#(such as HRT not being a magical cure for mental illness)

[saucerfulofsins]

Yeah tbh that's part of the popular "feminist"/TERF anti-trans rhetoric. The idea that transition is essentially self-mutilation, and thus an act of self-hate/self-destruction.

It's the words people use to prevent vulnerable people from transitioning, and for those who have transitioned, to detransition. A lot of the commentary starts fairly innocuous (I want people to love themselves and their bodies) and basically ends up with "you're dead to me if you transition/don't detransition". Unfortunately some of that does actually tie in to the lesbian community being concerned that too many of "them" leave/"are transed" (I hate that phrasing fyi). To them, that's a netto loss.

And yeah. People like Blaire White, Ariel Scarcella and Buck Angel DO draw an audience of people commenting this crap. People actually make a difference between "true" and "fake" transgenders, and then come to the "realization" that "there is no difference, it's all fake". It's all a pipeline of anti-trans vitriol. Usually people who believe the former may use someone's preferred pronouns, and ppl belonging to the latter group will reject all preferred pronouns, no matter how well someone passes.

I once asked someone which toilet I should use, if I present as male but am biologically female. They told me "you shouldn't be going to public toilets at all, stay at home." They don't give a shit abt EVERYONE's safety. They only support cisnormativity. Aka, their COMFORT.

PS. Part of why this group of feminists will sooner discuss MTF than FTM is becaus they see MTF as intruders, and they see FTM as in-group, aka women who are either fully dead to them, or who strayed from the path but can still be lured back; quite a few detransitioners fall into this group as well.

some people will really see elliot page simply existing and feel like it’s their right to say the weirdest shit about him. it’s really incredible (and i mean that in the most literal sense of fucking unbelievable) how openly these people admit that they think we exist solely to benefit them — no lives of our own, no autonomy. as far as they’re concerned, we’re just here to look pretty and have their babies, to decorate and populate their world.

this is why i really just have to laugh when someone tries to argue that transmasculinity is anti-feminist. can’t you see how much our mere existence makes the misogynists short-circuit? how much our transitions go directly against all of the expectations they put on us? transmasc transitions are in such direct opposition to their worldview that they resort to just treating us like we’re dead because our lives simply are not compatible with their version of how the world should be. we make ourselves so egregiously and irrevocably unfuckable to them that they’re actually going around unironically mourning the “loss” of our bodies.

[gor3sigil]

I’m Trans and Insane and I’m doing fine.

[TW Psychosis, transphobia, psychophobia, medication, psych ward]

“Are you sure ?” she asked.

I remember looking back at her in disbelief, because that was certainly a question I never asked her when she came out.

“Why do you ask ?” I say.

“Dude, I’ve seen you go into depersonalization so hard you even thought you were a human soul in a robot vessel and now, you want me to trust you when you say that you, too, are trans ?”

That’s the memory that comes back to me as I fold and put in my bag my psychiatrist’s note attesting that I suffer from gender dysphoria, NOT LINKED to any psychotic symptoms. Here it goes in my folder with my prescription note, an increase - again - of my anti depressants and Xan, and my endocrinologist’s HRT prescription, increased too - finally.

I go to two separate pharmacies to pick up each prescription for two reasons:

There is only one in this godforsaken town that always had testosterone in stock.

I can’t explain to you with words the look you can get when you give back to back, to someone who, despite not being a doctor, works in healthcare, a note for trans HRT and then a note for psychiatric meds.

And I’m lucky, because I’m not taking antipsychotics anymore. Contrarily to what you could think, it doesn’t magically makes the voices and the shadowy people disappear, but it can make a mess of your head pretty bad and my doctor and I both agreed that I didn’t need more damage up here than what I already had. And no, it doesn’t make your delusions vanish magically too: in fact, I was still pretty certain that I was talking to my soul family out here in Argentine telepathically about my mission on Earth, the meds just made it more difficult to understand their voices, but the belief was still solid.

Anyways, I’m back home with the Hoy Grail I fought tooth and nails to get: a letter from the Sacred Council of Mental Sanity also known as Psychiatry that I was, indeed, a bit delulu, but also trans, and that both things didn’t play into each other. My transness wasn’t a delusion, my delusions didn’t have anything to do with being trans.

