LGBTAI+ #59: Will You Take This Woman To Be Your Galpal?

[sneakykitten]

The remoteness can't be helpful, either, I'd think.

Yes, I feel kinda isolated. I do have friends and see the sun everyday yet it doesn't seem to be making the big emotional probs better. I don't feel like just going outside or being closer to activities around the city would completely change things either. I dunno, I'm so stuck in depression and anxiety and psychosis that I can't organize myself, I do personal hygiene everyday and that makes me feel tired and it shouldn't.

I've had similar problems with anti-depressants making me a zombie with no creativity or motivation. For me not being on SSRIs ended up being a better choice because while I may have to deal with more depression and anxiety symptoms, I actually have the drive to get out there and do stuff and to take better care of myself, including therapy. To each their own though, for some people anti-depressants are lifesavers.

Is quietiapine, seroquel, whatevs an anti-depressant? That's what's messing up my brain. Like, it does... 'work?' Yet it also makes me feel like I'm like, slooowed down, and it's relaxing yet as well a bit of a struggle to get thru the day. I like to mostly be awake when I'm with caregivers or at therapy, ah ha ha, goodness. Well, anyway, hope u can cope with your symptoms and like... deal with it all without the helps of meds. 'Cause I sure can't.

[Nemirthel]

I finally have prescriptions for estradiol and spironolactone! I am more than a little happy about this.

Unfortunately, I still have about 4 months before I can socially transition at work/school (these are the same thing for me). But that's a lot less than how long I've been trying to just get to this point. I still need to come out to my advisor and a few other faculty members next month- hopefully it'll go well, but if not they can't really get rid of me until the semester ends without blatantly violating university policy (between semesters they can sneakily violate it). Hopefully I won't need a backup plan, but I have one anyway.

And I'm still having difficulties with my mom. I can't talk to her about anything transition related without her telling me that I need to learn to love myself and just accept that I can't transition until some ambiguous point in the future (initially when I finished my PhD 2.5-3.5 years from now, but now it seems to have moved until at least 7 years from now). She hasn't told me why she thinks I can't transition until then- I suspect that she believes that I'm financially dependent on my dad and her parents but I'm not sure. I'm starting to think that she's hoping that if she tells me enough times that it's impossible for me to transition (even though the evidence suggests otherwise) I'll somehow turn into a gay man instead of a straight woman.

But overall I'm just happy about finally being able to start HRT and being close to being able to not completely hide myself all the time.

[sneakykitten]

Your post made me feel a lot happier today, thanks Nemirthel. Aaanyways, about your mommy, i wouldn't worry too much. Doesn't seem like she has any control over your actual living situation or whatevs so her opinions can just bend off u harmlessly like water. You seem v-very prepared and 'put together.' If u do wanna chat with her about your transition, i suggest just like, telling her you're gonna do it when you wanna as a starting point so she can't argue w/u anymore about it.

[Fantastic Alice]

I just wanted to say hello. I've been heavy lurking on the "Egads a woman mentioned having an ex girlfriend!" and the sequel " Gasp! Durkon's Mum tries to support her child by not caring who he finds love with " thread as well as the V's gender thread and just general strip discussions.

As horrible and ridiculous as some of the arguments were it established that there were not only a lot of great people on this board who enjoy the comic having people like this but the creator works really hard at making sure people like me can see people we identify with.

I'm a genderqueer lesbian. I use She, Her, Xe, Xir pronouns and as I am also intersexed my GQ identity technically means I'm cisgender(:p)

And I don't know how often I'll post. I've been bullied in every online environment I've ever been in(normally related to being a lesbian in some way) So I am really closed up and scared to open up due to such.

I'm also a DV survivor. Because of her I had to have my foot cut off and reattached, crippling me for life. And I have been unable to talk about it due to the utter disgusting looks.I get if I don't blatantly lie and pretend it was a bloke.

I even went to a DV group and had to deal with all these women who were 100% able bodied continually stepping over my attempts to talk and making it very very obvious their situation was worse than mine because their abuser was a bloke.

I'm crippled for life. I had to have my foot cut off and not only can I no longer stand, can barely walk, but I have developed sciatica due to it. I also no longer have an ankle. Because my foot was so destroyed not only did they have to cut my foot off to get rid of necrotic bone but they had to remove my ankle.

