Pinned Citation of My Blog Name

"By such a curse as theirs, none is so lost

That eternal love cannot return

So long as hope maintains a thread of green."

From canto three of The Purgatorio, second book of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

(In context it's basically just a poetic way of claiming that excommunication from the church isn't enough to keep someone out of Heaven, but I think it's far more powerful out of context. Also, the last line is the epigraph for All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren.)

Look, I LOVE Charlie XCX's Brat. I am adoring the fanart I'm seeing of The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All! and plan to start reading the manga later today. I'm a lesbian and green is my favorite color. But I think we need to have a conversation about whether we want this particular shade to be synonymous with sapphic love because, at this rate, they're gonna make our flag into a solid block of sickly yellow-green by 2026.

My past two posts have been all about confidently telling outrageous lies, and I worry that if I go back to talking about my experience transitioning or something like that, people will be like, "Yeah right, just like how God told you to swallow a mouse."

The reason why God was so involved in human affairs a long time ago but then noped out after Jesus is because God is going through the same motions for every animal species: making a covenant, giving commandments, and sending down his own child to die in the form of that species. I know this because I felt an odd urge to swallow a mouse yesterday and, when I questioned it, I received a vision from God saying that He was on mice right now, and the mouse I was about to swallow was the mouse-equivalent of Jonah. Tomorrow I'm supposed to spit him out in a den of sinful mice so that he can squeak to word of God at them. I wish that little guy the best.

Ms. Frizzle turned me trans. She had a stint teaching at my school in third grade and turned the whole class into fish to teach us about the ecosystem or something. Our class had ten boys and eight girls, and we turned into one of the species of fish that swap sexes to reach equilibrium, so yeah. I got turned back into my old AMAB self once the class was over, but I didn't feel right with myself after that. Years later when I was questioning things, I emailed her to see if she could explain anything, and she told me that she'd trans'd me on purpose, and was planning to do a whole class on gender dysphoria tomorrow (they were going to shrink down and go inside my body and mess with my pituitary gland to make it so I went through female puberty), but she got fired after the fish class for mentioning evolution.

At my consultation for bottom surgery, I found out that this particular surgeon operates using five tiny robots inserted inside the body. While this is fascinating and all, I kind of wish that there was a sixth robot, since if I had six nanomachines working inside me to correct a grave evil, my vaginoplasty would basically be a reenactment of Bionicle.

It's so odd to me that men call each other "gay" or "woman" as insults. I get that I'm biased, but my life as a straight man was miserable, and being a lesbian kicks ass.

I dunno, maybe they're just jealous.

Today marks one year on hormone replacement therapy, and I worry I won't see another anniversary. This time last year I knew that I was a woman, but I was functionally living as a man. I couldn't stand the sight of myself and, on the rare occasions that I went out as a woman, I wore a long-banged wig and a covid mask, which together covered 90% of my face. I had a workable female voice, but was still so worried of being clocked that I used it publically as rarely as possible. Now it's been months since I presented as a man. I can go out with no makeup and still get read as a woman. Old pictures look like an entirely different person. Every part of my body, from hair to skin to blood, has changed, and every change feels like how I was always supposed to be. 

And now it feels like all of this joyous transformation might just be a long weekend in the scope of my life. I could lose my job, lose my legal status as a woman, lose my access to estrogen. And, sometimes, it feels like I might be able to accept it. I survived twenty five years without transitioning, didn't I? Life wasn't so bad back then. Just numb and lonely and exhausting from the effort of denying that I had a body or a self or a desire for something more.

No. I'm not going back. Maybe the administration will fall down out the gate, or maybe living in a blue state will be enough, but even if not, now that I know what life can be like, nobody is about to take it away from me. I won't go back into the closet.

Thank you, this really warms my heart! I actually just had my last day at another con (I turned myself into Ai Hoshino this time) and it was an amazing escape from the fear and pain the past couple days have been. Now I have election despair and con hangover hitting simultaneously, so this is wonderful to see.

The post in question.

I'm scared about tomorrow. I'm not unique in feeling this way, and there's nothing I can really do about it, but yeah. Fear. It's what I feel right now. Goodnight.

What I thought internet fame would be like as a kid: You get rich! You get famous! You go on iCarly!

What internet fame (i.e. having a few posts get popular in a very specific corner of a dying website) is actually like: I got invited to Discord servers where the sweetest trans women alive post cute pictures and talk about anime.

Sometimes when I'm feeling blue, I remember that this time last year I didn't even have boobs. I always feel better.

I wore a homemade dryad costume (assembled mostly from a Poison Ivy top from Spirit Halloween and whatever plant-themed stuff I could get from the dollar store) to the Renaissance Fair today and absolutely loved it! Between this and my newfound love for cosplay, I'm just now realizing how much I would have loved to play dress-up as a kid, if only I could've worn the sorts of clothes I really wanted. Instead, I spent the vast majority of my life indifferent to my body and what I wore on it because the only alternative to indifference was dysphoria. So even now that I'm happy and constantly discovering new joys of having a body that I actually like, there's always a little bit of sadness in the knowledge that I could've felt like this before, if only I'd been born different or allowed to figure myself out earlier.

Surprised that the regional Hatsune Miku trend is overwhelmingly based on art when the cosplay options are so rich! All you need is a Miku wig and whatever normal clothes most represent where you live and, boom, you're a regional Miku! I thought I couldn't possibly be the only one onto this, so I went to Spirit Halloween expecting to see a collection of prominently displayed knock-off Miku wigs, only to be disappointed. Welp, guess I'll have a novel costume this Halloween.

While the whole "Ooh, the Cars film universe has nonsensical worldbuilding and elements of body horror" is fun, the obvious answer is similar to Byran Lee O'Malley's explanation of unreal elements in Scott Pilgrim: the story is told from the perspective of a narrator with a skewed perception of the world. In this case, all the characters are just normal humans, but Lightning McQueen is so obsessed with cars that he sees life through a permanent car-filter.