Why would we make those when we can ban the only country actually trying to make evs

That’s fair, I had sorts of folks I had to spend time around to get comfortable with too. I think a lot of people think that it’s necessary or easy to suddenly become comfortable with sorts of people who are marginalized. But what we should be doing is demanding people be moving towards a more equal and free society and not making their discomfort those people’s problem.

ETA: building comfort with those groups is also important, but it’s slow and it’s something we shouldn’t beat people up for not being quite at yet.

Yeah fortunately it’s been mostly in good ways

It’s funny hrt didn’t make me look anything like my mom (for both better and worse), but it did make me act more like her.

Many of us did that and only learned while recovering from bottom surgery lol

Yeah I’ve gotten decent at it thanks to my attitude that I only want to wear it occasionally and never to hide flaws (so nothing like foundation). The biggest thing is to try to replicate styles that you like on nights you aren’t going out. Also eyeliner is hard, everyone knows it.

Additional tip is to learn what colors/shades look good/bad on you. For example I only really look great in darker colors and tend to look best in jewel tones, this means that less bold lip shades tend to look awful on me, while I look great in really dark reds and purples.

I regret taking so long to actually learn, I spent a few years with a more masc aesthetic than I like because I was afraid to be more feminine. Turns out I’m pretty femme, though lazy about it and with a simple style.

True, but especially in situations where moving forward is scary and feels like everything will change immediately when you do, but then you have to wait a long time for it to happen.

Yeah, at some point I need to fix my voice enough to try to do stealth. But also, see number 2… But also in my career, having some masculinity is recommended for being taken seriously. So I’m out here with the “succeed as a woman in my field” advice being often at odds with the “how to pass” advice.

Yeah, though I will present a counter argument for why they do that.

A) I do think there’s are a lot of people who see us as a separate third gender (an experience I also find myself getting as a lesbian), and I think they’re on both sides. This comes down to the fact that even the people who insist up and down that they see me as a man still mistreat me in a feminine way. Even when I was terribly disliked pre transition there was a respect and deference I received that I just don’t anymore. Man hating terfs treat me differently now than then and it is more in line with how misogynists treat me.

This is especially the case with supposed allies (and sometimes trans men) weaponizing my assigned sex at birth. They aren’t treating me like a man, they’re engaging in female socialization of me in a way that is comfortable to them. They can push feminine expectations onto us while still acknowledging that those same expectations are damaging to themselves by using this.

B) More importantly, it’s a shut up button. It’s irrelevant to what they think and believe because it’s an easy way to force us to back down. It’s an easy way to force us to be smaller, to be quiet, to pressure us to put up with shit. It’s the only explanation for why I see it used by trans men on us and by cis monosexuals on their trans partners. People who clearly do genuinely see us as our gender pull it out for these purposes.

When a trans woman does bad things, the misgendering her seems to also be an attempt to just hurt her, invalidate her, etc. The right will focus on her trying to frame us all as evil and some on the left will attempt to claim she’s not really a trans woman (sometimes accepting right wing narratives in the process), or just the “this is a bad person, we hurt bad people, misgendering is how you hurt a trans person.” And I’m not even going to go into v coding of trans prisoners, which most people don’t even know about, and some who do still don’t care about how it’s a material reason to not put trans women in men’s prisons.

C) Yeah the pressure to be meek and infinitely understanding for fear of hurting us all. The fucking gamestop video ensured I ask cis friends to correct people who misgender me. I have a friend who offers to be a Karen for me because she knows how afraid I am of standing up for myself in public. Hell this has contributed to my difficulties maintaining my boundaries (not entirely related to being trans), which has resulted in some traumatic experiences.

I hide behind cis people I learn I can trust for a reason, and I didn’t start out that way. Since starting transition I’ve been heavily in lesbian spaces and communities. I was “taught womanhood” by tough dykes who encouraged assertiveness in each other and me. It’s just that eventually I learned all the above and how to gage if a space or group will treat me ok when I stand up for myself.

Conclusion: Sorry this went on way longer than I expected it to. But yeah, for anyone reading this for whom it’s all new information or stuff you’ve experienced but haven’t heard much of people talking about it, if you look into transfeminism you’ll find more of it and even some arguments on why and what to do from people who are much better at feminist theory than a woman who’s sitting around writing lemmy comments at work. Transmisogyny is difficult, and yet transitioning is still the best decision I ever made. I’m genuinely happy, I just would like these difficulties to go away.

And there are cis people I sincerely trust, and not even a shortage of them. My best friends are cis and treat me as fully a woman. My ex would occasionally forget I was trans because it was only sometimes relevant. Hell one casual acquaintance got cheated on by his ex husband with a trans man friend of his because the acquaintance was “too fem” and at no point even when hurting about it did he treat the other man as anything other than a full man.

