#knew i was trans and nonbinary. i think she assumed i was a woman. but the way she perceived and interacted with my gender was comfy in a

[the-trans-dragon]

Could a person with mental illness do THIS?

*spends 20 minutes trying to respond to a text, too anxious to commit to a first word such as "Hey" versus "Hi!" versus maybe a unique catchphrase I should incorporate into my personality like "Banjo bonjour!" or, if it would be more logical, "Bonjour banjo!"*

[lakesbian]

here's every way wildbow accidentally made pre-meiosis "russel" thorburn transgender that i can remember. if you can think of any reasons i forgot please add on

his parents named his younger sister "ivy," as if the obvious grandmother-pandering name "rose" had already been used up. blake theorizes that they used a male version of "rose" for PMT, but this is nonsensical--there is no male form of the name rose, and everything he comes up with as a possible option (in other words, everything wildbow came up with as a possible option) is a major stretch. most don't sound even tangentially like the name "rose." it makes far more sense to assume that PMT was afab and had the deadname rose. (this also makes sense on a thematic level wrt how rose thorburn jr is supposed to be the Real heir that grandmother is forcing blake to die for, but that's getting besides the point)

rose has memories of being harassed over the inheritance by her female cousins, and the idea of these memories just being wholly pulled out of thin air when basically everything else involves memories either being split btwn blake and rose or erased altogether is weird

blake is friends with, like. a lot of gay people. textually runs in poor gay artist circles. the idea of them adopting this weirdly cool cis straight guy is funny but it makes a lot more sense if PMT was trans + gay and only got turned into a straight guy (and a straight girl) yesterday, due to the homophobia demon

PMT literally thinks "Besides, why devote any more attention to your son, when you could just start over?  Have that beautiful baby girl you wanted, right?" which is also like one of the only pieces of internal narration we get from PMT in the entire story. first girl they named rose ran away and did some shit with their gender so now they have a second girl they can't name rose but can still try to raise to go for the inheritance

in the same chapter as when pmt says that, callan is like ohhh you think youre going to worm your way in-, implied sentence ending being "-to the inheritance," which is, like. the family knows it's going To A Girl. so.

PMT was childhood friends with paige, who is The Gay Cousin. it is deeply sensible to imagine them bonding over this, regardless of whether or not PMT (or even paige) knew at the time

it is, like, fully possible for a cishet dude to get sick of living with his shitty toxic abusive family and abscond at the age of 17, but also homelessness is an extremely prevalent issue among transgender kids in abusive families. the narrative of a transmasc kid growing up in an abusive, catholic extended family where girls are pressured to compete for a very gendered inheritance + leaving at the age of 17 & finding a new home among a bunch of gay artists is Significantly more compelling than the cis dude alternative. it just is.

okay i think im running out of, like, logical errors that make sense only if pmt was trans prior to the Obliteration, so as for the thematic stuff. like i said, rose being the half grammy decided was supposed to be "real" and blake being the half that's supposed 2 die for her 2 exist, rose just being unhappy and disconnected by nature of existence while blake is the parts of pmt that escaped from the constraints of the family + found happiness, so on and so forth. "catholic grandmother literally obliterated her transmasc nonbinary grandchild by splitting them into two binary gendered halves & expecting that the man they could've been die to allow the acceptable woman--literally forced to dress in grandmother's clothes--live on and do as grandmother wished" is Everything, doing the same thing but to a cis man grandchild is significantly less compelling

Others who r very old/operating on what are explicitly stated to be oppressive and antiquated gender roles as per the book's themes about inherited/traditional forms of harm keep mistakenly calling blake she/her and rose lmao

??? probably some other thangs im forgetting

[genderkoolaid]

Cw: "Aaron" Bushnell https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/bushnell-gaza-immolation-protest-trans-identity

I thought I should let you know if you didn't already. Rip Lilly

While there is evidence pointing to Lilly/Aaron being trans, I still think we should be careful in how we talk about it. I don't really have a problem agreeing that the username and the reddit history does feel like someone who, at least, is exploring their gender identity. A person who says they knew him/her in life is very insistent that s/he could not have been a trans woman based on private information. However, others who have said they spoke with him/her online frequently insist s/he went by Lilly and used she/her and he/him. Although I don't think there's any reason necessarily for those folks to be lying, I do wish there were actual screenshots of the pronoun use in discord servers? Given that rn the conversation is just People Online Making Claims.

I'm still unsure of how I feel we should talk about this tbh. Lilly/Aaron was very deliberate in how s/he presented his/her gender to the public. As the person interviewed says, I don't think Bushnell would be upset by being seen as trans if s/he was a cis man. But even if s/he was trans, I am hesitant to make assumptions about what is best for a trans person's legacy. The issue of trans recognition in death is very sensitive for most of us, so I understand why people are so invested in this. But it should be kept in mind that the discussion around Bushnell's gender should not overshadow support for Palestinians. That was his/her goal and its clear that s/he cared more about that than making a statement about his/her own gender. It is fully possible for a trans person to make the decision to let themselves be assumed cis, and be comfortable in that decision, and its not up to other trans people to decide whether they made the wrong decision with their own legacy.

Its possible s/he made that decision solely because s/he wanted to prevent his/her message from being derailed by transmisogyny. But again, that shows to me that s/he wanted more than anything for his/her death to be focused entirely on raising support for Palestine. I don't want to be patronizing about Lilly/Aarons's decisions and I definitely don't want any Discourse on this to do exactly what s/he was trying to avoid. Additionally, Bushnell is reported as having used he/she pronouns. The person who claims s/he used both uses both Aaron and Lilly. Its very easy for genderqueer and nonbinary people to have their identities reduced to binaries in death, even by other trans people. If s/he was trans, why are we making assumptions about if s/he was fine with being called a woman, or that s/he wasn't okay with being called a man? There is too much grey space and too much exorsexism that goes unchallenged in our community for me to not feel the need to point this out.

