Another healing thing I like about my irl jewish community is that my masculinity hasn't ever been questioned. In a lot of ways, I totally get where people feel uncomfortable with the binary expectations of the genders are, but I live my life functionally in a binary way. It's just nice (for me) to wear kippah, to speak hebrew, and it's clear what the expectation is for who I am. In so many ways, it's nice to just take a break from feeling the need to educate people, to be almost a sounding board, and to just focus on judaism. I've gotten so used to feeling out of place that being in jewish spaces just feels nice.
Of course, this isn't to say that all jewish spaces are the same, that jews are a monolith. This is just my experience at my shul. I appreciate that they just accepted me into the fold and that I haven't had to give a seminar like I feel many people in non-jewish spaces almost require of you so that they can even consider accepting you. I know there is a lot of work that trans jews have done and are still doing, and we ought to highlight, recognize, and appreciate.
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Hey, sorry if this is a bit of a personal question - and feel free to ignore it if it is - but how did you know you wanted to start hrt? I am someone who IDs as transmasc and knows in an ideal world, I would've loved to have been born a guy. But the idea of going on hormones is terrifying because I can't figure out if I really want it... I worry about regretting it, or it making me 'unappealing' physically, or my friends judging me for it. Did you ever struggle with similar worries?
I think every person thinking about and starting HRT goes through this. A rite of passage, if you will, and also not a bad thing to do. HRT is a big step, some of the changes (especially on T) are irreversible. It's good to think through if it's a choice that's right for you or not.
That said, it's also Just A Thing You Can Do. I first started really questioning my gender at the end of 2020 (thank you, Elliot Page, for coming out and making me go "oh shit, you can do that?"). I got a therapist to talk about gender... Mid 2022? And started hormones spring 2023, top surgery a year later.
Before getting the therapist, I spent over a year Just Thinking About It. And a lot of the thoughts were around the changes on T and if I'd like them or not or if I'd regret them. If I'd be ugly, after being conventionally attractive as a woman.
It hits a point, though, where eventually you have to pull the plug one way or another. I spent a lot of time thinking about how my body would change on T. A Lot. With longing. I caught myself putting things off Until I Knew For Sure and because I didn't want to do it while being perceived as a woman. I was sitting, treading water for a hypothetical Later that I could start moving towards at any time. I was scared for the Teenage Round 2 phase, and didn't want to spend months being "ugly and awkward", but then the months passed anyway and I was still in the same spot.
HRT isn't an all-or-nothing thing, you can ease into it on a low dose. My doctor started me on a low dose and we ramped up over months. Some T changes can start pretty quickly (voice dropping, bottom growth - this isn't true for everyone, but was true for me). If these changes excite you, make you feel good - great! Keep going! If they scare you, feel wrong - stop. Assess. Figure out what about it isn't right (a gender therapist for all of this process is a Huge Help). In early days if you stop T, the changes can revert, for the most part. But you can always stop at any time.
The bigger thing I actively worked to wrap my head around before starting HRT is - Who Cares If You're Wrong? What's right for you now might not be right for you later. The idea of detransitioning was scary to me, society has such a weird spotlight on it, the Right uses people who have detransitioned as props against transition. But it shouldn't matter. At the end of the day, if I do change my mind, I'll know myself better, and I don't think it's wrong to chase and find comfort in your own body.
A year+ on T, I've mostly made it through the ugly duck phase, I think. I was lucky, I didn't get bad acne or get too oily or anything (after having horrible acne in my first puberty). Most of what I dealt with was the chronic baby face, where I was getting read as male but a teenager - I'm almost 30 and a woman wanted to card me over a free T-shirt at a baseball game because it had beer logos on it. After some middle months of changes and going "oh my god what am I doing" and not feeling confident in how this was all going to turn out, I think of myself as relatively attractive and I think I'm just going to get more vain as my beard comes in. Some of that is physical, sure, but I think a significant amount of that is me feeling more confident in myself and liking the body I'm in more. I was never a selfie or picture person, now I am. I joke I'm like a budgie, always looking at myself if there's a reflective surface nearby. I'm more excited to exercise, I'm interested in lifting weights for the first time, I'm curious what my body on T can do and become. Keep your eyes on the pieces that are going well, the changes exciting you, and let the rest catch up.
My social circle helped a lot. I'm very lucky and blessed to have great friends and family, all of whom are supportive. If you don't have friends who are supportive of you, that are judging you for exploring yourself rather than lifting you up for it, it's a sign to expand the social circle and find ones that are. Family is harder, but that's a thing you have to navigate for yourself and find your own boundaries for.
So, there's no ~one moment~ where you're 100% certain that medical transition is right for you. It's a huge unknown and you're changing the body you've had your entire life. At some point, though, you just have to jump and see how it lands. Part of being alive is making mistakes and doing things you might regret.
