inconvenient catboy

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

"dad" I say, my eyes barely open "it's Colonel Sanders" while pointing down the hallway. He looks, and at the end of the hallway, there's a portrait of an old man, the donor who paid for the wing of the hospital I'm recovering in.

My dad explains as much to me, and goes "I mean the guy *kinda* looks like him, but why would Colonel Sanders pay for a hospital wing Mississauga Ontario? I think those drugs might me messing with you"

Then the nurse comes out of the room. I go "hey, who is that picture of?"

She looks at the portrait. She looks at me. She looks at my dad. She looks at the painting. She looks at me again.

"you don't recognize the Colonel??"

Is that what driving is for most people? I looked in the notes expecting to see a bunch of bewildered reactions but everyone is agreeing with OP and it's not that I don't believe you, but like.

I drove for years and hated every second of it because I was constantly aware of the fact that I was in charge of a massive chunk of speeding steel and glass capable of causing death if I sneezed at the wrong moment. Not for a single second did the car feel like a part of me. Driving always felt deeply unnatural and highly dangerous. It is indeed Wild to think that the vast majority of people apparently smoothly mind-meld with their car.

Driving shouldn’t be for everyone but if you’re not doing it on the regular don’t get defeated and think you are broken if you don’t experience this right off the bat. It takes a lot to build those neural pathways but it probably can happen if you keep at it. (Maybe.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: as a transfeminine butch it took viewing my masculinity from a transmasculine perspective to emotionally divorce myself from the toxic notions of societal normativity.

I was never an effeminate kid but I was SEEN as one. My masculinity was butchness even going that far back and all my peers did look at me and said "that kid's a sissy". I wore a suit and tie to school the first couple years of primary and I wrote cringy poetry for girls that I had crushes on and all my peers would look at me and say "that kid's a faggot".

And when I then came out and began transitioning, it was like shedding falser skin that never was me to begin with. But then the idea that I was now to conform to normative notions of "womanhood" hit me like a stack of bricks.

And it took trans men. It took transmasculinity. It took seeing the biggest, butchest dykes, it took looking at women, men and nonbinary people so UNLIKE EVERYTHING society broadly views as attractive who looked similar to me to learn to LOVE ME.

To learn to love the soft fur on my body, the coarse hair on my legs and arms and hands. The pits, the rolls, the bulging stomach, the small boobs, bigger upper pubic area. The stubble on my face, the way my nose hooks just so slightly. The shadow cast by hair upon my face, the way I smell when I do exercise.

It took being around people, LOVING people to whom all these things I was conditioned to believe to be fundamentally at odds with my closeness to womanhood were DESIRED traits that they STRUGGLED for. It took surrounding myself with people to whom the way I was and wanted to be wasn't things to be erased.

I'm butch. I love my body hair, I love my masculinity. I love all that. I'm not on estrogen to be less of me, myself. I'm on estrogen to be MORE of me, myself. Surrounding myself with people who love their masculinity, who STRIVE for masculinity. To whom testosterone is NOT a poison. To whom the way I am is not a state that's to be shunned or overcome.

It brought me peace. It brought self love. It brought serenity. I feel more at ease inside this body I inhibit and I have now to thank for that: trans men, transmasculine people, transmasculinity. Manhood.

I have to thank for all the love that I have found for my own self.

@thatgarden

and that's the thing: I know that the very binary and transmedicalist leaning focus on "womanhood first, trans second (or never, if stealth)" and "manhood first, trans second (or never, if stealth)" is very big because its a narrative that gets validation from a cissexist and horrifically normative society but the way I see it I will always have more in common with a trans man than with a cis woman without any of the non-normativity on her part.

My womanhood, my gender, my identity is shaped and molded by my experience of it being considered transgressive.

I wasn't a woman until I forced my way out of the norms that I was raised in and I couldn't BE a woman until I asserted MYSELF as that.

A trans man or even a cis woman whose womanhood exists on other intersecting axes of societal marginalization will ALWAYS exist in a way that is more closely related to how I experience the world than a binary, societally conforming cis woman.

And let me be very clear here: this is me saying that ANY aversion, divergence and anti-normativity in a societal sense is what connects and unites me as a nonbinary transfeminine butch dyke with others.

A cis person can 100% be transgressive against societally enforced gender norms and I will always be in solidarity and unity with that person.

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!