Anyways. I guess my Take on this is that both trans and suicidal people tend to have our choices undermined, and have people on all sides debate over what we Really mean and what we Really want. We are rarely seen as being the experts on ourselves, or having our autonomy respected even when it makes others confused or uncomfortable. I don't think anyone online discussing this can have a full picture of The Truth. Like I said, I don't think there's any reason to assume people claiming they knew Lilly and that s/he used she/her and he/him pronouns are lying right now. But more than anything I'm concerned that the debate over this could end up doing exactly what Lilly/Aaron was trying to avoid. And I don't think its my place to insist any trans person has to be out. I want to respect what s/he wanted for his/her legacy. I don't want him/her to be a trans hero if that results in detracting from his/her goals.

I think this is part of larger moral issue trans activists have to deal with when it comes to trans history: when is it okay for us to correct the language someone used for themselves? When is it illuminating and respectful, and when is it whitewashing someone's own self-perspective to fit our goals? Bushnell was extremely purposeful in everything s/he did as a part of his/her suicide, and that includes how s/he presented his/her gender. I don't want to disrespect those decisions.

[glass--beach]

I've been a fan of your music long enough to remember when you used to identify as trans fem. what's it been like circling back around to that and figuring out your identity now that you're doing it sort of in the public eye?

honestly it’s been nicer this time around. i sense a kindred spirit in every trans woman i talk to and it’s really lovely hearing from those who related to my music and figured out their own identity through that. it’s giving me a space where i know i will be accepted. i still boymode pretty often on the road and before tour was nearly always boymoding… there’s almost a safety on stage but despite being literally a performance it feels more real than when i’m not presenting fem. i’ve also now been girlmode out in public a lot after shows and not attracted any negative attention which is nice. even when there was an alt right harassment campaign against the band account they were gendering me correctly.

years ago it was much tougher for me, wearing feminine clothes at random diy shows or whatever. it was often in spaces that were anti transphobia on paper but did nothing to enforce against transmisogyny in practice. even in explicitly queer spaces i felt outcast. online was even harsher - which is really what made me increasingly scared to present fem as there were more and more eyes on me. there were many many trans women i looked up to a lot then but i felt they were so much braver than me. being nonbinary and vaguely “masculine” became a shield at the cost of being called a dude or a guy or just assumed to be male absolutely constantly, and after enough of it i kinda just didn’t want to show my face anywhere… the irony of having made what many considered to be iconic transfem music while feeling so closeted myself was honestly insulting.

with the recent album release and tour it kinda hit a breaking point because i knew a big wave of misgendering was coming if i wasn’t just honest with myself and everyone else. even saying she/they was softening the blow a bit. lots of people just stuck with they. and plenty of writers & critics still seem blissfully unaware that there is anything queer about me or my band or are simply too scared to write about it, idk. but i feel like i’ve come out of my shell a good bit. i’m not just playing shows, i’ve been able to socialize and party on off days and speak my mind more freely and dress in a way that makes me feel pretty. it’s really like flipping a switch - not just for me, but everybody else. EVERYONE treats me differently when i girlmode and i love it so so much, i feel like others are more willing to open up and to treat me with kindness and (respectfully) compliment my appearance and i feel like women (cis and trans) relate to me more, which is a whole lot better than feeling like i relate to nobody most of the time. it’s an entirely different set of social scripts that just feel so much more “right” to me, so much easier for me to embody, than the male social scripts. i know a lot of people feel like gender is bullshit and bad inherently and good for them but for me that mentality was a way to hide it think. i feel absolutely liberated in embracing femininity! :) thank you for the lovely question, i have so much to say on this

[velvetvexations]

I think we need to like place the term socialization on a high shelf until people will learn what it means properly. Like it's just a term to indicate social messages and influences people receive due to traits and perceptions about them and where and how they grow up. There is no one "male socialization" and socialization isn't even something that Is it's something that one Experiences. Like I wouldn't say that I was "socialized female" unless I had to really really dumb down a concept (especially cause due to being fat, possibly noticably queer, having parents very different from my peers, and most importantly to my own interpretation of my life, a "Weird Kid" growing up, I experienced a set of social forces very different from most of my peers, even those who shared my gender-as-assumed-by-adults. Almost as if the concept of socialization is very complex and intersectional 🤔) but I would say I was influenced growing up by the assumption by those around me that because of my body I Should act a certain, gendered way, which has influenced me, but also in some ways that are contradictory to expectations of some mythical "female socialization" that only exists on the broadest scale imaginable.

Socialization is incredibly intersectional and context dependant and is a process that people experience rather than a determined set of traits about a person. A trans woman might have experienced a so called "male socialization" in that people assumed she was a boy and pressured her to act a certain way and develop certain perspectives, but it's just that: a pressure; It has no guaranteed influence on her in any way. Most discourse (terfs misusing sociological terms to be transphobic, and then people attempting to push back against that while still misguidedly arguing within that exact same framework (often ending up transradfemmy(eg. Trans women were socialized female cause every single young trans girl knew things about women were about them and the opposite is true for trans men(disregard nonbinary people entirely) and all trans women are the same in this)) flattens the idea of socialization into this binary all consuming force that affects every person of x identity the exact same and has no nuance ever and everyone will act as if you're attempting to set them on fire for daring to say that there's nuance to the concept and people can have their own interpretations about their experiences with gendered society

I've seen trans women say they feel they experienced male socialization and those that don't feel that. I've seen trans women talk about how their experiences were shaped by attempts to force them into Proper Gender Based On Body Parts (that all people, cis or trans, experience) directly conflicted with their internal sense of self which impacted how they view themselves and their genders. I'm not going to argue with them about their own experiences of gender and society!? Its shitty to act as if it's a net good to try and force people's lived experiences into the box of Correct Theory just to make a point.

