of course!

To answer your questions: I use Linux (usually whatever easy distro, sometimes Debian with LXDE, often just Ubuntu - I'm lazy, kill me).

thoughts about the tool itself: it can be helpful to detect pitch but I'm not usually at my desktop when I need a pitch-check, usually it's right before a meeting, in a car before a social interaction, etc. - so I use my phone. It would be nice to have a FOSS alternative to the pitch phone app I use, though.

A tool that charts vowel formants would also be useful, there is less support for that, but there is an issue about users being able to interpret the data accurately.

Also, I worry about how much people focus on pitch, and while that's not the tool's fault, it is worth at least mentioning that pitch is one of the less relevant factors of how a voice is gendered.

Often times a piano is more useful for pitch work than a detector - it's easier for me to generate pitches from a note on a piano than trying cold, and then to chant words at that pitch, and then move gradually from chanting to normal speech.

haha, as a shy prude I don't even show up for the local trans-led dance classes run by a friend of mine, let alone go to munches 😆

I love your optimism though.

There are also a local anarchist punk group that does needle exchange programs, helps the unhoused, etc. but as usual they are more interested in ideological purity than pragmatic politics, so that was a hard group to break into.

I highly doubt guns will help me, if anything I think they are a liability (and early data coming out of urban areas suggest having a gun during a conflict increases chances of being killed).

You can't (individually) use them against the state (who is at this point my biggest enemy), and even without guns trans people are not treated sympathetically by the justice system. For example, CeCe McDonald who was convicted of second-degree manslaughter for stabbing her assailant with scissors after he yelled anti-trans and racist remarks at her, smashed a beer glass into her face, and then followed her into the street. Guns as self defense increasingly seem to be for white men (and even then, interactions of white men with guns and law enforcement often lead to police killings of innocent but armed people). The law penalizes minorities whenever they try to use guns in the same self-defense manner as white men, and the double standard makes using guns as self-defense a bit of a legal liability.

Besides that, handguns are honestly difficult to properly train with and most people don't have the time or money to properly train and keep up their training. This makes them a liability in other ways.

It's also harder to bring guns into blue states with shield laws in an emergency situation where you have to flee, so it increases risk of ending up in jail (which is the main thing I am trying to avoid at this point), or in best case creates hassle in terms of having to properly prepare for how to either dispose of or transport ammunition and weapons.

Still, I am semi-trained and armed 😅 Despite my overall assessment of the risk/reward of guns, there is a part of me that is proud that trans folks are so militant, I just hope that translates to positive outcomes.

I have surgery scheduled this summer, then I'm hoping to focus entirely on moving. Unfortunately the legislative session might only give me a few weeks between my surgery and when new laws come into effect that might force me to leave the state. It's a chaotic time, but I'm trying to stay focused on what is concrete and right in front of me.

I tend to isolate socially, but I did go to a local trans support group, and even though that was too toxic to continue going, a small group from that support group split off and they have a Discord I'm a part of, and they sometimes organize in-person events.

That said, I'm usually the one in that group providing resources to others, rather than the other way around - but it is at least still a way to hear about what's going on outside my little bubble.

Any advice is welcome, too. I know I can't prepare my way out of persecution, but I hope to do what I can.

rsync is not really comparable to syncthing, it's like comparing Excel to C++ or something. I need to be able to get lay people to install and use it, and syncthing has a UI that allows this while even I would have to do some work to get rsync to do everything syncthing is doing for me right now.

That's great, but as a trans person who uses injectable HRT who lives in one of the states they are targeting distribution, I can tell you the local "partners" are often not trustworthy. But my perceptions could be wrong, and I'm sure it will still help people - I just wish there was a better way to account for needs and to meet them more reliably (rather than relying on the luck of running into one of the local distributors and them being willing to help you). Remaining anonymous also makes it difficult for trans people in those states to know where to go to access a kit, for example.

I think this is just what it's like for a while, this is what transition can be like. I also thought I would never pass, I also found it difficult and awkward to figure out how to present as a woman after having lived so long as a man. I am still haunted by whether I'm a "real" woman (and most days I feel like an imposter and deny that I am "real").

Continuing to live as a man isn't going to help you, though, as it sounds like you know.

All I can suggest is that you keep feminizing because it sounds like that is what is affirming for you and the alternative sounds harmful to you. It is the same for me, and many of us.

It can feel awkward and difficult at first, but hormones work magic over long periods of time and over the span of years things do get better. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon - so it's OK if you have bad days, but don't detransition or quit HRT if ever possible, that just won't help you.

Personally I found my mood was impacted by the hormones, especially pre-orchi when testosterone would ruin my mood - might be worth figuring out what is most supportive to your mental health and doing concrete things to help stabilize your mood. Some of these things are obvious but commonly ignored, like not drinking alcohol, getting reliable and adequate sleep, eating a diverse and healthy diet, etc. I even find that drinking coffee can give me the blues the next day, so I have to be careful. How frequently I eat and what I eat impacts my mood too. I'm fragile, so I have to pay more attention and be more careful and protective of my mental health. Either way, take seriously your needs and work on protecting yourself, it makes everything easier (besides just the obvious benefits of feeling good).

