things often typed in periods of darkness

early 2021, date unknown

a sort of dysmorphia where someone could tell me they think i'm beautiful, & i could believe them, &
it wouldn't help because the feeling is rooted not in a desire to be desired/accepted, but in a simple &
desperate desire to escape my features. & i already know that for any feature there is a set of people
who will think it's beautiful, so for anyone to compliment me carries the implication that the features
i desperately want to escape are included in the things they think are beautiful, which means that
to be complimented by anyone who would compliment me is just a reflection of the problem

july 9th, 2021

i'm insane for considering myself a woman but only in the faultless way where everyone else is
also insane for thinking things like "this painting is prettier," "this flavor of ice cream is better"

july 18th, 2021

the way i'm thinking about it now is that with sex characteristics being bimodal instead of binary, i doubt
that it's impossible for anyone to "pass" if that is their goal. i think it's possible for anyone to utilize the
overlap as much as they need. it's just that. it feels like its being bimodal means some people are just
kind of, like at one of the peaks & thus kind of indisputably cisgender. so there's no real failure state
& what pain there is i guess just has to be rooted in very painful envy. but the envy is not so different
from, let's say, a person indisputably of a given sex who simply thinks they are ugly in comparison
to someone who is indisputably also that sex. it is no less helpless, or petty

& it's obviously still rooted in the act of idealizing actually being another sex. instead of restricting my
thoughts to the only choice. which is working with things as they are. i should have rooted that idealization
out by now. by this point it just kind of feels like an absurd sickness detached from identity, transition, whatever
i would like to be able to describe it strictly as "a human wanting to have been born another sex" rather than
"someone born male wanting to have been born female." the former is what i'd like it to be,
it's how i'd like the logic to be operating behind the scenes. a more general thing

maybe because on some level i'm still conceptualizing it like "a man wanting to be a woman" with whatever vague
implications that can be drawn. which i guess i imagine being sinister or weird in some way, probably because
of being "a man" in that model. which is, of course, projecting a quality onto manhood irrationally! ugh

but anyway, as it stands i am still at a point where i don't expect this to ever be outright "ok." i mean, i have
already been born. but any given condition in any person's life being "ok" is frequently an exception,
i think. i don't think about it so much. it hasn't been that frequent of a source of distress. assuming
i don't dismantle the idealization, it can still be as non-painful as any other thing that
a person can be obliged to cope with instead of really solving

august 8th, 2021

i don't want to be the sex that i am. but neither sex actually carries any inherent meaning. so for me to want to be one of them,
& not want to be another one of them, i must be "projecting" "subjective" "qualities" onto one or both of them. otherwise their
subjective values would balance out. which just means i'm insane. so all i have to do is not be insane. or at least, this is
what i'd like to say. i'd totally love to snarkily call myself insane & thus redirect the problem to the (potentially)
resolvable insanity rather than the (certainly) unresolvable sex. But. is every second of life not just the projection
of qualities onto the uncaring material world around me? maybe i am just terrifyingly justified & "reasonable" in this,
to the same extent you can apply "rationality" to an animal building a nest or foraging for food. maybe it's my nature
to be a self-contradiction, forever, clawing at the stark cruelty of a binary statement, a mismatch, forever, cruelly
cruelly simple a statement, "one & not the other," it offers nothing else, & it's what i have to hear, nothing else
to be told, nothing to analyze, nothing to interpret, the statement on loop, only growing more stale & familiar but
never faltering in the slightest, & also on loop is the thought pattern where i scramble for any conceptual way
out like a frenzied animal in a bear trap & all i find is that same inevitable extrapolation to the end of my life,
where i die having never solved the problem. is it just my fate to live forever trying to bury this gnawing,
unbreakable tension? like i already said, "uncaring material world." it wouldn't even be the most
abject display of an uncaring material world, it'd be a pretty tame one. i could have been
born with a heart defect & died at age two. i could have been killed in a flood
at age fourteen. these feelings are so far from the extent of it

OK there's literally people who simply go "im' a dude:)" & proceed with their lives so maybe all the stuff i just typed was insane actually

i'm actually feeling waves of excitement & joy now in total contrast to the giant despondent paragraph
i typed ten minutes ago, i think breaking it down to such a kind of nihilistic perspective made me realize
i was habitually waterboarding myself with masochistic fixation on that irreconcilable point of self-interest
instead of um immersing myself in the absurdity of having to exist & the metaphorical liquid is like an acid
that dissolves clothing & jewelry & spares organic material, no caked-on grime of layers upon layers of
cultural & social lenses to view myself through just the fleshy human desire to be happy
which when exposed can feed into itself, empower itself, affirm itself

august 9th, 2021

i treat my forehead like a crystallization of the birth sex woes which is why
i wore beanies for three years & now concern myself with my bangs a lot &
used to panic & whimper on certain occasions if it was very windy out

