TRANS FRIENDS:
Would you be willing to let me share pictures of your transition timeline on my blog?
There are so many of us that feel like it will be impossible to ever be ourselves. I want to show what social transition, HRT, and/or gender-affirming surgeries are capable of doing for us because I know that would have made a difference for me once upon a time.
If you can reply or send me a direct message with your timeline or before/after images, and let me know whether you want your name/masto handle on it or if you would prefer to have no name/handle on it, I would really appreciate it! The piece in question will discuss a little bit of complicated history of the before/after transition images but then focus on the power of seeing how dynamic our bodies are and how much is possible through different kinds of transition. If you change your mind after sharing, I can always remove your images.
One of the biggest challenges in transition for many trans people is getting their doctors to give them the care and medicines we need.
Patient Self-Advocacy is one of the best ways to bridge that gap, but you probably don't know How To Get What You Need From Your Doctor. Come by and have a read to see what good self-advocacy looks like, as #StainedGlassWoman returns from holiday break!
#ClimateDiary As 2023 is ending, I recall my hopeful optimism a year ago that 2023 might be a #TurningPoint for climate awareness, carbon emissions plateauing and #Transition / #Regeneration - it being the 50th anniversary of Schumacher’s #SmallIsBeautiful and all that (see 🧵 in link) .
I kept on sharing this great cover (“the new world is almost born” #Gramsci). But has 2923 been a turning point? 1/5
Today officially marks 2 months for me taking HRT. The differences have been small so far, but they are there. My skin is definitely softer and I feel my emotions have opened up a bit. Or maybe that's just allowing myself to let that happen. Who can say?
Either way I'm super excited for the future and can't wait to see what 2 more months and 2 more years does, and what my life will be like. LFG! 🤙💗 #trans#transition
The first series on my Substack, Opening the Black Box, is a detailed dive into what it was like to live through the #gender questioning process. We have a lot of accounts of what it's like to #transition and to grow up #trans but it seems like almost all of our accounts of people like me, people who hatched but had no idea before they did, are (ironically) comics.
I've been trying to advance #sustainability since about 2007. I originally have a background in #engineering and #design, and did a PhD about technological substitutes for critical resources. However, #energytransition has been my main focus.
I firmly believe that broadening #democracy is THE key to sustainability.
I am continuously gobsmacked how the significant changes to my outward appearance from #transition are miniscule when compared to the internal restructuring going on inside my brain.
I feel like a house that got a fresh exterior coat of paint while the interior was torn down to the studs, a whole bunch of those studs were replaced, and then a completely new floorplan was installed.
It is DIFFERENT in here, now. Way more roomy, way more comfortable, way more functional. Just… wow.
My brain has been working overtime, I’ve written 3 essays in 2 days. Strap yourself in, or on… whatever 🤷♀️
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
or, SISYPHUS vs VENUS
Last night I realized that my transition took about as long as it would take former me to write and produce an album of music, but transition has already given me more than a lifetime of making music ever did.
Hi, I'm Amani, could you please help me with my transition?
I am trying to change my life and finally be able to be a happy woman. I just hope to have the support of my entire community and all good people. Please, if you can donate and share, I appreciate it very much🤞🏼🏳️⚧️
I normally don't like doing this at all, but when I made the payment for the #DIYHRT shipment, my bank account comes up short and there's not enough money to pay my insurance this month. Insurance that I will need for appointments and paying for #HRT the legit way in the future.
So below is my venmo account for anyone who wants to donate to help me fund my insurance payments for this month. I was originally thinking "This isn't as severe as helping trans women move to a less-hostile environment," but then I realized that that was impostor syndrome talking. And that if you need help, you need help.
To anyone that will say "Get a job," I'm working on it via talking with job coaches. The process is slow, but steady. Hopefully, I will not have to do this again.
Is it typically when ones low on E energy levels drop quite hard?
My implants where due about a week ago but been trying to work another doc to do them.
So I am likely lower than normally and I feel so fucking tired and terrible... This is expected? I guess there isn't much I can do until I get things going again?
Hewo Fedi ! Ceci est une annonce, du coup les #boost sont plus que bienvenus !
Je suis à la recherche du Graal visiblement: un institut de beauté qui ne se met pas à faire le mort lorsqu'on lui demande d'épiler une personne en #transition. Dans le pire du pire à l'échelle du Grand-Est ou, idéalement, dans les alentours de #Reims.
