𝓝𝓪𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓲𝓮 𝓦𝔂𝓷𝓷  💎

Which means that I don't just want to feel like a woman. I want to look, sound, smell (HRT is great for that actually, don't tell the cis) like a woman. Maybe this is internalized transphobia that I need to work on but fuck it here it is: I want to look female.

And the "black pill" is that if you started transitioning as a 6'1" 28-year-old AMAB, looking female is very difficult. But it's a goal I've been pursuing pretty much constantly, which involves obsessively trying to discover the truth about how I'm doing.

And discovering the truth is very, very difficult. In part because there is no truth. Or rather, there's a million different truths because different people perceive you differently.

I get very mixed feedback on how well I pass. On the one hand, a lot of trans people tell me "you pass 100% 10/10 A+ mission accomplished, perfect." And I have had the experience of meeting cis people who didn't realize I was trans until I mentioned it.

On the other hand, when I describe the experience of passing to some cis people, they look at me with what I take to be a mixture of confusion and pity. This is especially true of cis people who knew me before I transitioned. & I sometimes get unambiguously clocked by strangers.

And when you get mixed feedback, the pessimistic outlook tends to dominate. If some people say I look great and some people say I look like a man, I'm emotionally going to conclude that I look like a man and the people who say I look good are simply patronizing me.

Online praise is especially flimsy. If you know me online you only know what I look like with a lot of makeup, from the right angles, in the right lighting, from the selection of pictures & videos I curate. You don't know what I look at in the mirror first thing in the morning.

Like a lot of trans people, I rely for psychological sustenance on positive feedback from other trans people. And there are a lot of great spaces online where everyone is full of love and praise for everyone else. And mostly that's good. But it can be undermined horribly.