august 10th, 2021

a magic birth-sex-altering button would be Heaven. originally that seemed to me like a really stupid thought which
idealizes an equally mundane & complicated subset of human experience. but i'm past that now. all the day-to-
day frustrations of life, all the angst about the world i live in, all my trouble with making friends, all the
existential confusion inherent to being alive, i know it would all persist after the button. but having
already spent so much time like this, i think it would be Heaven! i don't think anything could spoil
my outlook on life after pressing it. i would do anything to replace this eternal helpless upset
with the feeling of effortless alignment that has been so so easy to envision for so so many
years yet entirely unreachable, offering no direction that is even one step closer. it'd be
Heaven! no more friction where there should be gliding simple air. the unwinding of
an infinitely coiled knot, flopping to the floor as a piece of twine, no problem
anymore, a weight lifted, a pall cleared, slackening from stone to jelly,
a thousand year sigh of relief. & this will continue to have about
as much practical relevance to my life on Earth as Heaven does

august 14th, 2021

the thought of having any pride flag on display on my room feels like having a swiveling loaded gun installed
that constantly points at me... why would i want to take a space that i treat with an attitude of like, privacy
& self-expression, & introduce a prescribed color palette, an explicitly foreign & taken-on symbol that, in
being used as an expression of solidarity, inversely implies the presence of people off somewhere who'd
evidently like to destroy me. while reducing me to an aspect of myself that would be an afterthought
if not for the active interference of those people. it'd make me feel like i should be deprived of
any downtime from being hopped up on confrontational-ness, like a fighting dog in a cage that
people jab with sticks so i'll be constantly on edge ready to attack something... or maybe
i'm supposed to glance at it & derive satisfaction from being in an ingroup, to tell
myself there's something virtuous or prestigious about my label, haha!!! which is just,
i'm not even dignifying that little ritual with any more words, just picture me throwing up

august 16th, 2021

i think, in the back of my head, when i feel sort of angry or bitter or dry about anything,
i often feel like a man. & i dislike feeling like a man. i think if this was offset
through my body playing a part in making me feel like a woman,

(which is to say, if i was female & from there found comfort in a Treacherous subscription
to the cisnormative notion that it would enable me to feel far more secure & less
strained as a representation of femininity, far less in need of reaffirmation)

then i would simply feel like an angry or bitter or dry woman. as it stands, though, i have this range
of already-unpleasant emotion that sometimes comes with this additional disturbing feeling. it's
kind of like, "oh, who i really am, the pretending man, must be seeping back through"

of course, i could just be a cis woman still feeling at these times like i am failing to perform my gender. still, if it
has to be like this, with this demonization of my natural emotions... i think, perversely, i would prefer that form

if.

but it really doesn't have to be this way

august 18th, 2021

"wait, you actually still have a hierarchical view of the different gender / sex arrangements that
exist regarding love between human beings, even if it's an inversion of the status quo one?!
i thought we were just making jokes, ones with a playfully yet sincerely retributive tone toward
cis/heteronormativity, but jokes all the same... i think you might have a mental illness..."

august 22nd, 2021

the goal is to replace the extraneous "my body has been erroneously modified by testosterone"
periodically debilitating body image issues with the awesome normal "my body does not conform
to what i would like but in a random way like what normal people feel" periodically debilitating
body image issues, both of which are probably liable to be fed by unreal stuff like anime
drawings. also not actually, i'm actually not saying what the post says

august 24th, 2021

i've claimed that if i were female, i'd have a sense of like, a less strenuous & more secure experience
of representing femininity. even though i think the reality is... there is no secure & effortless variety of
that activity, it's... you know. it's a societal standard one holds their face to like a belt sander, yeah? but the
feeling manages to follow me past that acknowledgment, because, proceeding from that understanding,
there is still the sense that i would feel more secure in... the voluntary stress of that state
of affairs. that sense of inauthenticity is beaten into my head, i guess

august 29th, 2021

i went into hrt having a skeleton body & here approaching the end of year two it has, as has only been fair to
expect, not overhauled my having a skeleton body. which is, i mean, okay, it's not great when i feel morphologically
"masculine" in comparison to others. but i also know that testosterone doesn't have a particular tendency to make
people have skeleton bodies, so it's something i can rationalize as a random thing & not like. "damage." explicit
hormone-caused removal from how i might have liked to look, that "didn't have to happen"

the feeling is "i could participate in the feeling of solidarity fostered by this pride festival
but only on the condition that i roleplay as a person," which i am not interested in doing

september 2nd, 2021

"it's stupid of me to cling to the identity of 'woman' enough that i'd even care if someone misgendered me.
my body is just going to be what it is until i die. okay. & i am acquiring a sense of who i am inside, to
the best of anyone's limited ability to do that. okay. then who cares. i am tired of doing this silly dance
that puts me at odds with my body. i am over it," i assert confidently before remembering that i'm
coming to these conclusions while being male instead of female & dry heaving until i die

september 4th, 2021

surely it can't really just be seventy years of lamenting my birth sex, that's
absurd, i'm never going to attain what i actually want but surely the epiphany
that throws a wrench into the lamenting feelings has to come eventually right

september 7th, 2021

pouring breakfast cereal while i imagine having a conversation with someone that involves me starting to crack
up as i talk, then getting fixated on how... ok, the phrasing i'd default to is "what testosterone does to the voice,"
which is always kind of iffy because people's bodies vary but i think it's safe to say "what testosterone seems
to generally aim for with the voice," feels like it ascribes a particular tint to that moment of cracking up,
& it's really painful for me to think about as pure & giddy of a moment as that still being utilized by
evolution as a sex characteristic. can't escape it even in my random daydream conversations unless
the daydream is specifically incorporating me having a different sounding voice

september 14th, 2021

when i was approximately eighteen

what left me so at odds with my body? what left me so wholly incapable of coping
with gender dysphoria, to the extent that i saw no future for myself, that i just felt
wholly disengaged from my own personhood, numb, just a thing perceiving?

