend I'm not one of these things*

Like, my sister just messaged me and I want nothing more than to talk to her, but instead I ran away, because I feel so scared and fake. Fuck this head of mine.

There's a Dutch saying - "meten is weten", or "to measure is to know". I like it a lot. A few days ago my partner mentioned offhandedly that recently I've been about as emotionally stable as a teenager. This rang an alarm bell in my head. I knew that my mental health has been deteriorating in the last few months. I've been tracking my moods for about a year now and had already noticed that in the last quarter my monthly average has been dropping perceptibly. But now I decided to take a closer look at the last month, and sure enough, it's not only that the average score has gone down. There are also huge amplitudes between my highest and lowest moods, going from extreme lows to extreme highs, not only throughout the week but also throughout the day. That's concerning. Very concerning, and I'm kinda mad that I didn't notice it earlier. I know myself and this mood pattern for me indicates that I'm on the fast track to a crisis. As in, calling the suicide helpline at 3 am kind of crisis. Based on my past experience, from this point on I have about three weeks to even this shit out, before shit really hits the fan. Read More »

I started a new job this week and on the official channels I am still listed with my deadname and assigned gender. Meh. Luckily another person with the same name as my legal name started on the same day, so I could be all sneaky and just tell my team, "Ah, that's going to be confusing! Just call me [new masc name], everyone calls me that :)" Everyone caught on and I was pretty happy with how the situation played out.

Fast forward to this morning. Slack pings, I have a message from the team lead:
"Hi [new masc name], can I ask you a personal question?"
Cue panic. OMG. WTF. What do I do? Come out or deflect, come out or deflect? Aaaaaaa! Read More »