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As a lesbian, it’s happened twice already that one “guy” stands out to me and I think “huh maybe they’re kinda cute and interesting, I wanna get to know them” and then I get to know them better and it’s a closeted trans girl who I somehow sniffed with my little nonbinary lesbian nose

#many guys I found attractive in high school came out as gay #I have a similar gaydar as this eggdar #(also I should’ve realized I’m transmasc earlier lol)

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Slugs in love!

Pattern is my own

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TIL that there's an '80s movie where they portrayed Smilodon by sticking actual fake teeth onto actual live lions.

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For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

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You can tell when someone’s frame of reference for “normal people” is more “people at the church sponsored ice cream social” and less “people on the bus”

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some of you people are so obsessed with having an acceptable group to ‘punch up’ at that you would rather pretend a marginalized group are Basically The Oppressors™ than listen to their valid criticisms about the fact that ‘punching up’ very rarely hits the intended target, and the majority of the actual damage of that act is suffered by fellow marginalized people in your own community. there is a significant difference between venting frustrations about privileged groups and just outright attacking anyone who (you assume) experiences that axis of privilege regardless of - and in many cases outright denying - their actual lived experiences. it goes far beyond just ‘venting frustrations’ when what you’re really doing is trying to find a moral justification to bully people you don’t like, and when your own desire for catharsis and moral superiority leads to ignoring the voices of the vulnerable people you hurt. you’re not ‘punching up’ - you just like punching people for the sake of punching.

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Being single forever and never experiencing romance is only sad for someone who actually wants to have those things.

When an aromantic person says they’ll be single forever, that’s not “sad.” That’s just a statement of what they want out of their life.

Imagine if I responded to someone calling their partner their other half with “that’s actually kind of sad. Are you saying you’re not a whole person on your own? Why would you want to be trapped with someone who makes you feel like you’re incomplete without them? Are you okay? Do you need help?” They would probably be annoyed with me and I can’t blame them. But that’s coming from the fact that they’re not viewing it the way I am; they’re actually happier with the person.

Personally, as an aromantic, I’ve never felt more broken than when I’ve tried to force myself to date and be alloromantic like everyone else. I would be miserable in a relationship no matter how healthy it was because I wouldn’t feel any of those feelings they’re feeling and I’d feel stuck either being honest and hurting them or playing the part for their sake and feeling even worse. And a major reason for all that is cause I don’t even actually want any of that. I’ve just also felt like I didn’t get a choice because before I discovered the aro community, as far as I could see, nobody was willing to entertain the idea of someone being single because they wanted to. You see characters in media that say “I don’t do romance” and they’re always paired up with someone in the end and always portrayed as happier for it. You see characters that actually stay single forever and they’re shown as having something so wrong with them nobody would willingly date them. You step outside of fiction and you talk to people and it’s never if you’ll get married, it’s always when. When you go to prom. When you have your first kiss. When you start dating. When you fall in love. When. When. When. Never if. Because god forbid we consider the possibility you won’t. God forbid we consider you might not even want to. And if they don’t, then we start dragging out the godforsaken yet. I don’t get crushes… yet. I don’t date… yet. I don’t want romance in my life… yet. When did you get your first crush? I’m 28. When will I be old enough for you to stop saying yet? And if this sounds romance negative, sorry, I’m just sharing how I’m feeling about it. But if you don’t want more aros as angry and sad about it all as me, maybe do us a favor and stop treating romance like something as inevitable as death and taxes.

I initially planned for this post to be way shorter but I don’t think I could find a shorter way to express the gravity of how insufferable it is to be told “that’s so sad” when I say I want to stay single. Cause if I’m being real, it isn’t fully comparable to any annoying thing I can say to an alloromantic. It won’t have the same weight. Throwing salt at someone’s face might lead to it getting in their eyes, but it won’t sting like it would if you did it to someone covered head to toe in paper cuts.

I don’t feel like I’m asking for much. Just entertain the notion that someone can be happy without a romantic partner. That being single, temporarily or for life, isn’t a sad fate.

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Behold

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this video now

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where’s all the love for hairy femmes. hairy femmes i love you