The Trans Experience

1999-2000 were pretty good years, though. Fight Club, Girl Interrupted, American Psycho, and Requiem for a Dream. Lately, not so much.

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Hopefully its been enough time with HRT that you feel like you feel more like your true self :slight_smile:

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It has, thank you! I was on patches and pills for about three years, but switched over to injections and pills back in February. The first combination was good, the latter has been great! My doc said she almost never offers injections because too many people are either afraid to do them or simply don’t know how to do them right, which is understandable. However I’ve almost been diabetic for over 30 years now, so I think I’ve got the technique down and any fear I had of injections is long, long gone.

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Wonderful to hear :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

I’m not fond of shots myself either, but if i was told that doing so was more effective treatment i would (begrudgingly) switch to it. Understandable that most don’t though.

As an aside: Do you feel like your personal style has changed any? Is it the same?

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Important question 1: What’s the cool dragony sword?

Important question 2: Do you know any dao forms?

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A little, but it’s hard to say for sure. Part of it is I feel like I have more clothing options in both styles and colors. (Yes, I have always believed that anyone can wear whatever clothes, color, etc they want, but that doesn’t mean I had found a combination that I personally liked on myself.) I still wear a lot of denim and dress down clothes, but my wardrobe is more colorful in general and I seem to pay more attention to what goes with what. (I may have done that before, but I couldn’t swear to it.)

That’s probably about the best description of it I could give! Most of the time I prefer utilitarian melee weapons, but a friend gave me that one and that makes it very treasured. I don’t actually know forms, but I do find it feels good to use these and other weapons in stretches and such. (It’s not tai chi by any means, but that’s the sort of flow of motion I try to achieve.)

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Wearing more colors is something i’ve struggled with. I looked at my wardrobe recently and a lot of it is grays and blacks :eyes: I am trying to get more comfortable wearing more pops of color.

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My youngest is afraid of doing the shots herself. The doc asked if there was anyone in the house familar with the technique. Well, actually… It has been really goid for her.

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Getting way off topic here, but based on this information, I bet Indian clubs would be right up your alley if you haven’t experimented with them already.

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In my experience, exploration of rabbit holes and sharing of interests is a pretty core part of the trans experience :wink:

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James Franco too. I have trouble telling them apart.

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Fun shoes and boots? My chiropractor has a smashing pair of shiny yellow ankle boots that I covet. I wear a lot of grays and blacks too.

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https://lens.monash.edu/@technology/2025/05/15/1387564/how-video-games-can-unlock-euphoria-for-transgender-players

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I have straight men hitting on me, women hitting on me and I am having a complete mindfuck as to why. I’ve been dealing with dysphoria lately and I am struggling to figure out figure out what people are seeing that I’m not. :weary:

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I think it’s just that your awesome-sauce. That probably is just shining through and people want to be around you.

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We’ve been binging ER from back in the day. I had completely forgotten how bold that show was on LGBTQ+, HIV and women’s rights. I had to go back and see how old that was!

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So, in my drive to figure myself out, I kind of paused for years without getting more specific than ā€œnonbinary.ā€ This was because basically all of the categories I’d heard about below that umbrella term struck me as a little bit right, but more wrong. And I think part of that is, they tend to be based on their relation to the gender binary:

  • masculine
  • feminine
  • androgyne (combining masculine and feminine)
  • neutral (not related to masculine or feminine)
  • agender (not experiencing gender at all)

And there’s also polygender, fluidity, etc. which describe how one relates to these identities. And culturally specific terms (hijra, Two-Spirit etc.) which shouldn’t be used by folks outside the culture due to the likelihood of misunderstanding/misrepresenting them.

And there’s xenogender/xenine. (There are some other related terms, but this seems to be the one that has caught on the most.) The original definition I found is ā€œgender identities beyond human understanding of gender,ā€ but I feel like a better one is ā€œgender identities that are foreign to the gender binary.ā€ These tend to be described in terms of an archetype, an aesthetic, an abstract concept, or even a neurotype. The idea being that ā€œmasculineā€ and ā€œfeminineā€ are themselves arbitrary, abstract archetypes, which simply happen to be traditional. So why not use other concepts that resonate more personally?

A lot of the cutting edge of gender identity description and categorization is part of a subculture of folks 2-3 generations younger than me, mostly on Tumblr/Reddit, and mostly neurodivergent. I originally lumped it in with otherkin, multiplicity etc. as something I, An Old, was not meant to understand.

…

But lately:

I read Arcane Perfection, a sort of zine-like compilation of interviews, essays, poems, art and spells from queer pagans. I skimmed a lot, but there was a bit about interpreting some of Tarot’s major arcana as different nonbinary types that started wheels spinning.

I was thinking about how there are some folks who don’t like the term nonbinary because it is defining people by what they are not – but that exact concept of betweenity resonates with me personally. Not ā€œbetween male and femaleā€, but the concept itself.

I started to wonder whether there was a category for that, and started digging. People have coined literally thousands of genders – names and flags and descriptions and categorizations – as well as dozens of systems of categorizing and understanding gender. Most of it is on social media platforms that lack the kind of organization and persistence one wants for research. There are multiple wikis attempting to consoildate and archive this stuff, but they don’t have a good ā€œgetting startedā€ page, or maps or charts of this territory. So it takes some luck and persistence.

What I found was a few terms I can associate with, but not the perfect term. One of those that I liked was obscurian:

an umbrella term for genders that are unable to be exactly named, quantified, understood, explained, and/or determined. It is not the same as questioning, and it can be used as a gender on it’s own if the user chooses.

I hereby propose Zenogender: when each step in one’s life brings oneself halfway toward understanding one’s own gender, but the destination can never be reached. :laughing:

But much more importantly, I find I’m more able to describe my gender identity in truly nonbinary terms, not necessarily to communicate them but for reasons of self-knowledge.

Also I think the kids are alright. There’s some very clever thinking on display. They just need some library science on their side :wink:

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At the risk of repeating, and totally respecting ypur journey, i will put my clouds and boxes analogy forward again. I hold that one of the greatest weaknesses, as well as strangths, of the human psyche is the need to catagorize. I identify as a straight, cis man, but i certainly do that differently than others who identify the same way. Every one of us is a uniques pastiche of characteristics that is in some way different, but also similar, to everyone else. Where do you draw a line that says ā€œyou are too different for this box, you need to be in a different one?ā€ I have no idea, but the need to do that based on melanin content, geographic origin, language, heritage, gender, sex, sexuality, religion and every other sort of difference that might be noticed to my mind is just highly differentiated xenophobia. We are all unique, and at the same time we are all the same. And trying figure ourselves out is our main function in life. It has taken a very long time to learn to accept myself as i am. I can recommend this, which started my thinking on this road:

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