Or did it ?

Chicken or egg, you know the drill. Did I have my selves fractured before and one of the piece that shattered my brain happened to make me trans or was I just trans with a shitload of traumas in the back that made me insane ?

But don’t worry, at least, trans people when we’re together, we have each other’s back ! Right ?

“Transidentity ISN’T a mental illness !! We don’t DESERVE to be FORCIBLY LOCKED UP and MEDICATED and MADE TO CONFORM FOR OTHER’S SENSE OF SECURITY !!”

Neither do I, RIGHT ?

Oh

Or do I ?

Remember what she said, my girlfriend, right at the beginning ?

How I can’t be trusted about myself when sometimes I don’t even have a sense of self anymore or I have too much selves who fight against each other ?

And what do we say to that ?

Get treatment. Get in-patient. Take medication. And for the love of God, shut the fuck up about it, you’re giving us a bad name.

Because being trans and crazy can’t exist. It’s absurd. You have to fix one of these two things. Choose which jacket I’ll wear, and they call it a straitjacket for a reason it seems, so am I queer or am I insane ?

All I know today is there isn’t a universe in which I’m a trans without any mental illnesses, or mentally ill without being trans. And yet, I can’t tell you how many time I got asked “do you think you’d be trans if you never got through [x trauma] ?”. I. Don’t. Know. I’ll never know. And I deserve just as much agency as you get despite being mentally ill. If you don’t believe in that, don’t come yapping about “liberation for all of us”, but “if one of us is crazy they’ll all think I am too and that can’t happen”.

No LGBTQIAA+ person deserves to be told they need to be put away, to be cured, to be allowed out in the open only if they’re deemed “acceptable” by society’s standards. And no mentally ill people deserve to either.

No trans person should be going through years of counseling to have the access to HRT.

And I shouldn’t have had to threaten my own mother’s life to avoid being locked in an adult psych ward at 14.

If you ever think, for one second, that these two things have nothing to do with one another, you are far removed from history.

To hear queer people say “yeah but some mentally ill people are dangerous !” feels like you don’t even know where you come from.

And if I want to say, that me being trans is linked to me being mentally ill, or at least, that both are connected in a way, all hell breaks fucking loose.

So I’ll explain very carefully.

See, when I was young, my mind got shattered into a thousand of pieces I had to try to glue back on. All these pieces of myself broke further more down the line because I couldn’t catch a fucking break. And now, it happens that the final puzzle does not have the same face it had before. It happens that its shape changed over time, for reasons over the control of all of us who tried to build ourselves back. Now there’s a bigger picture, less pieces, a few other shadows, and me. Built from the shatters. With my own needs and afflictions.

And whoever you are, whatever your agenda might be, I will not let anyone take any agency away from me under the false pretext that I can’t know anything for myself. They say that about children, they say that about minorities, about physically disabled people, about the people they want OUT. And my trans siblings, you know that.

I came out for the first time 7 years ago, to my then girlfriend, who was the one asking the question that is the first sentence of this text. I came out a second time 3 years ago. Been on HRT, had top surgery, had psychotic breaks, got my meds changed, switch therapist.

Because I am trans and crazy. And yet, all these choices I made, I made myself. It didn’t have to be that hard to get the basic care I needed. It didn’t need to be. But it WAS. And I’m part of the lucky crowd of people who had access to out-patient treatment, who never have been locked up in ward, who managed to stay alive through meds withdrawals without medical assistance when I had no therapist.

Be very careful of when you start to put conditions on the rights you think you deserve. Be very, very careful about your definition of sanity and of how it warps the way you see people. When you start to say “I have access to that, but there’s people like X or Y who shouldn’t BECAUSE”, pause and ask yourself what led you to think this way. More often than not, you’ll find yourself playing the same mind games as the ones you swore to fight against, and when it gives them the upper hand, they won’t hesitate to come for you after that.

[gayhenrycreel]

amatonormativity can only be defeated if society learns that people can have different needs.

most people need sex. i need sex to stay mentally healthy, but not everyone is the same. i also need gluten, but some people get really sick from it. a lot of people need romantic love for emotional fulfillment, which i will never understand and find very strange, but thats okay, because people are different.

ableism is also tied into this. i need things to be explained very clearly, often multiple times, otherwise i dont understand. sometimes im literally unable to process sound enough to understand what people are saying. most people dont need basic sentences explained multiple times to understand, so i have a need that others dont have.

a lot of amatonormativity is similar to ableism. i theorize this is because society views both lack of attraction and disability as biological inferiorities that need "curing". this is why historical queerphobia is extremely ableist. electro conversion therapy is exactly the same thing one of my dead relatives suffered for being mentally ill (note that this form of... well, torture, literally cooks brain cells, eventually having similar effects as a lobotomy).

intersex people are often forced on hrt that makes them sick, because perisex society believes that "normalcy" is what people need.

ive heard of asexuals being forced on libido meds because asexuality is assumed to be a medical condition.

all of these are forms of conversion therapy (if your country has not banned igm, conversion therapy is still legal, sorry).

again with the inherent ableism, i used to have problems with anxiety induced meltdowns, and my psychiatrist assumed it was because of my already treated adhd. he forced me on ritalin, which i already had a record of it not working for me. my adhd meds that work were taken from me and i had to take whats basically mild meth. for 3 days straight, i had a panic attack. singular. it continued for days without stopping. as soon as this started happening my mum took me off ritaln, against that doctors orders. for a week i had no adhd meds, so i microdosed magic mushrooms and my anxiety (and adhd) caused no problems for that whole week.

all of these are medical assumptions, assumptions that a non existent problem needs curing. my adhd was fine. i was treated with a med that had worked since i was 5.

theres a huge similarity between gay men being forced on testosterone to try to make them more masculine, and me being forced on ritalin to treat a medical issue that didn't exist in an attempt to make me normal. (the problem i had was much more about my autism not being accommodated btw).

queerphobia and ableism have been intertwined since western society came up with eugenics.

i dont need to be fixed, i need to be loved instead of treated like a problem. people always think my autism is "worse" when they abuse me, and its just because i cant mask when im scared. it becomes a cycle of me being abused for not masking, and not masking because im scared. in the same way, things like psychosis are made infinitely worse by psych wards. can you imagine having a delusion that the government is hunting you and then actual cops throw you in a cell and drug you? thats reality for many psychotics! it happened to me, and everytime i became more convinced that i was being tracked.

queerness is treated how disabilities are treated, because to the medical system they are the same: disorders, and disorders are inferior.

in both cases people just need to be cared for. we may be totally different, but we have so many similarities in our experiences.

a society that sees us as the same will treat us the same.

[diamondsableye]

“Depressed? Just be happy!!

ADHD? Just pay attention!!

Autism? Socializing isn’t that hard!!

Gender dysphoria? Just be happy in your body!!

Y’all do realize like... that’s not how things work right?”

Hi. You left the above comment on some anti-gender post and I just want to let you know that you’re fucking stupid and you have no clue what “TERFs” think if this is what you have to say. We’re not saying “be happy in ur body uwu self love” we’re telling you that a woman’s only criteria for being a woman is her femaleness. Mental illness sucks. Depression sucks. Anxiety sucks. OCD sucks. Gender dysphoria sucks. None of these are things guaranteed to be cured by just sheer force of will and 99.99% of (real) feminists agree. There’s no magic cure for any of these, not even altering genitals or taking HRT will cure gender dysphoria. The best we have is therapy and meds to help. But even if you’re taking ADHD meds, you’re still a person with ADHD. Even if you have gender dysphoria, you’re not magically the opposite sex, and gender is a sexist social construct. Maybe you should stick your head out the window every once and a while and see how not black and white the world is.

Listen I just found out that my cat has cancer so I really don’t want to have to deal with you more than I have to. I came back onto this app to quickly chat with a friend and I’ve got work to do so this response is gonna be very short.

First of all, stop treating medical transitioning with such disregard. Of course they don’t “cure” gender dysphoria but these procedures are a huge advancement in medical technology and they’re extremely effective at reducing gender dysphoria in a myriad of ways. So don’t phrase it as some nilly whilly thing.

Secondly, you do do realize that sex is measured through the observation of 5 different traits correct? Chromosomes, gonads, hormones, and internal and external reproductive anatomy/the primary and secondary sex characteristics. You can change your hormonal sex through HRT and you can get surgeries to alter your primary and secondary sex characteristics as well as modify or remove your internal reproductive organs. Really the only thing that can’t truly be changed in some way shape or form are your chromosomes. So like... unless you’re gonna argue metaphysics here along the lines of “once your birth sex always your birth sex”.... you’re kindof... incorrect here? Sure you can never be cis, but biological sex is modifiable to various degrees. Again, if you’re gonna challenge this you’re arguing metaphysics when we’re discussing biology.

Also you do realize that currently it’s impossible to determine accurately how intrinsic gender is to the human condition right? You’re kindof making an assertion here without any evidence. We live in an incredibly gendered society and unless we’d be willing to subjugate humans to little or no contact to the outside world or other people starting from birth, we’re unable to truly determine how much of gender is purely socially constructed, how much of it is internally produced, or how immutable it may be. Are gender roles sexist and should be done away with? Of course. Is gender identity completely created through society or is it more innate? We don’t know and we can’t tell for sure.

Anyhow all that aside, even if I was wrong on every single point here, my initial argument is still valid. If you recognize that gender dysphoria is harmful and can severely damper a person’s ability to pursue a meaningful existence in certain cases, but the only words of sympathy are “yeah well it sucks but you’ll never be a real woman/man” then...???? You’re just... leaving people to themselves and expecting them to get over it. Many if not all trans people have an irrepressible need to be the gender they identify with and internally are, that need demands that they be seen as their gender within social contexts, and causes great harm when that need is not met. It would be like if you told me, an autistic person, that “sure it sucks that you’re an aspie, but you’ll never be a neurotypical” and I’m saying yes! I know! And that fact does distress me because people on the spectrum often face great negative stigma in society, and that’s maybe 1/100th of what trans people go through! You’d still be doing absolutely nothing to actually help and if anything you’d be making me worse if you kept insisting that no matter what I’d never be mentally healthy! It might be true but it’s totally uncalled for and ignores a fuckload of broader needs!

If you’re doing absolutely nothing to help, and if the most prominent leaders of your movement are doing their best to revoke the rights of health and safety that trans people need, while also denying them their identity, a key component to their health and happiness, then how is that any different than telling them to “get over yourself, just be fine as your agab”??? Like I’m very baffled that you don’t see the demonstrable harm you guys are doing to trans people, either that or you just don’t care?? Either way, you’re not helping, you’re hurting people, and EVEN IF my analogy was flawed, maybe stop perpetuating ideology and supporting movements that demonstrably hurt trans people instead of focusing on a fucking reply I left on a goddamn post.

@terf-tips @reptile-lesbian

If you all would like to add anything feel free, I need to finish some last minute college assignments.

[cntrspll]

this is a love letter to my own fic

hi hello hey, this is an essay about my own fic and the feelings i have about it. fic can be found here.

i am going to try so hard to keep this organized but i don’t know how well that will work soooo let’s go!

on the fic overall:

i just... like magnus. i think he is a fan fave for a reason, but i think there’s a lot of missing discussion of his post-canon situation and the development thereafter. when i finished listening to balance for the first time (in february-ish this year, i think?), i remember being super frustrated with where parts of the fandom had landed their focus. this isn’t an uncommon fandom thing, and i totally get where it comes from. some characters are just super relatable and a lot of fun to write about and have like absolute piles of stuff to unpack, so it’s totally fair that some characters get more focus than others, but where i felt that some of my faves got a lot of fandom focus, others... didn’t.

so this fic was in part an attempt to rectify that, because i wasn’t finding the unpacking of magnus and his emotional / mental state that i wanted. that being said, there are a couple fics that i did draw a little bit of inspiration from, the biggest probably being patterns of migration by goodnicepeople. the depiction of magnus as this big strong dude who also has these quiet vulnerabilities that he doesn’t like admitting to people is like, in part just really accurate to canon, but also something that i really wanted to see explored more, and i didn’t find a whole lot of other fics that fit that, so in part i just wanted to set out to put a little more into that.

also, like, i work in food service, and we are in a pandemic, and i moved in the middle of this year and i started hrt this year and have been dealing with the fallout of coming out and just kind of everything, and this fic was a really good way of just like, distracting myself from everything and sitting down for a little every day and thinking about something else and not so much about everything that was happening around me. so there is a good part of this fic that is just like, me coping with everything and trying to reorient myself a little. and it worked pretty well for that!

on process:

ok first things first, this was never meant to be 133k long. when i first sat down to write this, it was going to be a handful of snapshots set across [undetermined amount of time here] of magnus dealing with isolation and insomnia, and it was only meant to be like, maybe a 20k oneshot? that obviously did not happen. i think my original estimate once i accepted that this was gonna be multichaptered was like 60-70k, but then the chapters started getting longer with each one i finished, and then i wanted to add in an interlude, and then i decided i needed an epilogue, and here we are.

i’ll talk about this in other sections too, but as i wrote, i just kept finding more and more things that i wanted to talk about. i was also in the process of relistening to balance i was writing, and i kept running into little things that happened over the course of the show that i was like... oh shit! and that would inspire another scene or an interaction i wanted to write or something i wanted to focus more on, and the whole thing just kept getting more and more and bigger and bigger.

i’ve said it like 50 thousand times now, but i have never written anything this long before. i tried really hard to be regimented about the way i did it, because from the beginning i knew this was going to be an emotional journey for me to write, but i knew that if i let it slide for a week or so then i would never finish it. so to get through it, i wrote almost every day for a minimum of an hour. the process that i’ve found works best for me when i’m writing is using word sprints, putting on some music, and then forcing myself to tune out of social media and everything else for 25 minutes. i try to do between 750-1k words in that time period, then the site gives you a five minute break, during which i usually check twitter or fact check if i need to, and then i go back in and do another sprint. this works really well for me because i wasn’t trying to hit a specific word goal in any given day, just like... trying to sit down and write. i also tried not to guilt myself too much if i missed a day, or if i only did one sprint instead of two, or anything like that, and that’s kind of what helped me get through the whole monster without instantly dropping it as soon as i had another idea.

on mental health and recovery:

so one of my big personal pet peeves in fiction is the idea that trauma recovery is like, a one time single event deal. like, someone has this big horrible thing happen to them or they have some pressing mental health issue and then someone else walks in and they have one conversation and bam, everything is fine. i was exposed to a lot of [fan]fiction when i was younger that kind of supported this kind of narrative, and i get that there is a certain sort of wish fulfillment thing to that, but it also sucks, being an adult and having Problems(TM) and knowing that it absolutely does not work like that.

so when i set out to write a fic about trauma and mental illness and recovery, i felt kind of a responsibility to not fall into that trap and write it like, okay and then magnus and taako talk about it and taako’s like hey dude you’re depressed but it’s okay and then magnus doesn’t have nightmares anymore. also, because this is taz and the canon of like, historical accuracy is complete bullshit, i can put therapists and psychiatry and psychiatric medications in my fic and no one can tell me i’m wrong and it doesn’t exist. elevators exist, so i can make ssris and anti anxiety pills exist.

but also, magnus as a character is not going to jump into that right away. it is canon fact that he doesn’t like accepting or asking for help with stuff like this, and yes there are a couple big moments where he does, but like i bring up a couple times in the fic, mental health struggles are a big jump from like, a physical fight using swords and axes and shit. and this i think is really accurate to a lot of people’s struggles with mental illness, just taking that first step and admitting that you don’t feel okay, and that you need someone’s help to deal with it. that’s super super scary even to admit to like, your closest friends.

so that’s why magnus kind of shies away a number of times from some of the conversations that people try to start with him about mental health. taako and carey and lucretia and pretty much everyone else approach him at some point about opening up about this stuff, but he pulls away because admitting that kind of vulnerability to someone else is super scary, even if you’ve maybe admitted it to yourself already.

i also wanted to make sure that at the end of the fic, he wasn’t magically better. this is something else that i think people kind of forget, like... trauma and the problems that it causes don’t go away just because of therapy and medication. those things help, they help you reform the ways you think about yourself and about the world, but they don’t change the struggles you’ve been through or the sometimes biological problems that are causing whatever issue you’re having. and i remember reading a lot of fic when i was a kid where someone would be depressed, and then they’d fall in love and get magic dick or something and then they’d never be sad again, which... isn’t great.

