– Talk to the surgeon about the size you want your new areolas/nipples (don’t be afraid to ask)
– Numbness. No one talks about this for guys who are about to have surgery. You’re going to be numb all in your chest area, especially where the incisions were. They cut nerves as they pass along your chest, and it can take up to a year to regenerate those nerves. Still, feels super foreign for the first two weeks
– Make your bed into a pillow chair, body pillow, two on each side, and two for your head.
– Sleep alone. I tried to sleep with my girlfriend and it was miserable. You really do need the entire bed for yourself
– Go on Groupon, & get yourself a 10 foot lightning cable iPhone charger, BEST THING EVER, can reach from wherever you are
– Don’t take a week off from work, take two. You will regret the one week, and love the extra time
– When they say “don’t move too much, even after the first week”. LISTEN. I moved way too much and got so sore super quickly.
– Drink lots of water & eat if your taking the pain medication, otherwise your stomach feels super funky.
– Get stool softeners, & don’t be afraid to take those babies. Don’t wait a week to poop. you’ll surely regret it.
– The drains are scary & they may hurt while draining or rewrapping your dressings, but once they come out, the second they do, its no more pain, its crazy.
i hope this helps someone, because i wish i knew all of this when i was having mine a month ago. Looking back its like everyone forgets all the real negatives, its a great experience, & i healed very well & quick compared to most, but the first few days are crazy. They hurt, suck but it gets better.
To the few guys I know having surgery this week!
-the headache you get a couple days after the surgery because the anesthesia is leaving your body hurts 200 times more than the surgery itself. And even that isn’t too bad.
-after a week or, you ITCH. It’s awful. Try not to touch your stitches too much. An ice pack will help.
THINGS I NEED TO FUCKING KNOW: Why every fuckin trans man or nb person I know who binds is like “oh binders are the worst, you can’t breathe in them, I know someone who broke a rib once”,
And meanwhile over in historical costuming, we are fucking eating, sleeping, swordfighting, riding horses, and feeling great like this:
Omigods yes that’s what I used to make my trial binding corset for under a 1830′s gentleman’s costume! I adapted the Elizabethan Pattern Generator Corset to look more like the gentleman’s corset of the time as portrayed in satirical cartoons.
This was only the second pair of stays I made, but it already made me practically flat and was quite comfortable. I didn’t even full bone it and it looked like this:
(don’t judge me for the awful way the boning sticks out at the top, I am by no means a corsetry expert)
People who are actually good at stays will be able to make things like these with no trouble, because if something made from old sheets and recycled boning can do this, imagine what you can do with proper materials.
Just for fun, here’s me in my gentleman’s outfit:
It basically eliminates my boobs, but leaves the hips alone because at that time the hourglass silhouette was fashionable for men as well. I’m not exactly flat-chested, so I’d say for a first attempt this one is very succesful.
You are choosing to do that to yourselves. It’s not required of you or something you do in order to fucking live your life as you’d like to otherwise someone might misgender or harass you. Binding because of dysphoria and fucking cosplaying are two totally different things.
Whoa, this isn’t about trying to put transmasc people down compared to costumers. This is about saying, “Modern binders are based on medical compression technology–would it be possible to use other design methods from centuries past to make binding less painful and restrictive for people who bind today because of dysphoria?”
It’s about bringing two groups of people with really DIFFERENT experiences and motives, and saying, “Can we share knowledge and experiences to make trans peoples’ lives BETTER?”
Fair enough. The tone was confusing. I apologize for the hostility.
I also I don’t particularly think boned corsets are the way to go. 1) expenses and 2) the shape isn’t exactly what people are going for, and larger trans men will no be any flatter than traditional binders (it may even make the issues worse)
Yeah, sorry about the tone–I was so outraged by how universally binders seem to be uncomfortable and painful, in compared to my own experiences recreating an era where the conical torso was the ideal.