With all that I had to deal with these women making out that their abuse was worse just because it was a bloke. Support groups don't work if everyone in the group connects to each other afterwards as long as they are straight.

Not one person in the group gave two ****s about wha what I had gone through. And I've had to bottle.it up for so long it's next to impossible to talk about.

The fact that For 1.5 years I was also not allowed to talk about anything to anyone under threat of forced heat exhaustion, starvation, and being forced to walk miles and miles without shoes makes it depressingly ironic.

I'd rather have someone look at me like I am the most disgusting pile of human garbage they've ever seen than be dismissed in a sham of a gay friendly support group.

I don't have any friends left and people have been noticeably cruel and dismissive of me in most attempts I have made in environments I have entered to make friends.

I had 100s before I went 1.5 years not being allowed to talk to other people.

I spent years faking through my autism to pretend to have social skills and be functional.

It's really hard to believe I lost all of that. What's not hard to believe is having a wheelchair and being a DV victim has people quick to dismiss me. Or I just had so many friends I had built over so many years before I lost most of them(no way to contact them) that I didn't realise how difficult it was to make friends when you're a lesbian. It sure doesn't help.

I don't know what initial posts in this thread are supposed to be like and I have to end here so I can compose myself and dry my eyes but I hope I haven't talked to much I just feel so freaking alone. When your life has to revolve around reading and radio plays and audio books with perhaps the occasional comic and Doctor Who telly it feels like I am such a d@£# island.

Thank you for readin

[JusticeZero]

For me it's that I want to bring home enough money that I don't have to be afraid of poverty emergencies, and I want to be able to work anywhere and not have to fear that I will lose my entire career and have to start from nothing if the wrong somebody finds out that I transitioned or whatever. If that means unfulfilling or meaningless work, hey.
I need to feel safe. Right now I don't feel safe.
My first priority is to feel safe. So is my second. I can not seem to explain that to anybody, because they keep suggesting very unsafe ideas, and arguing with me when I object on that basis.

Ugh, with you on that. I have a career I actually like, and people keep trying to not so subtly tell me I should be unhappy with it because it's in some way "beneath me."
I just want a job that makes me feel like I'm doing something meaningful and doesn't make me want to jump in front of a bus, and this is the thing that lets me meet my own needs.

[Iethloc]

I'm also a DV survivor. Because of her I had to have my foot cut off and reattached, crippling me for life. And I have been unable to talk about it due to the utter disgusting looks.I get if I don't blatantly lie and pretend it was a bloke.

I am also a survivor of domestic violence, and my abuser was a woman. My situation is pretty different from yours (I'm mostly able-bodied and such), but I can still empathize with what you've gone through to some degree. I can definitely empathize with feelings of being isolated, and I myself may be on the autism spectrum (it's not as easy to get diagnosed when you're an adult). If you ever want to talk, I'm just a private message away.

[Sahe]

Your situations sound really terrible and I hope I'm not being cruel by posting how I'm doing pretty well, but I find, when I'm down if someone tells me what is positive in their lives, can really help me.

I'm sorry for what you all had to go through.

Now, about me. Don't think I mentioned this, but I have a girlfriend now. To bad we're separated by several thousand kilometers and an ocean, but I plan to visit her in February.

I also have a jon, something I was afraid of, because I knew I couldn't work under my deadname and wasn't sure anyone would take me. I applied for a job at my old place and not only did they accept my application, they were happy I returned after I skipped a season. They were accomodating telling me they would have my back should issues arise and all that. For example they asked me which wardrobe I wanted to use or if I wanted to take the uniform home (took the latter option).
I had some negative experiences regarding passing or stemming from ignorance, but that was to be expected.
From my collegues, old and new I feel largely accepted, at least with those that matter.
Soo, yeah...

[Lissou]

@Fantastic Alice Welcome! I'm so sorry you had to go through all of that, it sounds horrible! I hope you'll feel more welcome here, at the very least you can definitely talk about being abused by a woman, we know that it does happen (to men, women and non-binary people). Some people here may feel more comfortable if, if you decide to talk about specific, graphic details, you spoiler it and put a content warning, but that has more to do with it being descriptions of violence than who committed it and hopefully it won't make you feel silenced, because that's not the point!

