Latest Posts by pamprinninja - Page 7

Clothing

It’s fascinating to me how much male and female fashion differ; and how much variety there is in the latter.

It used to be that I would buy shirts; and I would buy pants; and generally speaking, pretty much any shirt would match any set of pants. Getting dressed was limited to randomly picking out one of each.

(To be fair, one can go fairly in-depth with male fashion; and I will be the first to put my hand up and state that I did not do so, as - I now recognize in retrospect - I found the act of shopping for male clothing dysphoric.)

Now I have all these amazing pieces of clothing; but there is so much variety - so much range! - that that any one item will only match a few others (or even none at all)!

I will invariably find myself thinking: “Now I need to buy x to go with this”... And I am loving it!

A cascade of name changes

When I changed my legal name, I was required to provide public notice of the change. There are legal news services that exist for this exact purpose - you pay them a small fee; they put the notice on their website.

(At least in my county, you can request the requirement be waived; there’s a good argument to be made that it exposes one’s status as a transgender individual and that this invites unnecessary risk in today’s fraught climate. I myself did not pursue this option however.)

The website for the legal news service in my area is, uh... Well, ‘archaic’ is probably the most charitable interpretation. Sometimes I want to share the notice with people, but there’s no search function for non-subscribers - you just have to scroll through the notices until you get to the right one.

(Really, I need to bookmark it or take a screenshot or something!)

Today I was doing exactly that - trying to find my notice again - and I was struck by how many other items between mine and present day were clearly transgender in nature (i.e. from a masculine to feminine name or vice versa). I would estimate a good third or so met this criteria.

It fills a girl’s heart with warmth and hope to see so many people finding their true selves and living authentically!

Winter fox

My friend Elizabeth invited me to an online painting class on short notice. It was an absolute blast, and we had a great time! Here’s the finished result:

This was actually a really interesting exercise in that it was technically an acrylics class, but all I had to hand were watercolors (bar the small amount of white acrylic I used for the snow).

It was quite challenging: trying to keep pace with a medium that required more applications of pigment to achieve the same depth of color, took longer to dry, and could not be used to over-paint!

It’s not going to set the art world on fire by any measure, but I’m actually really happy with how it came out under such constraints!

(Also: still sticking with canvas, despite it’s unsuitability! I really need to invest in a pad of watercolor paper already...)

Band-aids

I’m eight or nine sessions into laser hair removal on my legs; and minus some sparse patches that have so far escaped destruction, my getaway pins are now effectively hair-free.

This has an unexpected upside: Band-aids are trivial to remove.

Which is good, because I have to stick one on my leg every two weeks due to my shot!

Electrolysis

I just got done with the nth round of electrolysis on my face. My electrologist is a pleasure to deal with; the end results speak for themselves (hairs that kept resurrecting despite multiple max power laser applications - like some kind of follicular lich co-op - are now being permanently killed off); and the session fee is very reasonable.

However, I’d by lying if I said it didn’t bloody well hurt. It feels a lot like getting jabbed repeatedly with a superheated needle (because that’s exactly what electrolysis is); and unfortunately for me, one of the major problem areas is my top lip (which sucks, because that’s also a super-sensitive spot just full of little nerve bundles, ready to vociferously complain at a moment’s notice).

I’m glad I’m doing this - I’m a fan of fire-and-forget solutions - but god it would be nice to not to feel like I got hit in the face with a sack of bees afterwards!

Unexpected voice training side-effect #2

When I got my new car, I was delighted to learn that it came with a hands-free voice assistant. You press a button, and then the scene plays out as follows:

Car: Beep boop. “How can I help you?” Me: “Play that one sad song. I know, I know. That’s the kind of day it is.” Car: “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.” Me: “Play that one song.” Car: “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.” Me: “Just cancel.” Car: “I’m sorry-” Me: “CANCEL!” Car: “Cancelling.” Beep boop.

See, as awesome as this feature is, it really struggles to understand anything I actually say.

Until I started using my girl voice.

Legitimately! I’m not sure if this is simply because it’s in a higher pitch now (and the microphone can pick it up better); or if it’s because my accent has been slipping (and the original training data was chiefly American). Whatever the case: it’s a a welcome and unexpected reward for the work I’m putting in!

Another night terror

I had another terror episode last night. As with the previous episode, it was quite absurd in nature. I am mixed on whether this signifies a dearth of creativity on the anxiety-driven part of my brain, or that it is now entering some kind of postmodern phase.