I’m working on taking the basic principles of rigid vertical support and making it a lot more accessible. After a quick test-run, I found that it is possible to convert a sports bra into a binder, so now I’m experimenting with different ways to do that cheaply and effectively–my test run got some compression, but wasn’t totally flat, so we’ll see if I can improve that, or if this will be a kind of makeshift halfway binder that appeals because it’s inexpensive and can be made at home even if it doesn’t completely provide the desired look.
Right now the biggest chests I’m working with are DD/E cup. You’re right, I’m definitely worried about how it will work for bigger chests. Part of what I’m doing in my work is reaching out to biomedical engineers to ask about how much compression is realistic; it’s the kind of question mammographers ask all the time, since breasts vary a lot in density and squishiness, and to get a proper mammogram, they need to squish the tissue as flat as possible. So hopefully I can get several different fields of knowledge in there.
Some of the bigger trans men I’ve talked to have said they’ve given up hope for any kind of binder that fits them, and others say that even if it’s only halving their chest size (taking an H breast down to a D, which is still an impressively Chris Evansian pigeon chest) having chest wear that isn’t as obviously feminine as a bra would be worth it.
THOR(Transgender Healthcare and Organising Resources) is a new collective for transgender people to share resources for activism and healthcare.
We aim to make a home for simple, accessible resources for trans people. Being a trans and/or nonbinary person is a lonely uphill struggle against the system – let’s make it less lonely. THOR wants to do more to fill the gaps and create radical, organised networks to spread information and connect international trans communities.
Half of being trans is being hypervigilant against transphobes. Like, I spent 15 minutes scrolling down on a blog that I would be super interested in just to make sure that it wasn’t going to start reblogging stuff from my favorite transmisogynists. Turns out that my hypervigilance was right again.
Things to look for:
References to “vagina envy.” This is what initially got me scrolling. This alone isn’t a sure indicator.
Andrea Dworkin quotes without criticism
Reblogging from troll accounts like confirmed-/-terf
Most cis wlw on Tumblr are, in fact, supportive of trans people. Most cis wlw who mention “hating men” are not using this as an attack on trans women. However, because of my experience with the small, insular, and vitriolic trans-exclusionary feminists on Tumblr, I have learned to be hypervigilant and it Really Fucking Sucks and Really Fucking Hurts when I am right.
I am a lesbian. This kind of blog would have been My Shit. But I’ve been taught to distrust the very women I connect with the most. I’ve been taught to feel afraid in my own home.
Being a transgender lesbian is constantly walking on eggshells to not prove them right. And their standards are ever changing so it’s inevitable that you’ll prove them right. Righteous anger will be taken as “male propensity towards violence,” which closely mirrors the way men see outspoken women as “shrill.” If we do anything to fight back outside of debate within their terms, we are immediately casted as “violent men.” They will not be satisfied until we shut up, lie down, and die.
Cis wlw can and should reblog this. Help me remember my allies.
I’m gonna need you to find two hours of your life ASAP and watch the pilot of Pose. I’m totally serious. If I have to arrange a group watch via Discord, I WILL DO THAT. (Do I need to do that? I will. I bought the season on Amazon because we don’t have cable and supporting this is really fucking important to me.)
Why? I mean, Tumblr, y’all have to have been talking about this, because I heard about it through Tumblr, but let’s talk about it again:
The series is expected to include over fifty transgender characters total. FIFTY. f i f t y.
A blunt history lesson wrapped up in two hours of drama. There will be things you knew or knew about or heard about kinda and then you’ll realize how much you can learn, even if Queer History is one of your Special Interests.
One of the main characters is from Allentown. This is only vaguely relevant but it made me go ‘yey’.
Seriously, this media only gets made if people watch it. Vote with your eyeballs. Vote with your eyeballs and let’s bring more of this to TV, to the screens. We need this. I was honestly really nervous that something was gonna blow up or this was going to be somehow terrible and so I was nervously chewing my lower lip until I could actually watch the pilot and it’s not perfect but it’s a pilot and like… it’s … this is our history and our present. We need to make this shit happen.
Seriously, I’m probably going to watch this with @mistresskabooms this summer. Kids These Days need to know some dang history. We can trade off between RWBY and Pose.