Again, welcome, I hope you will feel free to participate as much as you'd like :)

[Threeshades]

Hey everyone,

I used to be an active poster on GitP quite a few years ago before a temporary disinterest in RPGs in general had me become inactive, and since then for some reason i never really became active again. Back then I made it a point on the boards here and really wherever possible to hide my gender. On the boards here in particular I found it fun to liken myself to Vaarsuvius in that way. This was only one expression of my journey to discovering who I really am. People active on the paizo.com forums may recognize what follows as it is mostl a copypaste of that.

Yesterday, I came out to my Significant Other as trans, which is the first time i actually verbalized my identity as female, which I only in the past few weeks fully realized about myself.

My SO themselves being gender nonbinary, was very happy for me and happily accepted calling me their girlfriend from now on (one of my greatest fear with coming out was that they wouldn't)

I remembered there to be a very lively and sweet LGBT+ communit thread here, and wanted to share my journey to finally coming to terms with who I am now at the age of 31, and also how it relates to gaming as well (since this is after all the LGBT Gaming thread). And please forgive me, I find it a bit difficult finding the right words for everything, since I never really actively dealt with what it means to be transgender and the vocabulary attached to it.

I apologize in advance for my habit of constructing long, meandering sentences. And I'm thankful for anyone wiling to suffer through this.

Spoiler: A very long, detailed look at my past and all my mistakes

Show

In my early teens i noticed for the first time that I didn't always feel entirely comfortable within the male identity. I think at the time the most significant part of this was my desire to wear skirts, which at the time i didnt think too much of, because men's skirts were already a thing and really, wearing a skirt does not a woman make.

As time went on I would always wear one of the skirts i had bought or made myself along with feminizing makeup whenever I would go out to parties or clubs with friends. I also started wearing more traditionally female articles of clothing, really anything that woudn't reveal my all to male body hair. My circle of friends have always been a rainbow coalition of all sorts of identities and sexualities so I fit right in, but at the time i would still refuse to (or perhaps be afraid of) call myself female, I just told anyone who would ask im a guy who likes to look feminine, or a crossdresser.

In my gaming life i had a parallel development. I've been playing videogames since childhood and started TTRPGs (in the form of the German game the Dark Eye) in my early teens, in which at the time i always made male characters. Whereas in videogames I found myself gravitating towards choosing the female options, even in games where this choice made little to no difference, such as in Civilization II. I later started playing D&D a few years later with some of the abovementioned circle of friends, and that was when i made my last male player character before playing almost exclusively female characters. I have made two or three male characters but would always quickly find that i never really feel those characters the way i did any of my female characters, even those that were much less well developed. I didn't realize this for a long time and always thought my preference for female player characters was based in the fact that i found them more visually appealing, and while I do, i only later and in retrospect realized how much more i connect to these characters than male ones.

When I started my relationship with my SO just over 12 years ago now, it didn't take long for us to find that we both were a bit gender nonconforming, and in our conversations, which at the time were purely online, because we lived in different countries at the time, we started using opposite pronouns.

Later as i picked up more about transgender, genderqueer and nonbinary identities more through cultural osmosis than active research, I thought perhaps calling myself nonbinary would be more appropriate. At the time i told myself I didnt really mind about what anyone would call me and what pronouns they used. But really, it always felt right to me when people used "she", or when i used it for myself when chatting with my SO, it made me feel affirmed, even when it was more in jest. The same has always been true when someone called me anything that is linked intrinsically to the female gender. I ignored these feelings however, and never acted on them by asking people to use female pronouns, partly for fear of ridicule, partly because some part of me still denied it.

In between, I sometimes felt a conscious desire that I would rather be a girl and even told some friends, but I kept dismissing these feelings every time.

As I grew older, i gained some weight and started growing rather strong body hair, (I already was slightly overweight before) which only pulled me further away from the image of the girl, or the woman, I would want to be and started me down a path where i almost completely blocked out my feminine side for several years. I told myself its better to be a hairy guy than a hairy girl, and almost completely stopped dressing in feminine clothing and using makeup. I grew a beard (more of a goatee) to hide my fading jaw line and really would only make any effort to dress up for dates with my SO who by the time had moved in with me.

