Some Assembly Required

Tfw you have to explain to your swimmers why you use the women’s bathroom at work, despite being a boy, and they all get really worried about your personal safety

Tfw you just wanna see queer people accurately and diversely represented being HAPPY and SUCCESSFUL and JOYFUL, like I get it, a lot of us suffer from very bad things, but sometimes I just want to see some off us being HAPPY in our lives so I know I might be able to reach that point one day too.

I just wanted to address something about HRT for those thinking about going on it. When I was beginning the process to start T, everyone told me it was going to make so angry and quick to temper, and that I would be prone to hitting and smashing things, and I was going to become a more violent person. Even my therapist told me this. I just want to say that I’ve been on T for nearly six months now, and I have not gotten truly angry once in that entire span of time. I don’t have an uncontrollable temper, and if anything, I’ve actually grown to be a lot calmer and more peaceful since starting T. Prior to getting on hormones, I was angry at the world, and myself, and I was so utterly disgusted with my body that I took it out on everybody else because I didn’t know how else to handle the amount of contempt I held for my body. I don’t feel like that anymore, and if you’re worried about huge changes to your temper due to HRT, I promise it isn’t even going to be a problem.

When you’re totally passing and everybody’s believing you’re a guy, and then you wear a swim suit at work, and you’re straight back to square one all over again.

Last night I performed my poem Dysphoria in front of some new friends and my family at a queer camp I'm attending, and it was one of the most intense and emotional moments of my life. It was the first time I had read that poem aloud to an audience.

I cleaned up my Facebook yesterday and it was really weird to look back on all those posts where people used my birth name and she/her pronouns. It was even weirder to see all those old pics of me that don't really feel like me at all.

Sometimes I wonder if I'll actually live long enough to see my chest post-surgery.

Lately I've been really frustrated with gender roles and gendered things and femininity and masculinity in general. As a transman I was raised into femininity and I was pretty happy to be somewhat feminine for most of my life. Now it causes me no end of dysphoria, however, and even though I may want to have long hair, or cute nails, or fabulous make up, it won't happen because that'll just get me mistaken for a girl AGAIN. I really hate this. Fucking gender roles and shit. They make my life miserable.

I’m at this really frustrating point in my life where I feel like I’m floating in the middle of this gender binary and nobody can see me and it’s really frustrating. Starting testosterone was supposed to fix this, but now I look at girls who are getting all dressed up and pulling out cute clothes for the summer and I’m like???? I literally did that just last summer. And now I’m here and I want to wear cute clothes, but at the same time it makes my dysphoria absolute hell. And I kinda really want cute masculine clothes, but nooooooo our society is all kinds of fucked and I can’t get cute masculine clothes. And I feel like I can’t just ask a guy for style advice because HEY!!! They don’t consider me one of the boys! Would you imagine that! Can’t be one of the girls, not really one of the boys, so yeah I’ll just sit here and float in the middle and wonder what the fuck I’m supposed to do now.

Kinda feel like I’m at a severe disadvantage in competitive swimming cause I’m lacking masculine musculature, and the comfort of knowing the ins and outs of my masculine body. Unlike all the other boys on the local swim teams, I have not had a masculine body for all 17 years of my life :/

My voice is already dropping and now all I want to do is sit and talk to myself for hours so I can listen to it....

Kinda, sorta really pissed with my dad because he hates that I’m trans and as a result, I never feel comfortable talking about T with him around. I don’t feel like I can practice with the needles and everything for my shots, and every time he’s around he mentions all the pain I’m going to be facing in a month or so and I’m really sick and tired of all his negativity and hatred towards me and this whole process. Just take it somewhere else and let me be fucking happy about starting Tokay.

When you have to explain to your mom that you want to join your high school’s boys swim team because you never got that when you were a kid, and you want to be able to say you were on at least one boys team somewhere in your high school career.