As a transgender woman, I think I’ll spend the rest of my life contemplating the practical and philosophical gradient between “being a woman” and “being a man who lives as a woman”.
Where I sit on that gradient is only as important as what it entails, but we spend most of our time focused exclusively on where to stick the pin.
Public service announcement:
If you're on estrogen and you take a multivitamin or if you take biotin to make your hair and nails healthier, it's ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL that you stop all of that stuff for at least 3, and preferably 4, days before you get your blood levels checked.
Biotin is the chemical they use in the estrogen level test, and if you've got a higher-than-normal amount of biotin in your bloodstream, your labs will come back saying you've got much more estrogen in there than is there in reality.
If you want accurate results, take a break from the multivitamins!
the feminine urge
to write an OS for a Sega Saturn, that can run a windowing GUI, that speaks X11, and can run networked programs
He was terrified they would find his Skeletor in the closet. #grickledoodle #hemanandthemastersoftheuniverse #skeletor #horror #cartoon #art #drawing #funny
I donated to her because:
1) She’s willing to throw a punch
2) She’s not throwing trans people under the bus
3) She’s too young to remember Vietnam
From: @nberlat.bsky.social
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:htdsafwakqmzvuk2oivijzn6/post/3lluoflklrk2m
The bird is out of the bag! We're introducing Thunderbird Pro (you already know Appointment!), a set of productivity AND privacy boosting services. And that includes...*drum roll*...an email service we're calling Thundermail. Find all the info in this excellent article:
It drives home how much passing is really a proxy for safety: I don’t mind being clocked in SF, because I know it’s not likely to end in an assault. The same can’t be said when I’m bouncing around my hometown, where I feel safest when I’m unnoticable.
I live in SF. There are advantages and disadvantages to that. One thing I learned after FFS is that, despite my size, I pass pretty consistently when I travel. The same is not true in SF, where us trans folk are such a common sight that pretty much anyone can pick us out of crowd.
I tapped out my annual #transdayofvisiblity work post while standing on a street corner in the rain. It was exceptionally easy this year: all my thoughts are right at the surface.
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
🏳️⚧️ Proudly Trans
🌉 Bay Area
Product-Engineering Manager for a software product portfolio; former iOS dev; attorney (CA/IL); large-format photographer; marriage ministress; cinema nut; weeb; lifelong weird girl.
Lover of myths, legends, fairy tales, fantasies, and folklore; 6502 assembly aspirer; book hoarder; gaming nostalgist; gore-adverse, torture-adverse feminist horror film fan; food worshipper; Slack poet; ace-demi-recipro-crier; a total and complete mess.
🍶::🍷::🍺::🍹::🍸