Tldr: it bugs me when people use socialization in the most ass backwards ways to try and prove a point when they clearly don't understand what the term is meant to convey: it's a set of social forces that individuals experience on an individual scale. Not a one size defines a person's entire personality prescriptive label that is unchanging throughout life. People just hate nuance

Socialization is always diagnosed in others rather than based in self-reporting about one's experiences. If someone says "I was pressured to be my assigned gender and that affected me in this way" that's obviously a normal trans experience, but socialization as a term exists to explain the way people are, to take a pattern of behavior and say "this is why that person behaves that way". There's no great way to spin that.

[amateur-art-critic]

Assigned TERF by trans women (or; we should teach people about Occams Razor)

So this is a new development. I got accused of being a TERF for writing this on a post I reblogged:

So I'm a TERF because I think TMA/TME as terms have set back trans solidarity? Because I think TMA and TME just reinvent the gender binary? That's TERF-y to you?

Sure.

But there's more; OP decided to comment as well;

Me when I'm not a TERF

Yes, that is the point of my blog. To hate TERFs. Because I was harassed by TERFs at one point.

and then her pinned is signaling how opposed to radfeminism [she is].

Radfems/gendercrits/TERFs are the same breed and I use the terms synonymously. There's nothing more to it.

bitch your header has a play on the terfs term TIM.

Yes, because I was trying to co-opt their language to piss them off. @/butchbarbieagainstterfs was the one to introduce me to the concept of using FIT, Feminist Identified Transphobe, as an alternative to TERF.

And if anything, it's a play on TIF (trans identified female), because it uses the exact same letters as FIT.

Your entire blog is predicated on transfem exclusionism

No it's fucking not? Never have I excluded transfems and trans women. I focus on transmasc and trans men's issues because they fucking apply to me.

This is the most "i like pancakes"/"so you hate waffles?" argument ever.

you ain't slick

Neither are you.

Then @/june-egbert-official decided to add onto OPs reblogs with an "analysis" of my bio, from the view of me being a TERF;

"Shrödinger's Woman" - Shrödinger's Cat was a thought experiment of being unable to measure something without investing it [...] - in other words they want to be allowed to look at your junk.

Or, maybe, we Occams Razor this: maybe I am both a woman and not a woman. You won't know unless you ask, but everyone always assumes and argues I'm one or the other.

In other words: I'm fucking nonbinary, you dumb fuck. I'm not a woman and I am also not not a woman, because I'm also not a man. And saying I'm "Shrödinger's Woman" is a subtle nod to TERFs assuming I'm either a cis woman, a trans man (who they see as women) or a trans woman (who they see as men, but I don't) when I argue with them.

I don't think I have ever in my life seen a more bad faith argument.

Aforementioned TIF as a play on TERFs TIM shit.

Well, if you knew anything about TERF lore outside them targeting trans women and transfems, you would know that "TIF" is already a term coined by gendercrits for trans men and transmascs.

I recognize that it's probably just a spelling mistake, but I just want to clarify in case it isn't. But, if it is;

But I digress.

Actively calling out where TERFs should go.

Or, and bare with me here, I want TERFs off of Tumblr. That's literally what I say in that sentence in my bio! Can you not read between the lines when I call TERFs an "invasive species" and how they "cause an imbalance to the tumblr ecosystem"?

Tumblr is the only social media left that I feel safe on and I don't want TERFs to poison it for me. So I would rather send them to an echo chamber of equally insane people than to other popular social media.

Just how much bad faith do you have to read my bio with to jump to this conclusion?

Calls themself a female pink and purple toed tarantula (generally considered "feminine colors, for what that's worth) [...]

...I just fucking like purple and pink. And I like spiders.

As for the "female" part, I'm literally just stating the sex I was assigned at birth. I may be female, but that doesn't mean I'm a woman.

Once again; Occams Razor.

[...] and, probably at least a little tangential, they become aggressive against males this time of year.

That's not tangential, it's just straight up wrong. Not the spider facts, but that you think that it's implying I'm aggressive towards males because I have a female spider motif. It's not symbolic of anything other than that I like spiders and that I was assigned female at birth.

To end this, I would just like to ask both @/june-egbert-official and @/0w0tsuki, in the small chance either of you are stalking my blog and reading this; Why did you think I was a TERF? Do you just see all AFABs who disagree with you as gendercrit radfems?

Or was it because I believe that transandrophobia is real you see me as a TERF? Because I can't find any other reason as to why you would call me a TERF other than the fact that I'm nonbinary transmasc and I disagree with trans women.

[rederiswrites]

I know I'm a day late and a dollar short, but I guess I haven't been Visibly Genderqueer in a while. So sure. I can talk about my trans-adjacent experience.

That's the thing, though. I am not. Visibly genderqueer, that is. If you're a traditionalist, you'd definitely notice that I utterly and completely fail to perform femininity--but then, you also might not. People tend to be very focused on specific features and assume gender and stick with that. My neighbor used to get grumpy because even though she routinely dressed her sons in camo and sports gear, they both had long, beautiful hair, and were both id'd by strangers as girls very regularly. Me, I have big breasts and wide hips, thick thighs, a cute, upturned nose, a fairly conventionally attractive face, and I top out at 5 foot 3 (160cm). I know perfectly well what basically anyone around here sees when they look at me.