what made the body i wanted to inhabit so worth it? what
committed me so deeply to the logic of gender dysphoria?

you'd think at some point, one would go, "okay, it'd be nice to have all these alternate features, but
i guess i'm (fe)male! i'll have to work with that." but no, it was like i couldn't resist trying to push
myself to a breaking point, & keep myself pressed against it once i was there, as if to a belt sander,
as if some threshold of despair would finally cause some miraculous change to be enacted

what was the point? was it like instinctive rage toward the gender binary being sublimated toward just my
body? was willful despair the only response to the situation that i felt was afforded to me: my only degree
of freedom? what was it? where was all that stubborn pining & certainty & conviction coming from?

would being (fe)male have been the same once puberty began? am i inclined
toward an undying & unisex rage at my body arresting all that control of
itself from me, changing profoundly in any way i never asked for?

or could it be as simple as that classic explanation: could there be a sexually dimorphic structure in my brain
that simply expected a body in accordance with it, intrinsically? could it be that simple, could it be could it be?

someone asked me what i would say to eighteen-year-old me & i guess it might be something like:

"it is going to become very possible to live. now, the problem itself is not going to go away, & i know that you, immersed in
masochistic hyperawareness of physical permanence, surely already know that. but it will simply become very possible
to live, in spite of it. & that is dumb. & i know that you probably find it as enraging as if i were to tell you that it
wasn't even going to become possible to live. & that's fair. i still find myself quite enraged sometimes

well, regardless, as it becomes very possible to live, you will find it undeniable. you will still feel cheated:
as you embrace life it will seem absurd to embrace it as it is, with what still feels like a very deep & fundamental
flaw, like you are admitting defeat: something you never wanted to do, even while having structured your
cognition for years around the stark awareness that there would never be a victory either

but even if you sit pouting with your arms folded, knowing you deserve better, it will, again, still be in that frame
where you undeniably feel that great possibility of living. it won't even matter whether you unfold your arms, although
after enough time it certainly may feel better to. it's dumb. you already knew i wouldn't have any miraculous, heavenly
resolution to report on. but this is going to happen, & you are going to like it whether you like it or not"

september 21st, 2021

sometimes i think about the possibility of one day having to make a post on tumblr where i very seriously ask for donations
with respect to housing or medical bills, & whether i would mention in the post that i am a trans woman, or if that would
make me feel like i was capitalizing on my identity (or being insincerely compelled, as i'll establish by the end of the post),
leading me to just withhold that information on the principle that i think simply being a human being in need is enough to
warrant consideration for being helped. but then, since it's typically used as a suggestion of general disenfranchisement, to
communicate a particular need for assistance, would not including it risk lowering my chances of receiving help, a chance
i couldn't take in such a dire circumstance, making the specification that i am a trans woman something that's in my best
interest but also "compulsory" depending on how you look at it? it almost feels like a pattern outside of anyone's control,
where no one really thinks that the user base has any intention of making their survival contingent on their category
of identity, but still might nervously speak a bit like it's the case... not that any of this really matters

i see it like trans & cis women will equally think "i am inadequately feminine because i don't resemble this picture,"
with this ironically being kind of a poisonously feminine thought, just with it not being quite the same in the case
that a trans woman has an ingrained self-perception of being removed from femininity in a way more inherent way.
& maybe that discrepancy also feeds into itself, with that differing connotation of the thought being a problem
in & of itself as a mark of difference. but ideally they just reconvene at "ok fuck this" anyway

september 23rd, 2021

a complex that that was once very prominent but is now less severe. a complex that doesn't always
necessarily have to relate to gender but very well can: an anxious & tangled relationship with the
idea of personal growth through horrible experiences. here is what i do within this complex:

in my head, i emphasize the importance of that situational growth. i see it as having a very significant property of
enabling people to become better people. i emphasize the importance of that property. i feel that i should cherish
& savor what tragedies & suffering i've experienced, for that effect. but i also feel like i haven't experienced
enough to be "an actual person," that i am fundamentally incomplete in ways i can never know

then there is also a substantial feeling of guilt. because if being an "actual person" is more whole & fulfilling & real, then tragedies
& injustices can be read as blessings of sorts, for the perspective they grant. so my want to be an "actual person" feels like it is at odds
with this act of framing these horrible things as ironic "goods," internally commodifying, fetishizing, any & all bad experiences:
things that actually do happen to others & which they never remotely ask for. so i consider this a repugnant thing for
me to feel. something disrespectful to those who have actually experienced the suffering i ignorantly long for

it is like a confluence of sitting in rooms for an entire (pre)adolescence & hungering to have had any life at all + internet-ingrained disdain
for privilege. like i watched a video of rich frat boys or something, & saw a total lack of humanity & perspective, so i extrapolated that a polar
opposite would be maximally human. but in this system, i was just helpless at the feet of fate, hoping it would grant me the state of being
real in exchange for suffering, to offer me the deal, or rather, force me to make the deal, for my own good. "oh, please please let
me suffer, nothing could be more restorative to my sense of self, please introduce a vector of suffering to my life"

