#because this year has been rough and her mastectomy really did a number on her self-esteem Tumblr posts

[romantichore]

🙃

[fulcrum-agent]

Dysphoria

I’m going to talk about some things that I need to get out there a bit more than I generally do. So today, I’m going to discuss my gender identity, gender dysphoria, and what it’s doing to me emotionally and mentally. Before I end up falling into a repeat of March.

People on both sides of the fence in regards to gender and sexuality (meaning both the LGBTQ+ community and the “straights”/”cis” world) aren’t going to like everything I’m about to say here. But the past few days and weeks, I’ve been feeling the same kind of horrible pressure I had largely freed myself from a year ago, some of it is almost as oppressive as when I was a teenager.

It’s not just going to be anecdotal information, not just “feels” - I involve science in everything.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the LGBTQ+ community can get upset about the use of science with gender identity and sexuality. A lot of really bad science has been done in an attempt at erasure and vilification. But that shouldn’t lead to discounting the good science that is starting to make its way into the fore.

All that out of the way, let’s get started.

Taking a trip in the Way Back Machine, when I was in utero, mum wasn’t keen on getting ultrasounds. It wasn’t something that was well covered by her insurance, and she had issues with the gel they use for them. So the doctors were more heavily relying on other methods to determine gender, and the few ultrasounds mum could afford weren’t very conclusive due to positioning. This was back in the late 70s/early 80s, and the tech wasn’t as good as it is now.

The vast majority of markers pointed towards the concept that I was a baby boy. The pregnancy and much of the social stuff surrounding it were treated like I was going to be a boy. There was a stupid amount of pastel blue involved.

As it turned out, not only were their predicted due dates off dramatically (an entirely separate story there), but physically, I was a female baby; it was so expected that I’d be male, they had no female names handy, so they used the name of the type of piano they bought for me (spoilers: I’ve always hated my birth name because of this).

Essentially, I’ve had gender issues since birth. One of my doctors expects that I’ve had PCOS nearly my entire life, possibly even before puberty, since my testosterone levels even in utero were higher than they should be.

While I personally had almost 0 concepts of gender and the societal bullshit around till around puberty, it still affected me all the damn time.

I was almost immediately labelled a tomboy, because I was physically active - climbing trees, playing sports, wanting to do martial arts, and I also liked things like GI Joe and He-man while having an obsession with dinosaurs and science. However, people who viewed me as a tomboy would get confused by the fact that I also liked dance, music, My Little Pony (this was before bronies), and dolls like Jem and Barbie.

Back at the dawn of the 80s, things were rather black and white when it came to gender norms.

Despite the people around me having issues with my “gender weirdness”, I was perfectly fine till around 11, when puberty started.

Much to my distress, my body became extremely feminine. Before I was even 12, I was more than an A cup, and I started getting curvy hips and rear. For some reason, I really just did not like the way my body was starting to look, yet I had tonnes of people telling me how “lucky” I was, and how I should dress to compliment my form.

I also was absofuckinglutely not okay with menstruation. It was beyond the typical uneasiness about this new thing, about learning how to manage it - there was visceral hate I didn’t understand. It didn’t help that having my period made me ill, something that only got worse and worse as I got older. Between the dysphoria related anxiety/depression and the actual physical problems, I wanted nothing to do with menstruation and decided I wanted a hysterectomy even before I had my first procreation systems problems. I also realised before I was out of high school that I really wanted a breast reduction; increasing back and shoulder problems were what I thought the root of it was, but I realise now I actually just wanted a more androgynous body, even back then.

Throughout part of junior high, and all of high school, my friends who were female were always being pushy about making me dress like a girl, and to weaponise the body I was “so lucky to have”. At the start of junior high, I dressed like a goth skater boy - in part because I was slowly building a gothic wardrobe, and in part cus men's clothes were just super comfortable. And cheaper - most of the stuff I was buying with saved lunch money, so buying boy’s/men’s clothes was also something of a financial strategy.

Despite often feeling awkward about my body, by the time high school landed, I had just given in to the pressure. I dressed like a little goth princess, I wore push-up bras (even though I was already a D cup at that point), most everything I wore either accentuated my breasts by being tight or super low cut. On one level, fashion was always fun for me, I nearly became a fashion designer before realising how horrid that industry is, so the putting together outfits and such was fun - it was when I was actually wearing them that I could feel super awkward.

Once I moved from Salt Lake to San Diego, I was able to ditch a lot of that. No one knew who I was, I didn’t know anyone else, and SoCal was a lot more chill about things than Utah could ever hope to be. I still would sometimes dress the goth princess, but my default style swerved back towards skater/raver in cuts. I wore rave pants and tank tops with men’s graphic button downs.

While I was in San Diego, I met a transman and transwoman who were both chill with explaining gender transitions to me. I suspected someone I knew in SLC was along those lines (I was wrong, they were intersexed, and parents made terrible decisions for them). While I was aware that I didn’t want to transition entirely to being male, I knew there was something along those lines that I needed. Sadly, I didn’t meet any non-binary people, and no one really ever brought up the concept to me while I was in SoCal.

About ten years ago, after I had gotten sick and had to move back in with my mum, on the Eastern Seaboard, I met an incredibly knowledgeable transwoman who pointed out to me that androgyny isn’t just an art style but also was gender. She was the first to explain to me what being non-binary was the full spectrum of non-binary - from being gender fluid to androgyne to flat non-binary.

For once in my life, I felt normal as far as gender was concerned. I wasn’t some weird tomboy, I didn’t have to conform to what I’d been told to while growing up, I wasn’t weird for having certain previously odd dreams. It all made sense.