They see a woman, married to a man (a very Manly man, at that, both in appearance and habits), with two children. I know that. Even though I am out to anyone who's been around long enough to hear me mention it, I haven't asked for a pronoun change. For me, it's just too much bother. It'd be different if my nonbinary experience were different, but I'm agender. I just don't have a connection of any sort with gender. It's just a sort of void space, a blank incomprehension, though I can observe that This Thing matters a great deal to nearly everyone else.

Well, there's a reflexive avoidance. Long before I had heard words like genderqueer or agender or even trans (when I was young, these words were limited to the queer community for the most part, and certainly not used where I lived), I had a reflexive avoidance of all things feminine. It wasn't a thought. I just knew that I absolutely did not want to wear lace, or pink, or ruffles--yes, we still wore ruffles in the 80's. My freshman year high school picture appears to be a fresh-faced ten year old boy, with short hair, a red and white striped turtleneck, and brown corduroy overalls. But I didn't have thoughts for that, only a feeling.

I envy younger people their confidence that people can and should and will treat them according to their personal relationship with gender. Maybe at 42 I am too old to learn that optimism, even though things are changing so much. I think about going by they/them, and it sounds like teaching multiple overlapping communities how to handle the idea of an agender person. Exhausting. Even though there are trans people in some of my in-person communities, and those communities are making honest efforts to welcome that, a person who just doesn't have any attachment to gender at all feels like going even further back to the beginning, undoing even more of their basic beliefs about the world. Ah, yes, you've begun to accept that sometimes the categories of "man" and "woman" can flip around. Now, how would you like to just reject the entire notion that people necessarily have gender? How would you like to just trash-bin one of the defining elements of Self?

And all this effort, over a concept I don't understand at all. It just doesn't feel worth it.

I am me. My name is Red. I look like this, and I like how I look. It comes with assumptions. Many of those assumptions are wrong. Some of them chafe. But I do not have the time or energy to individually disabuse people of every wrong assumption. I'll just live the way I live, and if that shatters a few assumptions along the way, all the better. And honestly, if you're calling me she or her, I'm probably not there to be bothered by it anyway.

[splatoon-edits]

I'm of the assumption that you're a Shiver fan do you wanna explain some HCs or reasons you like her?👂👂 I'm interested (I like her too 😋)

oh boy. do you even know what you've done? I am going to talk about this blue creature SO MUCH!!!!! (no but fr thank you for enabling me to talk about one of my fav characters!!!)

I'm just gonna be rambling with no general direction, so i apologize if this gets a smidge confusing..... Everything else will be under a read more since i don't want this post to make it hard to scroll through my blog if it gets too long.

so.. Splat 3 was my first game in the series. I knew about the other splatoon games obviously, and i was eagerly awaiting splatoon 3 since by the time i got a switch it would have been a waste to buy splat 2. So i went into splatoon 3 with very minimal knowledge of the characters/setting.

But when i saw Shiver in the Deep Cut announcement trailer??? It was love at first sight. Blue is my favorite color and the swag Shiver has is off the charts. Plus the hype around a potentially nonbinary character?? And imma be honest, i'm a sucker for smug characters. Especially the ones who are secretly failures. It's just one of my fav tropes.

So in short: Shiver was a character who had a lot of appeal for me in the beginning. But slowly over time as i came to learn more about her and the rest of Deep Cut, i came to appreciate them even more in new ways. Shiver is smug, sarcastic, and can come off as mean or over the top. But she is also silly, quirky, and has a lot of love in her heart for others. She cares about Frye, Bug Man, and all of Splatsville. She says silly things that don't make sense. She likes puns. She takes the time to listen to Sheldon's rambles. She is so much more than what you see on the surface. And it can be so easy to see her teasing her bandmates and assume she is mean or cold hearted. But she genuinely is such a fun character!!!!

Her grace, her gnc swag, her cringefail aura, everything about her makes her an amazing character.

And now, for some headcanons in no particular order:

I kinda see Shivers gender as "whatever is funniest/best in the moment. Commit to the bit of genders. But if i had to pick one thing to headcanon them as it would be pangender or maybe genderfluid. Uses all pronouns plus some shark themed neos like bite/biteself and fin/finself and anything else like that. Im gonna be mostly sticking to she/her and they/them for this post just cuz i think that's what people will be most used to. But really any gender hc for Shiver is correct in my head. MTF? Correct. Nonbinary? Correct. FTM? Correct. Genderfluid? Correct/ Bigender? Correct. Anything and anything goes an i love seeing everyone's takes on it!

I'm gonna go ahead and say trans woman Shiver has a special place in my heart. I just feel like i never see anyone hc this but i also feel like it works?? Idk... The same can be said for genderfluid Shiver. I myself am genderfluid so i rlly like that hc!

Mayhaps has a touch of the tism. (me too) I just feel like she doesn't read social cues well. Can mask really well but doesn't do it around Frye and Big Man for the most part. I think all of Deep Cut is autistic tbh. With Frye having ADHD as well. (ME TOO)

I'm caught between the headcanons of "secretly rlly strong cuz of archery" and "lowkey weak cuz it would be funny to contrast w Frye being strong". But i lean more on the side of both of them being strong. Just Frye having more obvious muscles. But if you look at Shiver she def if strong. And graceful. Like a predator built for ambush or stalking. She moves with purpose. Ya know what i mean? Like she seems very graceful and delicate at first but that is NOT the case.

