Bra shopping adventures

After a month of searching I finally have some bras that fit! And it feels so right to have it on now that it’s the appropriate size.

I started out with a trip to my local Lane Bryant where I’m usually treated really well. Unfortunately the sales associate I got this time seemed taken aback that I would ask for bra measurements and rushed through it and then disappeared and wasn’t helpful in finding options. And it appears she measured me wrong too. She said I was either a 42B or 40C (anyone can look at me and tell I’m definitely not a C yet). But I tried on the few options they had for 42B and they didn’t fit well, especially since they were all underwire which I don’t need at this point. And the bralettes they carried had a flattening effect which is the opposite of what I want right now.

So I went home disappointed and decided to try online since my size is rare to find in stores. I first tried an order of 42B wire-free bras from HerRoom. And I managed to find a couple that looked good if I used my silicone breast forms. But the jump from having very little to suddenly being in a padded and stuffed B cup didn’t feel right. And the silicone against my chest made me sweat like a pig in the summer heat. Every time I looked down or caught it out of my periphery, it felt like I was an impostor for being so large so suddenly.

So this time I tried ordering some 42A bras from Bare Necessities. They just arrived last night and today I’m wearing the Coobie Comfort Bralette with molded cup inserts which lives up to its name. I also got the padded Leading Lady Smooth Wire-Free Bra which fit well with a little bit of room to grow. This time it really feels like the right size and shape for where I’m at. And especially with the bralette I like the comforting feel of the gentle pressure around my chest.

I still don’t have many options for shopping in stores with a large band size and small cup but at least I know what to look for online now. And I’m still growing of course so eventually I should properly fit those B cup bras. I’m at the 4 month mark after HRT now and while the growth has slowed down, they are still tender which means they are still growing. Hopefully I’ll have another growth spurt soon and my right side will catch up with the left.

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You deserve love

The biggest thing I wish I’d know when I was 20 is that you deserve to be loved for who you are as a whole person, not despite it. And that is particularly true for trans and nonbinary people.
 
Don’t settle for someone who only loves a part of you. Don’t relegate yourself to people who only like your assigned gender. There are people out there who can and will love you for the complexity of who you are and who you are becoming. And yes, nothing is guaranteed to be permanent, but the biggest gift is finding someone that doesn’t expect you to be static but relishes the ways you grow and change.
 
For nonbinary people, sometimes that means not dating monosexuals like straight people or gays and lesbians. There is a whole big wide world out there of queers and pansexuals and bisexuals and more who don’t expect you to have a particular set of matching body parts and gender expressions.
 
You deserve to be loved for your gender, not despite it.

Bra feels

Today is my first time wearing a bra for a functional purpose. And I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it. Every time I look down it doesn’t quite feel right, probably because I’m not use to that being in my peripheral vision. It’s not that it’s physically uncomfortable because I found a good Bali bra from HerRoom without an underwire but it’s just a new self-image adjustment. And in a way I feel a bit like I’m being deceptive.

When I was measured at Lane Bryant they told me I was a 42B but I really don’t quite have a B cup yet so I’m supplementing with my silicone breast forms and using a padded bra. It’s hard enough to find them in that size with the large band and small cup – Lane Bryant only had a couple for me to try on that didn’t fit well so I ended up going online. And yet bralettes don’t feel good because they end up flattening and acting more like a binder than emphasizing what I have.

Don’t get me wrong, this is how I eventually want to look. It just feels weird to go from very little one day to a full chest the next. I wonder what my coworkers think because I’m sure they’ve noticed.

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The dress is a custom design made by my partner for when we went to see Hamilton made with a vinyl iron on from her Cricut. Also, I’m trying out a new hair color that was supposed to be a bit more purple but ended up Rose Gold.

Increasing Dysphoria

Isn’t being on hormones supposed to help dysphoria? I mean it’s helping my confidence in my chest and overall shape but it’s definitely bringing up more feelings about my face in particular among other things. The biggest effect that estrogen has had so far other than breast growth is that it is making it harder to ignore things I’ve been burying and ignoring.

