Tag: kirkwallhellmouth does gender

Fuck you, anxiety.

Might call psychologist’s office tomorrow to see if there’s anything sooner than Halloween.

Can I just short cut and call my gender “Knight in Shining Armor”/“Awkward Prince Charming”/“Wannabe Dapper Swashbuckler”?

I feel like I haven’t given her a full enough picture yet of How I Gender and that is making me hella fucking anxious. Because I’m me and my GNCness doesn’t need fixing and and I am a ball of freshly mostly-shaved head anxiety.

I’m in a “songs sung blue”/sad mood.

This music night brought to you by my complicated with gender and my body and my anxiety on how my psychologist is taking what because Conversation Interuptus happened today and i don’t see her again till Halloween 😐

It sucks when you’re really getting into some of the meatier part of something, and then it turns out your session time is up, because unlikeyou your psychologist has a better tuned concept of time.

And so then you’re stuck hoping you remember all the things you wanted to continue with when you have the next session, but until then you sit on your anxiety’s desire to Hulk Smash and try to convince it to calm down.

So I forgot till this morning (when my mom checked the calendar and reminded me) that my rescheduled appointment with my gp is this afternoon.

So. One fateful day has come sooner than I remembered it would. Gonna give doc the short, non-journal-post-including “why I need and want my boobs completely gone” list.

Also taking mom with because anxiety and I may or may not end up have trouble talking.

Also I expect my blood pressure and heart rate to be Interesting. Because lol.

So send me the prayers and the good vibes and good wishes.

For the first time, I am experiencing a positive feeling about the possibility of managing to get top surgery/double mastectomy.

I still don’t know how my various doctors will react when I introduce the subject.

I still don’t know how or when I would manage the money.

But for for the first time, I am having a positive moment about the possibility going forward.

And I am embracing that fully, even if part of this might be the ativan talking.

No context, but it is kind of heartwarming when your mother puts forth the idea of suing the hell out of someone on your behalf if something doesn’t work out.

Unrelatedly, is is also heartwarming when your mom accepts the idea that some day (when you have the money and the recovery time saved up/arranged) you want to totally get rid of you breasts because not only are they a physical problem, but they also cause pretty severe mental/emotional distress.

So my anxiety kicked up a bit tonight in regards to gender presentation/some related things, and I just felt like saying this:

Even though it’s been more than 20 years since I was a GNC kid (and at that time, more GNC internally than externally), I’m pretty sure the biggest problem GNC kids face today is still people pressuring them to conform to the gender “norms” and roles society has assigned to their assigned gender and punishing them if they don’t, not that people are pressuring them to transition from their assigned gendered to a different gender.

Advertising, especially for kids and teens, is still pretty normatively gendered, even if some progress is being made.

I mean, the message I got from advertisements as a kid was that girls like me didn’t exist; the message I saw was that girls liked–exclusively–Barbie, pastels, pink, flowers, cosmetics, etc., and that boys–exclusively–liked cars, action figures, bold colors, weapons, etc. Guess which ones of those things I like and which ones I didn’t. It was a very confusing message to get, and even though my parents were good about letting me play with whatever I want to, there was only so much they could do to combat that message, because as a kid, I didn’t know how to talk about how it made me feel.

So I ended up with a really complicated and also really negative view towards girls who did tend to meet the Expected Criteria for Girls for a long time (a long time in this case being elementary school through eigth grade and a little beyond). Both because they fit into that mold (for whatever reason) and because I couldn’t.

And I still feel weird about my relationship to my gender now, as a 30 year old. Largely because society is still fucked up when it comes to the myriad of ways people can express their genders. But I generally still think of myself as a woman out of a desire to make up for the years I hated and feared “other girls” and as a way of saying, “Girls like me exist! Even if you want us to ‘act like girls,’ we’re already girls.”

That awkward feel when apparently your mom found your Old Spice deodorant that you were kind of hiding because you didn’t want there to end up being a Conversation about it, and now you are wondering if there will end up being a Conversation about hiding it.

And it only got found because you still live at home at 30 because the economy is shit, the job market is shit, that higher paying white-collar job you had for a while fucked over your mental health, shit is expensive in general, and…sigh.

I love my mom. And I never would have survived my teaching job if she hadn’t stayed at my apartment with me. But sometimes living with her is hard 😐