I gotta be careful or this will turn into general Deep Cut hcs cuz i wanna talk about Big Man and Frye as well lol

Loses her temper easily. Can be petty when things don't go her way.

Master Mega is very special to them. She spent a lot of time with him when she was younger and her parents were busy.

Shiver whistles a lot as a stim/just for fun.

Big Man and Frye are the best hype men ever for Shiver. There are certain points in the game where she says absolute nonsense but those two are right there to back her up. They also don't understand what he's saying, but they are gonna act as if it's the smartest thing ever. Shiver thinks she is the coolest thing ever and those two only enable her. (dw. every once in a while they knock her down a peg by returning her teasing)

Shiver is the type of person to spend 30 minutes making her food look pretty before she serves it. It has to look good or else.

Is a decent cook. Frye likes to steal bits of food from whatever she is working on so Shiver will playfully smack her with her fan and shoo her out of the kitchen.

Is very proud of her singing. She worked very hard to get it as perfect as it is.

Probably used to have a violent streak in middle school, would bite people. Has since learned to control her anger better.

Very confident. Isn't afraid of things like public speaking.

Gets annoyed easily when overstimulated. Sometimes snaps at people when the environment is too noisy/bright or if she is tired. Tries to apologizes afterwards.

Speaking of apologies, she is the type of person to do something nice for you or get you food/a present for you rather tha admit she is wrong. Is embarrassed easily and instead prefers wordless apologies.

Is flustered easily. One of the ways to easily make her lose her cool is to do anything remotely flirty or to bring up something embarrassing she did in the past.

I could probably ramble more but it's LATE and i should head to bed. Thank you so much for the ask!!!! I had a fun time talking about my favorite blue goofball. <3

[desdinonniying]

US Pain management sexism bullshit

Background: My wife is trans. AMAB. That shouldn't matter, but it matters in certain medical stuff.

This rant will talk about sexism and maybe some transphobia, or at least people not being informed about trans stuff. And medical stupid stuff. And frustration.

I have a lot of issues with my time in this specific hospital and my treatment with kidney stones, but this rant is specifically about the sexism within pain management.

I have a history of kidney stones, between 2021 and 2022. Three stones. 2mm, 4mm, 2mm.

The first time I went to the ER, I didn't know if it was a stone or bowel blockage. I just knew I was in pain. Wife took me to the ER. Doc said it could be a kidney stone or diverticulitis. Thought diverticulitis was more likely because if it was a stone, I'd be "rolling on the bed in agony." I was still in pain, and they gave me IV morphine, took me for imaging. Morphine started wearing off, pain started coming back, and the nurse came in and declared it was a kidney stone and I'd be receiving pain meds that would be more effective for the condition - what I call extreme ibuprofen. Takes down the inflammation. Makes sense. They gave me some IV of that and eventually sent me home with more extreme ibuprofen and what was basically flomax - all to reduce inflammation and open up the ureters to make the stone pass easier.

I do have issues with that first visit, but pain-wise I think they took care of me.

Second stone was the following summer. I knew it was a stone because it was the same symptoms. I went to the ER and told them this. The only pain management they gave me was the IV ibuprofen. Ok, made sense. Sent home with the same stuff as last time, and followed up some days later with a urologist, who set me up to have an ultrasound in a few weeks to check stone progress.

Few weeks later, the pain again. Opposite side. Go to the ER. Explain the symptoms. They put me in a bed in the hall because no beds are available. Sucks, but whatever. It took over an hour for them to get me the IV ibuprofen and fluids. I get that they were busy, but I was in pain. I get scanned, they tell me that not only do I have a small stone on the side I was feeling pain, but the stone on the other side hadn't moved much, so I was to have surgery the next day.

I only had IV ibuprofen overnight. Had the surgery the next morning. Stents from urethra to ureter, bloody burning hellfire piss and kidney spasms for days. They gave me oxy, but it didn't touch the pain.

I found out via my mother that there's a specific medication that they have for this kind of surgery, specifically to relieve pain the the urethra for UTIs and post-surgery. I wasn't given this. I asked for it, but was told that I'm allowed to take over-the-counter Azo. I don't think it helped much, but it felt more effective than the oxy, which just made me dizzy for like fifteen minutes.

So that all happened summer 2022. I still talk about the experience in therapy, because healing isn't linear, but I'm okay.

Fast forward to early this morning. My wife starts experiencing the same symptoms I experienced. We go to the ER.

Now, my wife has been to this ER before for other issues. She's been there back when she identified as nonbinary, and after she started identifying as a woman. So she's had the F marker on her wrist band. She's "passed" enough that doctors have given her pregnancy tests "just in case" even though I've been there as the wife - we looked like a cis lesbian couple. (I understand that doing pregnancy tests with cis lesbian couples is done, because cheating and other stuff happens - they gave me pregnancy tests while assuming my wife was a cis woman as well. Covering medical basis with a simple piss test is not something I'll argue against.) But (I thiiiink?) it is in her notes that she's trans, and since she needed imaging done and this was regarding the urinary tract (also the receptionist said stuff about period/uterus involvement and questions), which is different in AMAB biology than AFAB, they needed to put an M marker on her wrist band.

Which I was pissed at - could they at least put some sort of "trans" marker on these bands so they know that while she has AMAB anatomy that she's she/her?

But whatever. She got a room and got treated relatively quickly - probably due to the time of day. They gave her fluids and IV ibuprofen. They determined she had a small kidney stone, around 2mm, and that she had an infection from it. The pain meds started wearing off.