-

i guess you can maybe begin to see how this entangles with terf rhetoric, in that it's clear that people are discriminated
against in being female, & exemption from this is something a terf will tend to lord over trans women, accusing them of
having privilege & co-opting an identity marked by discrimination they don't experience, stuff like that... which
i consider to be them sort of maladaptively basing their identity on their own sense of victimhood

but regardless: i greatly, horribly wish i were not male, for whatever silly reason, & although i recognize that i'm subject to various flavors
of discrimination as a trans woman, it does feel like a horrible deficit that i've been exempt from things i would have been liable to experience
if born female. or, if not a deficit, then at the very least: any & all negative experiences i would have incurred as a result of being born female
would have happened to have been comorbid with not having to feel this sense of bodily & existential unease that stems from being male

("yes, but only to have been burdened with an alternative set of bodily & inexistential uneases," you say, "a generally female set of uneases as
opposed to a generally male set, these two sets being separate sectors of an overall set of sexed & gendered uneases which, for each person, are
appended to the greatest set, of the general bodily & existential uneases shared by all people." - to this i reply: "well, i guess i am just insane.")

i spent so, so much time with my very personhood & essence feeling irreparably marred by nebulous events missing from my past & future. & that
awful sense of commodifying suffering, here cosigning the general existence of misogyny, followed me there too. that terf rhetoric is one that
happens to strike me very forcefull. if someone nastily said to me, "You can take hormones & get surgery, but it won't change what sex you
were born as!" it would be like that meme where the guy just stoically says "Yes." except instead of a stoic guy i'm a putrefying corpse

october 5th, 2021

recording day. having trouble getting into the recording mindset because each word i speak is shadowed today by the
parallel-timeline version of the show where my voice hasn't been affected by testosterone... i don't have to reiterate
it by this point, but i will: uncompromising psychological need for something to not be as it is, which exists at
odds with the incontrovertible physical reality that it is as it is. truly, absolutely life on the rock

the unstoppable force & immovable object that together comprise the clamps of a vise that has been
periodically crushing my head into a two-dimensional plane for seven years. all the dynamics &
complexity of life transiently folding down into only eight words, communicating a helplessly
simple logical statement, a sensation of living death: "to need to not be what i am."

the proactive outlook is that i need to push past this to accomplish a goal that will forward & improve
what life i do have, an imperfect one in which, regardless, i do have this show & want to produce
it, i know that when i am not feeling this way this is something that brings me satisfaction

the bad feeling's crippling reply, at times, would be that the compromise isn't worth it,
the flaw is too deep, the removal from the branch of life i desire is too great. that
it makes the life, as a container of goals i might pursue, invalid entirely

the permanence, the grief, the existential framing always call to my mind the rationalization of the death of someone
close. people deal with that, even if it "invalidates" life to one no longer lived with that person, so i can deal with
this, can't i? in comparing them, it's strange how there's no particular event, equivalent to the death itself, to
gradually distance myself from. just my ongoing existence, equivalent to the passive absence

i guess i could view my gradual biological comprehension of myself as a protracted "event."
everyone has to eventually read the "Unaffected characteristics" subheading on wikipedia,
or whatever. make the permanent shift from not having read it to having read it

maybe you could make the case that this feels more inherent to myself, that if someone
died i would still at times find myself wishing desperately for an un-invalidated
life as the vehicle in which to experience the rationalization of the death

pray for a maximal number of weeks before i basically type this post verbatim again, everyone!

october 6th, 2021

my brain dislikes public expressions of transphobia because they reinforce reactionary values & discrimination
toward a class of people (that i'm in! uh oh), but my heart dislikes them because they focusedly directs public
conversation toward sexual dimorphism which i then read & want to kill myself in a way that isn't actually
different from if i had masochistically perused a simple biology textbook. woody woodpecker laugh

(ok, the paragraph hinges on the disparity between those branches of reaction but
i guess there can be crossover in that it is bad for my heart to have it reaffirmed
that lots of people are practically impossible to relate to in any way)

"fundamentally wrong" has probably become the seed of a lot of my internal structures. to just not feel fundamentally
wrong is a feeling that feels outside of my power to reacquaint myself with. it seems like a really fundamental change
would be needed. i just don't know what switch needs to be flipped, to get over that "i'm simply not supposed to be male"
hurdle. i guess truly accepting it would be an astonishing relief, but i am so opposed to my being male that, on some
higher level of abstraction, the thought of accepting it disturbs me. even though there's not even any material
difference between me accepting or not accepting it. maybe if i sufficiently become where i am
supposed to be in other aspects of life i can just not notice it anymore

october 7th, 2021

i sometimes wonder if at times i derive some kind of masochistic satisfaction in how, regardless of what sociological framing for
my transness is presented, i can just narrow the scope to myself again & go "yeah well i can't shake the feeling that i personally
just was not supposed to be male even in some perfect egalitarian society. so with that in mind, i don't have to remove the boulder
of existential unease from my back. so there." what's ironic is that this is almost undoubtedly a sublimation of a bunch of
sociologically-rooted subjective conceptions of myself & the world that i am failing to identify & shake off