Besides taking concrete steps to stabilize your mood, there are things you can do to help your transition. Again, it's OK to have bad days, but continually seeking and implementing concrete steps in the direction of feminizing is helpful. The way this looked for me was carefully evaluating every detail and aspect of transition and trying to optimize it. For example, despite a moderately disabling needle phobia, I learned to do injections instead of taking pills, and I do believe this significantly improved my transition outcomes.

I find the dissociation allows me to look at transition from that detached and objective / technical lens, to see it as something to plan or strategize about even if I feel disconnected from it. This can be helpful, you can approach this as a "technical" problem to solve and thus move past all the emotions that are so disabling.

Another optimization I found helpful: fluctuating my weight - I need to lose weight overall, but having periods where I intentionally overate and gradually increased my weight, especially early in transition, helped distribute fat in feminine patterns. Breasts are fat stores, and I think being overweight has helped me grow breasts, and that seemed to really help me pass socially.

Sometimes people have trouble losing weight, other times people have trouble gaining enough weight. Either way, this is a place where dissociation can be helpful, if it gives you a way of looking that can give you more control, in so far as it dulls emotion and reduces everything to an objective problem to be solved. (There are obvious downsides, but if you're already dissociated, might as well use it to your advantage to dig yourself out of the hole.)

As far as the "you will never be a real girl" - I would just ignore those sentiments for pragmatic reasons. There is a bit of a philosophical problem here that won't be readily resolvable in any sufficient way, and the question is just a way to haunt ourselves. Lay people who hold this kind of sentiment aren't somehow in an advantaged position, they don't have better access to the knowledge around this issue, and in general they are actually more ignorant. The solutions offered are mostly arrived not because of some great access to ultimate truth or metaphysical insight, but because they are socially and pragmatically reasonable, like a trans woman is a woman because she identifies and lives as a woman. Sure, it's harder for a trans woman to be socially accepted as a woman when she looks or sounds like a man to others, but a lot of trans women do transition and transitioning does eventually result in passing and living as a woman, as much as most of us might not believe this will happen to ourselves. I truly believed I would never pass, and I transitioned later in life. Yet somehow I am passing in nearly all social contexts, much to my shock and confusion, something I can scarcely believe. I don't pass to myself in the mirror, either.

I think once you have accumulated enough progress in your transition and your health, once you are presenting as a woman and the hormones have done enough of their work, you too might find yourself accidentally just living life as a woman, at least in the eyes of everyone around you. It is a gradual shift, not a sudden one. It is as much a result of the way people see you as any change inside of you. Really, you were a woman all along anyway, though I suspect we are our own last frontier.

But all of this does require you continue to take HRT and work on feminizing and presenting as a woman. Admittedly that is difficult work, but it sounds like you're in the middle of it already. What helped me was having clarity that this is the right direction, and that I just need to keep going in the right direction, even if I feel hopeless or skeptical that I will ever reach the destinations I want. Just keep going in the right direction and don't worry about the outcomes.

This is great and I'm glad they're so close to their goal, but this gives me pause:

Distribute Aid will NOT directly distribute these harm reduction kits. Our supply-chains deliver aid to local frontline partners, who conduct their own distributions using their best judgement.

That's a lot of trust of local partners to properly distribute supplies to local trans populations 😅

Distribution: We've identified initial distribution partners in 11 states. Our initial trials will include distributions in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

It would be nice to know who these distribution partners are.

next steps, read: https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/

You can always take transition steps at your own pace, but educating yourself early and often is a good idea.

now I'm hungry 😩

"Western civilization" is a dogwhistle, and doesn't actually represent the West, since that would mean supporting liberalism. AfD is an illiberal movement. The Nazis claimed to be socialists, too - reactionaries lie, what's new?

EDIT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_German

In January 2022, after a lost power struggle, party leader Jörg Meuthen resigned his party chairmanship with immediate effect and left the AfD, as he claimed he came to acknowledge that the party had developed very far to the right with totalitarian traits and in large parts was no longer based on the liberal democratic basic order.[44][45] Former party chairman and co-founder of the AfD, Lucke, had left the party in 2015 with the same remark.

Some of the citations are in German, so if you don't read German you might have to use Google Translate or another tool to confirm these things for yourself. Just wanted to provide some evidence for the claim that AfD is illiberal, since they claim to be an economically liberal, conservative movement.

part two of my response:

What I think is the biggest problem when it comes to these studies, is that they seem to imply that having gender identity is related to gender dysphoria.

Gender dysphoria absolutely does have to do with having a gender identity, it seems likely that dysphoria is caused by incongruence between gender identity and assigned sex (which even if we lived in a utopia where no sex was assigned, some trans people would still experience dysphoria).