but at the same time, i didn’t want it to end on this note like, oh everything is still bad even though he worked so hard to open up and get help, because that sucks, too. so it was really important to me that the fic end on a hopeful note, like, magnus isn’t cured. he still has bad days and bad weeks and sometimes he is just as low as he was before, but he also has like, normal days, which is something that i think you kind of forget can even exist when you’re depressed, or when you’re dealing with any mental illness. but like, i really wanted it to be obvious that things did get better and even if he’s still coping with it and it’s not going away, he’s okay. he’s gonna be all right.

on an unreliable narrator:

this kind of plays into some of the mental health stuff, but one thing that i love about taz that i really wanted to play into with this fic is the idea of limited perspective. griffin does some really cool fucking things with this, specifically in relation to the ipre and the big reveal in the last lunar interlude, with the idea of like... a character can only know the things that they know. like, magnus knows that there is a picture of him depicted as a red robe, and barry knows that they’re all red robes, and taako knows that they found the umbra staff next to a red robed skeleton and that the umbrella spelled out lup at one point, but none of them necessarily know all the things that the other person knew, and none of them know all the things that lucretia knows or that fisher knows or junior knows, etc etc.

unfortunately, just because the pace of the story picks up so much in that last lunar interlude, there isn’t a whole lot of space to explore that like, disconnect between all these facts that they each have as individuals. and given the perspective of mental health and the way that plays into your perceptions of yourself and your perceptions of other people’s perceptions, i really wanted to delve into like… magnus’s misunderstandings.

this is not a strictly straightforward unreliable narrator situation, but i did bring in some elements of that. i really wanted to explore the disconnect between how magnus sees and how everyone else sees him and his issues. there are also a couple moments where he flat out completely misinterprets their intentions, which unfortunately i didn’t delve into as much as i wanted to so they ended up mostly being fun easter eggs for, uh… me? i guess?

one of those moments is the scene in ch 4 where barry and magnus are sitting in the kitchen and barry starts to ask magnus something. magnus assumes it’s going to be about his mental health, and that this is barry stepping up as representative for everyone else to talk to him about it, but it’s really meant to be a precursor to their conversation in ch 6 where they talk about barry and lup and marriage and proposals.

magnus gets a little perspective on this later, i think in ch 7(?) where he’s thinking about how maybe their lives don’t completely revolve around him and he’s missing some of their perspective. but like, they all have their own shit going on, and they all love him and they’re worried about him, but also, barry is thinking about lup. lup is thinking about taako. taako is thinking about lucretia. lucretia is thinking about davenport, and davenport is thinking about his own issues, and so on and so on and they’re not all just like… waiting to pounce on magnus the second he shows weakness.

a lot of that plays into the hypervigilance of ptsd, too. magnus is very aware of any perceived threat, and he sometimes treats the people around him as threats, when all they’re doing in reality is thinking like, man i wish he didn’t live out here by himself all the time.

on a more meta note, i also have a tendency to make every character i write just like, a super good judge of character. i don’t think magnus is that, and i really wanted to lean into that. magnus does not read intention super well, even when that intention is genuinely good.

on the ipre and their relationships:

so i… really don’t write gen fic a lot. even when i do, it is almost always tinged with a little bit of background shipping, and there is some of that in this, but whereas in most fandoms i end up being a multishipper, for some reason with taz i’ve ended up pretty much only caring about the canon ships (sorry…). that being said, the platonic relationships in taz (and especially in balance) are some of the most compelling and important fictional relationships that i’ve ever encountered. like, they are just really well fucking done.

this being the magnus love letter that it is, i really wanted to focus on magnus’s distinct relationships with every member of the ipre crew. i don’t know how obvious this is in the actual narrative, but with the exception of the interlude and the epilogue, the story is broken down into one chapter for each member of the starblaster crew (in order, magnus, taako, merle, davenport, barry, lucretia, lup). i did this specifically because it was really important to me that i dive into all of them and their particular issues. i didn’t quite get the deep dive with merle or davenport that i would’ve liked to, but hopefully in the future i’ll get more time to explore that.

