Well now I'm going to have to reconsider the old advice for what to do if life gives me lemons. Though to be honest, I'd always suspected that I'd make limoncello anyway.
Things I say to therapists that I then have to unpick in my own head after I've said them, number 772 in a series. "She is a disbeliever in her own power, yet afraid of it."
I just had an appointment with my endocrinologist, which went very differently to what I was expecting. In particular, she prescribed me testosterone. Now, I know cis women have it too, but the idea of deliberately giving myself my nemesis is quite squicky.
@Eleanor LNR Blair Broadly, unless I don’t take my antidepressants for a couple of days, I find I don’t get turned on very much or for very long, and sensations around my vagina, clit, and tits are very muted. Orgasm consists of little more than thigh cramps. This feels unsatisfactory
@lnr This is a pretty well known side effect of some SSRIs, though, isn't it? I realise that endo's might tend to prescribe from a limited pallette, but I do wonder if they prescribe T for cis women in your situation? Maybe they do. Either way, that might be an interesting data-point.
@chiffchaff that's exactly what I was going to say! (about it being a common side effect) I don't think I ever brought it up though, just kind of accepted it! So I don't know if they suggest T for it. I think T *does* get prescribed for cis women in some circumstances, occasionally as part of menopausal HRT even, but it's pretty unusual.
Hey did you know that Iberian rail gauge is what it is because Portugal used 5 Portuguese feet for their gauge and Spain 6 Castilian feet for their gauge and the are so damn close that splitting the difference wouldn’t have a detrimental affect on rolling stock for either. And so its officially 1668mm!
When shopping online, usually for clothes, I've seen the "Klarna" etc. buttons at checkout that allow people to buy now and pay later. It's obviously a form of unsecured credit, familiar enough. What I didn't realise until my OU course pointed it out is that these things come with no credit or affordability checks, making it very easy for people to land in significant debt.
I quote T.S. Eliot a lot, especially when thinking about the contents of my heart and mind. Here are some of the bits that speak to me, or rattle around my head, or have the right sort of memorability to be little modernist earworms.
First, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", a poem so bound up in its protagonist's inability to communicate his emotions it can't help but have resonated with a trans girl who stuffed most of herself in a box for a quarter century and time and again found herself flailing around ineptly with the bleeding severed tendrils of an emotional existence.
"Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea."
"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;"
"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?"
" And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth
... show more
I quote T.S. Eliot a lot, especially when thinking about the contents of my heart and mind. Here are some of the bits that speak to me, or rattle around my head, or have the right sort of memorability to be little modernist earworms.
First, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", a poem so bound up in its protagonist's inability to communicate his emotions it can't help but have resonated with a trans girl who stuffed most of herself in a box for a quarter century and time and again found herself flailing around ineptly with the bleeding severed tendrils of an emotional existence.
"Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea."
"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;"
"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?"
" And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— If one, settling a pillow by her head Should say: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.” "
"Do I dare to eat a peach?"
"Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
There are more, bits that I kind of remember but out of context or as familiar friends I'm forever meeting again for the first time... You can read the whole poem at poetryfoundation.org/poetrymag…
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that …
Can't quite believe that an acquaintance of mine thinks people vote Reform because they're "concerned about government finances". I mean granted he's probably one of the the most middle class cis het white men I know but come on.
I'm so pleased Reform have settled on a reason to vote for them now: I used to get terribly confused about whether it was about states rights or ethics in games journalism.
All these neoliberal politicians know what their oligarch masters want, and it's been agreed informally, behind the scenes, that Farage will take the reigns in the UK after this shambles of a Labour government
The Equality Act has a number of flaws, but I have a soft spot for a part of it. After the evening where it first actually occurred to me I could be trans, I found myself musing that having “proposed to undergo a process […] for the purposes of reassigning […] sex” I had acquired the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. It didn’t change anything practically but the way that was worded made me feel a little bit seen by whoever drafted the 2010 Act. A tiny legislative hug.
I was thinking over/into my beer just now. I want there to be a website for trans eggs. Is there one? Not just useful information, but actually something much closer to advertising. There's this narrative that shapes being trans as undesirable, faulty, at best a disorder to be treated and pitied.
But being trans is amazing, and I think we should be shouting about it to as many people who need to hear as we can reach.
A friend is having surgery at the same hospital I was in almost three years ago. It's bringing back so many happy memories, of daft things and frets, of little surprises and joys.
When trans women make ourselves more truly who we are, we do amazing things. Ain't no power in the 'verse can stop us.
I am listening on Radio 4 to Labour handing the next general election to Reform. It’s scary just how stupid they are that they don’t see that this is what they are doing.
Also, for far too many people, fucking terrifying.
This is from a thread I posted on Bluesky last night. I usually keep my transposting there, but it's been suggested that I need to publish it long form.
So here it is.
Storytime.
Once upon a time there was a little girl called Sarah. This would have come as a surprise to her parents because they thought she was a little boy called something else. Sarah herself also didn’t know she was called Sarah because she hadn’t yet met the friend who suggested it to her.
But what’s in a name? Point being, here she was.
Except for some reason everyone told her that she was a boy, and when naked she kinda looked like one. Sarah found this quite confusing and also didn’t understand why the other kids who looked like her were so bloody horrible to her.
But again, that didn’t matter so much, because there were plenty of girls to play with and Sarah got on with them quite well.
One day Sarah was watching TV with her parents and a comedy sketch revealed the existence of, “women who used to be men”.
Sarah asked
... show more
This is from a thread I posted on Bluesky last night. I usually keep my transposting there, but it's been suggested that I need to publish it long form.
So here it is.
Storytime.
Once upon a time there was a little girl called Sarah. This would have come as a surprise to her parents because they thought she was a little boy called something else. Sarah herself also didn’t know she was called Sarah because she hadn’t yet met the friend who suggested it to her.
But what’s in a name? Point being, here she was.
Except for some reason everyone told her that she was a boy, and when naked she kinda looked like one. Sarah found this quite confusing and also didn’t understand why the other kids who looked like her were so bloody horrible to her.
But again, that didn’t matter so much, because there were plenty of girls to play with and Sarah got on with them quite well.
One day Sarah was watching TV with her parents and a comedy sketch revealed the existence of, “women who used to be men”.
Sarah asked her mother what that was about, and her mother explained that there was something called a “sex change operation”. Young Sarah noted two things:
This was a real thing
Her parents thought it was a very very bad thing.
As Sarah grew a bit older, she would notice other things from popular culture. A man had accidentally discovered how to permanently remove facial and body hair with lasers. There were people called transsexuals. There were men who liked dressing up as women.
All these things seemed important.
But they were also scary, and also clearly not the sort of things that her parents or anyone in their circle would approve of if they knew that Sarah was thinking about them.
One day Sarah was playing dress up with her friend, Kirsty. She was about 7. Their mums saw Sarah in a dress and laughed hysterically. Sarah was humiliated.
It slowly got harder and harder for Sarah to play with her friends. It was becoming clear that whilst this was considered cute when Sarah was 4, or 5, or even 8, it was starting to get a bit much, but the boys were just dreadful. Sarah got on ok with a couple of them, but mostly she just played with her computer.
Her parents, especially her father, thought she was doing this too much. Sarah was terrified of her father, who bullied her, and bullied her mother.
When Sarah was 9, her parents divorced. They were both having affairs. She carried on living with her mum, and her little brother, and the two siblings did not get on. Their mum had to work a lot of hours to make ends meet. Sarah’s old friends weren’t much interested in her any more; they were more interested in the boys that Sarah was supposed to have stuff in common with.
Sarah spent more and more time alone learning to use her computer. She got really quite good at it. Her mum worked evenings in a pub near a local Catholic private school. The teachers drank there.
Her mum would tell the teachers about her kid, who was “really good with a computer”. Eventually this interested them enough that they wanted to meet this kid.
Apparently Sarah made a good impression on them, because they offered her a scholarship. At 11, Sarah went off on a full scholarship as a day pupil to this Catholic boarding school. It had a uniform. Different for boys and girls. Sarah had to wear the boys’ uniform.
Sarah couldn’t make friends with the girls and the boys bullied her, but Sarah’s teachers were fond of her. She did well academically, even if she got in a lot of fights.
It was clear to Sarah though that her teachers and the priests who ran the school thought that people who had the feelings that Sarah had, the ones she didn’t tell people about, were going to hell.
Sarah started to go through puberty. She felt extremely alone. She carried on doing well academically, but the light started to go out of her eyes. When Sarah looks at old photographs now, from that time and later, the eyes just look dead.
And then Sarah’s body started doing … things.
And the girls that Sarah desperately wanted friendship with, she now wanted other things from them as well.
She wanted physical intimacy, but more than that, she wanted to be one of them.
And she couldn’t tell anybody.
And it hurt.
A lot.
There were TV programmes that occasionally featured “transsexuals”. These people were all portrayed as pitiful parodies of women. They all seemed sad and the things the programmes showed … well Sarah didn’t see herself in them.
Sarah was 15. Sarah didn’t know how full of shit the media was. Yet.