Initially I dreamt that I was in my bed; and that it was nighttime, but there was just enough light to cast shadows. These shadows were sufficiently menacing (and there was a distinct impression that they were trying to resolve into the shape of people) that it became imperative that I extinguish all sources of light.

Enter into this scenario: an aquarium-themed night light (the same one that had kept my daughter company during her infant days). Not only was this thing on full brightness, but it had cunningly placed itself on my wife’s side of the bed - just out of reach.

That’s when my brain pressed the Adrenaline Dump button and I screamed awake.

Here’s the part that confuses me: I wasn’t terrified by the possibility that the night light would bring these Shadow People into being; I was terrified of the night light itself. Now how the hell does that work, brain?!

It’s bad enough I have these episodes. Could they at least be something genuinely scary?

Unexpected HRT side-effect #11

Sore thighs! My goodness.

To be fair, this isn’t really a side-effect of HRT, but rather my chosen delivery mechanism: intramuscular injection. Let me back up:

There are a lot of ways to ingest estradiol (everyone’s favorite, sexy estrogen). Pills (swallowed), pills (held under the tongue), pills (held under the lip), patches, creams, injections, implants...

How much of the hormone actually absorbed into the body (as opposed to being accidentally digested, say) varies between methods; and what works for one individual might not work for another.

I was advised early on that injections were the way to go; and that’s the route I took. I think it’s worked out pretty well in terms of the speed of my results!

However, it does mean that every two weeks I get to to inject 1ml of estradiol cypionate into my thigh muscle.

The injections themselves aren’t fun, but are actually pretty painless if all steps are followed to the letter (a process that really deserves its own post). Barring the occasional mishap, they are quite tolerable.

However, the muscle does not immediately absorb the estradiol. Instead, a depot is created - a little 1ml bubble of fluid that lives in my thigh and slowly releases it’s hormonal goodness into the surrounding tissue.

The day after it can feel pretty sore (as if I had caught my thigh on a piece of furniture); and frankly, it feels kinda weird having this tiny marble in my leg. It’s a small price to pay however for getting to be me; so I pay it gladly!

Transition-focused

Sometimes I worry that I come across as overly focused on the subject of my transition.

“So what have you been up to?” “Oh, you know. [Transition stuff].”

In project management parlance, transitioning is a multi-year project with multiple tasks, all of which have their own sub-tasks, and so on. Resources must be acquired; unforeseeable issues spontaneously arise and must be resolved.

I would not necessarily call this timeconsuming or overwhelming (although transitioning can be these things at times); but it’s pervasive. It touches every part of my life and requires constant care and attention.

A simple example: I wanted to change my legal name. In America, this generally means going to the county probate court and getting an order to that effect.

Every county has its own process and paperwork (although the vast majority at least try to adhere to some kind of nationally-distributed model process). All together, there were five forms.

I also needed to provide notarized copies of various personal records, so I had to get those.

Once everything was submitted, I had to wait for an invoice from the local legal news publisher; and then pay them to release a statement recording the name change.

I had to talk to the court and the publisher multiple times for input on what to do; to check up on the status of my case (”Oh, sorry - the person that mails out the confirmation was on vacation for two weeks”); and so on.

Eventually the court order was created, and I could pick up my copy of this incredibly important legal document.

Having done all this...

...I now get to reach out to the dozens and dozens of organizations that keep track of my legal identity and inform them that it has, in fact, changed.

...And some of them have their own requirements for updating their records; which necessitates addressing certain organizations in a certain order (BMV; Social Security; employer)...

All of this, all of this merely to change my name. One of a multitude of tasks.

Overall, this has been one of the most rewarding processes of my life; I would repeat it in a heartbeat. If however I do come across as eternally preoccupied with my transition, it’s because - at least for now - it constantly effects me, every day and in all ways (physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, legally) and I have no choice but to dedicate the necessary brainpower to managing these things.

A year in review: 2020 edition

Looking back on my progress this year.

(To be fair, the first picture is from March of 2019 and really shouldn’t be included; but I was still so camera-shy at the start of the year there simply aren’t any pictures from that period.)

Ōkami

When my daughter was younger, we started the habit of co-playing video games. I would be in charge of the controller, and she would direct me. These are some of my fondest memories.

One of the games we played through was Ōkami; which is an absolute (but often overlooked) masterpiece. (For the uninitiated: you play the part of Amaterasu, a white wolf (and god); and her traveling companion Issun, a tiny artist. The selling point of the series is the latter’s ability to paint on-screen, triggering the former’s supernatural powers to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.)

