Practicing Female Separatism By Being Female And Being Alone All The Time Always

anyone else remember being a child and seeing the very neat handwriting of other little girls and somehow knowing that you were a different genre of person than they were

You are someone. You may not know where you fit in, what your future holds, but you are someone. You will always matter.

Do you or your followers have any thoughts on that new book by Abigail Shrier? I'm not sure if to make a purchase because the cover alone and sensationalistic title gives me be a bad gut feeling

No, I will not be supporting this book with my money.

The Amazon listing for the book says “Abigail Shrier is a writer for the Wall Street Journal.” What it doesn’t say is that she also contributes to The Federalist, a well-known conservative hellhole. Anyone who willfully collaborates with the right does not have my best interests in mind, I can promise you that.

The title speaks for itself. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. The cover has a vintage photo of a little girl with a hole punched out of her pelvis. This is not my narrative. I am resilient, not ruined.

The title and cover align themselves with the conservative idea of “protecting our daughters”, protecting a commodity that belongs to men. It does not recognize that we were already being harmed before we transitioned. It does not recognize what we were responding to with transition. Instead, it posits that the “transgender craze” is swooping in and corrupting sweet young women, reefer-madness style.

The description in the listing says everything I need to know:

These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.”

Uh-huh. Never experienced any discomfort, huh? Right-o. Sure.

A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.

Condescending. “Inoculate your child”? Christ, transitioning isn’t the result of a disease. We aren’t “crazy”. Women who have gone down this path have reasons for doing do beyond being ~infected by those crazy liberal transes~. But the reasons for our trauma aren’t something they’re going to publish in a conservative thinkpiece, because they aren’t looking to solve the root of these problems. They’re looking to preserve it. They don’t want change. They want things to stay the same.

She’s using detransitioned women’s experiences and trauma as a pawn in her arguments, just like everyone else does (across all ideological lines, both left and right). These people don’t care what we actually think or want, they just want the juicy trauma porn they can pick pieces from and use to bolster their own point of view. This book is another example of using the “damaged woman” narrative as a boogeyman. “Look at this pitiful creature, see her moan and gnash her teeth and feel so much regret for what she has done -- your daughter could be next!”

No thanks. I’d maybe borrow a copy if I feel like seeing the latest in how conservatives are warping our stories for their gain in the year 2020, but I’m not supporting it with my money or clicks.

i think it's so funny we invented dogs to do so many specific chores (hunting, herding, tracking, etc). i couldn't imagine looking at my cat and being like what if your granddaughters could fold my laundry...

Hello, just came across your blog. I've been on testosterone for over a year and a half, and I'm considering stopping eventually to preserve my health, even though it's helped my with my dysphoria, and I feel a lot more comfortable with my body as it is now compared to pre-transition. Any advice, since you've gone through something similar according to your bio? From your experience, what changes revert back? Thanks for your time!

Hey! This is going to be long, bear with me.

Great to hear your dysphoria is better and you’re doing well. Honestly, this course has been very good for me personally. For brief background, I always expected to stop HRT after getting permanent changes from it, because the health risks like cancer and heart disease sounded like a bad tradeoff for essentially nothing in the long run, but it did surprise me that I had to stop early due to the health problems HRT was giving me, both mental and physical.

So in total, I’ve been on HRT for four years: I took two years off it in the middle because of the effect on my mental health, and then went back on when I was more stable, switched from gel to injections and stuck to it for another two years before I started losing hair, at which point I made the decision to quit permanently. I’ve now been off for some three years total.

For changes, I was pretty far into masculinization at that point. I had increased hair growth everywhere, although by genetics I was never set to become very hairy. Also by genetics I was doomed to have shitty facial hair growth, so I only ever managed to grow a couple dozen beard hairs under my chin. My voice dropped very low quite fast, and my friends say it’s lower than most men they know, although I’m personally deaf to how it sounds as it’s always just been “my voice” to me. My body fat had completely redistributed, I was thick in the middle and my face was angular, and within my own demographic I was usually read as male. And as said, I was losing hair, particularly from the top of my head, which was most unwelcome to me personally, lol. So I made the decision to stop there.

