I went on HRT 2.5 months ago ~June 21st. 1mg estrogen twice a day, and then more recently, progesterone.

The changes were quick and fantastic. My skin feels nicer, I feel nicer. It's cliche, but I'm more in touch with my emotions. I feel like I just know how I'm feeling, without having to take meditation and introspection.

I started growing breasts -- the first "permanent" change -- and I felt anxiety about that. It's an inflection point. It's a point of no return. I recently got a full-body mirror, and the changes are even more pronounced than I thought at first.

I'm at an age where I can safely say I am bound not to pass, and if I am to, it will take a lot of constant effort and money. If I continue to transition, it will be to be someone with curves, tits, body hair, and a dick.

I'm told it's a little early for all the changes I'm having, especially breasts. But the girls in my family grew large breasts and they did so very early, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised? Even "boymoding", I'm getting stares. I'm eagerly awaiting sweater season.

There's extensive bodies of literature (see: poetry) about the body horror that is female puberty. Every momentary glance at my chest is stabbing. I definitely have visible titties on what is also a visibly male body but on what is also nice skin and effeminate arms. (Nobody talks about the "girl arms" enough. What gives? That's definitely one of the most salient features of feminization.)

Anyways, shoutout to every teenage girl out there in the world going through puberty. No idea how you're not all killing yourselves all the time. I at least (1) am going through this as an adult with volition and a place to live, and (2) I have the option to simply stop.

To some extent -- and I don't know how much -- I think I went on HRT to, for lack of better words, "fit in". I feel more legitimate and approved among my trans peers. (Funnily enough, without the HRT, I'd probably not have the capacity to so readily realize that's how I am feeling.)

There's definitely way more than any "social pressure", though. There's a very real something which clicked in my head. "Gender euphoria" is a very real thing.

While my internal model of gender doesn't neatly fit onto our current lingua franca of gender theory, and while I definitely don't believe in the "girl brain / boy brain" thing, I very very very much understand how people come to that "girl brain / boy brain" internalization. It just feels like I'm giving my Girl Brain the proper Girl Juice(ro).

I don't talk about this much, but I've been "plural"/"multiple" all my life, (or at least since seven) and one side effect of going on HRT is that kind of stopped. I don't like calling people "broken", but I have a newfound feeling of wholeness that I can't succinctly express. I have a newfound feeling of not brokenness. Newfound feelings are crazy, it's been so long since I've felt something so novel.

(As an aside: A large part of this is enjoying a novel experience. I didn't even have those when I tried psychedelics!)

That said, I can't imagine going this route and seeing transness as illegitimate. I've been told an overwhelming detrans/desist narrative that people go on HRT and See The Light and regret Everything.

But my experience here has been the most affirming thing of The Legitimacy of Being Trans. The "maybe this IS all bullshit" which existed as bubbles in my personal epistemic film has become thinner, smaller, now taking up residence next to "what if the Earth is flat" or "what if God was real".

Aside: What's up with terfs? They're doing radical feminism really wrong. If Valerie Solanas were alive today and you told her of the epidemic of Biological Males taking feminizing hormones, she'd say, Huh? What's the Problem? Then she would start high fiving you and cheering the radfem victory over maleness. Instead, terfs are all federating with nazi forums, sharing FBI crime statistics, and apologist-ing for Alex Gleason. Come on terfs.

That said, this also gave me the chance to introspect about queerness, and the circles I operate in. A lot of it is centered around youth and discourse about the youth (and, on conservative media, the most outrageous of youth. "Are trans people valid? We asked this 14 year old who identifies as cumgender objectumsexual and their alter told us to go kill ourselves.")

*ps: I didn't make up the 14 year old who identifies as cumgender objectumsexual.

At the risk of sounding like a Fox News anchor, there's very much a "transnormativity" that's difficult to name, easy to recognize, and difficult to reject without also rejecting the approval of your peers.

And like... I feel a lot of friction with the ableism of the queer community. So much of queer people in their 20s and 30s center their social lives and events around Instagram and TikTok, which is so comically inaccessible to people who rely on screen readers that it makes me shake. Hatred for blind people is woven into a large part of queer culture.

The more I transition, the more I'm thinking... Huh, I don't respect the person who said "You can't say that, nontransitioning baby" at all. I want my transition to be independent of my respect for the queer community.

Put another way, if the queer community shuffed off the leftist aesthetics and went full socially-conservative fiscally-conservative, would I still want to do this? I think the answer is no, and if my transition depends on Vibing with the queer community, then... I probably should not transition.

I think that's what appeals to me about the concept of faggotry. Again, my personal internalization of gender doesn't match our shared gender theory. I'm surveying the same lands by a different map, with different landmarks.

I think labels have utility and descriptive purposes, and the idea of an individuals "identity" is at best a heuristic tool. But "people aren't real" and "ego death isn't something you experience on drugs, it's something you realize from first principles in the lunch room at age 13" are hard sells.

To me, being a faggot is existing anywhere outside the proscribed right answers. My gender is obstinance, baby. It's very freeing. (That said, once Amazon starts selling faggot pride merch in 2 to 20 years, I might have to say something else.)

As an example: I think "male sex" has utility as a term, in the sense that sex as a binary embedding of several dozen measures correlated within a population has utility as a term. To some degree, I'm trans-sex, in the sense that this binary embedding is less efficient (i.e. my set of measures are now very different.) I say "trans sex" as something similar to but distincy from intersex / dsd.

As another example: I'm very very afraid of losing my "male passing privilege". For all the myriad reasons that "male passing privilege" is the wrong term, it still perfectly describes what I'll lose and nobody who would argue with me has a better term.

This is all a longwinded way of saying, I think I want to stop taking hormones, so I simply stopped a few days ago. I have a refill. I look different. I wonder how I'll look when I go back.

I'm happy I won't live my life wondering "what if" anymore. I think the nature of my person is that I'll regret everything I do and everything I don't do. So many figs are rotting around me, I'm happy I at least have the capacity for the gratitude for the one that's in my hand.

TLDR: Play Outer Wilds