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 »

Gender Dysphoria is some fresh hell that eats you from the inside, and it makes your skin feel too tight, and your face is stupid, and your body's all wrong, and your voice is shite, and did I mention how tight your whole skin suit feels?!! It doesn't matter how long you've been in transition, it doesn't matter how well you pass (or if you pass at all), it still keeps coming and you might look fine but it is actually gnawing on your from the inside until you're a blood pudding inside a human skin sack.

Normally this time Friday evening I go training, which helps a bit to get out of my own head. But of course we're in lockdown again and sportsclubs are closed, so I can't go punch my friends/get punched by them, and NO I'm not going out running in public - not when I feel like all eyes are on me and seeing me as some ugly lady with an unfortunate haircut. So it's my home and as many push-ups I can crunch but HELL I HATE THIS! Read More »

The nice thing about being autistic in a relationship with another autistic person is that there is a lot of mutual understanding and lack of judgement when you get overstimulated and as a result lose your ability to regulate your emotions and end up having a tantrum. On the flip side, being autistic in a relationship with another autistic person means that there is now double the chance that one of you would get overstimulated, lose his ability to regulate emotions and throw a tantrum. And in any social situation that you enter as a couple, there is a non-zero chance that both of you would end up overestimulated and unable to regulate emotions at the same time, at which point you end up in a negative feedback loop where you amplify reach other's distress instead of lessening it. And suddenly it's three hours later, you're both exhausted, things have been said that neither of you really meant, and you're finally calm enough to be like, "Wow, that was all completely unnecessary. We were on the same page all along" and start cooperating to fix whatever got broken. Read More »

Tonight my partner called me his boyfriend for the first time and I swear I'm going to end up in the ER with a heart attack from the euphoria I feel. Yes, it was said 90% as a joke, but it's still a huge thing, considering we've been smack in the middle of trying to figure out this whole trans thing and how it affects our relationship. Last week he also unironically used my new masc name for the first time, and I'm just so fucking floored and grateful that he is as he is.

A week ago I was upset and wrote here about an extremely conservative trans- and intersesphobic decision that the constitutional court in my country of origin made: basically that the only valid identity is one's bilogical sex, and that given the demographic crisis of the country. One of my concerns was this will make it even more unsafe for LGBT+ folx. Another was that it was also going to be used as a playing card in the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elecetions.

What do you know. Less than a week later, a bunch of paramilitary neonationalists led by one of the presidential candidates broke into an LGBT+ community centre, trashed everything and beat up some of the people there. At least one of them was armed. And, no, no one has been arrested, although the guy has been identified by the victims. Read More »

Occasionally I share here stories about my gender transition. A few days ago it was one about my observations on the value and joy of living authentically and not fearing to break with convention.

Well, what do you know? Today the constitutional court in my country ruled that that only biological sex exists and that there exists no reason for anyone to be granted legal changes in their civic status with regards to sex and gender identity. The exception being intersex people, and only those with chromosomal intersex conditions that lead to ambiguous secondary sex characteristics, so not even the majority of intersex people. That's rich, on the international day of intersex visibility, too. Read More »

For the longest time I didn't want to start transitioning, because of vanity and some internalized fatphobia. As a woman I was moderately pretty, at least, back when I was thin. Then I put on weight. Like, a lot of it. Which wasn't a problem per se, as oddly enough I enjoyed the process of seeing my body changing that way. It might have even alleviated some dysphoria, because once I stopped being thin people also stopped drawing attention to my body. No one feels compelled to tell a fat girl that she's elegant haha. So that was a relief.

However, I was still scared to start presenting male. I was afraid that what was an acceptably looking but fat woman would translate to a hideous man. And maybe it did. Now that that I've taken the plunge, I look like the love child of Kim Jong-un and James Charles, which is... a look. Yet, every time I see my objectively hideous face in the mirror, the joy I feel is overwhelming. I'm beaming. And people see that and and seem to be genuinely excited about me. There is a lesson here. A lesson about living as the human being you are, not the one that follows a convention that is killing it. Read More »