Hey girls! I'm a plus sized trans woman in my mid 20's. I've always enjoyed swimming, but I havent done it since i began my transition over a year ago. Id really like to start swimming again this year, and id especially love to do so in an outfit that makes me feel good about myself.

The biggest concern that has stopped me is that i really dont want to have a visible bulge. Ive had some success with gaffs, but also a bit of an... incident involving short shorts. Bathing suits are obviously a bit trickier. I would welcome any reccomendations about brands, styles or techniques that would help me feel confident and feminine at the pool!

Does anyone know how long (if it happens at all) are testicules irreversibly atrophied from HRT? Basically I'm scared that if I stop HRT they'll just go back to working the way they always have and I'm hoping that they won't.

I've been on HRT mono therapy for a year now and my testosterone has been nearly totally suppressed for the whole time, so I wonder if the girls are done for essentially...

“dad

do you remember what i said about using the name ‘cara’ with me?

i wasn’t joking

what do you mean son

well

i’ve been having dysphoria for a while

so i want to try to present as a girl 😅

if it’s okay with you, i think im trans

oh

ok 👍

i think it’ll take me some time to get used to it but if you want to be a girl and it’ll make you happier then i don’t have any problem with that

good luck with everything my daughter ❤️“

Hewwo gwuys :3

I am quite a bit spooked by the permanent effects of HRT, but I rlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllly want a feminine body type! I would like to ask whether the fat redistribution of mtf will last even after I stop taking estrogen? Theoretically if I were to take estrogen for 1-2 years (as I understand thats how long the full effect may take?) while I put on a bit of a weight to get da curves, would any stick on after I stop the e? I intend to limit the breast growth with raloxifene

I unfortunately cannot really ask a doctor and the theoretical thought process would be a DIY… In Hungary the rumor is that trans folk might be put on a witch hunt since our far right government is loosing favor with the ppl…

I'm an enby and soon to start HRT.

I just had a strange conversation with a friend is saying that estrogen is messing up their dopamine levels.

They said on the pills, they felt ok, but the dose was too low. And then switching to weekly injections, they get a high for 4 days and then they have like a depressive crash on the last 3 days.

It's started a little bit of a spiral for me as god knows I've struggled with brain chemicals all my life. From drepression to anxiety and back and forth, but I've been doing much better the past year.

And so I'm kind of freaking out that estrogen will make me spin out.

Has anyone else had issues like this with the injections. I know its very subjective what people feel.

Last night I had a dream where I was socially interacting as male, had male anatomy, etc. - it usually disturbs me when I wake up and realize my unconscious is operating this way, it feels like I don't see myself as a woman, which is true on a conscious level but it's painful when I don't even see myself as a woman in my dreams.

Sometimes even before transition trans women see themselves as women in their dreams, and I marvel at that. I think part of my denial was integrating every internal part of me that felt female as being actually authentically male, that all men are actually feminine in this way or that. So the authentically feminine parts of me still feel "male".

Anyway, I just wanted to do a quick poll and see:

(if any transmasc folks or enbies are reading this, I would love your input too, even though I'm using gendered language, I don't mean to be excluding)

• did you have dreams where you were a woman before you transitioned?
• what was the process like of your internal concept changing as you transitioned?
• when did you start appearing as a woman in your dreams post-transition? (did the frequency increase post-transition, what was that change like?)
• how do you relate to your self-conception, does it disturb you to be a man in your dreams, is it a relief to be a woman in your dreams?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21928256

Hello girlies and other folk,

my boyfriend is programming a desktop app that displays your current voice input's frequency in Hz over time with a real time graph, similar to the app "voice tools" many of us use for voice training.

I'm trying to garner interest for such a desktop app and would appreciate input about it so I can show him that it's not something only I would want.

I would also be interested in the OS you would be using, since currently it's only on Linux (as we use arch btw).

The image shows what it's currently looking like and the settings window. The entire point is for it to be always on top of everything else so you can always see how you're doing.

And for the other nerds: it's written in Python (making it quite large, about 2GB, he's trying to port it to Rust (based) and make it smaller)

Thank you to everyone who replied to my post last week! This past week has been a whirlwind. I’m pretty sure my egg is cracked wide open.

I devoured the Gender Dysphoria Bible, and I found myself (maybe not surprisingly) relating to not all, but a lot, of the feelings and experiences described.

As I read more about how trans women describe their experiences, the more I realize that I’ve had similar feelings for a long time. Who knew that not every man secretly wishes he was a lesbian woman? I kind of thought that everyone had these feelings, and just settled for the disappointing reality of being male.