anyway, in case it isn’t obvious, lup is probably my favorite fictional character literally ever in any media created by anyone in the history of time. i say this only because a lot of this fic was set up to build to the conversation between her and magnus in ch 8 out on the mountain where he finally opens up for the first time. there are some really incredible unexplored parallels and relationships in taz (unexplored mainly because like, where would it even fit in canon), and while some of them are super self indulgent (ie, lup and mags, barry and mags), i really really really wanted to dig into those a little more. things like the conversation where taako is talking about everyone brushing over his trauma to rush to forgive lucretia, or lucretia talking about trying to learn to love writing again and recognize happy moments, davenport almost admitting that he’s not completely sure about stepping back into the family in his former role… i could write an entire fic on any of these, really.

but ultimately, this being a magnus fic, i tried to filter those conversations through a perspective of two things: first, how does this affect magnus and his mental health journey, and second, what can magnus do to help this. those scenes where magnus is trying to help someone with something and they’re like, backhandedly helping him are some of my favorite interactions in the fic.

the other thing i really really really wanted to explore that i never see enough of in fic is magnus and carey’s relationship. carey is canonically magnus’s best friend, and yet in fic i feel like she gets pushed to the side a little in favor of the starblaster crew. which i get, they’ve got a hundred and ten years of shared trauma, but also, travis flat out states that carey is magnus’s best friend, so… i mean, there is also a little bit of self indulgence here, because i am also a man who is exclusively best friends with lesbians, but you know.

that being said, i really wanted to emphasize that relationship in particular, which is why carey doesn’t have her own dedicated chapter and instead kind of slides in and out of each one and slowly helps magnus along the way. her personality i also feel is like, the exact kind of thing that magnus needs to push him into accepting / asking for help and moving towards recovery.

on real life parallels:

ok, i swear to god i did not intend to make this a holiday fic posted during the holidays. i started writing this in june, and again, it was only meant to be like 20k and not necessarily entirely set during candlenights. that kind of happened, anyway? candlenights just seemed like the best vessel to get all these characters whose post-canon situations i wanted to explore into the same room, and i finished the first draft around mid october and i wanted to give myself plenty of time for editing, so it honestly just ended up coincidentally aligning with the holidays. go figure.

that being said, isolation ended up featuring pretty heavily in this fic. that i think is to be expected to a certain degree given the nature of mental health and recovery and blah blah blah, but i probably unintentionally ended up leaning into it a little more because like… this year. and the holidays tend to be a time that a lot of us feel really isolated, and this year especially, but one of the big things for me this year is that like, all of my friends live out of state. the closest one to me is still a good 2-3 hour plane ride, which i am absolutely not risking. i had like a hundred plans to go see people and do things this year, and those obviously got cancelled.

probably the biggest one of those things was seeing a friend who i have kind of started a new years tradition of seeing, but we ended up calling that off out of safety considerations, of course. and it sucks! it’s not fun! i also moved out this year and i have my own place and in june i was really hoping that things would be okay by now and i could have all my friends come in from out of town for new years and that didn’t happen. and i wasn’t intending for this fic to be a kind of wish fulfillment of like, here’s my new place post-[saving the universe / coming out and becoming a real person], let me show my found family around my hometown and let’s make new holiday traditions together now that we’re no longer [fighting the apocalypse / literal children] and everything will be fun and happy and good, but that is kind of what happened anyway. [insert joke here that goes like “do you project your real world problems and mental health issues onto fictional characters or are you normal?”]

but yeah, magnus’s mental health struggles did kind of accidentally become a little bit of a pandemic / quarantine life parallel. i did not mean for that to happen, but it did help me tease out a little bit of what it is that i feel like i’m missing and what i want in the future when things are better, and i hope it helped some other people figure that stuff out too, maybe?

and in conclusion:

i said this a little bit in the final notes in the fic, but i am so so so grateful and emotional over the comments i’ve gotten from some of you. i’ve said it already, but this was such an emotional rollercoaster for me to write. i put a decent amount of my own mental health issues into the stuff i wrote into magnus, and it was genuinely therapeutic and like… super helpful and important. it was also a big struggle, and there were some scenes i came out of feeling incredibly drained and like i needed to not write for a week.

