Nightmares!

I'm having a great deal of stress lately, premature stress.  I haven't even gone to my first therapy session yet (one week and five days!) but I'm having so much stress related to testosterone it's insane.  I mean, it's at least around three months and two weeks before I even will know if I get the damned stuff and I'm worried about stuff like whether or not I'll be able to self-inject or whether or not I'm going to go bald.

I have financial worries, too, but right now I have enough support where I shouldn't worry too much.  Plus I have a job interview on Monday, and if they've hired my cousin, they should hire me.  My main reason for stress there is that I don't want them to fire me for being trans... not just because of the getting-fired-for-being-trans part, but because this is one of my favorite stores and I don't want to feel obligated to boycott them for firing me for a stupid reason.  But anyway, although finances are stressful, they aren't the stressful part of this.

The nightmares, though, are.

Drowsy personal updates time.

I'm the one on the left.  Yeah, go Packers!

This is a personal diary kind of which goes over:

• My state of health
• Therapy stuff
• Testosterone stuff

 I shouldn't be that tired, but today was a lazy day.  I "cut" class (I don't actually consider it "cutting" because there was no way my two-wheel-drive pickup truck which is nearly old enough to drive on its own was going to tackle the snowdrifts on my driveway, even with how much of my therapy fund I sacrificed for new tires) and so I slept in and tried to be productive.

So today I'm feeling good.  Based on the picture to the right and comments made by my friend Tina (also pictured) I am starting to be able to conceptualize how much weight I've really lost.

LGB People: No, you can't use the word "tranny."

Ann Coulter: Not a "tranny."

I've been cooking this one for a few days now.  I've decided to become involved in my old Rainbow Alliance again, even though I graduated from that school.  My current school I'm pretty sure doesn't have an LGBT group and I'm awkward about joining a new one, so off to the old one I go.

First, background.  I was an officer of this organization for I think two years (Or was it three?  I'm pretty sure it was two, but I was an officer in a lot of clubs and orgs in College: First Attempt so I may be wrong).  In the three years I was involved in it, I became kind of that go-to token trans guy who you talked to when you wanted to understand some trans issue and helped people who wanted to understand radical queer politics.  So while I was there, there wasn't all that much crap being said and done to our trans population.  Yes, there was cissexist garbage, but it was easily controlled because there were people who were advocating.  When I left, a different trans guy (who technically is an author of this blog, too, although he hasn't written anything) kind of took over.  Now he's gone, too.

Is putting trans people in mainstream advertising ever okay?

Edit:  Sabrina Pandora of TQ Nation has a different perspective on this commercial which you can read at REWARDS WHERE DUE on their WordPress.  Quite a few trans people are considering this commercial to be a good thing, so I figured it was important to show that they have perspectives on this too.

The commercials during the Super Bowl were pretty crappy this year, but somewhere between the pre-game show and kick-off this commercial came on and I immediately had to rewind the DVR because it confused the hell out of me.  It took me a while and a little talking with others to finally decide whether I was okay with it or not... and the answer, spoiler alert, is "no."

Do I Pass?

I've noted a trend that isn't recent but it is common among trans people online, and that's the habit of posting a picture of yourself online and asking the fatal question "Do I Pass?"  Recently a part of it included the tendency to get pissed off when people actually answered the question honestly, which I can only partially condemn because a lot of that advice really was pretty shitty.

But anyway, there's my basic opinion on the whole issue:  Most advice you get from people looking at your picture will be neither necessary nor accurate.  And there is a very good reason for that.