In terms of mental wellbeing, testosterone always had a shitty effect on my anxiety and paranoia; it masculinized my depression and made it more active instead of passive, leading to anger and anxiety rather than sadness. Other than that I felt very good about myself and overall had a positive experience with T, even though it (combined with binding) caused me various unexplained health issues like trouble swallowing, muscle tension and such, which, like mentioned above, were high on the list of reasons I quit and have to be mentioned as “effects” of the treatment.

Backstory over, so, I quit T.

What happened first was my hair literally just fell off all at once. Yay? This is apparently normal, based on my extensive research on male-pattern baldness prevention online; when you start taking DHT blockers (or cease injecting testosterone into your muscles), the damaged hair on your head just dies off and gets replaced by new, healthy hair. I shed like shit, I’m not going to lie, I had short hair but when I went to take a shower my palms would be covered in hair when I ran them through my head. So I shaved it all off, problem solved(?). Like promised by the Internet, my hair did grow back more healthy, and I was no longer losing any afterwards. At three years in I have a normal head of hair.

Second, my periods came back. Based on my previous experience on stopping T, periods coming back is shit, not because nobody likes them but because your body’s fucked up from the treatment. First time around I had horrible cramps for a couple months - pretty much non-stop through the entire period, debilitating and just awful, way worse than I had in my teens. Second time around no cramping but I literally just bled buckets. I had a large-sized mooncup, but I had to empty it hourly instead of every 8 hours like recommended, and I would still bleed through it. Like there was just so much fucking blood everywhere. I had to leave work for it, it was that bad. So be prepared for your periods to be fucked up afterwards. I was warned repeatedly by gynos that they’ll probably not come back after stopping T, but they always did, and after a couple months they went back to being regular and normal again. Three years after T I have a normal cycle, pretty much the same it was pre-T, with less cramping due to my age compared to when they stopped the first time when I was still pretty young.

Third, my body hair calmed down. I lost the hair on my chest entirely, my neckbeard had slowed down to the point where I don’t bother shaving it more than once in three months or so, my unibrow vanished, and my whiskers grew lighter. My arm hair has gone back to being relatively invisible. My leg hair and thigh hair is still thick, which I like. Brows still thick, which I like.

Fourth, body fat redistribution. You have to lose and gain weight for this to happen, so it may be faster or slower depending on your lifestyle, but essentially your new body fat distributes in a female pattern whereas your old fat burns from the male pattern. My waist is back and my hips are wide. Breasts are way fuller, even though nobody needed that. Face is round. I still retain some angularity to my jaw but essentially back to babyface for me at three years in.

Fifth, voice. My voice is still low range masculine,

but reaching higher pitches is much easier, and my voice overall has softened and regained range in general. Nobody else has picked up on it, but I’ve noticed, especially within the past year, my voice becoming much more versatile and in general higher and more feminine. Obviously, as imaged, this doesn’t affect the average range of my voice, but it is noticeable.

I’ve done plenty of voice training for my safety (sometimes I get questioned in female bathrooms, for example) so this is not just the effects of T alone, but here’s an example of the ease in which I can reach a passable female voice three years off T:

Sixth, TMI and sad, but I no longer have a dick. It’s gone. I’m back to square one in that field. Luckily I don’t suffer penis envy, I just really liked the growth both aesthetically and in terms of it being on my body. I really, really liked it. Safe to say I never had much to begin with, but it was quite significant in comparison to what I have now. Bye, dick. You are dearly missed.

Health-wise, I’m doing much better! I no longer experience issues with swallowing, my muscles are feeling much better especially with regular exercise, and I don’t have unexplainable physical symptoms that leave my doctors shrugging in confusion. My mental health is also excellent, but it’s worth noting this has a lot to do with external factors as well, such as escaping abuse for a major contributing factor. However, it’s also due to active practice in merging together my fractured self in terms of embracing my female reality instead of trying to live as a male in whole. Finding that balance has been a big help in alleviating the dysphoria I dealt with upon quitting T. I feel really good in my skin now, with the permanent changes T has provided me together with my healthier body, so I can safely say this has been a good choice for me overall.

