I've decided to pull the trigger on laser beard removal. (It's less thorough than electrolysis, but cheaper and less painful, and my light skin and dark hair is supposed to be a good match for it.) My [earlier fear of](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) maybe needing beard shadow to avoid accidentally passing (and thereby incurring unwanted social costs, however much I would prefer my reflection) looks ridiculous in hindsight; I'm sure I've never read as anything other than a man with gynecomastia—and it's even more moot now that I've [quit HRT](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/). (On that subject, the return of my standard-issue hormone balance has been mostly uneventful, my main observation being that spontaneous erections are a disturbing nuisance after the peace of having had that system set to Do-Not-Disturb for a few months.)
-I told myself that before committing to laser, I should take some days or weeks without shaving to make sure I really understood what I would be giving up. (One thing I regret about the HRT experiment is that I neglected to take a bare-chested "Before" photo. As having breasts has become more familiar, I'm not sure I _remember_ what my chest was like seven months ago; I should have been _documenting_ the changes: you know, for Science.)
+<a id="anchor-before"></a>I told myself that before committing to laser, I should take some days or weeks without shaving to make sure I really understood what I would be giving up. (One thing I regret about the HRT experiment is that I neglected to take a bare-chested "Before" photo. As having breasts has become more familiar, I'm not sure I _remember_ what my chest was like seven months ago; I should have been _documenting_ the changes: you know, for Science.)
I lasted about six days. Facial hair is just _gross_.
My first session was Wednesday. The clinic—parlor, salon?—was in "Portland"'s historic gay district. I checked out a nearby bookstore beforehand. They had the _Hamilton_ soundtrack playing, and a table setup encouraging customers to write postcards to our Congresscritters to protest GOP villainy.
-Meatspace bookstores never fail to conjure up a healthy sense of greed and ambition in me. O books O knowledge! O vastness of human thought, O connectedness of the readership graph! O _searing pain of wretched humiliation_ that I've been so slow and lacking in my own contributions to the graph. (Lest we forget, _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ is [more than a year old](/2016/Sep/apophenia/), and I've barely _begun_ the Sequence of things I've wanted to say for a long time.)
+Meatspace bookstores never fail to conjure up a healthy sense of greed and ambition in me. O books O knowledge! O vastness of human thought, O connectedness of the readership graph! O _searing pain of wretched humiliation_ that I've been so slow and lacking in my own contributions to the graph. (Lest we forget, _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ is [_more than a year old_](/2016/Sep/apophenia/), and I've barely _begun_ the Sequence of things I've wanted to say for a long time.)
I bought a copy of _Counterexamples in Topology_, and a short story collection with a 2017 copyright date, subtitled _The New Trans Erotic_ [_sic_]—research for the blog, I told myself; I should understand the competition, the bright young gender-dysphoric literary minds sworn into the service of the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus and accordingly shunted down the transition track, rather than the repression track or—whatever you want to call what I'm doing. (And if _they_ can write and produce a meatspace book, why can't I?)