wanting to have been born female (whereupon i could be feminine or masculine) feels like as much of a phantasm as wanting
to be feminine does, whether here where i am male or there where i am female. like preferring mint ice cream to cherry or
thinking a certain painting is prettier. just another inclination produced by the spontaneous way my self comes together
as a confluence of my genes, childhood experiences, adult experience, soul, or whatever you'll attribute it to

except: one phantasm that feels psychologically disastrous, in intermittent waves, for my entire lifetime. why should
my self involve a, a need to not possess a trait that feels inherent to me? a meaningless trait that i already know
doesn't need to have bearing on my self-conception & expression? i know i can be feminine, masculine,
both, neither, anything, so why should there be that need? it feels like a mental illness

i feel as if i am transgender, &, completely separate from that, i have some sort of mental illness, but then i am grabbing
the two & mushing them together & entwining them. i feel as if i have an express interest in being the only trans person
where if some slobbering brainless Facebook comment section dolt goes "u r simply mentaly ill" they are right

october 26th, 2021

the authenticity of going against prescribed gender roles in favor of my own individuality, paired with
the desire for the sincerity of that individuality having been expressed in the first place through
conformity to gender roles that, in reality, i wasn't born in the position to have prescribed
to me? but not the sincerity of conforming to the ones that were actually prescribed

november 2nd, 2021

if a cis lesbian ever did not want to be in a relationship with me because i am trans, the idea of actually being
vindictively upset about that would make me feel like a complete psychopath just externalizing my gender dysphoria
upon someone just because she is not so awesome & cool & woke to detach the terminology of her physical preferences
in a relationship from the gender binary. it'd be real cool if she was! but if it doesn't provoke vindictive spite from
me day-to-day, it doesn't here either. & i'd probably feel pretty damn hurt, even! having it thrown in my
face what i tend to so hate about my body. well, how is she any more culpable than the mirror?

maybe she is still ironing out the intuitive associations (perhaps not negative but at least incongruous with
romance, in all the nuanced ways it may be) that the gender binary has ingrained between physical characteristics
& subjective qualities. or maybe she is just living with those associations! it's none of my business, we are all
weird, screwed collages of the cultures we're born into, taught how to exist on such granular levels of
consciousness, projecting all sorts of diverse qualities onto absolutely everything

an unattractive trans woman's jaw, an attractive cis woman's clavicle, a child's glasses, the scar on an elderly
person's cheek, an unattractive cis woman's forehead, the unremarkable person's freckles, it's all the same.
in upsetly seeing a sort of brutish character in my own eyebrows, i am guilty of it towards myself

but regardless of how insensitive the phrasing might be, "oh you have a male jawline," whatever, i just...

screw identities, right? screw "woman," i try to keep myself tethered to "woman" by a thread. screw any category with its
generality's contradiction of the specificity that i really am. & so the only way that i can imagine becoming vindictive is...
if i am so obsessed with being a woman, which is to say, abstracted from the particular situation where the identity is
"woman," obsessed with defining myself by a concrete identity, that i cannot, for the sake of respecting the intimacy
of this decision, just put things aside & apply reasoning to see what this person means beneath her language

anyway i typed all of this in response to what is almost certainly just bias, exaggeration, &/or outright fabrication in
reactionary news articles. i have no idea what's really happening out in the world. if there's anything out there
justifying that terf rhetoric to some minor extent, it's just like so much else: discourse between people
mutually acting like psychopaths, making things difficult for everyone else outside of it

november 21st, 2021

tumblr photosets containing stills of actors who i feel i conceivably could have looked
like if i hadn't been sex-hormonally-excluded from the possibility of looking like them

tangentially: people whose facial features are distinct from mine in
aggregate but for whom i can't verbally articulate any specific difference

tangentially: probable asexuality, due to potentially many factors, but prominent among them
is likely the essential horror of being made sexually dimorphic without being given any choice

tangentially: presenting, in this very specific context, a photograph of a real living stranger

tangentially: i could cry & cry to someone for as long as i want about it & receive all the sympathy in the world,
but at the end of the day, the most anyone could really do is wish they could solve the feeling, wish, in the
same helpless way they might wish to cure someone of a terminal illness. albeit in a less grave context

tangentially: sickening details i will die fully ignorant of, with regret, mundane as they may ultimately be

tangentially: people's body parts matter to them because they are
insane, although it's okay since it's just the uniform human insanity

to be quite frank: it's hard to feel that anything is really worth it when considering that one day i may rest my
body against another person's & find myself repulsed by the sex-differentiated timbre of my own contented sigh

h- hHAHHA SORRY I AM FORGETting that love heals things even when, for the sake of justifying the act of giving up, you don't
want to believe that it will. even when you would like for nullity & death to be justified, because a particular flaw feels so unacceptable that
you don't want to see the life which contains it be validated as something to settle for... i do really really want nullity & death to be justified though

my hypothetical love is so beautiful & life-validating that i don't want to see it
contaminated by the un-hypothetical terms on which i am obligated to exist

