Looking through OKCupid and I find a match that describes himself uncomfortably similarly to egg-me. He seems okay, but I probably won't be clicking the like button or messaging because I can't shake the feeling I'd crack him and then need to post a buncha #trans 101 shit over IM. It's irrational.
He wants to learn how to knit, and he's describing losing a ton of weight and still having trouble being comfortable with his body! 🤔
@ikea_femme oh my goodness
you found one
@alyx Like normally I don't feel comfortable playing the whole "apropos of nothing, I wonder if this person will transition" game. Everyone's got their own issues and a massive private world in their head. And I'm shit at reading people.
But uh. He's kinda exactly past me?
@ikea_femme maybe send him to http://haveyoureadnevada.com/
@alyx Oh huh someone bought the url and pointed it at a terfy blogpost.
Yikes.
@ikea_femme heh. damn, you only spent a month doing that? i was like 18+ months. :) that's funny though. well put.
have you yourself read nevada? it's fuckin' good and i think it could really strike some chords in certain eggs, maybe help them accelerate along their eventual trajectory.
@alyx I started reading it, but put it down when I got to the part where she realized she needed to be a single woman.
Because damn. That was me. At the time, I was clinging to my fiancee, who herself was becoming dependent and a bit more distant than she used to be. And I realized, "why am I clinging to her? Why did I even propose?"
So that was upsetting and I switched back to The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.
Now I'm separated from her, and I'm finding my doppel-egg-er on OKC. And I finished the Wind Up Bird Chronicle.
@ikea_femme oh, interesting. i can see that hitting home.
do you like murakami? i only started with him via his why i run non-fiction. was thinking of moving into fiction via his earliest stuff like pinball 1973 or whatnot
@alyx I like him, but I get why he's divisive. I think I connected with him because of how egg-me experienced himself and emotions. I always felt kind of detached, and he likes emotionally numb and passive male protagonists who wander through dreamlike narratives.
It was reading A Wild Sheep's Chase that I actually found myself suddenly getting really mad. I realized I saw how strange the main character's emotional responses were, and realizing they were mine, and that I was leading a life and feeling feelings like his and not like characters I admired more. But what could I do? My body was my body and my feelings were my feelings. Little did I know.
@alyx I like to think I thought about it on some level for more than a month. Like, I hated puberty in middle school, read up on the procedure of GRS, and thought the teacher mentioning some people are trans in sex ed was really interesting (yeah, one year we had a progressive teacher who gave a shit about LGBTQ issues and heterosex, the rest of the years were gym teachers who thought sex was gross). And as an adult, I kept reading and rereading the trans megathread OP on Something Awful. I hate to say it, I think proposing to my fiancee and feeling so little was a sign something was broken and needed fixing.
@ikea_femme oh, the lady i'm dating (and others she is dating) is also from the SA trans scene. i learned it was a thing through her. i understand some of them have a private fb group here in the bay area. i don't like SA myself (i was friends with fragmaster btw, if you remember him) but it really spawned community.
i had similar experiences romantically. i still feel pretty broken in that area, actually, not very hopeful of finding something that works for me long-term. low/no sex drive is a factor in my case.
@alyx Yeah, I never really asked to join the facebook group, and I'm spooked by how crazy people are about doxxing trans goons.
What's hard for me is that I love my fiancee, and she was a real asset to me as I transitioned and recovered from depression, but I don't think I could handle being her monogamous partner for life. She's too emotionally needy, and I'm easily tempted into being her therapist. I just couldn't live with her and get a good night's sleep because she'd have so many episodes where I needed to talk her down, or rock her to sleep. She wasn't always like that, and I hope she recovers. And with HRT sappiness, it hurt more to see her sad.
@alyx I guess it's just that there's not a lot of stories where the moral is "sometimes, love isn't enough and life is short."
It wasn't the way a relationship should be at 28 yo.
@ikea_femme it is fantastic that you reached that conclusion before greatly complicating your life with a doomed marriage. you probably know but many trans women go ahead with the marriage, some thinking it'll "fix" them, and it never solves dysphoria and makes everything much more complicated later when dysphoria won't be shoved away
see also joining the military
@alyx Dang, that's like a slow burn alternative to amitransgender.com (the triage tool an IRC used to crack me when I spent a whole month being all, "I fucking hate being a guy and like to imagine being a woman, but does that mean I really wanna transition? Like, is that allowed? Will I regret it? But is it a thing I can do? Am I allowed to take pills and be a girl?")