Someway, somehow that I can belong!

I'm coming to love my graft.

It looks freaky. That's okay, I'm a freak.

It looks scary. That's okay, I'm scary (so I’m told).

It looks like it hurt. It did, and it was great.

It represents a long hard road out of hell. It's a sign of my dedication to authenticity. I'm proud of it.

Transphobes do their best to scare trans men away from life-saving medical care like phalloplasty with gruesome photos of fresh surgical sites. They want you to believe that it'll always look like that. But your flesh will heal, and so will your soul.

Here's the truth about transphobes: if gender affirmation surgeries were pristine, blood-free, scar-free, magical transformations, they would STILL try to scare you out of getting them.

Getting pins in a broken leg is gruesome, too. But isn't it worth it once the leg heals?

I love my scars. They're stories told in skin. Here's where I broke up a dog fight. This one's from a gun. Here's one from an Offspring concert. Here are the ones I got in exchange for a life without dysphoria. My scars celebrate my life and remind me of lessons I've learned.

So, too, with my graft. Every day I can look at it and remember that I made it. That I am made whole. That I am free.

For romantic relationships we have:

Casual dating, where you're expected to be getting to know one another and it's understood that the relationship could end at any time.

Formal dating/"Going steady", where you've acknowledge that you have a bond that you are interested in pursuing and you want to spend significant time with one another.

Engagement, where you're actively working to enmesh your lives completely, and are expected to be interested in one another as people and supportive to one another through serious difficulties.

Marriage/partnering, where you have formally intertwined your lives and have an expectation that this will be a permanent, continuous relationship based on mutual interest and mutual caretaking.

And every time you want to "go up a level" in a romantic relationship, the expectation is that you actively ask the other person, and get their consent. There is (ideally) no confusion about what the other person expects from you in terms of commitment and intensity of your relationship.

Friendships don't have that.

Which means that instead of a consent-based checkpoint for going up "levels" of friendship, you just have to try to figure out where you stand based on vibes. And there's no way to tell if there's a mismatch of expectation until someone makes a mis-step.

And there's no socially appropriate/expected way to navigate friendship rejection either.

It's totally normal in a romantic relationship to say "I'm not interested in/ready for that kind of commitment" but when you have to handle a friendship the same way, the person being rejected is often scandalized because they had no clue you had a mismatch, and they have no socially appropriate way of expressing the grief of a friendship rejection.