And I’m better able to put words to the positive feelings I get from growing my hair out, painting my nails, shaving my chest and legs - it’s gender euphoria!

I feel so excited, like I finally know who I am! And I’m so eager to learn makeup, get girl clothes, etc. And I really want to go on hormones. I guess any remaining potential doubt would be erased then - if I go on hormones and start to have a really bad time, then I guess I know I’m not trans.

I did talk to my therapist, and she was so encouraging! She was completely affirming, and at the end of our session she said that she could see me as a woman, and that felt so good to hear! I get butterflies in my stomach and keep smiling when I think about it.

She did encourage me to take my time though. I’m really excited, but I am also extremely nervous and scared about how people might react, especially my wife. She’s bisexual, and she’s been really supportive of my gender exploration so far, so those are both good things. But she’s also autistic and sometimes has a hard time adapting to rapid changes.

So I feel like I need to make sure I know what I want, and that I’m able to answer any questions she might have about what my transition process is going to look like - and there are still a lot of questions I don’t have the answer to.

And I worry a lot of how my family, friends, and work might react to my coming out. I’ve spent a lot of time getting educated, getting a good job, and building a nice little life, and I don’t want to mess it all up. And unfortunately, my immediate family are all devout Catholics, so I don’t anticipate a great reaction from them…

I get my hair cut at an LGBTQ salon, and I think at least one of the stylists there is a trans woman. Would it be appropriate/inappropriate for me to ask her if I could talk to her about her experience?

I don’t know any other trans women in real life, and I think it would really help me to have someone to talk to. But I also don’t want to just dump all my burdens on someone either.

Any other advice on what I should do, or things to consider, would be really welcome - I’m just trying to figure out how I want to navigate this.

HRT day 17.

I always wanted to be more social. I cared about people, wanted to know them more deeply, and wanted them to know me. I just never enjoyed the experience because I felt that the time people spent on me was an arduous act of charity that they endured for my sake, out of politeness and perhaps pity. I therefore kept to myself, unintentionally presented a pretty hard exterior that made me seem abrasive and antisocial, and spent nights wishing I could be closer to people around me. I was ashamed of who I was, and ultimately faded out of the lives of everyone I met sooner or later, once I felt I'd revealed too much of myself to put them through any more. It was lonely, and worst of all, many of these people continued trying to reach out while I sequestered myself and waited for the guilt to subside.

Short of growing breasts and marked shifts in fat distribution that I likely won't see for many months, I can never be sure what's an estrogen thing, what's a placebo thing, and what's just a good mood, but the last few days have been an unprecedented shift in my overall outlook. I talk honestly with people. I opened up to my mother about deeply personal things that I've kept guarded for decades. I message people just to ask if they're doing okay and if they want to catch up over coffee some time, and without even cringing at myself for doing so.

Today I've been thinking a lot about how remarkable it is to simply feel like I'm allowed to exist in the world, and allowed to be part of other people's lives. This isn't me. Except it is, and I hope it stays this way forever.

I’ve been questioning and curious, and I wanted to talk to some people about my experience, who know more about being trans than I do.

I am almost 30, I’m bisexual, and I was assigned male at birth. I was raised in a very Catholic household (and went to Catholic school from elementary through high school), so it wasn’t exactly an environment that was going to give me the language to understand who I was, or encouraged to explore my sexuality and gender identity.

I was always more emotional than my peers - my parents put me in wrestling and karate during elementary and middle school to “toughen me up”. Although that may have had to do with my RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria) from my ADHD.

I never really enjoyed sports like wrestling or football - I ended up liking volleyball and distance running. I preferred hobbies that are more traditionally feminine, like baking and sewing. Don’t get me wrong, I also liked camping and stuff with Boy Scouts (not that camping and hiking are inherently masculine) but I definitely never felt like a super masculine as a kid.

I would get in trouble for growing my hair out as long as I was allowed to, and then some, and I got in trouble for wearing more jewelry than a Catholic school was appropriate for boys too (too many rings and necklaces). I was made fun of in middle and high school for wearing pink, or liking things that were too girly.

About 5 years ago, I started to identify as nonbinary, as I learned more about queerness and started to find the language to describe what I was feeling. When my wife came out to me as bi, I finally felt comfortable coming out as nonbinary to her. And since then, I’ve started to feel more confident expressing my gender differently, mostly in small ways, like growing my hair longer and painting my nails. I’ve still only come out as NB to a small handful of people, and day-to-day I probably present more as “eccentric guy” than anything else.

