aaro [they/them]

touch grass, eat ass, abolish class heart-sickle

  • 7 Posts
  • 485 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: October 22nd, 2020
  • aaro [they/them]@hexbear.nettotraaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net•Anyone here transition later in life? (Book discussion)English
    3·
    1 day ago

    so i started E at 27, which i like to view as early, but this all really hits. i had a deeply fucked up complexion, testosterone puberty hit me hard, i have severe acne scarring and also fairly deep forehead wrinkles. i’m still under 30 agony. spoilering because this is a transfemme cognitohazard and interwoven with self-aware internalized patriarchy and transphobia:

    spoiler

    there’s two big sides to this - part of it is missing out on being a woman for your teens and twenties, where so much life happens, and part of it is the physical reality of trying to work with the body you essentially have to “start” with. there’s a pretty big intersection too.

    there are so many firsts that i’m just never going to have as my true self. kisses, crushes, sex, relationships. so many life experiences with loss and victory and change and comfort. all of these memories, i (and i understand the internalized transphobia laced in this statement) experienced as a man. it’s easy to say i’ve been a woman all along and that i was actually experiencing those things as a woman because i always have been one, but never being taught how to cry - not even having the hormones for it - changes the way you internalize and process the death of a loved one, to the point that it was necessary for me to start grieving all over again. never having shared so much as a compliment with a woman for fear that the interaction would be colored by the binary you sit on the opposite side of changes your ability to communicate with women, so much so that even casual interactions that are unquestionably positive keep me up at night wondering how much “masculine energy” leaked into the interaction because i never got to learn to interact with other humans the way that feels right for me. all these things that form your personality are altered. and you just… go on. sometimes you have energy to try and consciously change, sometimes you don’t have that energy and you just have to watch as you hyper-analyze every movement and word, parsing out all the bits that feel like they wouldn’t be there if you just learned to be a human right the first time.

    and then there’s the body stuff. i have a lot going for me - pretty wide hips for a testosterone skeleton, fairly conventionally attractive in a way that translates well in the right light. cute boobies - maybe a little pointy but it’s a look. it fucking kills me knowing what i could have had. something that i believe is extremely common to the transfeminine experience is the desire to be desired. there’s something freeing about living a life being praised and wanted for what you are capable of, what you can do, and what you have done, and then all of a sudden one day you get desired for just existing as you are. physical attractiveness is not the cleanest reason to be desired but there’s something about the relation that feels so freeing and simple. and i could have had so much more of it had i just had the emotional tools to know earlier. physical beauty isn’t worth but it changes the way you interact with the world and the way you interact with the world changes who you are. and you just have to accept what you have. this is just a distillation of the same privileges surrounding beauty standards women face, so truly in a patriarchal society, this desire is feels like part of the woman experience at its core, but it does hit somewhat different, i imagine. the reassurance that you’ll find someone who loves you for you feels a different kind of hollow.

    this is rambling, it doesn’t cover everything and i’m not at my most articulate right now. might delete later who knows. just feeling extra down right now and needed to spill my guts blob-no-thoughts

    at the end of the day, the pain of it all is knowing how much better it could be any other way. but that pain is so intense because you know the intense joy of how much better things are now than they were before. there’s no age cutoff to reaping the rewards of living authentically and there are euphorias at every age. every single breath you take is better now. the highs are higher and the lows might be lower but they’re better for it. every day you live after coming out at 14, 30, or 75 gives you more of the little things and the big things to live even truer for the next one.

  • aaro [they/them]@hexbear.nettomutual_aid@hexbear.net•u/storyofrachel and community trustEnglish
    41·
    7 days ago

    lying about it being your birthday and repeatedly soliciting money in a political space, taking photos of you spending it on drugs (not even cool ones), and calling the people who gave it to you homophobic slurs and telling them to kill themselves are two different orders of magnitude

    e: they’re also qualitatively different, she harassed the community too

    e2: this all said, people can grow and change, and while it’s up to the individual offering the aid, holding something against someone forever, especially when their behavior is from a situation of crisis or duress, is not productive.