Ain't I a woman?

“People were just smaller back then”

Because apparently this is a literal actual thing that retailers hate cuz you think more before spending a lot of money, they want you to spend a lot without thinking about it so much

Source

how much guilt it brings to constantly ask people to do something for you, especially something basic and presumably "simple." how little privacy you have left when you need someone to assist you with bathing, feeding (putting food from plate to mouth), dressing, moving, brushing your hair and teeth, and other tasks socially considered private and/or very basic.

even if your caretaker(s) are always nice and respectful and patient and do everything like you wish, it may still feel humiliating. and lots of caretakers are not like this, not even close.

and it's hard for you, and it's hard for caretakers, yes, even paid ones, but often our caretakers are not professional and paid workers. often, it's our loved ones. and it creates unique dynamics that are too taboo to discuss because society sees disabled lives, dependent lives as gross, and toxic positivity requires never to show complicated parts of our experiences even in disability rights activism.

get out of bed because there’s something you’re excited about.

don’t think about people who left.

clean the clutter in the room and dishes in your sink.

smile at yourself and random people.

do something kind and out of the blue to make someone happy.

work out or meet with friends even though you have no energy to.

calm yourself down when your thoughts race.

remember to drink water.

don’t dwell on things you can’t control.

do things good for yourself, even though you have no motivation.

So I just told them to add the $20 something onto my bill, and I thought she was going to break down crying right there.

Another time, my dad gave 50 bucks to a guy who said he needed to buy medicine for his kids. I told my dad he was probably going to spend the money on alcohol or something, but my dad said that “whether he was lying or not says something about HIS character, but hearing someone in need and choosing not to help when I have the means to says something about mine”.

support disabled fat women. support fat women of color. support fat trans women. support fat women when they wear crop tops and low rise jeans and bikinis and support fat women when they wear hijab and abayas. support fat women who are advocates and support fat women who are just trying to live their lives in peace

But if the thought of being a man and living life as a man makes you feel free, like you’re becoming yourself, like you could actually see a future for yourself as a man, do it.

You’re going to have people all around you who have strong opinions about what you should do with your body. They’ll beg you not to get rid of your boobs because they’re soooo hot or because why would you want to remove your healthy breasts. They’ll also tell you this is proof you’re not a man, that having them makes you a woman, that if you were really trans you’d do everything to hide them, then turn around and complain that your shirts are too baggy and that binder is warping your ribs (even if it’s properly fitted and you only wear it 8 hours a day).

The hair stylist will complain about cutting your hair too short. She’ll assume you’re in crisis; was it a bad breakup, or did someone die? She’ll go out of her way to not give you an actual men’s haircut. How about a bob? Or maybe a pixie cut? You could spend a full hour, maybe two, trying to convince this person whose job is to cut your hair to give you the haircut you actually asked for. Or you could go home with a short but feminine style you didn’t want. Either way your friends and family might tell you this was a mistake or they liked how you looked better with longer hair. How boys won’t like you like this, as if you did it for them or as if you were supposed to have complete strangers in mind when you decide on your own goddamn hair.

You could get sexually harassed or assaulted. By people who decided they need to show you you’re not a real man. Ignorant fucks who think their dicks, hands, and fingers are magic forcefem tools that erase any manhood from your mind the moment they touch you in intimate ways you never agreed to. Or they’ll pretend they view you as a man in order to worm their way into your life to manipulate you out of being trans. And people, including other trans people and including people you thought would support you, will mock you for being foolish enough to think they accepted you.

You’ll be treated like a monster. You’ll have people tell you men are evil. You’ll have women tell you the only reason you’d want to be a man is so you can escape misogyny and gain male privilege (as if a cissexist patriarchy would ever make it that easy for you, as if you can do that without leaving everything you once knew and hiding your entire past from your new life). Worse, they’ll tell you you just want to be a rapist and an abuser because that’s all men are in their eyes. If you’ve been assaulted, they’ll use that to say you’re doing this out of trauma, in the hopes it won’t happen to you again, even if you knew you were trans long before it even happened.

And the craziest part of all this? Being able to live as a man instead of pretending you’re not is still worth it.

You’ll get the gender euphoria from watching your beard grow out. It’ll look terrible. You’ll still love it because goddamnit it’s yours and it’s on your face and it’s real. You’ll catch yourself singing and find you no longer have to watch your voice to make sure you don’t sing any notes too high so that stabbing pain of dysphoria doesn’t grab you by the throat and decimate the mood you were having because your voice just naturally won’t go that high anymore. Hell, it’ll go even lower and you’ll fall in love with your own voice as you awkwardly relearn how to sing at all and hear yourself again and again. You’ll put on clothing from the men’s section and find what you actually like, not just what suits the womanly costume you’ve been forced into since birth. You’ll get to take off your shirt and see a scarred flat chest and feel the breeze against your bare skin as you stare down, either checking for chest hair or feeling the joy from within bubbling to the surface as you see all the hair you’ve grown. You’ll hear strangers casually call you “sir” or “him” and at first it’ll be exciting and threaten to force a grin on your face in a situation where you’re trying not to show it, but over time it’ll just be so normal that you stop responding to “ma’am” and “she”; after all, since when does anyone call you that anymore? The pharmacist filling out your testosterone prescription will assume you’re picking this up for a relative because you look too manly to be the person whose name is attached here. You’ll get the legal name change, and the government will be a bag of dicks about it, but after a certain point they run out of hoops to make you jump through and reasons to say no before they just give in and let you name yourself legally, officially.

And through all of that, the good and the bad, you’ll find a community of men and boys like you. Who are dubbed broken women. Treated like monsters. Celebrating their transition milestones while you either wish it could be you right now or remember when it was you and how amazing you felt in that moment.