They gave her an antibiotic and oxy in the hospital. Ok, fair. I had morphine during my first stone.

They sent her home with antibiotics, flomax, and oxy.

For the same condition, same size stone, they sent an AMAB person home with hella pain meds, and only gave me, and AFAB person, a script for hella pain meds after a surgery.

Which, honestly? That tracks.

Now, my wife is not a man. So don't you radfems or terfs come after me. And trans friends, don't come after me for sharing my wife's gender assigned at birth. But she had the M on her wrist band, so she was interpreted as male by some medical staff. And because most medical professionals are barely informed on trans stuff, they likely saw her as a man.

And you know what's common? Medical professionals giving more/better pain management medication to men (or people they interpret as men) than women (or people they interpret as women.) For the same conditions.

My wife, who they interpreted as male, was sent home with a script for an opioid for a 2mm kidney stone. I, an AFAB person who is interpreted as a cis woman, was sent home with high-dose ibuprofen for a 2mm kidney stone. And for a 4mm kidney stone.

How is this fair?

Now, I'm not asking for pain meds - I'm not in pain now. I'm not a drug seeker. When I was given an opioid after my surgery, I had two doses and flushed the rest because they did nothing for me. That's due to my system being weird - I have no idea why I metabolize drugs like this. Happens when I consume cannabis (legal in my state) as well.

I'm not asking for justice. I don't want my wife's meds to be taken away. I just want her feeling better. I'm not upset at her either - she's not the one who asked for specific meds. She just has a kidney stone and is in pain and asked for treatment.

I'm just saying that there's sexism in how medical professionals give out pain medication. And this should be changed.

AFAB people feel pain just as much as AMAB people.

And kidney stone pain is comparable to pain from childbirth. And people who give birth deserve to have pain meds too.

So yeah.

[fanonical]

Ideas for other characters that would be trans/the various societies' views on transness?

i’m taking kind of a slower approach to deciding which characters are trans, feeling it out & listening to my heart. strangely enough the first character i knew i would make trans was Kass, because who could say no to a travelling transmasculine parrot musician??? other than him i’m not totally married to any particular ideas — just that i want to inject as many trans & non-binary stories into pre-existing BOTW/TOTOK characters, so expect all flavours of trans characters — guys, girls, nonbinary people, closeted, stealth, out, transitioning etc i guess with an emphasis on how their gendered experiences are different across the four corners of Greater Hyrule.

Gorons obviously do not have a gender binary, and i think that whilst they would get it right most of the time they would struggle with pronouns. all pronouns. any pronouns. Gorons are rocks! rocks don’t have genders.

Gerudo, like in the base game, are all “female” with a single exception every 100 years, but my introspection of the Gerudo would also i think address Gerudo trans guys, their relationship to their hometown. like Gorons seem to be able to pass through Gerudo Town, because they’re genderless, so i wanna explore how Link might observe other interestingly gendered people and how the Gerudo treat them. i think over all the Gerudo are culturally on the more trans inclusive side — but perhaps that they expect a commitment to presenting a certain way? in BOTW it seems clear to me that many of the Gerudo in the town actually fully clock Link but just don’t care that she’s not a cis woman — this happens multiple times in this part of the game; i want to incorporate this into the fic. plenty of people will be able to tell Link is trans (or exploring her identity) but she’s not gonna get kicked out over that

Hylians have a very similar deal to us going on — i think there’s a bit less cultural transphobia (but also less cultural recognition of being trans as like an option) but an assumed gender binary that limits their imaginations a bit sometimes. that being said, Hyrule is full of magic. i think if you told somebody from Hyrule that men can become women and some people intentionally seek this because they’d prefer to be women, most Hylians would be like “oh that makes sense i hadn’t thought of that” they have bigger things on their mind i think haha

Zora & Rito i’m still working on, but i kind of want to give them unique gender structures too? or at least explore different parts of MY experiences as trans in these fictional cultures. unsure! i kind of like the Zora just already having a firm understanding of transness that doesn’t really translate well to Hylians? again, not sure yet. fantastic question though!!

[tincansamurai]

a long post about my exp figuring out gender

i'm seriously so glad that it's so easy to find information about gender these days. just knowing certain things are possible is so important to figuring out who you are.

when i was like 11 and becoming a Junior Poster, even with all the lurking i did i only saw people talk about trans women. of course, this was because people are fucking horrible and love to make fun of trans women. i liked to read webcomics and therefore also read people talking about webcomics and webcomic drama. there was this one woman who got shit on all the time. her webcomic was bad, that's true, but there was also a lot of precursor-kiwi-farms type shit about her personal life and her other website about being trans. people were accusing her of being a groomer (wow! things sure have changed!) because she had a quiz up for boys to take to see if they were trans. for some reason who knows why i was really fascinated by this and read a lot of drama about other gender-y webcomics, and of course i took that quiz. the result was essentially "you're not trans, you're a regular boy." i didn't really know that you could be trans in a way other than being transfem, so i just kinda shrugged and went "ok, i'm not trans". like, i wasn't stupid, and even the tg fetish webcomics everyone liked to laugh at included women turning into men sometimes. but no one talked about those fictional moments with the same terms, and i didn't have any examples of real life people, so i guess i assumed that transmasculinity was a separate, theoretical thing. and if it was only theoretical it couldn't apply to me, of course.

