my brother asked why my voice was so deep and I said I’d give him 3 guesses, and he said “You doin the little flip-flop? The little switcheroo?” and it took me like 10 seconds to realize that was his Polite Way of asking if i was transitioning

US transphobes are running with a new gotcha of “you never hear about WOMEN becoming MEN, hmmm curious!” and everyone is saying that you don’t hear about it because trans men are completely under the radar and like…that’s not true!

Did I hallucinate the “little girls are mutilating their bodies” “mentally ill girls are taking hormones” “what happened to our lesbians” “you wanna be a man I guess I can hit you” arguments that have been made for years??? Some of the main talking points of JKR???Hello!?

People are erasing trans men and it’s YOU TOO!

how do transmascs not want to kill themselves all the time honestly

it's silly but the biggest reason why im not into t yet is bc im so afraid of losing my hair. do you have any solutions/tips for it?

first of all, i don’t think it’s silly — it’s natural to be worried when hair loss is talked about by so many people as like…one of the worst results of aging for men. listening to my dad talk about how much he hates balding definitely did not make me feel particularly good about the knowledge that i may very well be joining him someday. i’m not saying the fear is right, because i don’t think hair loss is something awful that we should avoid at all costs, but it’s an understandable fear given the beauty standards we’re working with, and it’s one that a lot of us (myself included) feel.

one thing that’s helped me is just…paying more attention to the guys that i interact with on a daily basis. i’ve learned two things from it: 1) hair loss is super fucking common. i’d say it’s much harder to find an adult man who isn’t balding at all than it is to find one who’s completely bald. and 2) if you forget everything you’ve been told about how bad hair loss is, you’ll realize that quite frankly, every single one of those guys looks totally fucking fine. it doesn’t ruin their appearance and make them ugly, it looks totally natural and isn’t really even something you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. we put so much weight on it but it’s really just not that big of a deal. i’ll hear my parents talk shit about men in my family who are losing their hair when i didn’t even notice a difference last time i saw them. it’s one of those things (like so many other appearance-related things) that you really only notice at all because you’ve been taught that you’re supposed to care about it.

this isn’t something i’ve done personally, but if you really want to desensitize yourself to the idea of it, embrace the time-honored queer tradition of just shaving your whole damn head! find out what you’d look like without hair, find out how you feel about it and what you can do that makes you feel good about your appearance without hair, test the waters while it’s still a temporary change and not something permanent. that way, it won’t feel like this big scary unknown, and you’ll actually have a frame of reference for your feelings about how you look without hair rather than accepting the societal assumption that you’ll inevitably hate it. if you don’t want to actually shave your head, you could also just fuck around with bald filters or photoshop and see what happens.

oh, and if you’re attracted to men, keep an eye out for guys who are bald or balding and also hot as fuck. in my experience, there’s no insecurity or potential future insecurity that being gay for other men hasn’t helped me with. just off the top of my head, i can think of a couple actors who i think are absolutely fucking gorgeous who have helped me get over my fears about losing my hair. despite what our anti-aging-obsessed world might want you to think, there is no such thing as a physical feature that automatically makes someone less attractive, and while making attractiveness less of a priority in your life is good, it can’t hurt to also give yourself some proof that actually, you might lose your hair and look hot as hell doing it.

basically, entertain the possibility that it won’t be a bad thing at all! whether that’s just because it turns out to be a neutral thing for you or because you end up actually liking it, it’s not an inherently bad thing. i’ve ended up liking a lot of things that were “supposed to” be bad effects of t — i love the weight i’ve gained and the new shape it gives my body, i get a lot of gender euphoria from the fact that my acne is now on parts of my face that i saw a lot of guys in high school get it and i’m not complaining about the scars i get from it either because i’ve always liked the added texture that acne scars give my skin, and so on. i think there’s a lot of joy to be had in the changes we’re taught to fear, once we look past that conditioning and actually explore how we feel about it.

but if it’s something you really don’t want and you just want to improve your chances of not having to deal with it, it’s not like there’s nothing you can do! products like finasteride (oral) and minoxidil (usually topical but i think there might also be oral versions) are pretty commonly used among trans guys, for the purpose of avoiding hair loss and for other reasons, and there are plenty of other anti-hair loss products out there (though i don’t know how effective any one of them might be). if it’s a big enough deal for you, you can just decide that you’ll go off of t if/when you start noticing signs of it, since no longer having higher t levels would stop the process in its tracks. and if you don’t find prevention options that work for you so it ends up happening, you can always explore different hair styles (judging by the pattern of hair loss i see in my family, i suspect that keeping my hair long would make it less obvious if i started losing mine), find your preferred method of covering it when you don’t feel good about it (personally i love a good beanie generally and would probably wear them a lot more if i didn’t have hair to worry about because my main complaint is the way they press my hair onto my neck), or just shave it all off if you don’t like the look of the partial balding but don’t mind a shaved head. the point being — you have options!