december 5th, 2021

i quite like to close my eyes & be happy in a fantasy where i think "i am having such a great time with my romantic partner who
has at some point affirmed to me (or maybe i am just letting it be something i am inherently aware of) that they would like to be in a
romantic relationship with a cisgender woman but would not so much like to be in a romantic relationship with a transgender woman,
which some might posit is somewhat of a problematic standard for them to hold but in any case i am at least okay with it within
the scope of this fantasy scenario because it affirms an additional aspect of it which is that i am cisgender & do not
have to be transgender, for in real life i do not want to be transgender but i have to"

every once in a while i go "ok, but- i mean, come on- can't i-" & then my reasoning cuts me off & says "no, i will say
it again: you can't be certain how & when you will die, but you absolutely can extrapolate forward to that vague moment
& be absolutely certain that you will indeed leave this earth having not had whatever sex-differentiated experience
you were about to suggest" & then i sit in acceptance for a while & then i start to ask such a question again.
i wait for someone to come help me before remembering that there is no help that can be offered, only
suggestions for coping mechanisms. palliative care. a life cancelled yet conscious

at times i might stand inches away from someone who was not born like i was, perhaps in a lunch line, & feel astonished by the simplicity of their existence right
there & my simultaneous existence & separateness & how we will walk away & i will be me & they will be them & neither of us could change if we wanted
to & we as people have nothing to do with the blueprints we have been built from but i seem to have so very much to do with mine, & bone grows in a petri
dish & sets into a shape & never changes again & then it leaves the dish & lives a life for perhaps eighty years that might as well be an eternity & stands
in front of people different & alike, mere air between them, & neither they nor anyone they stand inches from can change, whether they want to or not, as
skin & bone imposes its laws, letting itself be changed only to a certain extent & no more, & how very simple it would have been for something to be just
slightly different, & how everyone stands inches away inhabiting what they are with simplicity that is astonishing relative to the inescapable grief
around all this permanence, & how no one is reducible to a blueprint, really, this has nothing to do with this person in the lunch line, i empathize
with them, for the blueprints are insults to us all, to the minds stuck in them, god knows i understand that, but ignoring all that for one second
i am being stunned by the insanity of the realization of a blueprint at this moment in the lunch line, separation only by some long-ago petri
dish scenario, & how i would stand inches away with my astonishing simplicity, with which i already do stand inches away from people, here,
today, in my actual lived reality, in the lunch line, because here in my actual life i really do also stand like anyone does with a simplicity
that is astonishing, but i would be much happier, i think. if there was a slight difference. after i pay for my lunch i go home
& seventy years pass. i wait for someone to come help me before remembering that there is no help to be offered

it's been like eight years now & i've changed a whole lot but i still get caught up in these waves of dread about my body that
have the exact same tone of stark helpless pleading inescapability that they did eight years ago so uh haha when's the epiphany
supposed to come that gets rid of these feelings haha am i just incurably mentally ill, or am i overreacting to a universal
feeling, or is it gonna take another sixteen years, thirty-two, um, is this a manifestation of some mental illness that's
exterior to the bodily concerns themselves, like, an illness that i can treat, what's the situation, ha... ha...

this is how i imagine it: (me on my death bed with someone questioning me about how i feel looking back on my life) oh yes
i really did have an incredibly enriching journey through this life. so very much that i never could have expected, not at
all. the spiritual undertakings i went through, all the lessons i learned, all the loves i had, all the responsibilities i
bore, all the... significant epiphanies i had, each seeming exponentially more significant than the last. i'm such a
fundamentally different being from the one i was in my twenties. i still can't say i really understand this crazy
thing called life, heheh, but... my god, what a journey! i'm truly grateful to spend some time with this
perspective that one can look back on only once they have reached such an old age

"wow... it sounds like you've been pretty satisfied with the life you lived, alex"

NO! I MEAN, ALL THAT STUFF WAS PRETTY COOL I GUESS, YEAH, BUT I GOT FORCED TO BE MALE INSTEAD OF FEMALE & I DIDNT GET
A CHOICE, I JUST WANTED A CHOICE ABOUT THAT. THIS IS PLAYING OUT JUST LIKE I KNEW IT WOULD WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I KNEW
IT, I KNEW IT, AAAHHH, I STARTED LIVING LIKE I WANTED TO PRETTY EARLY ON, RIGHT? I DIDN'T ADHERE TO THE GENDER BINARY,
& THINGS WERE SO NICE IN THAT REGARD! I REALLY DID HAVE A GOOD TIME IN THAT RESPECT! I WAS A SWEET PERSON, UNAFRAID
TO BE MYSELF FULLY! BUT I JUST WANTED A CHOICE, AT THE HEART OF IT! I JUST WANTED TO GET OVER THIS, I REALLY DID TRULY
WANT TO COME TO TERMS WITH THIS CONDITION BY THE TIME I DIED BUT IT DIDN'T HAPPEN, I COULDNT STOP WAITING
FOR THE STUPID BLUE FAIRY TO COME & FIX ME AEEEuURRhEAaEu (eyes roll back in my head, heart monitor flatlines)