Because she wasn’t like the transsexuals she saw on TV, and because she was going through puberty and occasionally had blood in her testosterone stream, Sarah assumed that this must be some sort of transvestic fetish that she had. She didn’t know that when people do weird sex things, they don’t actually occupy their every other waking moment either, like when they’re brushing their teeth, or walking the dog, or doing their homework.
Sarah was good at maths and sciences, but she could be a bit slow on the uptake in other ways. If Sarah had thought about it more, she would have realised that a person’s core identity will manifest throughout their personality and sexuality is only one part of that, but she was operating in a limited information environment, and anyway, her sexuality was disgusting and she was going to hell for it. Everybody said.
And her eyes were lifeless.
And she had nobody to talk to about this. It didn’t even matter that they would hurt her if they found out.
It mattered more that she was so utterly ashamed that if anyone found out, she would have to die. Nobody would want her. Not even her own mother.
Sarah was by now a shell of a human. She lived for her special interests and not much else.
And there was no light in her eyes.
Occasionally, when she knew that she wouldn’t get caught, she would borrow a bra or something. Sometimes this gave her a sexual thrill. This just confirmed that this was a fetish. The whole “I’m not even a person any more if I’m not a girl” stuff was obviously irrelevant background noise.
Sarah got the grades to go to Cambridge and study computer science. Away from the priests, and exposed to new ideas, she started to realise that a lot of what she’d been told was bullshit. Especially the hell stuff. Especially the stuff about how LGBT people were bad people.
But she was still very ashamed. That stuff runs deep.
And her eyes were still dead.
During her time at university, Sarah, who had never actually had any kind of intimate relationship because she was a hollowed out shell of a human being, met Sylvia. They became friends.
Sylvia was also studying computer science but in the year below. Sylvia’s mother was profoundly emotionally abusive and she didn’t want to go back to her during the university holidays.
When Sarah graduated and started working, Sylvia got a summer job at the microprocessor company Sarah was working at. Since they really only knew each other over the summer; everyone else had got jobs elsewhere one gone home, they spent a lot of time together.
And then one day they ended up in bed together.
Sarah wanted to tell Sylvia the thing, but she was ashamed. So ashamed.
Eventually, Sarah and Sylvia ended up engaged. Sarah couldn’t marry Sylvia without letting her know. It wouldn’t be fair.
But she was utterly fucking terrified. Sarah was 26 years old by then and the company she worked for had floated on the stock exchange and made her wealthy. She paid off her mum’s mortgage and thought about looking for a house with Sylvia.
But she had to tell her this one, catastrophic, world-ending thing. She didn’t know how.
She told her she felt better in a dress sometimes. Felt better if she painted her nails sometimes. God, it was terrifying!
The world didn’t end.
The. World. Didn’t. End.
THE WORLD DIDN’T END
Sylvia was not disgusted. Sylvia, it seemed, was a little bit bisexual.
The dam started to crack. Sarah grew her hair out. Told a few of their friends. Some of them actually thought it was cool and fun.
One of them told her she looked like a Sarah.
Sarah’s friends started calling her Sarah in private.
Even if her eyes still had no light in them.
Sarah reached 30. She’d told people the thing. She wasn’t even really hiding it any more.
But she still remembered the pathetic transsexuals she’d seen on TV.
And her hair was starting to thin on top. There didn't seem to be much time left to do what she secretly knew she needed to do.
Sarah’s friends told her she had amazing eyes. Particularly her female friends. That there was something that triggered profound emotions with her eyes.
This is because if you looked into Sarah’s eyes, they were dead. All that was in them was pain. Deep, endless pain.
She had read some stuff, in secret, when nobody was looking, and then less secretly, about transgender people.
Some of them took oestrogen apparently.
Sarah didn’t understand why. It seemed controversial. She thought being transsexual was about an operation. Nothing more.
And then one day, just after her 32nd birthday, when she was presenting as a woman half the time in public anyway, but increasingly realising her body wasn’t going to keep letter her do it, Sarah got drunk, broke down in tears, and said, “I have gender dysphoria and I need a sex change”.
And over the next months, Sarah saw doctors. She saw several. Most were useless. Her last hope was a private doctor called Dr Curtis. Obviously though he would tell her that she wasn’t actually like the people on TV, and therefore he couldn’t help, and if he said that, there was nowhere left to go, and no possibility of further existence.
He didn’t say that. He said that he thought Sarah was a very straightforward case of transsexualism.
And a few months later he gave her an oestrogen prescription.
Sarah started to take the pills, and over the next few months, for the first time since she was a little girl, the light came back on in Sarah’s eyes.