at the end of the day, whether you go on t or not, you’re going to see your body change as you age in ways that aren’t always going to be attractive to others or aesthetically pleasing to you. that’s just the reality of having a body. even if you never went on t, you’d get older and you might see your hair thin out even if you don’t bald, you’ll see your skin start to wrinkle and sag in places that used to be smooth, your metabolism might slow or your body fat might start to gather in new places; hell, you might lose your hair for a totally different reason and end up in the same place but without the benefits of having been on t that whole time. life is full of bodily changes like that. transphobes will fearmonger about the permanent changes of testosterone all day long but the truth is, there is no escaping permanent bodily changes. whether or not you go on t, your body now isn’t the same as it will be in 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years, just like it isn’t the same as it was at any point in your life before now. our bodies are never supposed to stop growing and aging and changing throughout our lives. there’s no guaranteeing that we’ll love every single change our bodies go through, but that’s okay! there are so many things in life that are more important than the way our bodies look. even if you go on t and lose your hair and don’t like how it looks, your life won’t be ruined; plenty of other things will bring you joy and more than make up for the insecurities.

just think about the gender euphoria and relief from dysphoria that t could give you. would losing your hair be bad enough to outweigh all of that? or is it just the pressure of a society that decided balding is bad that’s making you fear one single change despite how much joy you could have if you let that fear go? only you can decide if going on t is worth the potential downsides for you, but i suspect that for most of us, the benefits of going on t far outweigh the possibility of side effects like hair loss happening down the line.

HRT: hormone replacement therapy. Common forms include pills, injections, and gels.

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i wear women’s deodorant and men’s cologne i mix pink and blue to match my birthstone amethyst, creating a synthesis a dialectic speaking my singleness womanly chivalry and masculine grace a twist of the wrist that turns on its face bending borders into a threshold equal parts silver and gold i lead and i follow a solo in parts it’s hard pill to swallow if you’re scared of the arts i’ve never been more one than my two perhaps this will give you a breakthrough— the illusion that arose of oil and of water proves that opposition serves those opposed to the other as for me, i’ll keep my duality it beats a boxed-in, binary, banality

                                       – bigender means

Poetry Taglist (Check out my Google form to get added): @elegant-paper-collection​ @polyphonetic @qelizhus @liv-is @maxdamax @auroblaze

transgender characters in sci fi are really good bc it’s like. how will future technology change our ideas about personhood and transition. transgender characters in fantasy are even better because they will be drinking hrt potion

trans men who wear feminine clothing (because fuck the idea that men have to dress a certain way to be "real men") 🤝 trans men who refuse to wear feminine clothing (because fuck everyone who's been trying to force you to tone down your masculinity and "accept" being feminine your whole life):

being so strong and rad as hell and not needing to change a single damned thing about their gender presentation

don't you love when you Just stopped feeling guilty about eating the things you like and then one of your parents drops the "i'm concerned about your diet"

Miles: some kid told me i’d make a good father one day

Gwen: have you tried dyeing your hair or getting some piercings about it

Miles, pulling her to Hobie’s dimension with him: you are honestly the smartest woman alive

Gwen, preparing to be yelled at by his parents later: i know <3

i think i might be legit happy for the first time in my life.

i got out. i actually got out.

faerie thoughts...

i love helping other transmascs speedrun getting over their doubts and fears about going on t. there are two people in my personal life who have been contemplating going on t for a while, and both of them talked to me about it because i’m the resident Guy On T, and by the end of our conversations one of them was fully decided that they want to start t and the other had realized the thing that had been stopping them was actually probably not a real barrier at all. i’m making it my life’s mission to become the little trans devil on as many people’s shoulders as possible whispering “you should totally go on t i think you would really like it” in their ears. maybe the real transgender craze seducing our daughters was the friends we made along the way.

mirrors - me and my body over the years.

a short comic i've had bouncing around in my head for a few months.

when i was a kid, every morning felt like flipping a coin on whether i'd feel like shit that day. something was wrong with my body. i didn't know what it was. i was a tomboy and my family wanted me to be ladylike, so i thought i just wasn't femme or white enough.

then i got groomed out of high school, by a worthless excuse for a man who told me he understood me and liked me as i was. i wanted to reconnect with my femininity and asked for help, but he took a mile. he tried to feminize me and neg me into his perfect fantasy bangmaid. every day it was being compared to women who weren't me and being made out to be the bad guy if i didn't cave to one of his demands.

when i got away from him, i could finally examine who i was as a person without anyone else's influence. no family, no high school classmates, no abusive boyfriend. and finally figuring out the answer to that question (what's wrong with me?) didn't make things any easier. turns out i'm not a girl. now i have to live with that knowledge.

i turned 22 this year. i started HRT. i finally have a voice that i like. i have hair on my arms. i have hair on my chin and a little dirt stache. on my birthday, for the first time since i can remember, i saw myself in the mirror and thought "hey, looking good." i think i'm going to be alright.

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