✨Spirit Halloween⚧Femme✨ @ikea_femme@witches.town

@kelly Good luck! You might want to go in barefaced the first time to get used to what to expect, and try lidocaine gel on later sessions. It helps me a lot. Also, take three ibuprofin and with a tall glass of water two hours or so before.

Laser's a huge pain, but it's really a time and money saver. I still have to shave six sessions in, but I only have to shave every other day, and my beard shadow is much lighter. What still grows is very blonde most places. I'm saving myself that time and anxiety in exchange for a few hundred dollars.

@Eve This specifically, since I know fashion brands vary a ton even with basic things. https://witches.town/media/ld8d1BO9_mbdISr5S3c

@Eve Skater dresses. Also, usually I find my shoulders look better the less I have on top of them. Tank tops are actually pretty good for shrinking your shoulders, despite what you'd think. Match them with something loose down below, be it a skirt or harem pants or whatever. Also, raglan tees (like your stereotypical baseball shirt) tend to minimize shoulders if they're dark there.

Also, hormones help a little. A lot of what we think is bone structure is really muscle that rearranges a bit on HRT.

Just to be clear, I'm not mad at anybody for being able to afford FFS. It's just its popularity makes me feel like I "should" have it, when I definitely can't afford it.

People spend way more money on things that are much more frivolous, and dysphoria's a huge drain. I guess I'm just mad at myself that I can't make myself as successful as the trans women who go through college, get a great job, and transition either way early or way after getting the Cadillac HMO plan. I broke mid-school. And needed years to pick up the pieces before I could even tell I should reassemble them in something loosely female shaped.

Why does my brain do this to itself? And why do I feel the need to share this garbage when I have pens and paper. I can journal just fine...

And it's not entirely other people's fault that I become a weird trans person between man and woman when they know! When they know, I don't shut up about my experiences, because it's what I think about all day. But it means the cis see the chasm between us that could be invisible. Suddenly, I'm not a nerdy and shy young woman, but a drag queen in people's minds. I've had more than one classmate who knew me pre-transition say an outfit I wore "gave [them] life."

And dang it, it all makes me realize being myself calls on either slowly showing myself after they get over my transness, or never revealing it in the first place.

Sometimes I feel like there's two trans communities, one with rich trans people who are just waiting between surgeries and celebrating their milestones. And then there's the people who can barely afford to stay on hormones, whose milestones are more making it through each day and figuring out how to keep going.

What scares me is that at my new job, I seem to pass to my female coworkers. They chat with me on a more intimate platonic level than I'm used to. It means a ton to me. And it scares me, because I used to say passing didn't matter to me. But in this case, passing meant I'm
a full person to them. I'm a hypocrite.

argh i hate that any trans person I follow who comes upon a little money gets ffs and blogs about it, both because it reminds me that ffs exists and people seem to generally like the results, and because it makes me want it.

I didn't feel such a drive or urgent need for money before I came out. It was kind of a comforting way to deal with career anxiety, since I always think I'm too lazy or unintelligent to work in software.

My friends and family seem to think I look okay, and most strangers treat me like a normal woman. But damn if I don't compare my chin and ocular ridge to my sister and mom.

Now I'm at the point in transition where I read too much into my college roommate and still close cis male friend likes my ig swimsuit pics.

@mxsparks Wow, what a powerful piece. I wish she had a part on what to do if you experience that abuse. While I get that, by nature, vulnerable people have limited resources to resist attacks, there's got to be ways to endure this kind of thing better than going in blind.

I guess the main thing is just recognizing abusive or potentially abusive spaces early.

Does this color work for me? Worried it makes me look sickly.
https://witches.town/media/NXqI4b1ETXruXgmduao

Why aren't arms sexualized the same way legs are? Functionally, they're both muscle poles.

Funny, talking to my mom about being sleepy and mopey about laser recovery turned into talking to her about GCS, and she was a really good listener, even though it's completely outside her experience and I ended up having to explain a bunch of genital and sex stuff to her. She's a near-60 church lady.

@nire @Eve Also, I realize that's a dumb thing to say, "She loved me as a woman," but I think that's how cis people process transition. It's not us trading personas or dropping a facade, transition to them is a weird fucking ritual where their loved one turns into a stranger.

Cis are weird.

@Eve @nire My ex-fiancee said kind of the same thing early on. It wasn't what broke us up. That was my decision because she was emotionally dependent.

But we took it day by day. I think she said the no hrt thing early on because I told her I wanted something that would change so many things. She wanted to clamp down that change, even if it meant ignoring my feelings. It was a pitiful, but human, reaction.

Later, she came to realize she loved me as a woman, too. And I loved her and still kind of do. It's complicated. But we had to break up for completely different reasons (She was codependent and not taking care of herself)

I think a big thing that screws with me is I'll always have that dumb doubt. Would people like me more if I had FFS? Would people see me as me, and not as their preconceived notions of a trans woman? And being too broke for FFS means I have to deal with those possibilities, and the self-loathing for getting depression and getting my bachelor's at 28, when it seems half the trans women I follow have great jobs with Cadillac healthcare plans.

ARGH psychology today's search is so bad.

Also, how the hell does someone find a therapist on medicaid? I'm starting to realize leaning on my psychiatrist and HRT doc for talk therapy when they officially don't do that is not a long term strategy.