then when i was around 13 or 14 i was reading tab's khaos komix and when a gay trans dude was introduced i kind of broke. like, wait, you can be trans in that direction, for real? wait, you can be trans AND gay?? two big parts of why it was obvious i wasn't trans crashed around me and i absolutely had a crisis about it. entirely internal, of course, because i knew how much everyone hated trans women. and if they thought being a trans woman was stupid and fake, there was no way this new (to me) thing would be well received either. i can perfectly picture standing in the shower, staring at the faucet handle, completely still - or more like stuck, and thinking "i'm a gay man". without qualifiers and everything, no "i think" or "i might be", like i 100% came to that conclusion. it made sense.

i talked myself out of it because it was terrifying. some of the stuff i used to talk myself out of it turned out to not be signs i wasn't trans, but signs i wasn't binary, but i wouldn't know that existed for even longer. plus i had mentally shock therapied myself hard enough that when i did find out you could be nonbinary, i avoided learning more. honestly thank god for tumblr and patient art school mutuals, who have probably (more like hopefully) completely forgotten me arguing with them about how nonbinary identities don't make sense, lol. sorry for being a dickhead. but thanks to this space i couldn't avoid exposure anymore, and that was really good for me. i can't even imagine how miserable i would be. actually that's a lie, i can picture it pretty easily lol.

anyway the fact that kids can get online and learn about just about any kind of gender anybody has ever thought of, and find real people talking about their experiences, and form or join any kind of community about those shared experiences is so so good. meeting nonbinary kids makes me so fucking happy. i'm so glad that it's at least a little easier to figure out who you are these days.

[hell0mega]

a newer friend of mine, who is trans and talks a lot, asked what gender people i don't know assume i am. i pretty confidently said, well, if they're queer, sometimes they just ask my pronouns, but normies just think im a woman

she seemed genuinely surprised and said if she hadn't have asked my pronouns when we met, she would've defaulted to they/them anyway. "you look very androgynous" she said.

i appreciated the sentiment but im not sure if i really believed her lol. she's not one to lie, but still. all my life i've had this weird form of dysphoria where i never felt enough like a girl. but it felt like i couldn't be. i wasn't a girl, enough. being girly felt like i was pretending. but i didn't want to be a boy, or even really boyish, either. i liked certain feminine things, and certain masculine things. i took "where on the gender spectrum are you" tests throughout high school and always landed right smack dab in the middle every time.

i've almost always wanted to be androgynous. and before i knew what that was, i wished i could turn "back and forth" between the "two." but i was a girl, right? girls looked like girls. so i tried to look like a girl. and it felt like i was faking. i didn't want to dress like a boy, though, either. i shopped in the boys section on and off, mostly for shirts, out of comfort (and interest. the girls section didn't have charlie the unicorn shirts) but i didn't want to be a boy. boys were dumb. i WANTED to be a girl. why couldn't i just be a girl? everyone says i am, and that's cool, cuz girls are cool. wish i could be one.

nowadays im firmly nonbinary genderfluid-y and worry about what other people think of my gender presentation WAY LESS than i used to. i have a lot more to worry about as a 27 year old adult, and being surrounded by queer friends and community helps a lot. but, i don't know. that comment brought up a lot of... thoughts. a lot of memories. a lot of feelings i don't think ive ever processed.

ive been not a girl my whole life. and that's okay.

[dervampireprince]

(Previously mentioned the sorrow audio, didn’t include a signature…Oops!)

I myself am struggling with identity issues, I was wondering what made you feel secure in your identity? I feel like I question myself a lot.

-🐈‍⬛

oh boy uhhh i'm not really sure how to answer that. nor what identity you're talking about. i started writing this based on the assumption you were talking about gender identity but for all i know you meant sexual or romantic attraction, so if you didn't mean gender sorry that really wasn't clear.

i don't know what you identify as, and it's different for everyone. i feel secure in being a boy because i am a boy, i'm sorry i don't have any deeper meaning i... i don't have doubts about being a boy, otherwise i wouldn't identify as such. if you're asking how do i know i'm a boy? i can't answer that for you. gender is a feeling. only you know what fits right for you, and not everyone can find a label that fits them and so just uses an umbrella term like trans or nonbinary or genderqueer or they just call themselves unlabeled.

if you're in the early stages of figuring out if you're trans or not, you'll get more secure with time. you've got plenty of time to try out different pronouns and names and labels and see if you like any of them. sometimes it isn't always about what you know you like, but what you know you dislike. at the beginning i didn't feel like i was allowed to be a boy, that i couldn't be because i'm not hyper masculine, but i knew i was so uncomfortable with being called a girl and she/her, so i tried out different names and went by they/them for a while, at the time i only knew one trans person, and what i would say allows me to be more confident in expressing my identity is surrounding myself with other trans people and seeing other trans people who express their gender in different ways.

and i phrased it as 'confident in expressing my identity' not 'secure in my identity' or 'confident in my identity' because that implies things i don't like, i don't want to be asked if i'm insecure in my identity because that sounds like someone is asking 'are you sure you're really a boy?' which would be a gross thing to ask. i know that's not what you're asking, but i don't understand what you mean by 'secure'. because i'm reading that as "what made you sure you're a boy?" which.. if that's what you're asking, i don't have an answer for you. i just know i am. and i know i'm not a girl. it's just what i am. asking me to question that makes me uncomfortable, as if i'm not being believed.

in terms of questioning yourself, back when i first learnt what gender identities were, that there was more than just cis man and cis woman, yes i questioned 'am i really trans?' because i would have thought i would have noticed i was trans when i was a lot younger, 20 felt too old to be questioning it but, the more i looked back the more i was like oh right okay so i have always had these feelings, i just didn't know that those were signs of being trans. but then i realised i wasn't really asking 'am i a trans boy?' i was asking 'am i allowed to be a trans boy? only because a cis man can be feminine or wear different fashion or make up (eg harry styles) but the moment a trans man does it then cis people and some other trans people say he can't really be trans. which is bullshit.

so i guess if you're asking what can make me more sure of my identity, assuming you already have one you feel is right for you, is just think if transphobia didn't exist and i could just be whatever identity without any consequences, would you identify as it? because when i was 15 i used to say to myself well duh if i could shapeshift my body with magic or just switching to be a boy was easy to do of course i'd be a boy. and then i grew up and realised no cis woman ever says or thinks that.

i don't know what i was aiming for with my answer anymore because i don't understand the question so if any of that was helpful then yay i guess , if none of it was well. and if you didn't mean gender identity then you should have specified.