I often have days where I look in the mirror and literally see a blank where my face should be. My brain can’t handle the cognitive dissonance between my real appearance and my identity. And even more often I find myself avoiding mirrors or hyperfocusing on my hair to avoid looking at my facial features. And I can’t decide whether growing out my hair would help that or make it worse.

I’ve kept my beard thus far because it hides parts of my face that I can’t handle, especially my chin. But more and more I wonder if it is doing more harm than good. I get stares everywhere I go because people don’t know what to do with a bearded person in a dress. And it makes it so that I can be spotted blocks away as trans. I mean it’s not like I can hide easily with my height and tendency to wear bright colors, but maybe I don’t need to make myself that easy to spot. It also gives me a lot of “not queer enough” feels and makes me avoid spaces that are supposedly for femmes because I don’t think I would be accepted with my features.

But the thought of removing my beard and having to come to terms with the face underneath terrifies me even more. I am dreading what is going to happen when I’m forced to shave next winter for a long planned jaw surgery to correct my bite. But I also find myself wondering if there’s a way to capitalize on that to change my face. From what I remember of the consult, they are already going to need to make adjustments to my chin to make my face symmetrical and I wonder if I can talk the oral surgeon into taking some of it off permanently. Or if I could work with him to do a combo jaw surgery and facial feminization technique. The thought of cutting open my face twice doesn’t sound pleasant.

Then there’s the matter of my genitals. I’m feeling more disconnected from them recently which goes along with my feelings of asexuality. Most days I’d rather forget they are there and sometimes my brain does that for me. The other day I was on a date and I was trying to get myself in the mindset but everytime I thought about what was between my legs all I could picture was a black hole. I ended up not being able to do anything with my own body because I couldn’t reintegrate. Luckily queer sex doesn’t revolve around a penis or any specific kind of sex. But when I think about bottom surgery I’m still not sure whether having different genitals would help at all.

I’ve also realized that I only feel confident at all when my chest, stomach, and legs are shaved. Which even with the estrogen means trimming twice a week. I need to go back for more hair removal but I can’t decide between laser which requires $1,400 up front for 3 sessions (probably twice) or electrolysis which has more guarantee of permanency and I can break into smaller chunks but means more sessions.

Basically I’m feeling dysphoric most of the time now but I don’t know what to do about it and what interventions would help and how I would pay for those. So my brain gets overloaded with that background anxiety and I end up being less productive or mildly dissociating. I know I should try to do things that connect me with my body more instead of just escaping into video games. But I have a hard time figuring out how to do that in ways that a) don’t involve gendered locker rooms, b) don’t trigger my asthma (running is out of the question), and c) don’t make my back and neck pain worse.

There’s a little peek into what’s in the back of my brain most of the time these days. So when you ask how I’m doing and I say I’m fine, please know that there is a giant asterisk there.

Debunking “Biological Sex”

So this is probably an unpopular opinion but I think the term “biological sex” is meaningless, as is the distinction between sex and gender. While I continue to hear trans people use it and share it in various forms such as the problematic genderbread person, it is primarily used by cisgender people as a way of convincing themselves that the binary does exist in some form even if they support diverse gender identities. But as a biologist (by training) and a real life trans person™, I am here to tell you that it is just as much of a shared illusion as binary gender.

Hopefully by now you are aware of the existence of intersex people. According to the Intersex Society of North America, “intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.” Without going into excruciating detail because you should hear it from intersex people themselves , both chromosomal sex and reproductive organ configuration exist in more than two options. There are 6 different ways that chromosomes can combine (X, XX, XXY, XY, XYY, and XXXY) that create various different kinds of humans and most people never have their chromosomes tested so using this as the basis for your gender is ridiculous. And various other changes in development mean that regardless of genetics, genital variation is nearly infinite.

But even putting intersex people aside for a moment, let’s talk about how useless the term biological sex is when you are dealing with reality. Many trans people such as myself have known from an early age that our brains are different. Long before I ever knew the term transgender or nonbinary, I thought that I didn’t fit in because I didn’t have a boys brain. And more and more evidence suggests that the brain can develop in utero in ways that more closely match the gender identity that child eventually expresses than the gender they are assumed to be based on external signs (although even that research is hopelessly binary). Though huge disclaimer here because there is no one way to be trans. Not everyone knew they were different from birth and not all trans people experience things like dysphoria.