The game was recently re-released on the Switch, and we sat down together last night to play it. In a charming reversal of earlier days however; now my daughter holds the controller and I advise.

When playing games herself, she’s generally adhered to more casual fair. (I really want to stress that there’s nothing wrong with this. Deus Ex: Human Revolution had an excellent metaphor for this approach: it has no “Easy” mode, only “Give Me A Story”.)

That changed a couple of years ago when she fell in love with Hollow Knight; and she’s been seeking out greater challenges ever since. Ōkami is the latest such iteration; and I could not be prouder of her.

Unexpected HRT side-effect #10

 Confusing simple homonyms.

For context: while I am not dyslexic, there are certain idiosyncrasies with how my brain inputs, organizes, and outputs information that resembles a mild form of that particular disorder.

One example would be: analog clocks confuse me. My brain takes great umbrage at the hour hand - which is the larger unit of measurement - being represented by the smaller hand; and vice versa with the minute hand. If I need to read an analog clock, I have to manually reassert the correct order of the hands in my head; and this happens with each and every attempt.

Another is that certain words have unintuitive spellings (e.g. ‘Wednesday’; ‘business’); and I have to intentionally mispronounce them in my head to recall the correct spelling.

These are not major impediments; but are something I deal with on a daily basis. (As to why this is, I have no idea - there is a known association between left-handedness and dyslexia, so perhaps this has something to do with it; it could also be a result of the structural mismatch between my brain and body).

After starting HRT, I noticed that I was regularly confusing simple homonyms - ‘to’ and ‘too’; ‘now’ and ‘know’; ‘their’ and ‘they’re’; and so on. While I’ve been dealing with this problem my whole life, the actual set of troublesome words has been fixed since childhood; so it’s kind of interesting to see not only the set now expand, but with basic vocabulary that has never posed an issue before!

Unexpected HRT side-effect #9

I sometimes get asked by people that have to stare intently at my face (usually in some professional capacity):

“Your skin is so good! What’s your secret?”

And I tell them:

“Every two weeks I shoot my thigh full of the cool, sexier estrogen!”

As with a number of other effects, I knew that I could expect softer, better skin. However, I didn’t truly appreciate with any kind of granularity as to what that actually meant.

For one thing: I have no breakouts, no blemishes; I changed literally nothing about my diet or skincare routine, and suddenly my face is completely crystal-clear.

(The one exception to this seems to be immediately after I load up my progesterone; although even here, ‘blemish’ seems kind of a strong word for a series of nearly imperceptible bumps.)

For another: my pores have shrunk! This caused some issues in the first couple of weeks, as it effectively forced some of them to trap their contents; but that went away after a little over a month and it’s been plain, small-pored sailing ever since!

The one downside - and it really isn’t much of one - is this: I am actually allergic to cats (which is probably not a great trait in a cat owner); but have great tolerance providing said cats are not rubbing themselves on my face. Doing so would set off a reaction where my lips would tingle and I would break out in hives.

Since starting HRT, the time in which this reaction occurs has gone from many minutes after the initial contact to practically seconds. It really isn’t much of a problem (and truthfully, I’ll gladly accept hives as a consequence of cat affection); but it’s interesting to see how yet another tiny part of my life has been impacted by the simple expedient of transposing my hormone levels!

Nominally I’m not in the habit of reblogging (nothing against it; I just prefer to create myself) but Nick is not only an incredibly talented artist, he’s also an amazing human being and deserves so much love!

Collection of Nick Robles Nightcrawler, for…uhh…art reasons.

Unexpected HRT side-effect #8

Skittering!

Strictly speaking I started HRT on year ago; but my endocrinologist didn’t want to go full-throttle with dosages until he had established that doing so would, in fact, not cause me to die (which seems perfectly reasonable).

It really wasn’t until around... April-ish?... that my levels actually got to where they needed to be; and the moment it happened, it was like a switch in my body just flipped.

Then I started skittering around the apartment. I would bounce off the walls! Dance in the kitchen. There was shimmying. Oh so much shimmying!

I told my spouse: “Sorry, I don’t know why I do this. I guess it’s just a thing!”

I’ll never forget their response: “You don’t need to apologize. It means you’re happy.” Beat. “I’ve... I’ve waited so long for this. For you to be happy.”