That said, the regret rate for trans people is something like 3%. The regret rate for knee surgery is something like 20%. Trust yourself.
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FOR REAL I GET SO MAD WHEN I SEE POSTS LIKE "eww why are ntsmg fans such weirdos!! They dont deserve to have natsume/tsumugi as their favs!!" Like first of all we're not hurting anybody pls let us LIVE, second of all Have You Seen the Characters in Question. Like if we're freaks then what does that make THEM!??!? If they were real theyd be the freaks ur complaining abt!!! TL;DR natsumugi loser weirdo freaks canon and im here for it. Also that alice natsume is so CUUUUTE
ITS KIND OF ODD TBH ?? like obviously i get that not everyones going to like the same stuff but like. if you dont like characters being weird, why do You then also like ntmg.......? if its someone who doesnt ship them thats complaining then fine whatever but its so weird to me when people who claim to ship them make these complaints bc its like?? then why do you ship them???? do you Only like the bits where the two of them are being sweet to each other? do you only like their angsty backstory? do you only like the comedic relief? i have a hard time grasping the idea of dedicating yourself to a pair or character without loving (or at the very least tolerating) every aspect of them........ have these people read the stories? or are they being deliberately oblivious? i have no idea
it makes me really sad how people are so afraid of being seen as "weird" though. too often that word comes with negative connotations when that doesnt need to be the case at all, and i wish these people would stop living in fear and surrounding themselves with those who judge people based off how Socially Normal (according to a christian society) they are
also i just get annoyed seeing ntmg get watered down to some idealized couple completely stripped from their complexities to better fit what we're taught is Morally Correct (according to puritanical beliefs) or reduced to a comedic duo SHDKJFHD
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Thinking the suprisingly wholesome thing about tumblr (and when I do a yearly IG anon thing with the NGL app, too) is that so, so few people use it to be absolute shits.
Like, 99% of the time (unless you're burdened with being a really big creator and in that case I pray for you), people use it because they're just a wee bit shy about being nice off-anon? And like same, bestie, I get it, but it makes me think of how many times I've been somewhere and I've noticed that someone has like, a gorgeous jacket or an amazing look or whatever and I'm so tempted to compliment them on it, but I am socially anxious and I don't want to be weird or creepy or I'm worried about their reaction being bad, so I say nothing? And the person never even knows that I was sitting like 😍 for a good thirty seconds debating on complimenting them.
And then you realise how many people have probably had that exact same feeling around you, so they just sort of quietly admire and move on because slipping an anonymous note into someone's jacket being like "your vibe is God Tier" is serial killer behaviour.
With the IG thing, for example, I remember a friend who I have a very joke-y banter relationship with used it as a chance to be like 'I never say this because we don't talk like that but I really respect and admire you and I'm glad we're friends" and it just stopped me in my tracks bc it's so easy for us as individuals to just never think others go around thinking that way?
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Hello! I came here to ask since I don't know anyone else active to ask, do you have any information on/know where to get information about a Wild Grinders character (toy line exclusive, not in the show, according to the broken down shack that is the fandom wiki) called Beefy? I can't find anything other than like 2 images proving they exist. They are a bulldog like meaty, but have some brown spotting. One of the images is them as an action figure and the other is of them on a box, so must be real.
in short, do you know anything about beefy (not meaty) Wild Grinders?
Foreword: This was written at 11pm
Anon the answer to this entire question is that there's no fully compiled archive of the toys (both past and planned that would be discontinued). But my assumption would be that Beefy has not been confirmed to be part of the next toyline (post-discontinued) because FANDOM Wikia runs on 'opinionated info' aka misinformation and tends to be unregulated. As long as you have an account, you can make any sort of page or manipulate others into believing text.
One of my closest friends drew mecha fanart for an obscure fandom and the Wikia people stole it and claimed it as production art from the official artists (who never planned on making a mecha for their female characters).
Another instance of Wikia being Wikia has to be when one of my headcanons, for another small fandom, led to everyone believing 2 characters were canon brothers. (They weren't, it was just my headcanon).
But looking at the page for 'Beefy', there's no real proof of Beefy to have a toy. Especially when most of the images are of Beefy are just only of Meaty toys. There's no leaked prototypes or any references to Tracy's sketches of Beefy either. Because in order for the toy to be planned for production, Tracy needs to at least draw a reference for it. (He probably has drawn Beefy one time, but very unlikely usable for model reference).
If anything, the page could have originated from Rob Dyrdek making a comment about a Beefy toy from one of his series (he has a lot of reality TV episodes and it's just a random snippet). And it seems that it could have been a color malfunction (very common for toys to have this sort of thing).
Some of the 'leaked' toy plans on Wikia were reuploaded from this Facebook (unactive), where someone who was part of the production team just dropped it off there: https://www.facebook.com/FansOfWildGrindersInBrazil
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