Ok, so say you put aside natural variation in genitals AND you ignore differences in brains. Well I hate to break it to you folks, but the differences continue to be useless. Trans people do not all experience socialization the same way or come out at the same age so there is no point at which you can make a valid argument that we are somehow “essentially male” or some such bullshit. And there are MANY different kinds of gender confirmation surgeries that make trans bodies infinitely variable and often indistinguishable from their gender.

So what’s the point of this? It means that you should stop using terms like “female bodied” or lumping people together based on binary genital arrangements. And you should stop saying things like “all women are” and reducing your research to binary sex results. Yes, statistically there are vast swatches of people who never have cause to question their gender or assumed sex. And you could do your research based on those people and ignore the tails of those statistical curves. But you are missing out on some of the most amazing parts of human experience when you do so. I am here to tell you that the conversations that happen among trans and nonbinary people behind closed doors that cis people rarely get to experience would blow your mind! And because of constructs like “biological sex”, many of these people intentionally avoid revealing that complexity to cis people and often rule out dating or interacting with you altogether.

So if you want to benefit from what we could bring to the conversation, think deeply about how you can be more inclusive and the assumptions you make on a daily basis. We are here and we are so much more queer than you could possibly imagine.

Religious but not Spiritual

As open as I am about most things, one of the most challenging things for me to admit both to myself and to those close to me is that I am really struggling with how I engage with religion and spirituality lately. This isn’t necessarily a post about gender but I think it is important to show how everything in your life can be interrelated and this is (or was?) a significant part of my life so I want to take a moment to talk about it honestly here.

In the past I was skeptical of people who said they were spiritual but not religious because that seemed like an artificial divide to me. But more and more I am coming to see how that distinction is meaningful and how I have been essentially practicing the reverse for the past decade. I’ve been religious but not spiritual.

I honestly don’t know what I believe. I guess that makes me an agnostic. I don’t think you can ever rule out or disprove a god or deity or metaphysical property because by their very nature they are outside of science and tangibly observable facts. But the way I’ve been justifying my continued involvement in Christianity and the Episcopal Church is because humanity has been searching for the divine and building religious structures as ways of doing that communally since before the dawn of agriculture and civilization as we know it. And I figured that if so much of human history has been devoted to that, it is pretty foolish of me to think I am outside of that pursuit. I use Christianity as my lens mainly because that is my culture and the context in which I grew up and I don’t want to appropriate someone else’s religion and culture, especially when I am not ready to lean into it as a whole but approach any religion as a skeptic.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in a Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian community. And built into that culture is a lot of spiritual abuse, patriarchy, and denial of the real world in many forms such as rejection of scientific discoveries, gender variance, and sexualities. I am sad to say that their techniques worked on me and for a long time I was a good Fundamentalist bible-thumper who had successfully pushed my questions and doubts to my subconscious and at least ostensibly bought into the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. So part of the reason I stayed in the church is because I thought it was important to heal from that past by reclaiming “good” Christianity or at least fully understanding how it didn’t need to be practiced that way. If I had just run away I don’t think I would be the same person I am today.

But my doubts have never gone away and the harder I try to lean into the discomfort, the more resistant I grow. It’s been a long time since I’ve believed in miracles, divine intervention, the heaven/hell divide, or “the power of prayer” to do anything other than change (or more often confirm) how the person praying thinks. Does the afterlife exist? Maybe. But I don’t know how it has any relevance to my life if I don’t believe in a god who would send people to hell and wouldn’t want to spend eternity with one who does.

And my doubt isn’t exclusive to Christianity either. In queer community there is an abundant amount of “woo” in the form of astrology, tarot cards, reiki, meditation, pagan rituals, witchcraft, etc. And while I’m slowly learning to just accept that other people find meaning in it I don’t think I could ever dive into that with an open mind myself.