The thing that I’ve noticed, though, is that the less masculine I look, act, and present, the more I feel like myself. I feel like men’s clothing is so limiting, and I always feel out of place when I’m in a group of otherwise all guys.

I feel like If I had been born as a woman, I would prefer that to having been born male. And if I could flip a switch and instantly be a woman, I would. But I don’t experience the sort of revulsion at my genitals that I hear some trans people describe (although I do hate being so hairy).

All of that said, I don’t know what exactly it feels like to be trans, or be a woman, so I don’t know how to compare my experience to how I “should” or “shouldn’t” feel.

And obviously right now is a scary time in the US to be queer of any kind, so there’s a part of me that’s very scared about what if I am trans - what that would entail in terms of how people/my friends and family would react and treat me.

Anyway, I’m not trying to presume anything about the trans experience, and I apologize if anything I said seemed ignorant. I guess I’m just confused and looking for some insight and support, since there aren’t many people in real life that I can talk to about these things (wife and therapist aside).

I am one in 200. Someone like me is at every concert, every school, in every workplace. Every town, every street, every neighborhood. Every store, every mall, every park. Every government, every nation, every continent. Me and my people have been here since time unrecorded and we will be here to the end of humanity. We will not be eradicated.

Hey girls and friends, I am 8 days on hrt and I feel like my skin is already softer ??? Is it even possible or am I just imagining it?

Nothing else seems to have changed.

If you're out of the loop or intentionally avoiding social media and the news cycle, then I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this. Two executive orders were written yesterday by Donald Trump that specifically target transgender rights and freedoms. One targeting the rights of transgender members of the military, another targeting the healthcare rights of transgender youth. These orders state in no uncertain terms that trans people are unsafe evil liars deserving of contempt and exclusion. This is not an exaggeration, and the shift in the narrative behind these executive orders is extremely alarming and likely to be seen again as the basis for further attacks against us.

There is a narrative created by these two orders. A narrative that trans people are dishonorable, that trans people lack selflessness and humility, and that we are liars. That we are wrong that our existence is wrong. That it doesn't matter whether transition decreases our suicide rate, whether it allows us to live happy, fulfilling lives. That death itself is preferable to the existence of an adult trans person. That being transgender is by itself wrong and makes us worth less than cisgender people. A narrative that children must be protected from becoming transgender people, even if it means they die. That no one can be allowed to think that being transgender is alright, that it's okay to be a transgender person.

This cannot go unchallenged. It's not enough for trans people to resist alone. This has to come from as man voices as possible. The writing is on the wall. This amounts to dehumanizing persecution intended to foster perceptions of us as inhuman. It is going to get worse. This is week 2. What awaits us in a year no one can say for sure. We need protests we need civil disobedience. We need to help our most vulnerable get out. We need to protect trans youth.

Please refer to the transgender resistance network for mutual aid and help. I had tried last year to organize something here but was not capable of it due to problems in my own personal life.

We need solidarity. We need to help each other. And we have to resist. Not just these orders, not just this narrative, but we have to resist the fall into hopelessness and acceptance. We have to fight. Our lives have value. Our lives are worth the same as anyone else. Don't let them get to you, don't believe in the narrative. Transition saved my life, maybe it saved yours too. Transitioning and seeing others transition has been the most beautiful and rewarding experience of my life. I refuse to accept a reality in which we are forced into closets, forced into hiding. I beg of everyone to join me in refusing that outcome.

Someone told me that we're only getting our "extra rights" taken away

I couldn't think of any "extra" rights that we had before, but then I realized it is a bit unfair that we're all so beautiful, smart and talented.

permalink by melody_elf

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18135870

A great video about both getting hormones and blockers and how to safely use them if you want or have to do it DIY.

I read Rain this week. I'm sure you all know this comic already. Sorry! Anyway, I really liked it and ordered the print copies too (hope v7 comes out soon!). It's about a trans girl, Rain.

I'd come across it before, a few years ago, when I was still an egg. I didn't get in to it then. At the time, I'd have said it made me feel "kind of uncomfortable, idk", or made some excuse. (Hey, who are you anyway? How did you get in here?). But now I realize I was feeling a lot of dysphoria and envy (thanks, ContraPoints!) to see someone I unconsciously identified so closely with just being herself. This time I just kept bawling my eyes out, so I guess the hormones are working, at least :3

Anyway, something in that story made me snap. I don't want to hide any more. I mean, I'm out to quite a few people already, but I'm done keeping quiet. The whole world can know who I am, and to hell with what anybody thinks. (That said, this is still my alt, so no selfies, sorry!)