The light is still on. It’s been back for 19 years now.
Epilogue: the media lied. They picked people carefully. They edited carefully. They utterly misrepresented these trans women because their audience wanted titillation, not education.
Well, most of them.
Sarah met other trans women after that. Lots of them. They were not sad parodies. They were amazing strong women who loved their lives and their womanhood. They are the best of us.
The media lied about them, and who they are. It still does.
And it was always about the oestrogen. The media lied about that too.
Or rather they simply did not get it, because nobody ever thought to ask the actual women taking it.
If by some chance you read this, and you see yourself in it, and you’re crying, or you want to but can’t (that’s testosterone doing that to you, by the way), know this:
Sarah, out there somewhere on the internets and posting about, I don't know, just existing, helped create the environment that allowed Julia (hi! Third-person narrative is hard) to exist/instantiate.
Thanks for that! My youngest daughter said one of the OWL (Our Whole Lives sex-ed program of our UU church) was the day they got to meet and interview a trans woman. Although I am cisgender I saw a bit of myself in your account in regards to a few things. I was bullied in school. Quit grade 9 because of it (I would return after a move and go on to graduate). I also developed a reputation as the kid who knows computers in our small town. My dad was not impressed and often said I was wasting my time. Later he did come around on that score when he saw it was indeed a real job. Transgender is unfortunately under attack by the Trump administration here. The community needs all the support it can get. Your post and others like it are important.
Our stories aren’t exactly the same, but they sure do rhyme. Thank you for giving me a good cry, because little Sophie was also there all along, even before she knew it was possible to not be the person everyone told her she was and be herself instead. 💜
I never realized (or connected enough to recall) that you and (redacting brother's name for privacy) didn't get on when you were younger. Seemed to agree well enough as adults that one Christmas I was visiting...
Do I know any psychologists on here? I'm wondering if there's been significant study of the variety of ways trans people relate to and think/feel about their pretransition selves. If that's even psychology!
(I could just go diving in, looking for papers, but that often fails in subjects I know little about because I lack the terminology to know what I'm looking for.)
That is such an interesting question. On where to find such research, being trans has been so pathologised by the medical and mental health professions that I'd go looking for research done specifically by trans people, or more likely autobiographical writing, rather than research as such. I'd not trust anything else.
@Zumbador I think I agree. I think there are a lot of great counsellors in this space with kind of "meso" scale experience, things they've learnt from many patients, etc. I think this and support groups etc is probably the best place to look.
But psychology in the paper-mill" "Professor of Brainiology, OBE, CBE, bar, bar, sense at the University of Old", I'd be very skeptical about.
Throughout history, as a profession they always seem to be playing catch up with reality and enabling lots of horrible things done by states. It seem like quite a foetid hunting ground.
@Zumbador I don't like to be abstract political, so here's a concrete example from a paper on Autism.
There was an experiment which showed that autistic people were more consistent in applying professed beliefs in private (a faked experiment where subjects were asked to eat taboo-animal meet in exchange for money, in company and alone).
This increased consistency was pathologised as autistic people failing to adapt to social situations by not being hypocritical in private. They did brain scans and stuff to show the hypocrisy nexus and suggested interventions to fire it up in autistic people.
I suspect this is very likely how that kind of psychology works in the trans space too.
My therapist introduced me to the concept of RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria) last week and it is a very powerful match for a lot of what’s in my head.
It makes sense in this context that I appreciate my strength training sessions because I only ever get positive feedback and encouragement.
“In Our Time” on radio 4 is discussing Pope Joan and a rumour from shortly after the time that popes had genital examinations to stop this ever happening again.
Talk to me about lipstick, my combined soshul masses!
In particular, how the hell do you apply the stuff when you don't really have any lips to speak of? I either end up with the barely perceptible impression I might have drunk some red wine or JACKSON POLLOCK CRAYON EDITION.
Lipstick is easy for me - I just don't (except once a year for Halloween, in vampire costume). Now I think of it, most of the women of my acquaintance don't wear lipstick, and it wasn't common in my work environment either. Saves us money, I suppose, and faff time in the mornings.
@sunflowerinrain I am currently committing myself to faff every morning, and I am conscious of my lips being very thin and would like to maybe bring balance to the forceface. Maybe it won't be something I do every day in the end, but I would at least like to have the skill for the occasions when I want to.
I think what you need is a lesson from someone who does make-up for camera (not stage, which I have done: it's quite different and looks shocking close up).
Luke
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Luke • •Tattierantula 🎃
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sensitive content
Sarah Brown likes this.