Of course, this does rather make it sound as if the preceding years were spent in unspeakable misery, and this was not the case. It might be accurate however to say that I spent a lot of time giving my love to others and never reserving any for myself. Undoubtedly there are greater acts of loving oneself out there; but I figure committing to turn one’s gender upside down is up there!

Here’s to my newfound physical expression of joyousness!

Bras are cool

I went pretty quickly from HRT kicking in, to getting kind of pokey in the chest region, to buying myself a couple of bras. Altogether, it was perhaps no more than eight to ten weeks from Point A to Point B.

And I was so glad that I did. There was something so satisfying about being able to see myself in the mirror, with matching upper and lower underwear. It was... completing.

It makes me wonder if perhaps there’s value in snagging a bra before it even becomes a necessity; just for the gender euphoria / psychological comfort it can provide!

The Brutalizer

I was in a really, really bad spot a few weeks ago. I found myself sitting in the bath, crying my eyes out, when my friend messaged me.

On a crazy whim I asked her if she wanted to video chat, and that’s exactly what we did (with me doing my damnedest to keep the camera above neck-level).

She was having a pretty bad time of things too; and it was really good that we were able to talk and be there for one another.

To cheer me up, my friend then shared with me a recent experience: during a visit to a sex shop, she encountered an object for sale of both prodigious length and alarming girth. The name of this objet d’art - alarmingly - is The Brutalizer.

I would like to stress at this point that the two of us are super sex-positive. (You do you! If it isn’t harming anyone, why should we care?)

However, there was a fundamental absurdity to this particular item that kept us giggling: it’s gargantuan proportions (intimidating for all but the highly experienced); it’s bizarre marketing (including emphasis on the weight of the product); and perhaps best of all, a glowing appraisal from a professional online reviewer (hidden, like some kind of butt-stuffing landmine, in an otherwise tranquil field of gardening product and Bakugan reviews).

The store had three of these things on display! (Presumably to combat a rush of customers?)

There was much-needed laughter.

During this episode, I made the offhand comment that between the name of the product and the ultra-macho slogans adorning its packaging, I could very much envisage an ‘80s buddy cop show where this inanimate, intimate object plays the role of the maverick detective.

...And that engaged my dark muse. Despite the inherent ridiculousness, I then went on to paint this monstrosity:

(Actual Brutalizer censored because it’s Tumblr; but you know, use your imagination.)

My daughter described this, with utmost aptness, as a ‘physical shitpost’.

The painting is currently moving through the transit network of the US postal service as I type; winging its way to my utterly unaware friend. I very much look forward to seeing her reaction when she realizes that I have immortalized our in-joke in a format that can never, ever be displayed before polite company!

Lessons learned:

Planning typography is laborious, but so worth it!

Watercolors and rough canvas still don’t mix, but I’m persevering.

Also, watercolors are not great for ‘80s-style neon colors.

It feels like cheating somehow, but fine-tip Sharpies are great for outlining!

Update: It arrived! My friend’s reaction: “😂🤣👮‍♂️🍆🎨“!

Art exchange

I made an incredible friend this year; and dear sweetheart that she is, she gifted me this equally incredible artwork:

(In a delightfully small detail, the initials of myself, my wife, and my daughter are hidden in the leaves!)

I absolutely had to return the favor; and feeling newly inspired, produced this work piece celebrating her three lovable cats and their very different personalities:

All things considered, it came out rather well! Lessons learned:

Typography requires planning (which is why the title is off-center).

Watercolors and rough canvas are poor bedfellows.

I need a more controllable outlining medium than black acrylic paint.

Unexpected voice training side-effect #1

I’m losing my accent.

Developing a more feminine voice is not merely a case of raising your pitch (although this is a significant component). Women also use a specific vocabulary; elongate their vowels; and vary their overall tone more while speaking.

As I’ve attempted to replicate these qualities, I’ve used my wife’s voice as my model to aim for. As she is American however, I have also picked up elements of her accent in the process; causing my original accent to fade.

Unexpected HRT side-effect #7

Muscle strains.

I knew I was going to (and wanted to) lose muscle mass on HRT, and that this would significantly lower my functional strength. I assumed that during this process, I would simply adjust to my new strength levels as I went along.

Not so - my brain continues to assume it’s working with pre-HRT muscle capacity.

As a result, I keep injuring myself in new and novel ways. For instance, I used to buy 40lb containers of cat litter at the store; but after straining the muscles in my forearm several weeks in a row, gave up and switched to 24lbs instead. I don’t recall ever having strained a forearm muscle prior to that.

