when I was a kid my favorite was the Count, but as an adult my favorite is Oscar the Grouch

I will be discharged from the hospital this weekend 😝

The scrotum and phallus skin is removed and used as a skin graft and it becomes the lining of the neovagina. You don’t want hair in your neovagina. Besides the obvious discomfort with that, there have been cases where hair in the neovagina leads to infections.

Usually surgeons now will cauterize the follicles they find on the skin graft, but that only addresses the hairs growing in that cycle - you need to have removed the hairs over many cycles so new ones don’t come in after the surgery. That’s why it’s best to have cleared all the hair with electrolysis across several cycles - ideally over an entire year (even longer than that would be better because the following year you can kill any that were missed the first year).

it is interesting how JK Rowling hasn’t had the same boycott pressure than Elon Musk and Tesla, I think trans rights are just not as motivating to most people, unfortunately

someone needs to write an enthography of 4chan

incredible 👏

had to double-check the community name, never expected greentext in a wholesome community 😅

I went through all of this too, and transition is weird in that it simultaneously decreased and increased my dysphoria.

When I first transitioned I wasn’t bothered by my deadname at all, but after a few months it really started to bother me and I even started to feel weird that I had ever been called that. It’s like the way I thought about the name had been rationalized and seen as “genderless” and just “me”, and only once I started going by a different chosen name did I have the space to see my deadname more objectively - the way it is gendered and used in a gendered way, and how poorly that fit “me”.

Also, yeah, I paid little attention to my voice before I transitioned and once I transitioned and started paying attention to my voice for practical reasons like wanting to pass for safety, I suddenly realized how horrible my voice sounds and how it isn’t “my” voice, etc.

On the other hand, there were also lots of moments of gender euphoria happening - dressing the way I’ve always wanted in public, and integrating as a woman socially was like a dream come true, a dream I had buried and suffocated and tried to kill but which somehow miraculously came to life anyway.

From what I’ve read these are common experiences - I know it seems weird for dysphoria to suddenly appear, but I think as coping strategies like denial and repression melt away, there is some instability as you pay more attention to your body and details that before you successfully ignored.

This is a challenging part of transitioning, but all I can say is that repression really is worse than transitioning and that it does (slowly) get easier. Also, the mental health improvements and joy that come from transitioning are a lot more than I ever could have expected.

whoa

I would agree it’s not misogynistic to think JK Rowling is one of the most infamous transphobes, but that wasn’t quite ContraPoints’ argument. I am admittedly sharing the conclusion without providing her argument, and I’m actually in the hospital right now recovering from surgery so my head is a bit fuzzier than usual. If you watch those videos it should cover that territory though, in case you are interested. Either way I get what you mean about Rowling being so famous and influential in her transphobia, I tend to agree with you.

EDIT: it’s the second video, the Witch Trials of JK Rowling that has the argument I’m talking about, the way that women bigots in particular are such popular targets of outrage. The first chapter of that video is entirely about Anita Bryant as an example.

but we can be successful collectively ;)

that’s the spirit!

thank you

this is so upsetting

thanks!! I’ll just be excited to be able to walk around again, being on strict bed rest is a lot more difficult than I expected, lol.

thanks 😊

yes, wait times can be very long and this is a surgery that requires a lot of planning. 6 months isn’t even enough time to get your hair removal finished, generally I see recommendations to have 1 whole year of electrolysis and at least 3 full cycles of hair clearance. That alone is a huge amount of work and time - I had 1 hour electrolysis appointments once a week. When you add in the typical insurance requirements to have been on hormones under the supervision of a doctor for a year and the requirement to get two independent letters from psychologists, you are looking at a lot of appointments with endocrinologists, psychologists, and eventually with the surgery team. It’s a lot - so start now if you think you might even possibly want it.

When I socially transitioned I practically promised myself I wouldn’t get a vaginoplasty, I only wanted an orchi … and that position was fully reversed after 6 months of estrogen. I wish I had taken the possibility of a vaginoplasty more seriously, and that I had started hair removal for that much earlier.

I DM’d you some details. My recommendation is to start electrolysis yesterday, lol - hair removal takes a very long time and it’s best if you can get at least a year of electrolysis so catch all the hair cycles.

thank you!! ❤️

thank you! 💗

I actually opted out so the chaplain couldn’t find me and somehow they still ended up dropping by during my recovery. Luckily this chaplain was pretty chill, it could have been a lot worse - but it was still a stressful event for me and against my explicit wishes and choices.

I wonder - what do you think the purpose of a chaplain is - all of this has made me think more about chaplains and their role. I tend to be cynical and think the worst, that being that chaplains are basically there to try to convert people when they are vulnerable (after a surgery can be a traumatic time, and a significant number of religious conversions occur after a trauma). There is also the opportunity to convert before death, so that might be playing a role too. But I need to actually read up on the history and context, maybe my cynicism is misplaced here.