Right now, in the year 2025 CE, it is relatively common to believe that if you are born with a penis, you are a man, and if you are born with a vagina, you are a woman. It is common to believe that anyone who attempts to assert otherwise is mentally ill at best.

At face value, when I put it that way free of any other context, reading it as a severed employee of Lumon Corporation might read it, it looks relatively reasonable.

But let's look at it another way: Why the fuck would you care what genitals someone else has?

There's lots of talk about gender lately in the human world, and it's frankly getting exhausting. It's not likely that anyone who reads this will have not heard all the arguments, so I won't bother going over them. But I will say a little bit about my experience.

I never felt comfortable as a boy. As in, when I was a child, I was basically always uncomfortable, but also, the idea of "boyhood" never resonated with me. I have vague, distant memories of being a child wishing I was a girl. But those thoughts were socialized out of me. They were "wrong." I was a boy, and that was that.

Fast-forward 25 years. I've got basically everything I thought I wanted. I've been extremely fortunate. I'm married with no kids and two cats. I'm doing quite well in my school where I'm changing careers. But still something isn't quite right. I've spent years feeling things weren't right, but I couldn't seem to find what it was killing me.¹

To make a long story just a tad shorter, I saw this meme.

That was my egg-crack moment.

Then, I had some friends who convinced me that, if I wanted to be another gender, I could just be another gender. I started doing research on hormones and whatnot. But still it seemed scary.

Then, one night while I was bored at home alone between Christmas and New Year's Eve, I decided to download a pre-LLM AI face-changer app. My entire life, every time I looked in the mirror, it was... acceptable, at best. Seeing myself as a woman I realized just how little it took to make myself... hot. I say that half in jest, but truly, I finally saw a version of myself I could be happy seeing in the mirror.

I immediately realized I could no longer live like I had been. It wasn't even a choice. I had opened Pandora's box. Insert another cliche.

Fast forward another 4 years, and I am so much happier with who I am. I've gone through the tumultuous second puberty, the divorce (we're still friends!), figuring out makeup and bra sizes and realizing to a whole new extent how patriarchy affects both cis and trans women.

Now, I just want to live my life. Like, I just want to go the grocery store, movie theater, travel, walk my dog, pet my cats, visit to an aquarium. Normal shit.

I am fortunate enough to live in a place where most people don't bat an eye at me anymore than any other person. In fact, I've been getting a flattering number of comments about my hair being beautiful lately. I'm very grateful!

However, that comfort comes at a price. No, literally, the cost of living in this town is starting to get ridiculous compared to more rural areas of the state, and especially to other states. But living in one of those other places comes with another cost: I'd be much more likely to run into folks that glare at me when I wear a dress, or worse, accost me when trying to use a bathroom for folks that match my general appearance. Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated assault. There are videos of cis folks trying to go to the bathroom and getting harassed by people thinking they're trans and asking to see their IDs.

If I hadn't been an ADHD procrastinating dummy, last year I could have gotten a passport that said I was a lady. Fortunately I have my license, but now with this stupid administration, I can't leave the country without outing myself, which can be a major deal in certain parts of the world.

Two of the times I've travelled by plane in the US since coming out, I've been groped by security and told that they detected something in my pants before I outed myself to them as transgender. Because I didn't do a good enough job tucking. Because they saw my license said I was a lady, and set their stupid machine to that setting, I'm guessing. Or maybe they wanted to humiliate me! Who knows.

The company I work for is based in Florida, where laws, although vague, potentially allow folks to assault me for trying to go to the "wrong" bathroom. Every time I use a gendered public restroom, I do a little speed-walk to the stall with my head down, and upon exiting, try to wash my hands as quickly as possible.

I just want to shit in peace. I just want to travel without danger of being outed and potentially assaulted. I'm not demanding that I be allowed to do a strip dance or inject unwilling children or feminize anyone or put litter boxes in my schools (god that rumor was fucking stupid lol). I'm not trying to shove my identity in anyone's faces. I just want to live my life. And a lot of folks, for some reason, want to make that very difficult. I think that's fucked up.