see, like, that's the thing though: i might read this & wholly accept that i'm very wonderful & experience a peak in my
self-esteem, but this will be underscored by an awareness that the "game" of fluctuations in my self-esteem, where i try
to maximize the highs & minimize the lows, is forced to take place entirely in the domain of my fixed unchangeable birth
sex. & so, when i am at my worst moments with respect to processing my birth sex, the "game" loses all stakes for
me & i have no investment. appealing to a personal system, that exists inside of my life, can't patch up
the feeling of the life itself, as a container of all personal systems, being corrupted

where was the inescapable birth sex despondency when i made a post on tumblr, with earnest frivolity in my heart, that just said
"cow moo mp3"? how can it be so all-consuming, yet periodically recede so i can type cow moo mp3? what's the deal with this
funny picture about zoo pals animal-themed paper plates that i sent in a discord channel shortly after waking? i thought i was
fundamentally corrupted, what's going on. how is it that while engaging in all sorts of frivolity i still can't say that
it doesn't hurt a lot & maybe still invalidate all of it? how am i reaping the frivolity then? what's the deal

there is a morose comfort in the sense of helplessness that accompanies a notion that any conversation, about
rationalizing the condition of being transgender, will cease to bear fruit once it crosses that basic threshold
of acknowledging that i am transgender - i refuse to inhabit the reality that is. i am going to drop
out. i will find peace in a sustained ignorance of my body henceforth. i am not

camaraderie will only reinforce the underlying reality that inherently obliterates me - camaraderie
within an existentially invalidating circumstance will only serve as a vector of obliteration -
obliteration will linger in either the presence or absence of company

the valuation & devaluation of different modes of life, whether in excess, deficit, or at a happy medium, is a squishy &
irrational & subjective thing even in the best case. when it crosses into a territory of outright existential invalidation
with no room for negotiation, it can probably only be reasonably regarded as a mental illness. it is a mental illness
who takes the form of the denial of its own presence, & the assertion that where there is an illness it is a bodily
one - the condition of being sexually dimorphic. unfortunately, acknowledging this does about as
much to remedy it as acknowledging that one has depression does to remedy that

one thing is for sure - i don't think i will ever be driven to kill myself, because i would just be fast tracking myself to
that accursed stupid rotten mocking predestined outcome that was set in stone from day one, where i leave earth under the
same condition that i arrived under. i see no difference between that & waiting seventy years for it. but there are still
a lot of sensory & intellectual treats for me to take in during spans of time where i can manage to just forget

human voices may universally become a source of discomfort or distress at times, because each reaffirms
my own voice by comparison - whether by its similarity or difference, it doesn't matter. they all hurt,
all reinforce with their helpless pre-ordained timbres the condition of bodily entrapment

december 6th, 2021

im fine. i typed a lot of earnest words here that seemed to have the fervent intent of articulating precisely why it
was inconceivable that i could ever be fine again. im fine though. yeah i dont get it either. this is why i regard it as
episodes of exceptional mental illness that surpasses the boundaries of what is typically called "gender dysphoria"

"a sort of dysmorphia where someone could tell me they think i'm beautiful, & i could believe them, &
it wouldn't help because the feeling is rooted not in a desire to be desired/accepted, but in a simple &
desperate desire to escape my features. & i already know that for any feature there is a set of people
who will think it's beautiful, so for anyone to compliment me carries the implication that the features
i desperately want to escape are included in the things they think are beautiful, which means that
to be complimented by anyone who would compliment me is just a reflection of the problem"

big big big big part of it i think. the raw thoughts & feelings trace a route which approximates:

"i want precisely what i can't have - on the grounds that it is what i can't have,"

"i want someone to look happily at a face that is not my own,"

"love will forever be tangential to this pipe dream of self-actualization,"

"will love forever serve as a symptom of perceived existential dislocation?"

"i will never be loved how i wish, because how i wish to be loved is to not be loved as myself,"

"i will never connect with any experience of loved," which is essentially, "it is a foregone conclusion that i will never be loved,"

& once you're at that point what do you really do but collapse & be obliterated? & particularly agonizing is that this all
creates the impression that i have found a reasoning, for this expectation of never being loved, that is not rooted in my
dumb squishy emotional convictions & judgments, but in the plain physical reality of my body - & not just by
some tired old petty "i'm too ugly for anyone to love me!" conviction, but by... this whole area, you know

it's all something like this, at least. i just woke up & pecked all these words out quickly

december 10th, 2021

i feel so bad when i look at wikipedia pages about gender dysphoria or hrt or general trans stuff. reading
those & stuff on reddit & weird web 1.0-looking webpages was such a bleak limbo to spend time in. &
voice training videos on youtube, oh my god, i'll die before i watch anything like that ever again

the agony, insofar as it claims durations of one's waking hours in which it makes itself felt, is inherent, & perhaps
the only thing worse than that observation is to have dangled before one like a dog treat the idea that there might
be a true escape along the bodily route instead of the mental one. but genuinely also take hrt probably

december 11th, 2021

realizing that if i told someone that i take hrt, even if they were really nice, it might come with a sense of
embarrassed inauthenticity, & if they asked me why i take it i would say that by now it's primarily just that
i am more comfortable not having much of a sex drive, & secondarily i guess i also feel a need to inanely
claw for handholds against the surface of a cliff that i am clearly already splattered at the bottom of

december 24th, 2021

"disidentification, so what does it matter,"

december 25th, 2021

drunken typing christmas night

endlessly rallying, & pantomiming a life as though my body doesn't disallow it, & yet between the cracks, there is a life which
is defined by the present body. it is defined by precisely the difference between the desired one & the actual one. I'M DRUNK