Si quelqu'un a une adresse ou un élément de réponse, je m'engage à lui faire livrer un paquet de Choco Moo.
So it's a well-known effect/side-effect of feminizing HRT, but wow has my appetite gone through the floor. Not like "never hungry" but like, "it takes a lot less to satisfy my hunger."
This is colliding with my grew-up-poor impulses to always finish what's on my plate.
I never understood it when a woman didn't finish her fries, and now I sit there staring at half an order of fries, not knowing what to do with myself.
(Astro)Physics has been a core part of my personal identity since my childhood and illuminates my views of the natural and human worlds. In particular, doing research on dynamical complexity on astronomical scales has contributed to the development of my increasingly alarmed scientist perspective on a variety of very earthly issues, chief among which our climate & ecological crises.
However, paradoxically (or perhaps as a logical conclusion ? ), what I have learned in part thanks to my astrophysicist viewpoint has also increasingly led me in recent years to wonder if I should not use my scientific skills and training to help mitigate these crises instead of doing astrophysics. After much weighing of what was the best move from my comfy position in the astrophysics ivory tower, I have finally “looked up” from my speculative theoretical calculations, and have recently decided to gradually shift my research priorities to ecological sciences with a focus on biodiversity conservation, in an attempt to make the most of my research training, experience and vocation to modestly help, to the best of my scientific abilities, understand and mitigate the ecological crisis we are facing here, on Earth.
Why ? Well, first of all, with increasing professional experience, my personal views of astrophysics & astronomy have evolved to become quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is a field full of very smart people and intellectually challenging and exciting. But it is also now sufficiently mature that we essentially know all we need to know to grasp our position, both insignificant and precarious, on Earth and in the larger Universe. In some sense, mission accomplished: the field has done its job (well) to scientifically enlighten human bipedes. On the other hand, there remains a myriad of unanswered questions, of lesser importance I think, and more or less interesting to solve, that in my opinion me and most of my colleagues could spend their lives working on without making any significant difference to human progress, knowledge, and well-being in relation to our environment. Most of the research questions we work on have become in my opinion misguided intellectual raisons-d’être in an era of bloated, overhyped academic research and industrial-scale scientific publication. Working on such questions make us feel busy and smart, but in reality my own impression, informed by accumulated experience, is that we are nowhere near to have the adequate tools, theoretical, numerical, observational, or experimental, to make any significant progress on most of these. Why then waste our energy and time on these questions, most of them quite insignificant – when exceptional times invite us to focus our intellect on more pressing issues ? Fact is, astrophysics is and will remain a very speculative field, with very limited falsifiability, in the foreseeable future. I may expand on this in future posts. What matters here is that having spent most of my professional efforts myself on not even being wrong, all of this while the world burns, has become a major existential issue for me.
Then, there is the problem of the pollution footprint of astrophysics. Let’s write this plainly: we are the most polluting scientific field on the planet: mega-observatories, steel and concrete cathedrals of science built in remote desertic locations, mega-space observatories packed with electronics dumped into space by huge rockets (some of them built by corporations that are actively contributing to the destruction of our environment), billions of CPU hours spent in high-performance computing numerical models of doubtful informational value sucking lots of not-so-low-carbon electricity (3t/MCPUh in the lowest-emitting countries), lots of electronic purchases to develop high-tech astronomical instruments, and buzzing international travel all over the world to conferences and international collaborations all contribute to our huge footprint. In my current research institute, each individual, researcher or other, emits on average 28t CO2 eq/ year in his/her professional activities ! My own individual professional footprint, including HPC (but excluding my occasional use of observational data from space observatories) was of the order of 10t CO2 eq/year until recently. None of this is sustainable and justifiable for a field that is nowhere near essential to document and help solve our environmental crises. However, despite a rising awareness among the base, our community has barely started taking significant steps to change that at the science policy power levels that really matter. This would require questioning the actual need for our most polluting, core research activities, and to downscale significantly instrumentally and in term of human resources, especially on the engineering side. I am having a very hard time being part of the problem in the environmental catastrophe movie unfolding in front of our eyes. Here too, I will probably talk more in future posts about the detailed arguments underlying the case I’m making, as I do not want to give the impression that I am saying this lightly.
