The Mythologized Woman

Shout out to Tsambika, the world’s best electrolysis technician.

I'm Still Alex - Webtoon | Tapas | Linktree | Patreon 

There were a bunch of places I called trying to find an electrolysist that was willing to take a trans client prepping for bottom surgery, and I was kind of stunned to learn tons of places weren’t down with that, even salons that listed themselves as LGBTQIA+ friendly.

There’s something to be said here about the trans experience, but I’d rather focus on something positive. 

I don’t know exactly what makes one technician better than another, but I have to assume that one of the most vital elements is client comfort.  At no point in time has Tsambika ever made me feel awkward, ashamed, or anything even remotely less than positive during our sessions.

Each appointment is basically me hanging out and chatting with a friend.  That friend just happens to be repeatedly stabbing and electrocuting my genitals. 

…ok so I just made electrolysis sound like it’s a nightmare, but with good prep it really hasn’t been too rough for me.  Some lidocaine and acetaminophen an hour beforehand seems to do the trick, though your mileage may vary!

Whatever prep it is you do, the most important prep of all is finding the right electrolysist.  Tsambika is absolutely the right electrolysist for me.

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

Lately, I've been reflecting on why I feel so much better. I'm just over a year and a half into my transition now. Even though I'm still pretty androgynous and spend a lot of time boymoding, I'm not really treated as a man anymore in any of my social circles. And when I do dress super femme (or atleast try too), I just feel like me. I've never felt more certain of who I am.

Now that I've allowed this feminine side of myself to exist openly, I realize it was always there. I just didn't have the words for it. It felt vague, distant, and difficult to grasp. It was buried so deeply beneath years of suppression that I couldn't see it clearly.

What I didn't realize was how much I hated performing masculinity.

Not just the expectations placed on men, but the role itself.

It felt like I'd been put into a box that never quite fit. A box everyone else seemed perfectly comfortable with. A box so normal that nobody questioned it. Everyone silently agreed that this was just how things were supposed to be, and if someone didn't fit inside it properly, people reacted with confusion, discomfort, or outright hostility.

For years I thought the problem was me.

Then one day I tripped, fell, and knocked the box over.

And suddenly—

Wait. There's more outside of this?

There's a whole world out here.

And honestly?

I'd rather stay here.

Because it turns out I wasn't comfortable in that box at all. I was suffocating in it. I just didn't realize it because I'd spent so long convincing myself that struggling to breathe was normal.

The freedom that came with stepping outside of it is difficult to describe.

Even when I encounter transphobia, I still feel lighter. The way I carry myself now is unmistakably queer. Most people read it as gay or feminine, or at the very least not traditionally masculine. And that alone brings me relief, because no matter how someone perceives me, I'm no longer being seen as a cis straight man.

And that's important because those were never things I was meant to be.

I spent so much of my life trying to force myself into an identity that wasn't mine, believing that if I just tried harder I'd eventually become comfortable with it.

I never did.

What I discovered instead is that living inauthentically drains you in ways you don't even notice. It becomes background noise. A constant exhaustion that you mistake for normal life because you've never known anything else.

Then one day it stops.

And you realize how heavy it all was.

He stopped covering the No Kings protests because conservatives were calling him 'woke' just for posting that a thing happened (neutral.) When he interviewed conservatives about them and showed 'both sides' the conservatives still called bias. Again, for reporting that a thing happened (neutral.)

He does not report on pride because thats not what his readers want to see. He still goes. He takes photos. He does not report.

If I am busking while repping the queer advocacy group, he puts his camera down. Because im very rainbows.

He caters very closely to this neutral-conservative image, but for what even? The conservatives are still hounding him about his liberal bias for not covering their pet conspiracy theory of the moment.