At this point, I’d already done a lot of research on what all transgender, the emerging science behind it, the process of transitioning, chest binding. But at that point, I did a lot more research into non-binary aspects of gender; there’s not nearly as much as there is on MtF/FtM transgenders, but there was a fair bit.

Since I was having problems with depoprovera actually helping with the PCOS and nixing menstruation, I decided that I wanted to do low dose HRT. It took a lot to get to a facility to do so, but I managed to start that in 2015. I was also hoping that if I was right about my hunch, that a number of other medical issues I have could be affected for the better. There’s a lot of emerging science pointing to the fact that transfolk have chemical imbalances - their chemical make up doesn’t really match that of their birth gender; about how HRT helps move their different hormonal chemicals to the range their body actually needs; how many times transfolk feel better physically once their HRT reaches stable levels, and how often times being on HRT reduces or eliminates different chronic medical issues.

Locally, there was no facility that could manage HRT. Even with the hard science in my hand, local doctors couldn’t wrap their heads around it, so I couldn’t even “cheat” and have a mainstream endocrinologist manage it for me. Most didn’t even want to look at the science. I still have to go to Philadelphia for HRT, and half the science I take with me is still relatively new to the Mazzoni Centre.

Getting HRT was the lesser struggle. Although I had started addressing the need for a breast reduction clear back in 2012, insurance coverage in general on reductions is trash. A certain amount of mass has to be removed for them to cover it, which often times cannot be accurately gauged before the surgery; much of the time, a person needing a reduction would go under, get mass removed, only for it to be too little for insurance coverage, leaving them with a $7,000 bill.

The only surefire way to have them cover it entirely for almost the entire decade I was working on this was a full mastectomy, whether or not it was related to cancer. For a while, I was very on the fence about a full mastectomy, because I didn’t want to transition to being male - I wanted a body that was just a hell of a lot more boyish than mine’s been since puberty.

Eventually, I came to be at peace with the idea of this, thanks to people like the fabulous Elliott Alexzander, who promote non-binary fashion and are also male-bodied. Seeing someone who had absolutely no breasts rock women’s fashion helped immensely.

I did finally luck out, however. By the time I was okay with the concept of having to have a full mastectomy to get insurance to cover the surgery, a WPATH certified surgeon had moved into the area. With his help, I was able to get what he termed a hybrid top surgery, 100% covered by my insurance, due to gender dysphoria.

While recovery was rough, as it became painfully apparent that the boyfriend who lived with me at the time had massive issues with all of it, despite having been warned back in 2013 that I was going to be doing all of this. He’d always been lowkey abusive, often in ways that evaded mum seeing him be so, but that escalated rapidly after the surgery, to the point where even mum could see it; I had an HRT check up not long after the surgery, and the nurse who roomed me asked if I was okay, or if I needed help - the abuse had become that apparent, and constant. (Yes, the relationship was terminated, though it took 3 or 4 more months for him to find a place and move out.)

For most of the time since the top surgery, I’ve not had my dysphoria trigger all that much; at most, I have a lowkey fear of some crazy, conservative, Christian redneck here is going to decide they don’t like how I look, and try beating me up - or worse. This has already happened once since the surgery: some loon was sitting on his porch at like 2 AM, and I was out on a walk; I had my headphones in, and music on, so I couldn’t hear everything he said, but caught something about how I was a vile dyke, and he started coming down off his porch at me - I ended up just looking at him as if he were less than a gnat, while continuing to walk, and he backed off. The power of looking like you don’t give any fucks.

Recently, I’ve been having more and more dysphoria, due to people just not getting that I as a person am non-binary. I have pronoun preferences. Ignoring them isn’t okay. I actually have to have my characters all have small breasts still because I get the same sense of dysphoria I’ve had for my entire life when they’re much past an A cup. I’m not going to wear a dress when I don’t want to, and I’m not going to wear an a-shirt/muscle shirt when I don’t want to. I’m not going to forgo mixing and matching men and women’s clothes for someone else’s comfort.

Generally, I’m not one to get aggressive about this stuff, because I don’t believe that aggression helps the LGBTQ+ community (or any community) considering its aggression that creates the situations we find ourselves in right now. I’m more about educating someone politely, giving them time to adjust, to remember that for me as a person, it’s They (or Xe) and not She. Let those who know me offline adjust to the fact that no, you can’t use my birth name, you have to use the name that I go by (even though that’s about as variable as David Bowie during his early musical career). You can prefer people with more curves, but you can’t tell me that I can’t be okay when you want me to be curvier, in a game or out.

Initial microaggressions are fine. Persistent ones after the fact aren’t.

If I ask you to stop doing something because it’s causing dysphoria, you don’t get to shrug it off, and just continue to do it. You don’t get to ignore the fact that what you’re doing is harmful to me, just because opening your eyes to who I actually am is inconvenient to your current world order. You don’t get to invalidate me as a person because you think your religious doctrine is against who and what I am (spoilers: nearly every religion on the planet preaches love as its highest law - and doing any of this shit to anyone violates that tenant of your faith).

You don’t have to entirely understand the why of all this. You don’t have to be savvy on all the different points on the gender spectrum. You don’t have to know the science behind it.

What you have to understand is that your actions are harmful and that if you want to be a better person, you have to stop those harmful actions. Not just because they’re harmful to me, not just because you care about me, but to just be a better person overall - to avoid doing this to anyone and everyone.

If that’s asking too much, well:

EDIT: It occurs to me that I should probably mention that it doesn’t bother me when people refer to my characters by their gendered pronouns. Ashe, Claire, Fia, and Vaylin can be referenced by she/her while Rel, Saber, and Kym’a can be referenced as he/him. Vieno will probably lean more towards they/them. The only one it’s a hard must be they/them with is Dwynd, because when I made her, it was an outlet for being completely out of the non-binary closet when I couldn’t yet be RL.