#also i have a hunch that other afab people can relate this experience but

[filtheopathic]

as a kid i used to wear headphones in restaurants because i would become overwhelmed by all the noise and have panic attacks and not once was my family like “perhaps this is autism”

[selfiecharmedlife]

RE: Thinking About Buttons (again)

Turns out I was wrong in the last entry. It was actually my four-year HRT anniversary on the 4th of December. I’ve officially been doing this gender stuff long enough to forget how long I’ve been doing it. Even the google doc I write all these entries in is now over 50 pages long. Time has really flown. Pandemic time dilation has certainly helped that along. 

Like with most of these entries, something has been on my mind. For the past year or so, I stepped up to be a facilitator for the local trans support group that I mentioned in an earlier entry. It doesn’t feel like that long ago but, I’ve become one of the veteran members of the group and I’m actually a pretty good facilitator. Volunteering to help out has been one of the more fulfilling things I’ve done in the past few years. By some standards, I might even qualify as a trans elder now. Don’t worry, I have no intentions of putting out hot take think pieces anytime soon. 

The other day, a friend dropped something that has been lingering in the background noise of my brain since.

“Over the course of transition your problems start to become less about being trans and start being more about just being a person.”

I hadn’t thought of how to say it out loud, but that lined up with a lot of how I’ve been feeling. In another month and change, I’ll be attending my first wedding since coming out as trans. It’s exciting but has also been challenging. Women’s formal wear is a minefield of potential fopauxs on top of the already herculean task of finding a dress I like, looks good on me and is comfortable enough to wear for several hours. While trying on a potential winner, I had to ask my partner for help with the zipper. As she struggled to get the thing zipped, I started worrying that it wasn’t going to close because my chest is too broad. Had I been born cis, obviously it would be just close without any hassle. 

Eventually, it did close. The dress fit. It even made my already wonderful ass look even better. Then it dawned on me, it was supposed to be this much of a struggle to get in and out of this thing. If it were any looser, the strapless dress would slide right off. What I had thought was a trans-problem was actually just a person-problem. Anyone would struggle to get into and out of that dress. 

Almost all my recent problems that seem related to being trans are more about the common experience of being a person. The struggles with getting facial feminization are less about being trans and more about trying to navigate the labyrinthian nightmare of a for-profit healthcare system. Same thing with having to take supplemental estrogen for the rest of my life. I think of it kind of like having a chronic medical condition which is again just a person-problem and not really a trans-problem.

Person-problems can overlap with AFAB (assigned female at birth)-problems but they’re not exactly the same. For example, I don’t menstruate. I feel silly about it, but I find myself feeling a little jealous whenever my partner is complaining about cramps. It’s nonsense right? I know I would complain about them too. I know it would suck, but part of me wants to have that problem to complain about.

There are even moments where I get nostalgic for the time my body was convinced it was pregnant for about a week while I was starting progesterone. I even had to cancel a date because I was hunched over the toilet with cramps and nausea. It sucked and yet in that moment I had a taste of AFAB problems. Sometimes I consider going off progesterone to see if I could get back there when I resumed taking it again. Kinda like a tolerance break. 

Four years of pumping large amounts of estrogen into my body has done a lot, but there are limits to what it can do. Honestly, I was sad when I realized I had slipped up and confused my fourth HRT anniversary for the third. It meant I was that much closer to the five year point where most people stop seeing changes. What I got from the process is more than expected but less than hoped for. Even in the absolute dream scenario, I don’t know if I would be totally satisfied. There will always be a gap between where I am and where I want to be. It’s an asymptote extending infinitely forward. No matter how much time passes, I’ll never quite get there.

For the past day or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about the hypothetical button you can press that would instantly make you a cis person of whatever gender. Mostly, it is because I came across a plotline in a fantasy novel that made that hypothetical button a major plot element. In the setting, there is a curse that causes a person to appear as the opposite gender. It’s a relatively common fantasy trope. A character will put on a cursed item of gender bending and spends a portion of the story trying to remove it while other characters crack jokes at their expense. 

In this story however, the curse is used as a vehicle for talking about gender dysphoria in the setting. It first comes up as something that was placed on a woman by her mother who wanted a son and then a second time when a woman seeks out a way to inflict herself with the curse in order to transition. It was a welcome departure from how I’m used to seeing this trope used. As an aside. I would strongly recommend I’m in Love with the Villainess.

Back to the point of departure, I stopped and wondered what might happen if I were inflicted with such a curse. If it flips someone to the other end of a gender spectrum, I don’t know where I would end up. Would it turn me into a man, a woman or just not work at all? Yes, I am a woman but there are some things that I just can’t have. For instance, I don’t have baby pictures or childhood photos that I feel I can share. When other women ask me about growing up, I usually lie and say that I was a pretty intense tomboy. I almost fainted the first time a work friend asked me if I ever get weird food cravings when I’m on my period. 

Those things fill the space between the asymptote of my own transition and cis women. No matter how close I get, it feels like something is missing. It’s lonely. Most people seem to graduate from trans spaces when they get to this point and stop talking about being trans. 

If there was a magical button that would do my life over where everything is the same but I’m now a cis woman, would I even still want to press it with where I am now? Personally, I think I would smash it as hard as I could without a second thought. I also think I still wouldn’t be happy. AFAB problems are still problems after all. My envy is at a distance and the gender just seems greener on the other side of the fence. Even my *very* modest chest is an inconvenience about 99% of the time after all. I think I would even miss parts of myself that stem from my transition. 

I’m at the tail end of the window where I can expect any physical changes from HRT. From this point on, it’s mostly maintenance doses so my body doesn’t start breaking down from a hormone deficiency. Maybe it’s a sign of maturity that my relationship to the fantasy of the gender reversal button has changed so much. It also kind of sucks that I can’t even come up with a scenario where I feel at peace with myself. Even in the perfect fantasy I come up with for myself, gender is still a bitch