Tl;dr: Post-T Edition

Things that changed for me: body hair lessened, balding stopped and hair grew back, voice became more versatile, physical and mental health improved, beard growth slowed down to fuck all, regained a round face and hourglass figure, boobs filled up, bottom growth went back to 0

Things that didn’t change: normal speaking voice is still deep as shit, leg hair growing strong, brow game bushy, still have whiskers, people keep questioning my presence in female bathrooms and nobody tries to sell me makeup, dysphoria doing good.

Overall: I’m in a good place, yo.

Henriëtte Ronner-Knip (Belgian-Dutch, 1821-1909, b. Amsterdam, Netherlands, d. Ixelles, Belgium) - Playing Cats, 19th c. Paintings: Oil on Canvas

As a butch who struggles w dysphoria, the temptation to wear compression tanks, get a double mastectomy, take just a lil bit of T to try to get some kind of results that just might last afterwards, even though I know it’s detrimental to my health- it’s crushing sometimes.

And I do have to put myself first and distance myself from butches who encourage doing these things. Because seeing that makes that little voice go, “oh yeah, look how easy that is, you could definitely pull that off no problem.” And no.

I want to fight that unhealthy part of me. I want to accept my body as it is. Breasts and hips and all.

Enough is enough. Sometimes we have to protect ourselves and other women struggling with dysphoria by standing firm in what we believe and keeping our boundaries up.

I know there’s a lot of overlap in the butch and transmasc communities. But I have no interest in interacting with dysphoric women who promote needless hormones and surgeries or harmful practices like binding. It isn’t a reflection on those women’s worth or value- it’s a protective reaction and sometimes fierce anger that more and more women like me are transitioning.

I’m not gonna do it.

I’m going to learn how to live with myself the way I am. I’m not going to lie to myself and say that taking testosterone and getting unnecessary surgeries is okay or something to even be desired.

And it’s an uphill battle every day, but I know I’m not alone, and that I’ll get to the point where I can stop wishing my body and voice were something they aren’t.

I saw that you mentioned butch dysphoria ... can you please post resources or just any knowledge that you have? Im trying to figure out who I am.

Hey there, that’s a huge question, but I’ll share a little of what I’ve learned as a dysphoric butch person myself. I know that plenty of butches experience dysphoria to varying degrees, including women who readily identify themselves as cis — it’s way more common among non-trans people than I think most people realize, especially among gay people (but certainly not limited to them)! You are definitely not alone, and you’re also not doing gender “wrong” if you experience discomfort with social roles or gendered aspects of your body but don’t identify as trans. And if you do determine that describing yourself as trans is the best and most accurate way to frame your experience in the world, that’s an ethically neutral decision despite The Discourse™️ suggesting otherwise. Feeling dysphoric also doesn’t mean you need to commit to any one specific course of action to alleviate your discomfort, whether that means binding, using HRT, or getting top surgery, and it also doesn’t mean that you’ve just got some internalized misogyny/homophobia to unpack and once you do your dysphoria will magically vanish overnight with sufficient therapy. It’s complicated and none of have the one “right answer” for what to do about dysphoria and how it shapes our concepts of ourselves!

It definitely does help to do some serious thinking about your dysphoria — what tends to make it flare up, what body parts or social situations it seems to be attached to, how it impacts your daily life — and then work from there to address it a step at a time. I’m dysphoric about my chest, and don’t bind regularly any more due to compression-induced nerve pain (which can and does happen even with high-quality binders), but I’ve done a lot of mental/emotional work on body image to push back against negative self-talk, wear clothing that conceals my chest without actively compressing it (hence that post on 80s fashion, though I dress like a Winchester brother rather than Marty McFly), and do physical activities that help me refocus on what my body can do rather than what it looks like, such as hiking and swimming. Friends with dysphoria (of various gender identities!) report that this combination of mental reframing of your body as Not A Bad or Wrong Thing, distracting yourself from your image on bad days, and doing positive and enjoyable body-oriented activities helps a lot, even when they’ve had surgery, taken HRT, or otherwise mitigated dysphoria physically. Hang in there! You don’t have to have the answers yet (or ever, honestly), but it helps to remember that you are you, fundamentally, and that any realizations you have and decisions you make about how you occupy your body and the language you use to describe it is just part of your continuing evolution as a human being.

”Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.” ~ Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart … Artist ~ Carl Larsson