Look, I can knit during anything. I have knitted during concerts, I have knitted in the car on cross-country trips, I knit my way through hurricanes and migraines and medical procedures and movies, I don’t have to look at my hands anymore when I knit kippot. There were a couple of points when I realized only after I had stopped knitting to stare at the television, totally entranced, that I had stopped knitting so I could concentrate on the screen. I cannot express enough how much that just does not happen.
I feel very passionately about this show already, now that I’ve stopped holding my breath and have allowed myself to feel things about it, aaaand I’ve only seen the pilot. Is it perfect? No. But it doesn’t need to be.
It’s real and raw and vulnerable and beautiful and triumphant and the MC’s name is Pray Tell which I found out in the first 2m from the subtitles and I love him already and we need to make it happen.
So who wants to do a watch party on this with me? @thebibliosphere, you wanna do something on the Discord? Seriously. Watch Party at the Wizard House, I’ll bring the popcorn.
fx nominally has it on their site but I couldn’t get it to load, even turning off adblockers.
I know, that’s why I’m offering to do a watch party if need be, bc I bought it from Amazon. I figured if I could spend $20 and do a watch party for folx, then we could at least get eyeballs in front of it if ppl don’t have cable, or want to watch it with a group.
A lot of transguys or masculine people aren’t comfortable with wearing a bikini top, so they get stuck wearing shirts in the summertime, or settling for something that doesn’t make them feel confident.
The Rhodes siblings are currently fundraising for the Bareskin Top, which comes in four skin-tone options, on Kickstarter
It’s important to remember our past. Marsha P Johnson was born in 1945. She was a trans and aids-activist and a well known drag queen in New York’s Greenwich Village. During the so called Stonewall riots (riots which broke out after the police had once again raided the lgbtq bar Stonewall Inn) in 1969, she was one of the first to begin resisting the police. These riots led to the first pride parades. In 1979, she and her friend Sylvia Rivera started an organisation for supporting lgbtq-people. The organisation was called STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). They bought a property, called it STAR-house and used it to shelter lgbt youths. During the aids-epidemic, Marsha was involved in ACT-UP: an organisation which worked for better treatment of and medication for people with aids. In 1992 Marsha was found dead in the Hudson River. Police initially ruled her death a suicide, but the case was reopened as a suspected murder after witnesses claimed that they had seen her being harassed near where her body was found. There were also claims made by the people who found her and saw her body being pulled out of the river that there was a large wound on her head. Her case has now been cold for 25 years. But we still remember Marsha P Johnson.
have i ever told y’all the story about how a snake knew I was trans years before I did
okay so
my 7th grade social studies/8th grade science teacher (he did both classes. Somehow…) had a snake lovingly named Hisser. Hisser would occasionally be taken out to crawl and he was held by kids and when there were fire alarms Hisser was taken along, usually to his chagrin.
This was one of those days where we had in class work time and most of us were just chilling and so Mr. A got Hisser out and started passing him around.
Every girl student that he came to, he would immediately snuggle up to, wrap around their arms, and get cozy. With boy students, he would just sort of sit in the coiled lump that he’d been handed in. This was true with just about every single student, and Mr. A said that Hisser likes girls a lot better than guys and this has been thoroughly proven by Hisser’s attitude.
Then Hisser was handed to me. He was a loveable cold scaley rope as you would expect, but he didn’t coil around my arms. He didn’t get cozy. He just sat there. And Mr. Anderson said, “Huh. That’s weird. He usually likes girls.”
I passed the snake to my friend and surely enough, Hisser wrapped around her arms and got cozy.
I came out as a trans guy about 7-8 years later, and just recently realized that Hisser was right about me not being a girl all along.
I’ve also decided that whenever anyone asks me “Why I think I’m a boy,” which is my LEAST favorite question ever, I’ll just tell them that a snake told me a long time ago.
writing prompt: alternate universe in which, instead of taking a look at your genitals or checking your chromosomes, doctors determine your gender at birth by having snakes crawl all over you and observing their behaviour.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 