Why am I doing this again?
-I'm not trans. I mean—I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, _don't_. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it seems a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given my views. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire'".
+I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, _don't_. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it seems a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given my views. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire.'"
-But you only live once. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about my emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and in the absence of full-body transplants, I couldn't expect anyone to take that seriously. But this—_obsession_ with gender has been a _thing_ for me for a really long time. It's not going away.
+But you only live once. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about the emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and anyway, in the absence of full-body transplants, I don't think I could expect anyone to take that seriously. (Passing is _hard_! Our doctors do their best, but there's _so much_ sexually-dimorphic _stuff_ that we _don't know_ how to fix. Everyone loves [Janet Hyde's meta-analysis showing that](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891) most psychological sex differences are pretty small, often in the range of Cohen's _d_—the difference of the means of the female and male distributions, in standard-deviation units—being around 0.3ish. Vocal pitch [is _d_≈6](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/880344518251261952). _Six!_)
+But this—_obsession_ with sex differences has been a _thing_ for me for a really long time. It's not going away. If I can't jump the gender chasm—because I don't expect to land successfully on the other side, because I have too much to lose—don't I at least deserve a _taste_ of what my trans sisters who are braver than me are getting?
-legitimacy
+I think—though introspection is difficult—that there's another motive, too, one which I would be remiss to omit, despite my suspicion that some readers (insufficiently appalled by the rest of the blog) may find apalling. Something about legitimacy. If I'm going to have the termerity to blog about trans issues—
-Sufficiently attentive readers of _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ may have noticed that the day number in the title of this post isn't congruent with the
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+Sufficiently attentive readers of _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ may have noticed that the day number in the title of this post isn't congruent with the date I re-started
(The _starter_ in _starter dose_ is code-switching for _placebo_.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff