This is a tidy bit of genius.
Thanks, I have thieved that for future use.
I go through phases where I donāt feel much need to express my gender. I always know Iām not really āa manā in some ways but not a woman either, that duality is an aspect of it, and I have some aspects of dysphoria but not others (my organs are acceptable but Iād like to be smaller in build, have more feminine or at least less masculine features, and not all this body hair). But a lot of the time, I just feel like genderās kind of irrelevant to most things.
Iām also in the 85%+ of nonbinary folks (according to a poll I saw while I was reading some stuff last night), who just does not want to explain themselves to a society that still doesnāt really believe nonbinary is a thing. Some of my experiments with expression in the past left me feeling really uncomfortable and self-conscious.
Lately Iāve been cycling back to wanting to express it. I think part of this is spite and resistance to the MAGA/Project 2025/general transphobia shit lately. Part of it is also due to getting back to my (oversimplifying here) pagan stuff, which always makes me feel more fluid. (There are a lot of different traditions around the world of shamans/magicians being outside their birth-assigned gender and I sympathize with that pretty hard.)
Several years ago I used to paint my toenails. Mostly mermaid colors ā silver, blue, green, purple. (Red never seemed right, nor black.) I usually wear socks and shoes in public anyway (except in summer rarely, and also at the time I was in a taiko group and we practiced barefoot). I stopped due to some damage to one of the toenails, and just never got back in. But I feel like itās time to restart. (The Drās Remedy brand, though it is lacking in a lot of the colors and fun chrome/glitter stuff that I like from other brands, is supposed to be more healthy if you have issues with psoriasis, fungal nail, diabetes, other damage etc. so Iāll start there.)
Will I be bold enough to also do my fingernails? Ehā¦ I know this is not just a gender expression thing, thereās also emo/goth/other people identifying as men claiming it. I donāt know if I can rock that or not though. Weāll see.
Also grabbed myself some enby pride jewelry on Etsy. A black ceramic ring with fluorescent opals, a pin, a sort of subtle pendant.
I may lean more into floral and colorful print shirts (I do wear a couple of subtle ones) for days that I go to work. Maybe look for a hoodie thatās not just the plain dark green that I have now. Small steps!
I can relate to this. I mentioned in a previous post here, were I younger Iām sure I would see myself as non-binary. The me now doesnāt care about labels and gender but my self-expression and identity is male because at this point itās quite ingrained. Iād say itās more cultural than anything, same how I consider myself Catholic by culture even though Iām agnostic because so much of Latin culture is derived from Catholicism.
I do hope that you can get to a point where you can express yourself more freely. Paint those nails! Iām sure itāll look great on you, donāt worry about male goths and such.
The other day I happened to notice the number of images I have saved to my devices had grown quite large. I decided to slowly start deleting things I no longer want. I started that process yesterday and came across pictures of myself from 2015. I look much different now, sure, but what stood out the most was how joyless I appear. I was smiling, but it was easy to tell how fake that smile was. It was in my eyes. There was a dullness there. Even though Iāve been struggling with my mental health since the election (the last several days Iāve gotten a little better), when I looked in a mirror, I saw a brightness in my eyes. It was just a nice reminder of how much transitioning has helped me.
Iāve noticed that too. In old pics, I look kind of dead-eyed, which makes sense. I was numb inside. Everything was a mask to project normalcy, but it was all fake. My life has been immeasurably harder since I came out, but Iām happier than Iāve been since I first became aware of gender.
And as for pictures, I have my photos archived going back to like 2014 and thereās a clear inflection point where I went from no pictures of myself except an occasional pic with my kids/family to the majority being selfies. The inflection point is a picture of myself I ran through the FaceApp gender changing filter 
I came across my senior class picture during our move. I donāt know if I looked joyless. I looked pained. Everyone in the picture did. Itās pretty obvious the sun was shining brightly right in our faces.
I didnāt like taking pictures of myself or even being in pictures. Any old pictures I took of myself were because I needed to for some reason.
That is literally what caused me to transition. I had learned to manage my dysphoria by my late 20ās/early 30ās. I had told myself I was too old to transition. Then I decided to try FaceApp one day. I had a breakdown after seeing the picture because in a way it was like seeing myself for the first time.
My old pics were all taken with my kids, because they wanted pics with me. I have always hated seeing pictures of myself (until recently).
Iām planning to write an account of my coming out process, and actually meant to do it a couple weeks ago, but things have been far too hectic here for me to sit down and be creative like that, but for me the gist of it is I was getting increasingly dissatisfied with my life over the last half of the 2010s, which only accelerated when Covid hit. I started reading more gender transformation stuff, following more trans folks (trans women in particular) on social media, and diving into some pretty gross feminization stuff when I was chemically altered late at night. It wasnāt until my YouTube algorithm persistently recommended a F1NN5TER video that I gave up and watched it. My whole life Iāve been really good at avoiding anything that might cause those feelings to come up so itād been in my recommendations for over a month at that point.
Anyway, I watched it and everyone was calling him an egg, which was not a term I was familiar with so I googled it. That led me to the r/egg_irl subreddit (memes for trans people in denial) and as I scrolled it was like āRelatable. Relatable. Oh yeah, I get that. Too true! Oh. Oh fuckā¦ā
I thought about it for a while, then the dam burst and I stopped my active denial and considered the possibility of maybe finally doing the thing Iād always been too scared to do, decided fuck it, what have I got to lose? Came out to my ex-wife that night and was on HRT 2 months later. FaceApp came after the decision to go ahead with it, Iād have never even considered using it until the walls were down.
Truth be told, Iāve had an affinity towards felines long before I figured out that I was trans; Cat 4 Life!
I have no experience with rabbits. I love both dogs and cats. Can I choose both?
You can choose any and all, you donāt even have to stick to those 3
I am slowly going through eps of You Are Not So Smart. But the ep iām listening to today was a surprise, it touches on the topic of gendered bathrooms
Nah, not me. Iām a foxgirl.
Though I guess as a canid itād be a subsect of Dog. But sometimes I also identify with cats. I guess when it comes to animal sects Iām non-trinary?
FYI the following episode is thematically continuing the topic