Now my neck and shoulders are kicking my ass; I assume from either tanking a forty pack of water or moving my desk (or both).

I imagine at a certain point I will (like everything else) unlearn this habit and replace it with something more fitting. Until then, I find myself pausing before certain physical tasks and asking myself: “Wait, can I still do this?”...

Animal friend #1: Jexer

For the previous six months, I’ve been at the center of a triangle with PTSD on one edge, work stress on another, and transition-related depression on the third (itself a mix of “Why did I wait so long to do this” and “I’m never going to escape the fact that my biological starting point is ‘male’“).

During my first flashback, I instinctively grabbed my (then three) animal friends for support. This became a reoccurring pattern - I would clutch them tightly during each subsequent flashback; hold them at night; and sit them next to me as I worked.

It’s difficult to tease out whether the comfort they bring me is some kind of holdover from childhood (there’s a certain logic in the idea that the trauma I experienced was as a child; therefore the antidote would also come from that era); or if it’s the result of a kind of mythological girlhood (one that never actually took place, and exists purely in my head; a phenomenon that warrants its own post).

Either way, they have been very effective and keeping my anxiety at generally manageable levels during a trying time.

I wanted to talk about one of them in particular: Jexer, my hedgehog friend. He was delivered to me by a crane machine in the Isle Of Wight when I was eight years old; but this suggests that he is some kind of possession, which could not be further from the truth. He’s my friend, and I love him dearly.

(You may notice that he has a blue nose; this is because the original was lost in an incident involving a much loved but at that time, also rather destructive puppy. The new nose was a skilled repair conducted by my dearly missed grandmother.)

Currently he goes everywhere I go. He sits on my lap when I am at my desk, and when I am driving. There is a special compartment in my bag reserved for him when I have to go into places.

I had a little blanket made for him; because he is a British hedgehog, and quite unaccustomed to the extremes of cold weather that pervade the North American continent.

All of this sounds quite insane, of course; but that’s how things are - when life threatens to drown you, no raft is unwelcome.

Lip service

There’s only a handful of hairs left on my top lip; everything else has been obliterated via laser hair removal and electrolysis. All the same, I get pretty self-conscious about the few surviving stragglers and run a razor over them every now and then.

I just did that now, and somehow managed to lop the top off of two hair follicles (which are of course, as is their want, bleeding profusely).

HOW?! This is like playing Minesweeper with a 5 x 5 grid and literally one mine in the bottom left corner, and still somehow hitting it on the first try!

Unexpected HRT side-effect #6

I’m not really up to speed on Tumblr etiquette yet, but I believe the polite thing to do when dealing with heavy material is to provide a content preface. To that end: this is a kinda heavy. There’s abuse and stuff.

Sooo... PTSD. This is an actual, unexpected side effect of HRT. Let me explain.

I’ve previously touched on the idea that I have a female-structured brain; that certain parts of it require estrogen to function correctly; and that during the pre-HRT portion of my life, these parts operated poorly (or not at all).

A large - and rather nuanced - group of these malfunctions come under the umbrella heading of ‘emotional processing’ (or lack thereof); including the inability to:

Fully feel my emotions,

Understand them,

Connect them to my thoughts,

Communicate them to others;

...And perhaps most importantly, make sense of (and move past) the various negative events that life likes to throw at us.

Once HRT kicked in and supplied the estrogen my brain so desperately craved, all of this changed! I cannot stress what an incredible experience it was to go from zero to full emotional processing capacity virtually overnight.

The next thing I discovered, however - much to my chagrin - was that far from passing through the troughs of life with a stiff upper lip, rather I had simply deferred my response to those events. Now the bill was due.

I relived a lot of grief and anger: at the loss of loved ones; at lines crossed; at years in the wrong body.

One day, I had a disagreement; the matter was settled amicably, but afterwards I felt ill at ease. Without even understanding why, I gathered up my three animal friends and retreated into our walk-in closet; turned out the lights, and just... sobbed. Great, unrelenting torrent of tears. I didn’t understand what was happening; only that I was terrified, and hurting.

After what felt like hours, my wife coaxed me back into the light and to normalcy.

As night approached the following evening, it happened again. And again. And again. Every night, for months on end.

During these episodes, I would experience repetitive, intrusive thoughts for which I had no context. “Please don’t hurt me!”; “Please stop hurting me!”; “Let me go!”; “Why did he hurt me?”