[alliswyattonthewesternfront]

thinking today about one of the saddest things i ever witnessed online.

in like 2011 when i was still on facebook, i was in this private group for feminists. the other members were largely women from michigan who knew each other irl to some extent. it was one of the first times i ever really leaned into being a self-hating southerner and bought into the idea that northern states were some leftist utopia (lol). there were a lot of fall outs and blow ups, usually because a white member put their foot in their mouth and refused to listen to the (very few in number) non-white women in the group, or because of personal relationship drama between members. you know, like real life. it was a good learning experience in some ways, especially for someone sheltered in the particular ways i was, and i am still friends with a few folks from the group.

anyways there had been 2 notorious former members of the group who happened to be trans. one was a sex pest in the dms, another was an irl abuser in some capacity to another member. this lead to a lot of discourse about who should and should not be allowed in the group. though they eventually made the correct decision, (that a group for women should always include trans women, because they are women) those conversations were LONG and they were UGLY, and clearly stuck with the trans members.

there was one member in particular, who felt she needed to personally apologize whenever a trans woman (in or out of the group) was acting up. to ask everyone not to assume all trans women were like that. the way she would post made it very clear that she wasn't trying to get attention or constant reassurance from other members. she genuinely was worried how the actions of others in the community were coloring our perceptions of her, because she had seen it happen before in that very group. even though the remaining members of the group had ultimately learned the right lessons and not gone down the TERF path, the echoes of what was said while a bunch of cis women got to comfortably unpack their own prejudice at their own pace in front of trans people never stopped being present.

it made me so sad. it still does. i see traces of the same thing in the way my other trans friends will sometimes post. when someone says "we aren't all like that" i just wanna give them a hug. i even catch myself doing it when nonbinary/trans masc people come up. this doesn't really have a point. i am just melancholy today.

[izzysarchivedblogs]

if i have fcs for characters, i always match age and gender. or match age as closely as possible. so if i am using trans fc, that character is trans; just a if i hc a character a tran, their fc will be an out trans actor

i know that i do have this on my muse list. pepper potts is a trans woman, i write her as a trans woman, thats why her fc is a trans woman. this was the hc and how i wrote pepper when she had her independent blog years ago. and pepper is 45 like her fc.

just as johnny doesn't have an fc, or well scott turner schofield is since he is a trans man but i could not find his age but google mostly thinks scott is 30 to 40, as i typically write johnny as 38, because i also write him and has been written as a trans man since his original blog as well.

i don't write transphobia or focus on these characters experiencing it; you can assume that they have through the nature of the real world; but in marvel setting they are out and mostly focus on these characters for their characters and plot and write trans joy instead; nor do i get too much into their medical history or any of that; i mostly focus on these characters for their stories we knew in the comics; but always saw pepper's insistence on having her rt node in her chest and being her own woman, as story that could be related to by those who are trans and nonbinary, and than when i started writing johnny, which i had picked up for with a friend (not on tumblr) when i brought him to tumblr, i kept their hc for trans johnny storm; and now i am trying to find trans man actors to cast as johnny as opposed to cis actors

anyways. that's why clint's fc is ryan gosling now; which clint's had a lot of fcs; but i like ryan now for him; and while i put clint at 44, ryan's at 42.

greer's aging/physical age is around 30; due her superhuman serum/human enhancements as well as her transformation/mutation. adira her fc i 31. and i place greers age around 37 ish. looking younger than she is cause mystic stuff, serum stuff.

look when you write characters, whose canons date WAY back. age is a really hard number to figure out with 616 comic canon.

[labyrinthphanlivingafacade]

im not going to speculate whether ppl in the past were secretly trans or not they didn't live in our time & no one living now knew them well enough to speak on their behalf but i hate that hostility we have towards even entertaining the idea. when youre trans, looking to the past & trying to find yourself can be a matter of being told time & time again that the v essence of what you are is a recent development in human history. & maybe the language is, but not the thing itself. not to mention that no one has a problem w assuming a historical figure was just whatever gender or sexual role was assigned to them at the time. but there's also this idea that to be a thing, you must rage against what is considered its "other", its "opposite". but man & woman are not opposites, and to adore being one is not to forsake being the other. & i really despise the v binary & cut & dry way we think about gender now & in the past. "[REDACTED] wasn't a trans man, she was a lesbian!" as tho those things contradict. as tho it would matter if they did. as tho there is any true, inherent, metaphysical irreconcilable difference. there is no magic buzzfeed quiz that can tell someone whether they're a trans man or nonbinary or a lesbian or all of those things at once.

anyways i hope that one day when whatever the future equivalent to a trans person is looking back at the course of history & they find me. i hope when they think "that person is like me", they dont kick themself for "projecting modern labels onto historical figures" or w/e. i hope whatever language they use to express themself does get projected onto me. i hope they consider us the same. & i hope whatever killjoy that tries to tell them differently gets scrooged by the ghosts of gender past, present, & future.