I think what you mean to say is that a trans gender identity does not require dysphoria to be present to be valid, which is of course true. The brain studies don't contradict this, at all, and are entirely consistent with this understanding of trans identity.

These studies are the basis of transmedicalism. Many ignore the fact that there are trans people who lack gender dysphoria, they also do not acknowledge the conditions that are problematic for their theories like nonbinary or genderfluid people because they ultimately do not have an answer for those, even though many of them have gender dysphoria as strong as binary trans people do.

Transmedicalists wish to deny someone like Jacob Tobia is a trans person, and I think that's silly and obviously false. I don't know why we're talking about this - I don't endorse transmedicalism, neither do you - we agree, can we move on now?

Conversion therapy is wrong, it’s very easy to prove why it is wrong without promoting lies about how gender identity works that invalidate or misrepresent the experiences of nonbinary and genderfluid people, who very much do share the same experiences in terms of dysphoria and euphoria as any binary trans people.

A lie is a falsehood with the intent to deceive, what I have shared is peer reviewed research and reproducible findings about brain sex which are not only false but represent the best current body of evidence to understanding how our brains relate to unconscious sex and gender identity. The fact that this evidence accords with studies that find conversion therapy is clinically ineffective only furthers the legitimacy of the working theory that gender identity (including genderfluid and nonbinary identities) is fixed and biological.

To characterize what I have said as a lie is honestly confusing to me, and again it feels like you aren't responding to what I wrote, and maybe you are unfamiliar with the actual research and evidence?

Saying that gender is locked in that is doing exactly that. Maybe instead of overthinking to the extreme and finding a reason based on biological existentialism for why conversion therapy is bad and wrong we should just point out the fact that one cannot change who someone is through coercion and abuse. It’s that simple.

Again, people engage in conversion therapy in earnest and not under coercion. Many forms of conversion therapy are essentially talk therapy to help patients try to be more comfortable with their assigned sex/gender.

Your claim that conversion therapy can be dismissed off-hand because it's coercive and abusive would not address cases where conversion therapy is not coercive or abusive, where it is engaged with earnest consent and a desire by a patient to alleviate gender dysphoria.

Like a genderfluid person who may feel strong dysphoria towards her penis, yet after a shift he may feel perfectly comfortable with it, or even possibly miss it when it is gone. Such situations don’t just “not fit” they challenge the merit of it altogether. These situations really need to be taken seriously, not brushed aside for acceptance, but actually looked at to re-evaluate the conclusions that were drawn otherwise.

Nobody is suggesting we brush them aside, and at this point I take offense that you mis-characterize what I have written as dismissive, debunking, or invalidating genderfluid and non-binary people. I engage in this discussion assuming that the conversation is grounded in good-faith on both sides, and I am starting to feel I can no longer carry on a conversation with you based on your responses.

I admit there were ways I should have worded things better to avoid miscommunication, so this is not entirely your fault, but I have tried to be patient and carefully parse what you have written and it feels like you are not offering me the same treatment at this point.

I do appreciate your willingness to engage with me, I think a lot of people feel communication with me is tedious and exhausting - it is a lot to read and think about, and these are not easy topics to discuss for lots of reasons, including that they impact us personally and we have stake in the outcomes.

Honestly I think you should really think over if brain sex or brain gender has any merit, because to me and many others, it is for the most part transmedicalist garbage and biological existentialism.

Do you mean biological essentialism, rather than existentialism? Just so you know, I strongly oppose gender bioessentialism, and I think a lot of this conversation has been futile and frustrating because you assume that is the position I am taking.

Transmedicalism tries to gatekeep trans identity based on the presence of gender dysphoria, and they might point to the studies on brain sex to explain the source of dysphoria, but that doesn't mean the studies on brain sex are transmedicalist in nature, it just means transmedicalists use that evidence to try to support a view they have, which ultimately is a view that doesn't make sense.

Ultimately I think transmedicalists are just another form of respectability politics, it is no different than previous movements within gay cultures to assimilate as much as possible to straight culture and to assert the notion of "we are just like you, except this one thing". These movements always seem confused about the way power works, the problem is that the oppressors aren't going to respect you just because you think you are more like them than others in your community. Trans people like Caitlyn Jenner or Blaire White aren't effective in achieving trans rights precisely because they want to capitulate as much as possible to the people who are most invested in denying trans rights. Not that "respectability" isn't entirely irrelevant, certainly moral panic can be more easily whipped up when a group behaves in a way that is alienating to the majority of people, but trans people for the most part aren't even guilty of the things anti-trans activists claim - like that trans women are sexually preying on cis women in bathrooms, there just is no evidence of this and yet lots of people believe there is real harm being done and bathroom bans are the only way to stop it.

So I don't think respectability politics will be that effective and is probably more of an emotional response than a pragmatic praxis, even if I can understand the fear about the trans community not taking seriously the need to be careful and not lean too much into anti-trans panic, which will happen regardless, even if the trans community does nothing wrong. Facts and reality matter little to the anti-trans movement.