For years I’ve been going through the motions of going to church partly for the reasons above about reclaiming and retraining myself, partly because I want to change the church and make it a more welcoming place for people who want it, and partly because I think intergenerational community focused on doing social justice work together is valuable. But recently I’ve realized that the only thing that keeps me coming back is the people. I am lucky enough to have spent the last few years in a very affirming and supportive small community where I have made many friends. And because of that I’m tied into various commitments like childcare, hospitality, and policy changes.

Lately I’ve noticed an increase in my anxiety every time I try to engage in anything related to church. It started out slowly with more and more resistance to attending on days I didn’t have commitments, but lately I have started having near anxiety attacks just sitting through services and last week when I tried to go, I couldn’t even get up the courage to walk through the doors. Part of it is that I feel like an impostor but there is definitely something deeper going on. And I suspect the reason it is really surfacing now is because the estrogen is really shaking out any emotions I haven’t dealt with yet.

I spoke to my very wise, queer femme priest who said this about what might be going on: “I think Christianity (all Christianity, not just bad Christianity) is wired into you entangled with the kinds of ways you were taught to shove yourself down and hate yourself. I think this is true biologically, even, that the neural pathways that are marked “Jesus” are also marked with the awful things you were told about how to be and how to behave, and that any encounter with Christianity, whether in line with your values and politics or not, sends an alert down that pathway. That’s a lot. It may or may not be reclaimable. But to repeat a pattern of forcing (the way you forced yourself to conform, and forced yourself within your marriage) with Christianity will likely only do you harm.”

I think she’s really onto something there. Christianity may not be something I can reclaim, at least not right now, and I need to listen to the wisdom of my body instead of fighting it. Christianity was integrally tied to painful and abusive parts of my past both through my upbringing and with my ex wife who wanted to be a priest and felt threatened anytime I had doubts. So as much as it hurts me to say, I need to step back from church for the time being. I need to find the things in life that give me hope and meaning and right now that isn’t religion or spirituality. But hopefully I can learn to open myself up to what is next.

PMS sucks – HRT week 10

I know this isn’t news to anyone who’s had an estrogen-dominant system but PMS really sucks. Apparently I’ve already settled into a monthly cycle because I am SO grumpy today and ready to burst into tears over little things. When I look back at my messages this happened almost exactly a month ago. And surprise surprise, it matches my spouses cycle. Also my boobs hurt way more than usual. Maybe the bra shopping trip I was planning for tonight will have to wait…

The game of anxiety life

Life with anxiety is like a game of whack-a-mole. If you deal with one thing, another will just pop up. And adding more estrogen to my system shakes it up and switches the game to advanced mode. I am (re)discovering so many things that I thought I had dealt with hiding beneath the surface.

Affirming photo

So often when there’s a photo of me I go back and look at it only a few days later and dislike it because of dysphoria. But I took this one the other day using my iPhone portrait mode that I’m really loving. It feels like I can actually see myself looking back at me. My hair is extra curly here because my spouse had just helped me style it.

Caleb board portrait

Breasts are cool – HRT week 9

Last night I was admiring how different my breasts feel now. Before I took estrogen I did have some fairly visible breasts due to my weight and low testosterone levels but they were just pockets of fat with pectoral muscles deep below. Now there is definitely tissue underneath and they feel totally different. My spouse described them last night as “somehow soft yet firm” because underneath the initial layer of squish they have a layer that is clearly not muscle but also not fat. I think my nipples are already bigger than hers too but she disagrees.

One of the funniest parts is watching how they grow unevenly. The pattern seems to be that my left breast will grow one week and then my right will catch up. Sometimes they are the same size but right now the left is significantly bigger. Currently they are pretty tender and painful with pressure but don’t actively hurt. We just redid my measurements last night so I guess it’s time to start trying out some bras.

Last week I increased my dose of estrogen to 6 mg a day which seems to really be helping my mood. I no longer appear to have the radical mood swings. At first I was taking 4 in the morning and 2 at night but I was seeing a dip in mood and energy in the early afternoon. I spoke to my doc and she recommended spacing it out evenly which seems to be solving the problem. Apparently my body likes estrogen, just not low levels of both hormones.