In retrospect, what I have been able to piece together is as follows:

These events were flashbacks. They relate to a trauma that I have no memory of; perhaps because it happened very early on in my life. Based on the intrusive thoughts - and other indicators, such as an intense phobia of forcible restraint and what I believe may have been unconscious efforts on my part to relive the original acts - I believe the trauma was sexual in nature.

HRT kick-started my brain; and the first item on the agenda was - completely unbeknownst to me - processing this forgotten trauma.

For the curious - I’m much better now; my wife and I are no strangers to PTSD symptoms and well-versed when it comes to handling them. Still; I cannot say that when I undertook that first estradiol shot, that I ever imagined it would unearth this particular landmine in my psyche.

Unexpected HRT side-effect #5

I got my artistic creativity back.

For real.

I was bursting with creativity as a teenager. I wrote, I drew, I painted, I modeled, I designed, I composed. I would be overtaken by these ideas and was compelled to bring them into being.

...Then it went away.

This I ascribed to the usual factors: newfound work and family responsibilities that overtook my time.

Now I posit a different theory: it’s my belief that I have a female-structured brain; and that the operation of certain parts of it require a sufficient provision of estrogen. Suffice to say, by the end of the teenage years, estrogen was in rather short supply and my brain malfunctioned accordingly.

That is no longer an issue; and I find myself once again not only bursting with ideas but more importantly, utterly driven to birth them into the world. The catgirl shirt was one such project; now I’m about to complete a painting (details omitted here, as it’s mildly NSFW).

It’s good to be back!

Oh no

I was doing my progesterone shot last night and the plunger in the syringe got stuck 20% of the way in. I really put some force behind but, but it wasn’t moving and I was terrified that if it did suddenly give way I’d dump the entire contents of the syringe into my thigh in a split-second.

(I’m not sure of the exact ramifications for doing so, but my nurse practitioner was quite clear during instruction that this was an undesirable outcome.)

I really didn’t want to toss the rest of the progesterone (it’s not like I had more on hand), so I withdrew the syringe and switched to a fresh needle. Poked myself again, depressed the plunger, and...

...The syringe got stuck again.

As classic “Well, what the hell do I do now?” scenarios go, sitting there with an immovable syringe sticking out of your thigh has to count pretty highly, I reckon.

I wiggled the plunger a bit and applied more force than sensible, and finally the damn thing overcame whatever the resistance was and immediately dumped half the load (so I guess I will find out why that’s a no-no in short order). Everything proceeded smoothly from there.

I’m still nonplussed as to what the issue was. A manufacturing defect in the syringe itself perhaps? Some kind of sediment in the progesterone blocking the barrel of the needle? I have no idea.

I just really hope that this doesn’t happen again...

Update 1: I talked to my friend about this and her first go-around, the needle disengaged from the syringe while it was in her leg. OMG!

Update 2: I had more soreness than usual but was otherwise okay; so I’m guessing that firehosing half the dose didn’t do too much damage, thankfully.

Unexpected HRT side-effect #4

I have no ability to regulate my temperature anymore. At least, not compared to how it used to be. Blazing sun? Sign me up! Below freezing? It’s all good! But... not anymore.

Now, that in and of itself wasn’t unexpected - pre-HRT, I read a comment from a trans girl to this exact effect (and indeed, that entire thread was the inspiration for this series of posts).

What really gets me is when and where my newfound lack of temperature tolerance likes to strike. Today, I was sweating bullets and getting flushed because I was eating soup. Soup!

(Original from wintersbucky; via feed-the-roses.)

I made a t-shirt. Absolutely no idea what I was thinking at the time, but now it’s out of my head and into the world. There’s pastel pink and blue halftone edging on the lettering for... reasons.

Cat tent

I will often sit in bed with my knees up; and our insane baby cat has now decided that the impromptu blanket fort this creates is the perfect place to snuggle.

It’s the fucking cutest.

Compliments

I’ve noticed an uptick in compliments from strangers on my appearance recently, so when I went out on Saturday I decided to keep count. The final tally was six.

Now, to be fair, I recently colored my hair and it’s something of an attention-grabber.

Even before that however, I would receive random compliments from other women over the course of the week: “I love your outfit”! “I love your nails”! And so on.

It’s interesting to me because the grand total number of compliments I would receive from strangers in any given year prior to transitioning was exactly zero.

Maybe it’s society’s purview that men do not deserve compliments. Perhaps it’s a misunderstanding on my part, and the compliments are symbolic showing of gender solidarity.

I don’t know.

I enjoy that people seem to approve of how I look now; I just wish that this had always been the case.