so that being said, those of you who have commented things about how this fic helped you deal with your own emotional turmoil or helped put something in perspective for you, i am genuinely so happy to hear that i’ve impacted you in that way like, at all. that is so incredible to me, and not necessarily what i set out to do, but it means so much to hear someone say that and also to know that someone felt comfortable sharing that with a stranger on the internet. thank you so so so much.

again, this fic means so much to me. the fact that it’s impacted even a handful of people in that way is absolutely amazing. some of the things you guys have said have had me seriously choked up. i am so glad that anyone even took the time to read all 133k of this, let alone that it affected people like that.

i don’t know if i’ll be writing more about magnus in this universe. i would love to! but i’m also super happy with where i’ve left his story. i have plans to explore the calen thing in the future, but only kind of tangentially in a side mention and not fully, so who knows? there is more though, a lot with taako and kravitz and lup and barry and hopefully one day i will find the motivation somewhere in me to flesh out everyone else’s situations a little more, too. who knows!

anyway, i just want to say thanks again to everyone for reading, and even more so if you are reading this dumb essay. you’re super cool.

[tmitransitioning]

I've known and tried to suppress the fact that I was transgender all my life but I've reached the point where it's like, I'm not happy here, I gotta transition and start being myself. I want to get on HRT soon. However, in my years of depression, I've put on a lot of weight. I hear it is very difficult to get on MTF hormones and lose weight at the same time. But I don't know if I can go another year before starting E as I try to shed pounds. Is it really THAT impossible to do both at same time?

it sounds to me like you’re really at the point where you want to stop living as a person you’re not.  I can’t tell you what you SHOULD do, but i would personally rather begin my journey and work on getting other problems under control when i feel less depressed and more energetic to work on those issues, rather than try to struggle through my depression in the hopes that i can /one day/ be the person i need to be.  I’m speaking honestly, as a fat person, who has struggled with mental illness for more years than not in his life.  When I'm depressed, everything is harder.  Transition isn’t a magic pill that cures depression, but living as the wrong person sure didn’t make the depression better for me. 

Good luck.  

[realtransfacts]

hi i live in norway and i been at a pshycologist for 1 year now, talking about gender stuff, and i rlly wanna go on T, but i have to "get my depression fixed" before i can get hrt, pshycologst now thinks depression is cleared up but i now think i need anti depressants because its getting really bad, but idk if that'd slow down my transitioning? like if i have a mental illness i have to get it cleared up which tbh to me makes 0 sense, idk what to do anymore tbh ? any advice? 1/2

2/2 norwegian here, so if i still have depression (it cant be cured tho?) i have to get that cleared up before i get hrt, and i should get hrt next year max, but tbh waiting has made me suicidal and dysphoria makes me depressed, but being depressed has to magically clear up so i can get rid of dysphoria?? so its just an evil circle of how healthcare literally laughed in my face (they laughed at me when i told them i was bullied for my name, it was humiliating) and idk what i can do to help myslf

I’m so sorry you’re being put in such a shit situation. You shouldn’t have to choose between getting help for your dysphoria or your depression - you should be allowed to get help for both of those things at once, especially as you say that the two are connected.

I have heard from other Norwegian trans people in similar situations in the past though, so you are at least (perhaps unfortunately) not alone in being put into a crap situation like this.

I don’t know all the laws and I am in no position to make these decisions for you. But if once you are on T you can feel certain that it isn’t taken away from you, and you feel like you can manage your depression until then, it might be worth considering waiting to seek help for the depression until that point. That way you could get the help you need for both things, without needing to put off your transition any longer than necessary.

It absolutely sucks having to do that, or even having to consider doing that. It shows how shit the trans and mental health care is. But it is what it is.

Of course, as I said, I don’t think I should be telling you what and what not to do here. That is just what I imagine I would have done in that situation, if the things worked that way. But that also very much depends on that you would be able to keep your depression and suicidal thoughts under some sort of control until you started hrt, and I understand that that might not be possible for you.

If you are able to get in touch with some other Norwegian trans people, irl or online, who are going through the process of getting to hrt or who have already gone through it, I would strongly recommend doing that. Having a network, big or small, of people who understand you and who you can turn to for support or just to vent to can be a hugely relieving thing. So having that might make the waiting time feel more managable.

Other than that I don’t really know what to say, sorry.

If any of my followers have any other advice or suggestions for anon, please do feel free to add to this post.