Kinda galling talking to my brother and realising he's already written his own son off due to his gender.
-
@bedhead fascinating! I see in this how hormonal changes can be a powerful anchor for personal transformation. Your experience of society growing up left you with a constant anxiety about social interaction, and when your emotional landscape changed due to blockers you were able to leave this anxiety in the past and step into a new way of being. Have I understood that correctly?
@valentineexpressivity* of speech rather than expressivity of gender. i tended to hang around other women, and that brought with it the comfort to express myself in form rather than just in intellectual acknowledgement that i was feminine (also hormones tend to reshape your hips more when blockers take effect so it wound up making it easier to express myself in fashion too). me and my bestie would regularly go thrifting because i had to rid myself of all the boymoding clothes in my closet loll
-
you understood correct! i even swapped cities and felt very isolated, but after being on blockers, i decided to reach out to a coworker who became my best friend in the whole world, i went out to places by myself to engage with the idea of feeling the agency to go out without anybody else (take yourself out on dates whatnot), i went to my best friend's apartment all the time to hang out. later on i went to parties and actually felt free to be myself while also limiting my expressivity (listening more than speaking).
@bedhead I am so happy for you!
️ My own transition has similarly felt like stepping into a new me, and it has been so joyful, so transformational.
@valentine -
@bedhead I am so happy for you!
️ My own transition has similarly felt like stepping into a new me, and it has been so joyful, so transformational.
@valentineeleven years later, and i'm still learning new things about myself in both practice and in form: curvature i didn't have, new habits granted from regular affirmation of my transness. i've recently begun to actually dig into being in a larger trans community locally, and that's brought tons of solace and grace and comraderie too. the individualist sociocultural dynamic of living more north in the US left its trans spaces a little clique-oriented, and as a socially-atrophied trans lady, fitting into those spaces of trans people that have lived their entire lives in society was difficult but altogether okay. but moving to the south has taught me that trans people here collectivize and have a shared understanding of interconnectedness that is pretty amazing.
i guess some of this is a ramble about my surroundings (been on a weird kick of wanting to feel more grounded to the world under my feet than the one in my head), but i guess it also is an observation that environment has tons to do with how you respond to your hormonal treatment, and that no one roadmap is the only path on that route to transness.

-
eleven years later, and i'm still learning new things about myself in both practice and in form: curvature i didn't have, new habits granted from regular affirmation of my transness. i've recently begun to actually dig into being in a larger trans community locally, and that's brought tons of solace and grace and comraderie too. the individualist sociocultural dynamic of living more north in the US left its trans spaces a little clique-oriented, and as a socially-atrophied trans lady, fitting into those spaces of trans people that have lived their entire lives in society was difficult but altogether okay. but moving to the south has taught me that trans people here collectivize and have a shared understanding of interconnectedness that is pretty amazing.
i guess some of this is a ramble about my surroundings (been on a weird kick of wanting to feel more grounded to the world under my feet than the one in my head), but i guess it also is an observation that environment has tons to do with how you respond to your hormonal treatment, and that no one roadmap is the only path on that route to transness.

side note: after i got on blockers i kept a pretty consistent bi-weekly journal.
-
eleven years later, and i'm still learning new things about myself in both practice and in form: curvature i didn't have, new habits granted from regular affirmation of my transness. i've recently begun to actually dig into being in a larger trans community locally, and that's brought tons of solace and grace and comraderie too. the individualist sociocultural dynamic of living more north in the US left its trans spaces a little clique-oriented, and as a socially-atrophied trans lady, fitting into those spaces of trans people that have lived their entire lives in society was difficult but altogether okay. but moving to the south has taught me that trans people here collectivize and have a shared understanding of interconnectedness that is pretty amazing.
i guess some of this is a ramble about my surroundings (been on a weird kick of wanting to feel more grounded to the world under my feet than the one in my head), but i guess it also is an observation that environment has tons to do with how you respond to your hormonal treatment, and that no one roadmap is the only path on that route to transness.

@bedhead oh yes, I'm very much contemplating the same things; the larger social contexts in which we live, how all our identities are ultimately in relation to the communities we situate ourselves within.
I like to say my transition happened from the inside out; from my body to my presentation to my environment to my relationships to my role within society. But maybe I'm describing there what fell within my awareness, and subconsciously it has always been a holistic project.
@valentine -
@log it's such a tough one, isn't it? Because as well as the realities of child-rearing, kids do need to start socialising with their peers at some point. There's no easy answers to societal problems.
@Bel_tamtu@Tattie @Bel_tamtu Especially when societal problems can beget further societal problems, in a spiral that cycles vicious one way, and virtuous the other. The departure from Bowley's Law circa 1980 has hollowed out the working class, and its children paid a price. Now the grandchildren are paying the same price and more.
-
@Colman @Tattie My parents raised me and my siblings pretty gender neutrally. I think there's a decent chance they would have done that even if I hadn't been nonbinary. I'm not even sure how much of that was because I was nonbinary. It doesn't help that nonbinary wasn't a concept any of us had then.
@BernieDoesIt @Tattie I don't think any parents in my extended family would have understood the discussion in the 1970s.
-
@Tattie @Bel_tamtu Especially when societal problems can beget further societal problems, in a spiral that cycles vicious one way, and virtuous the other. The departure from Bowley's Law circa 1980 has hollowed out the working class, and its children paid a price. Now the grandchildren are paying the same price and more.
@log Googles
Learns
@Bel_tamtu -
@BernieDoesIt @Tattie I don't think any parents in my extended family would have understood the discussion in the 1970s.
-
@Colman @Tattie It turns out that people judge your gender compliance a lot by what clothes you wear, and coding what clothes you wore by what genitals you had was one of the few parts of gender that made sense to me as a little kid. That conviction started to fade by the time I was a teenager, but I still kept wearing the same clothes out of inertia and some understanding that it kept me safe.
-
I ixi@mastodon.online shared this topic