is happy!
and oh such a great place to be queer...
hills, climbable trees, thrift stores, used book stores, local organic food, and queerness are in abundance, so i'm beaming :D
10 weeks on T! I just noticed some of dinner's cous-cous got stuck in my peach fuzz so figured it was time to shave it off (first time)...That was fun.
I'm easily singing a low C or B now, and my voice is a lot less crackly, except for when I forget that I've lost my soprano range, and try to squeal. My face is looking a bit more masculine as well, it's funny to look at old pictures of myself and realize that really, I always imagined myself looking more how I look now than how I look in those pictures.
The biggest change since coming to San Francisco is that since I got here I've been read exclusively as male, or I spose by queer-aware folks as a transguy. It's fun, and pleasantly surprising, to suddenly not have my masculinity questioned in the subtle ways that it used to be when I interacted in public w/strangers, etc. before. I'm much less preoccupied with proving my masculinity (or just being read as male), and freer to express gender in a variety of ways. I feel less attached to a fifteen year old's body and freer to be as free-spirited/spunky/jumpy or chill/wise (haha)/mature as I want to be. Thrift store shopping nicely augmented my wardrobe, and I love being able to choose my clothes for the day based partly on how I feel like expressing my gender. As I expected, physically transitioning to male (and incidentally reinscribing the binary) is allowing me to feel more comfortable queering the binary (this paradox sums up a lot of my generation's post modern experience for me...but that's another conversation). Not that pre-T I wasn't, simply through my behavior, queering the binary--because I was, in a very real way. But I was more consciously preoccupied with simply proving my masculinity, whatever that meant, and so my dress, composure, expressions, etc. were more focused towards whatever would get people in my environment to gender me male (at times these different mannerisms could seem subtle, but experiencing several different city and family environments since leaving Dartmouth showed me the extent of this). As my physical maleness is less questioned, (and my physical image matches up with my mental image of myself) I'm able to think of masculinity less as opposed to femininity (ie being read as a boy OR girl) and more as a way of viewing and interacting with the world. (I should clarify that I always intellectually thought of gender that way; I don't tend to think of gender in binary terms--I see it more as a spectrum or collidescope--but was frustrated because it really matters to me that people read me as guy, and that my body feels male). I now have more brainspace to focus on what I've wanted to focus on since I came to understand myself as trans: calling myself out on my sense of male entitlement or for taking advantage of male privilege, exploring a variety of masculinities and figuring out how to be the kind of man I want to be. Lucky for us, this process never ends! hahahah