Mix all these considerations together, and shake with a pinch of mid-career scientist professional existential crisis and boredom, having the feeling of having done everything I could and not being able to give more to the field, and you have the recipe for a major introspection and reconsideration of future career directions. I have honestly grown tired of astrophysical sciences, its research practices, and of my own perceived personal inadequacy to do anything significant there. I feel both useless and wasted. So I have concluded it is high time to use my energy and experience to serve more important research causes before I get too old and intellectually rotten, modestly and with whatever limited intellectual capacities I have left at my advanced age of 44. What better cause to serve than ecology and biodiversity conservation research for someone with a deep sensitivity for nature, mountains, and complex patterns of the natural world ?
This place will be here to describe my experience, thoughts and struggles as a scientist in the process of such a (scientifically difficult, and certainly not obvious) transition. I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience as it unfolds, both for egoistic reasons, to encourage myself and to conserve momentum when things get difficult (as they inevitably will do), but also to make other younger or older people with similar questionings, and maybe eager to take similar steps, relate and share. And also maybe as a bit of an activivist too, to contribute to instill through some logical arguments some sense of emergency and questioning among some of my colleagues less sensitive to these issues.
How, when, where all of this is going to happen, what is going to be posted in this place, that will be a story for upcoming posts. I hope you enjoy the ride. Please feel free to weigh in in the comments now and then to tell me/us about your own experience and thoughts on the matters I will post about, especially if you are a scientist yourself. I would also like this place to be a forum for debate or experience-sharing. What is important for me though is that this is always done constructively, in a civil and informed way, and in good faith. My view of these exchanges is that they should in the end lift us up all to help us better understand our place and role as humans and sometimes scientists, both as part of, and powerful actors (for the best or the worst) of our earthly natural world. This kind of conversation, in my view, is more than ever needed (actually, well-beyond scientific circles) in times of massive media dis- or mis-information and through-the-roof political irresponsibility on the biggest issues of our times, preserving the physical wonder that is nature and life on the pale blue dot.
“I have been in denial, trying to conform for 64 years. My family, friends and acquaintances knew me as a ‘straight woman’. I know this is not going to be easy for them. Time is not on my side, so the long wait I am faced with for GIC appointments is daunting. But there is only one way for me to go now and that is forward!”
Alt text: Text as in post. Picture is a close up of someone holding a phone.
Tout plaquer, la desertion ne fait pas partie de la solution mais du problème, Anne Humbert
@livres
Un petit essai qui parlera de la transistion, du choix que certain et certaine feront pour changer de boulot et mener une autre vie plus en accord avec nos valeurs.
Ce que critique Anne Humbert est justement tout un mouvement qui fait dans l'Art du storytelling et le vend. Un mouvement qui oublie ses racines, son héritage, plus exactement leur classe sociale qui leur permet de réaliser leur rêve quelqu'en soit le cout et le risque.
C'est une chose que la majorité des gens ne peut pas se permettre à cause de leur situation fragile.
Donc pour résumer, ya la narration "j'ai été ingénieur.e et j'ai tout plaqué" sous diverse forme. Qui sous-entends "quand on veut, on peut". Ya la classe sociale, "j'ai de l'argent, je peux acquérir des terres, changer de boulot comme de paire de baskets"
Sur le fond, je suis plutot d'accord avec ses idées lorsqu'elle explique qu'on manque de paysans et paysannes parce que les terres agricoles sont inaccessibles à cause de leur prix. Plus exactement des investissements à réaliser sont élevés. Et que forcément celleux qui ont les moyens sont avantagés.
Reste, que ya tout de meme une autre vocation derrière le métier paysan où une grande partie seront à la retraite et l'agrobuiness va acquérir leur terre. Ya aussi la question de l'insécurité alimentaire, instabilité climatique où il faut agir très vite...et travailler dans le vent sous la pluie, laver les carottes dans l'eau froide, se lever à 4h du matin pour le marché à 6h un samedi, les demandes de dérogation, autorisation de construction, planifications, plein de choses qui ne sont pas abordés ou ellipsés via le ménage des champs.
Au final, le très petit livre n'offrira pas vraiment une perspective nuancée, ce n'est pas son propos mais elle nous rapelle que la transistion n'est pas forcément accessible à tous et toutes. Et qu'il existe d'autres moyens de luttes.
EN:
Number2 just told us about transitioning.
I would love to have insight, info and testimonies from trans people and their families!
Her dad doesn't really get it... I will need to be the buffer and explain things to him.
Any info, link, book recommendation and sharing of your experience welcome! #transgender#transition