Hello Fediverse,

I am trying to help my friend raise funds for a safe place to live, she has recently been diagnosed with Autism and is trans. Due to where she lives, she feels unsafe and is looking to raise funds to move somewhere safer. If you may help spread her gofundme page around, that'd be amazing.

Thanks for your time!

In it, I was trying to sleep on my couch, miserable and hating myself, when I heard someone moving around my apartment. At first, I was worried about an intruder, but that was quickly replaced by gladness. The only person it could be is my one friend who lives within an hour of me. They must have gotten concerned I haven't been on discord or steam in a while and come over to check on me! The door to the apartment building is supposed to lock when it closes but it sticks open half the time and I don't bother locking my apartment door half the time as well so that's definitely it. Suddenly, there's a gunshot, and I feel the impact in my abdomen. I'm too shocked to do or say anything and after a second or two, the rest of the magazine follows into my chest. For a instant, I panic. A flash of betrayal, a million thoughts about how I can stop the bleeding, how much it's going to hurt, am I going to survive. Then, I realize that I'm a dumbass. I shouldn't (and with this realization, don't) feel betrayed, I want this. I've wanted this for so long. I can finally let go. I don't need the panic, I don't need to think about how to survive, I can just be calm and let go. She's better than being the only friend to check in on me, she's the only friend who was willing to put me out of my misery. I hugged my stuffed animals tighter, relaxed, woke up, and freaked out a bit.

Not over the passive suicidal ideation thing, that's just reality for me and while living through it in a dream really makes you confront it, it's just... normal at this point. It was just an awful lot of emotions all at once when I'm number than I've been in a while, which is saying something. I got up, checked whether my door was locked (it was), had a cup of tea, and went back to sleep on the couch again.

I wish there was a moral or pleasant conclusion to this, I wish I could be like "and I that moment I realized I really wanted to live!" but there isn't. I'm just to be bringing more negativity and worry into the lives of those reading this. Sorry. This doesn't even really belong here but I can't think of a place it does and I feel compelled to tell the story.

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/25037238

Note: I was writing this text throughout the past week. Yesterday Trump signed an executive order (Erin Reed breaks it down here) which forbids changing one's appearance to conform with the “opposite biological sex”. I spent all my big words in the text. TL;DR Bathroom bans are an entry point to criminalizing being trans, which now must be crystal clear that it was.

Two common comebacks with which trans advocates respond to respond to the scourge of bathroom bans are the following: On one hand, it is not feasible to confirm people’s assigned sex for an act so mundane as visiting a public restroom. On the other, enforcing the bans cause cisgender people to be questioned and harassed if they do not meet expectations of how a member of their assigned sex should look like.

Trans advocate organizations, and some Democrats, during an early 2025 hearing of an anti-trans sports ban, correctly stated that such a ban will open up opportunities to perverts to interact with children to “inspect their gender”.

The legislation has an “intrusive focus on scrutiny of students’ bodies,” according to over 400 human rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and Advocates for Trans Equality. The groups issued an open letter to the legislature in opposition to the laws, which they said “invite scrutiny and harassment of any other student perceived by anyone as not conforming to sex stereotypes.”

According to trans man scholar Jack Halberstam[^1], masculine, androgynous, butch, women, trans men, all face policing a women restrooms as well, despite being assigned female at birth. Bathroom bans enforce gender role stereotypes: rather than biological sex, it is feminine self-presentation that it is enforced. Even expected statistical variation within cisgender women, such as height, can also make a person target to gender policing vigilantes. To bring this point home, many cis-passing trans women are not questioned in women restrooms, whereas butch cis women are. It is not chromosomes or genitals that are beholden in these cases, but perceived femininity.

But if appearance is not a conclusive estimate of a person’s assigned sex at birth, advocates continue, the only way to enforce bathroom bans is to have genital inspectors, public restroom permits and certificates, which are impractical and defeat the very concerns of dignity and safety, which are the very issues supposedly stemming from "allowing" trans women in female bathrooms.

By the same coin, enforcing restroom use according to chromosomes or genitals will mandate that trans men use female restrooms, which itself reverses the problem. The right suggests that self-determination will allow any man enter female restrooms by “faking” trans in order to commit sex crimes. But this would also be true if the bans are upheld: trans men are then forced into female bathrooms, and yet again there will be masculine-looking people walking in freely into female restrooms (you know, like male janitors do all the time).

