Good for them, with reasonable testing and precautions in the modern day there’s no reason to prohibit them. They’re no worse than swingers clubs

Star trek is one of the first TV series to get a serious fanfic community. It’s just that that happened in the zine era.

Good luck and congrats

Congrats on getting to where you are and good luck getting where you’re going

Well Nissa, you’re never going to find out without trying. I personally think that showing this post to your wife may help convey your feelings to her, though depending on what you find it may or may not impact your relationship.

So I’m just going to start by talking about how I found myself. I’m a few years younger than you, and I transitioned a little over a decade ago. I had similar childhood desires for experimentation, though I was never brave enough to do it openly even as a joke. By my mid teens I was questioning my gender, and began using sexualization of it as a means of attempting to silo ir off (that’s absolutely not how I would have framed it at the time, but at rhe time I thought all boys just really hated not having breasts so I was very in denial then). I was constantly maladaptively daydreaming, often imagining myself becoming female through convoluted means. But at the same time I was large and masculine and complaining I wasn’t allowed to wear a beard to high school.

At 18 I did some reflection and came to the conclusion I was bigender. I then proceeded to decide I’d hide the feminine portion of that forever. I was a good catholic kid from a swing state that was headed red, and while I was progressive as all hell, I worried about how others would see me. This was before most people had seen trans people in a positive light. But I kept struggling with it. No amount of trying to hide it or ignore it made it actually go away. I occasionally experimented with using a female name online (yeah it’s now my govvie so I’m not using it here) and it felt uncomfortably right. I experimented with stuff like painting my toenails and shaving my legs (I still have the scars lol). I grew my hair out, but didn’t shave my beard.

Then when I was 19 I saw a post by a trans woman that made me feel like it was something I could be. She was just kinda normal. She was gay and not super femme. She’d be cliche today, but I’d read so much about gatekeeping and RLE that I’d just assumed that even if I was a trans woman I’d have to lie to doctors, acr more feminine than I felt, pretend I just wanted a good husband, and completely abandon my life. For the next two months I was seriously thinking about my gender and seriously asking myself how real the male side of me was. I used a female name online. I seriously thought about my dysphoria. And one week while my parents were out of town I decided to experiment (in retrospect no idea why I didn’t do it in my dorm a month earlier)

I went to a Walmart in the middle of the night and bought some makeup (it was hideous on me lol). And I got supplies to make breast forms. They were certainly of a weird quality, accidentally too big and they began leaking, but they were appropriately dense and jiggly and with them taped to my chest, I couldn’t go back. The night I tried them I did some real thinking. It clicked that the reason I’d always been unhappy crossdressing was that it made me too aware of my masculine body, and that that’s what I had an issue with. That night I realized that while I thought I was genderfluid the times I felt male I really just wasn’t feeling particularly dysphoric. That night I accepted that I was a binary trans woman and that I needed to transition sooner rather than later.

The next year was a struggle against mental health, fear, and life. But within a year of that fateful night I began hrt. Everything afterwards are different stories. Life during and after transition have been hard, but they’ve been a lot better than a life spent struggling and wishing I could actually like who I am.

I’m happy to talk more if you’d like. I’m not saying where you’re headed, just telling you what my path was. Good luck, this won’t be easy no matter what you find, but not looking won’t be easy either.

Welcome and go fuck yourself /s

Geordi’s blindness is a plot point at least once in an episode that’s basically exactly what people act like episodes involving queerness are. Where he has to hold a eugenicist’s hand through accepting that he doesn’t mind that he was born blind and that he even has some advantages thanks to his visor. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very good episode, and people did need it laid out like that, but it’s very much not the “we’ve moved beyond such concerns” in a way that say having a ranking officer use a wheelchair would be.

I will say something they did right was that his visor gives him headaches. It’s very in line with what folks with cochlear implants or very strong eyeglass prescriptions describe.

It’s a reference to this comic that became a slang term for the general category of behavior that it focuses on

Oh wow. Like I can’t speak to the struggles cis people face for their cisness, I’ve never been cis. But also I’ve never seen somewhere that passed a law saying that only men are allowed to have an abortion or that only AMAB people are allowed to have estrogen.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think the best way for Trek to handle queer issues is to just put queer people on the bridge. A gay Riker equivalent or a trans woman who talks about her past with the same discomfort but honesty as how Picard talks about his is what I want. And in that vein I’m still on my first watch of TNG and it’ll be a while before I get to nutrek.

But I’m not going to pretend that to a certain portion of the population TOS wasn’t seen as being overly preachy on race. But seeing as I haven’t gotten to TOS yet either, I will say that in modern day I do think TNG was a bit preachy about disability and I’m glad they were.

Yes, I’ve met my parents. The latter being deaf didn’t sway the former’s opinions

Oh petrified forest is so cool! Have fun

It’s scary, it’s hard, and you got this sis. Just remember, keep moving forward as long as you’re headed in a direction that’s making you happy. A lot of transition is hurrying up and waiting. Targeting the bits you have to wait for is super valuable. I really regret taking a few months to call doctors to get on waitlists.

In a few years all this difficulty will just be memories of a scarier time.

Good luck sis

My childhood was in many ways indistinguishable from many cis femme lesbians in the fact that involved an aggressive rejection of femininity and complicated relationship with it until my 20s (years after transitioning actually). But yeah no it’s kinda funny to me that early on I felt insecure for my childhood not matching the “proper trans childhood” until I started talking to cis gay friends and learning that some very feminine ones had a buzz cut and combat boots when I was growing a denial beard.

But yeah I always knew I wanted to be a girl, it’s just that sometimes that girl wanted to be one of the boys

Yeah no, ecofascism is “there are too many people for the environment to sustain, you can stop killing when that’s no longer the case”

Is neon actually good?

But also you will be different if you choose to grow and change

Fine, I’ll go tell my wife I love her again, but I do that enough that it has to be a bit annoying

Ain’t showing gratitude for my job though

That’s totally fair lol. It’s not a beautiful city, especially compared to Cincinnati or Cleveland, and there’s nothing about it that would drive a person driving through to think “I bet this city has been a long time hub of alternative lifestyles to the point it’s a destination for people in certain communities as far as Kentucky.” Even Peoria IL is more beautiful to drive through. But Columbus is a city where a lot of organizations refuse to address it by name and instead call themselves “central ohio” and where the state government keeps having to wash paint off the statue of the namesake.

Also it’s long been a meme there to want to rename it to flavortown after everyone’s favorite person from the city, Guy Fieri