I think in someway i was also afraid to actively claim any sort of trans or genderqueer identity because I felt inadequate claiming a label of a grou of people who have had to suffer so much historically and even now, both with the society around them and their very own bodies, when my life was always quite comfortable and dare I say, privileged.

We're both currently staying at their parent's home (it's been nearly two weeks now and we're going to stay until the end of the month) and I haven't taken anything with me with which to express my feminine side (for multiple reasons which I feel I shouldn't get into). and it's only since we came here that these thoughts have been building up, and i have been reflecting back on my life so far, that I realized that i'm neither male nor nonbinary, and I wasn't for all this time.

I'm a woman.

[Eldest]

I think in someway i was also afraid to actively claim any sort of trans or genderqueer identity because I felt inadequate claiming a label of a grou of people who have had to suffer so much historically and even now, both with the society around them and their very own bodies, when my life was always quite comfortable and dare I say, privileged.

I'm a woman.

Congradulations, you get to join the suffering bin now!

In all seriousness, I am happy that you realized that about yourself, and wish you many happy years of self-expression!

[Astrella]

Hi all,

after the big mess in the lgbt questions thread as well I think I'm just gonna start bowing out from following the discussions here cause it just, it just aint good for my own mental health anymore to read these vile arguments. There's lots of people here I care deeply about, and like, if you're still interested in talking to me send me a pm or such for my discord or tumblr or whatever, but just, I'm just done with it.

[Anymage]

Hi all,

after the big mess in the lgbt questions thread as well I think I'm just gonna start bowing out from following the discussions here cause it just, it just aint good for my own mental health anymore to read these vile arguments. There's lots of people here I care deeply about, and like, if you're still interested in talking to me send me a pm or such for my discord or tumblr or whatever, but just, I'm just done with it.

For what little it helps, it seems like it's usually the same handful of people who come in with the same arguments. Ignoring, or at least mentally making a point to skim over anything they say or any time they're quoted, can save you some frustration.

Sympathies, though, that those posts always blow up into huge things instead of just being written off as "cool, you're free to date or not date whoever you see fit", and then having everybody else move on because those topics are never productive.

[Heliomance]

Hi all,

after the big mess in the lgbt questions thread as well I think I'm just gonna start bowing out from following the discussions here cause it just, it just aint good for my own mental health anymore to read these vile arguments. There's lots of people here I care deeply about, and like, if you're still interested in talking to me send me a pm or such for my discord or tumblr or whatever, but just, I'm just done with it.

Also I think we've got reasonably good about not letting this thread get too inflammatory. The questions thread was specifically started to keep the potential blowups out of this thread, so I guess it's doing its job?

[Sahe]

With some of the comments over there reading it comes at the very least close to digital self harm. Stopping to read it is probably a good idea.

[Astrella]

Also I think we've got reasonably good about not letting this thread get too inflammatory. The questions thread was specifically started to keep the potential blowups out of this thread, so I guess it's doing its job?

True. It's just, it's hard for me to not check it. I'm not good at not seeking out like, stuff that hurts to read in general. We'll see. Maybe I'm being a bit too overdramatic, apologies.

[Threeshades]

Congradulations, you get to join the suffering bin now!

In all seriousness, I am happy that you realized that about yourself, and wish you many happy years of self-expression!

Thank you so much

Ironically, where im staying right now, i cannot express myself without judgement from some of the people im staying with...

but nonetheless i've been feeling much better about myself, healthier even, since coming out (even if not to those people mentioned above).

[YossarianLives]

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[Jormengand]

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[YossarianLives]

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[golentan]

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[lio45]

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[YossarianLives]

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[Jormengand]

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[super dark33]

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Anyway ive been wanting to present myself more femininely recently, and be refered to as such more, idk if its cos its a whole new area for my identity to explore, being bored of Male-ness, or not wanting to 'be' male, but i kinda wanna broaden my horizons.

What i wanna ask is should i dye my hair to Bi Colors?

[golentan]

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[Jormengand]

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[golentan]

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[noparlpf]

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Anyway ive been wanting to present myself more femininely recently, and be refered to as such more, idk if its cos its a whole new area for my identity to explore, being bored of Male-ness, or not wanting to 'be' male, but i kinda wanna broaden my horizons.

What i wanna ask is should i dye my hair to Bi Colors?

Absolutely, go for it.

[Jormengand]

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[noparlpf]

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