Edit to add: This is part of why I feel making friends with other trans women is vital, even if you’re looking to go stealth. It’s so important to have other people in your life who have first hand experiences with this stuff.

Oh yeah I forgot about the mood swings. Yeah I picked so many unnecessary fights with my mom when I was early into hrt and living with her.

This is all great advice and matches my experiences at 11 years hrt. I will add three things here:

1. Passing for cis isn’t binary, I’ve been misgendered consistently by some coworkers at the same facility where another coworker asked about my birth control before correcting himself upon remembering I’m married to a woman.

2. Your height may decide how often you pass for cis. The tallgirls subreddit taught me that at my height even gorgeous cis women get misgendered and assumed trans. The majority of women at heights at which this happens are cis.

3. I really need to second point 8. You won’t just be called a difficult bitch, you’ll also be accused of being a man or whatever else a person can think of to hurt you. Cis women can get away with more aggression than you, I’ve hidden behind plenty of them. Oh and the professional discrimination is brutal and many people will refuse to believe it

Seconding it. I made some fake boobs and that night I realized I never wanted to not have boobs.

So this week I’ll hit 11 years on hormones and did hit 5 years post bottom surgery (thinking of writing up a post on my reflections actually), so take what I say with the grain of salt that times have changed, I transitioned fairly young, and the exciting parts are far enough in the past for me to have mythologied it in my memories.

The most important thing is to move forward when there’s moving forward to do and be patient when there isn’t. Every step you take has a wait period before it’s satisfying. Whether that’s wait lists for hrt and surgery or waiting for the effects to kick in, or even just the time it takes to learn your style or how to do makeup or voice training. So much is out of your power, so be expedient when you know what you want to do/try.

If you’re going to want to lose weight and to start hrt, do so while waiting on hormones. When you start them you should eat when hungry. Your bust line will thank you for that.

Get to know other trans people (IRL, go to support groups or PFLAG or something, internet trans communities are not sn effective replacement, though you can make irl friends through them), especially other trans women. The people already in your life may be wonderful and awesome and supportive, I still cherish my friends from before transition and many of my post transition friends are cis, but there are two things here. Firstly, you’re going to want some people in your life who can understand what you’re going through, especially when it comes to experiences like transmisogyny. And second, we’re all kinda annoying as shit about it at first because this is the most exciting new life changing experience where we’re finally being ourselves. And it’s good to share that with loved ones, but make sure you have other things on your mind as well and that you talk to your loved ones about them too.

Having other things going on for you also means you don’t get hit with the “now what” at the end. I’ve seen people who kinda forgot everything about themselves but their gender during transition as they devoted all their focus to it, but at a certain point you’re just there, no longer transitioning, but having transitioned. Those people can find themselves feeling lost and empty at that point because they’ve not engaged in their other hobbies in years.

Oh also there are trap communities. Not like the offensive word for trans woman, but like cognitohazard. I’m going to not include ones I just dislike and think are nuts that happen to have a lot of us like the rationalists. Places like 4chan’s LGBT board is filled with self destructive trans people who hate themselves and other trans people. Then there’s places like the trans surgery subreddit which is both a useful tool and also filled with people who traded dysphoria for dysmorphia. My cis ex would browse there while we were prepping for my bottom surgery and she got increasingly frustrated at women who passed perfectly talking about how they need more surgery to ever pass for cis. The youtuber contrapoints has a video titled “incels” that touches on these sorts of communities. In general avoid masochistic epistemology (“it’s true because it hurts”).

Oh also you can’t do targeted fat loss it’s a myth and everyone should lift, but wait until you’ve been on hormones for like a year or so to ensure you get feminine muscle growth.

If I think of more I may add it as a reply. But I’m absolutely open to answering any questions you have.

Monthly it’s about what I’d expect for a low-medium experience engineer. But I’m an industrial engineer not software.

Ooh good luck!

It’ll take time and you’ll get sick of how much time it takes. In some ways it’s kinda like the first year of hormones, a really exciting beginning followed by lots of anxious waiting for everything to start being ok as it slowly gets there. But it does get there, even if when you’re mostly but not quite there it feels like it’ll take forever or might not happen.

Hey congrats! And yeah the first 6 months or so are rough. It took me nearly a year for my first post op orgasm and I was terrified it wouldn’t happen.

Wait, holy fuck I think tomorrow is 5 years post op for me… Time flies when you don’t hate your genitals

Edit: apparently yesterday was 5 years

I miss the days when we’d be mocking it for connecting trans women to [chaser stereotype of your choosing], instead of the very accurate “this is going to take your legal ID and tell governments that hate trans people and maybe the occasional fascist unaffiliated with them about you”

Even my windows using wife is considering a Linux phone over this

Except it’s more “why I can’t begin the nighttime procedure that I should have started an hour before bedtime”