Thus bathroom bans are correctly fenced off as absurd, self-defeating, and eventually pointless. Advocates are absolutely correct in their analysis, and I agree to all the arguments I cite above.

How are they then wrong?

Advocates fail to realize that what the right really wants is to delegitimize the public existence of people whose appearances are not consistent with their assigned sex at birth. Florida attempted to designate to present oneself as the opposite gender in public as a sex crime. It also sought to pass laws that assert that all artistic impersonations of a sex different than the performers are inherently obscene.

Bathroom ban proposals stipulate a problem about which they fearmonger, without a shred of evidence that there is a problem that needs to be addressed, in stark comparison with the problem of trans women being harassed, and raped in male prisons, or even cis women that are mistaken for trans sometimes. This is a real problem that we could be addressing the past decade if the right did not choose this avenue of trans vilification and demagoguery.

But we have a greater problem here[^2], which is a threat to democracy itself. The bathroom bans, which do not appear in isolation but bundled together with several other measures that prohibit being trans/in public/altogether, do not address any real problem, as they do not address the real problems of children and cisgender women, whose reproductive rights and credibility in case of real sex crimes perpetrated en masse by cisgender men, they want to stripe away.

Here is why I think bathroom bans are entry points to the corrosion of democratic values.

If people are to use exclusively the restrooms that match their assigned at birth sex, then all people must be the sex that they are perceived to be. Trans advocates were not paranoid enough to imagine that the right wants to wipe trans people out of public life to such a degree, that no ambiguity about a person's sex can further be possible, except for those "extremely rare genetic accidents" Ben Shapiro keeps talking about.

Public erasure, however, of transgender and gender-nonconforming people amounts to the enforcement of cisgenderism by a state that defines sex as a natural binary with no exceptions, and no behavioral, nor performative, nor psychological deviations from the norm. This take is inconsistent with modern understanding of sex biology and endocrinology, the psychology and phenomenology of gender expression and gender identity. It wants to perpetuate for trans identities to be medicalized and intersex people be erased. It aims to enforce strict gender roles, identities, and expressions, coded on the appearance of external genitalia at the time of birth. It wants to hinter any progress in the societal issues brought up by professionals and activists surrounding trans and intersex people.

Gender non-conforming expression is a fundamental freedom

The elimination of sex and gender variation and non-conformity is incompatible with fundamental freedoms, such as the freedom of expression, and the freedom from discrimination on the basis of sex. In fact, the same actors and organizations do not attack sex and gender minorities alone. They consistently mock and delegitimize a number of other accommodations we have established as a decent society, such as racial equity, reproductive rights, disability measures, and accessibility.

This broader attack to fundamental protections shows it is not only bathroom bans that are embedded into a broader picture of plans of trans genocide, but it is also trans genocide itself that is embedded into a broader picture of a rightwing attack to established democratic freedoms, which entail freedom of speech, reproductive rights, religious freedoms, protection from discrimination.

Advocates fail to reflect on the horrific divide in assumptions: they assume a world order in which trans people can freely move and exist in the public space without the knowledge of cis people. When proposing the bans, the right assumes a world where trans people will not be allowed to exist at all, and they now have the means to implement this world order.

Bathroom bans are a gambit to attack fundamental pillars of constitutional law and human rights protections in western societies and they seem very consistent and well thought out in their conception: No one should be allowed to appear to be a different sex that the "biological reality"[^3], and this should be enforced by the state. But for this to be enforced by the state, fundamental rights and protections should be abandoned, including the rights of children and cisgender women.

Bathroom bans are to be understood as coal mine canaries of the rise of totalitarianism in Western Societies.

[^1]: Female Masculinity (book) [^2]: In fact, Trump's fresh executive order will force trans women (and some cis ones too) into male prisons. [^3]: I literally arrived to this conclusion a couple days before Trump's executive order. I wish I had realized sooner.

I have been on HRT for a little over two months. I am taking sprio and sublingual estradiol.

These treatments have pretty much cured my depression, but otherwise I feel pretty much the same. I kind of expected estrogen to feel actively different most of the time, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case.

However, today I felt my nerves for the first time on HRT, and it felt very different. I get stage fright on occasion. This time wasn't worse or anything, but it felt so very different. Like the nerves were in my body instead of my head.

Has anyone else had similar experiences with performance anxiety before and after HRT? I'd also love to know if are other experiences that feel distinctly different that I can look forward to.

Thx in advance. Love you all <3