I'm just here to reap precisely as much there is to this life that ISN'T excluded from me, insofar as isn't spoiled by the tragic
human intellectual capacity to value potentials that lie beyond the happenstance of genes & sexual differentiation in particular

december 26th, 2021

& shortly past midnight

poetry

nothing is sexually differentiated as we walk to the store. until later what is sexually differentiating is said. i want to be happy
just to honor the honor of your wanting me to be happy. yet it still feels foreclosed. this makes me tear up. the dishonor.
i want to dispel the hopelessness. it is too painful relative to the unsexed naive sociability. i stare dead-eyed & drunk at
the ceiling with the round flat eyes of a fish. my gaze is trained on the landmark that is the fire sprinkler. please.

when i die I'll say "AT LEAST MY EXPERIENCE WAS APPROPRIATED BY MYSELF AS CONTENT"

i mean if the "poetry" really is anyone's "#fave" I'm honored but do know that i typed & published it quite
drunkenly not considering the ramification that my moments are contextualized as something like a "#fave"

december 28th, 2021

i don't like when i wake up with all of my systems of meaning just totally missing because i feel existentially invalidated by my
biological sex & can't bring myself to care about what happens to me, or how any of my social entanglements with anyone pan
out, or any of the virtues & values like sweetness or frivolity that i might have cherished just the night before. & i have to
just sit there & stare catatonically, feeling like my head is in a vise, working to justify even a light nod or head shake to
answer a question, telling myself that all my excuses for existing will come eking back in if i just give it time

december 31st, 2021

we walked along the nature trail listening to stevhen peters & slugbug then got lunch at the coffee shop. there were three
different women in the back room of the coffee shop who i wanted to look like. this flipped the lightswitch in my head that
governs a feeling of fundamental ruination on account of being male, so i had to come home & go catatonic under a blanket
& cry for a good while. then, as per usual, i felt my mannerisms & values & personality begin to eke back in despite that
feeling fundamentally impossible & absurd given the condition of me being inherently corrupted beyond any recourse.
the eking is largely complete, & i expect the rest of the night to be fine, which i regard as an incredibly fucking stupid
reality given how abject my feelings of ruination were, but i regard it as a reality all the same. i have mental illness

rejecting conservative ideals of masculinity or femininity - yet existing as an inversion of those ideals, still under
the purview of their supposed relevancy, thus continuing to refer back to such arbitrary constructions... there's
something - positive or negative - about the constructions that can keep someone coming back towards the binary

maybe you could draw a line between a trans man / woman's attraction to masculinity / feminity &/or repulsion
from femininity / masculinity, & how these two forces might mingle in a given individual... & also take into
consideration a simple desire, in that individual, for the unity of what has been prescribed as divided!

a conservative polemic, might say - "oh, so 'woman' doesn't even mean anything anymore. it doesn't entail anything - it's
just whoever wants to be called a woman." & they're right! the scope, of who is permitted to occupy the categories,
broadens... & so does the scope of what behaviors are allowed to fall under the scope of masculinity & femininity

how could these processes happen without multiplying each other & "greying out" the categories, truly reducing all of this to
the basic semantics of being called a "man" or a "woman," & this entailing nothing else? which... is what people want in the
disestablishment of gender roles, yet, like i said, something keeps people coming back to arbitrary constructions like
semantics. some people simply want to keep gender around, i guess, just without having it enforced

masculinity & femininity change - these two categories, defined only by their names & each's state of distinctly not being the
other - can be occupied by anything... will the categories themselves exist forever? will they always boil down to abstractions
of human sexual dimorphism, taking on forms that are ever more abstracted & removed from it, as cultural dialogues
progress, but still referring back to it at their heart? or would there come a point that they become truly unmoored?

(& speaking of "desire for unity in what is prescribed as divided," is there an inherent, or at least common, distress about
what is "prescribed" (really just abjectly imposed) as divided, by the state of just having to physically exist as a sexually
dimorphic species? & then gender roles, exaggerating the differences, are like a mountain of salt in the wound...)

is gender fun to keep around? an arbitrary construction, yes, but an incidentally fun arena for human
expression? by maintaining a primary current of norms, people are free to play with the tension in their
degree of acceptance & rejection of it... but then, does this tension, which i am positing as fun, not
rest on a basis of enforcement, real human harm? at its most extreme, a primary current of
gender expression is maintained by... like, a conservative parent beating their kid

obviously, we want to remove enforcements of that severity, & plenty of other less severe sanctions as well, significantly
less severe even... but if we remove absolutely all of them, do we then just pretend that some variant of gender expression
is the norm, for the sake of maintaining the fun tension in all the others? does no one actually want gender? is that fun
"tension" system just an adaptation to a problem? can gender ideally just fall apart so that people are left at last
in the unmoored, unbounded, unsectioned space of open human expression? from there, is there a risk
of abstractions of human sexual dimorphism just beginning to crop up again?