diary

10:30pm

time marches on! unfortunately, not much else goes with it.

it's hard to conceptualize myself as an adult or even someone with independence, and because of this i've made little progress on the whole "being myself" front, and a month has gone by without me following through on quite a few of my new years resolutions. i guess a month isn't that long, in the grand scheme of things, but its still a 1/12 of the year the resolutions were ever for. luckily, i dont actually care too much about resolutions, and i have been (successfully!) making an effort to follow through on others. i wont bother to list them here, because they're kind of silly, and all pretty much boil down to what i go to therapy for. or did go to therapy for, when i went regularly.

speaking of therapy and doctors and stuff, its on the to-do list to call the clinic and make an appointment to finally, finally get my t prescription. im going to try and do it tomorrow, between school and group, or maybe during school, whenever i get a chance. my good friend says he'll drive me there, and my other friend says after insurance t costs like, four bucks. (before insurance on the goodrx app its ~11.) i'm banking on just being able to bill my parents for the doctor appointments. i can afford t myself, so long as someone takes me to CVS for it.

other fun trans updates include: binding with kinesiology tape is good, actually, but should be done sparingly. as soon as i can afford it i'll look into buying some transtape, because i get sick of binders, but i get sick of not wearing them around the house, and tape's a good compromise. plus, my trustred friends tell me it does work on me! i'm a little more critical, but i think that's just because it's my own body.

and now for the reason my feeling up there is a frowny face despite a good chunk of positivity.

i think i've mostly decided that i'm going to go to OU for my undergrad. i'd love to go to tulane, or colorado, or something, yes – but we can't really afford out of state tuition. my dad says we could if we had to, but my mom's the real breadwinner in this house, and she's been pretty frank that we'd be relying heavily on scholarships, and failing that, loans. i don't want to be in debt in my twenties, and there's no way on earth i'll be able to cough up upwards of ~160k dollars in scholarships, no matter how many commercials say billions of dollars go unclaimed a year. (what they don't tell you is how much time and effort that goes into applying for them and that you're ineligible for 99% of them.) even on scholarship congregate sites, a GENEROUS estimate of how much i actually fit the bill for is around 400k, which means i'd need to be awarded over a fourth of those. and i probably don't even actually qualify for that much, because the filters for those websites kind of suck.

i don't mind going to OU. OU is a good school, and my friends will be there, and they'll let me major in linguistics and education, and i think it'd be fun to go to a school with a lot of school spirit (the energy of football games is nice, even if the sport itself is duller than dirt). they have a robust study abroad program and the campus is pretty nice, too. so the school itself isn't really the problem. staying in oklahoma isn't even really the problem. here's the problem:

"Students are assigned to living spaces based on their birth gender unless sex reassignment surgery is complete."

full offense, but what the fuck?

it also says this: "We offer some gender sensitive housing options to accommodate the unique circumstances of individual students. Housing assignments are made on a case-by-case basis, recognizing the variability of individual needs and the fact that spaces may be limited." you know what that sounds like to me? it sounds like, "If we determine you to be sufficiently deviant, we'll give you a single dorm and isolate you from your classmates, because you're a freak."

i was talking to my not-really-related-to-me-brother and he thought it was weird that i wanted a roommate in the first place, but for me, it's... it isn't that i want a roommate, per se. it's that i want a normal college experience, and a roommate is part of that deal. i mean, the only reason colleges require you to live on campus (besides squeezing more money out of you) is to integrate you into the community, so that college doesn't feel so much like "bigger highschool" as it would if you still lived with your mom or something. your roommate is meant to be one of the ways you're forced into the community, by meeting someone new. at least, that's how i think of it.

that's what i want – a college experience. and this feels like... it feels like them saying i'm not allowed to have that. because i'm trans. because my "birth gender" (what?) is female. i'm not allowed to have this experience – OU's housing policy explicitly states that i can't have it – because i'm trans. because i'm a freak. like, is this a joke? do i not live in 2018 anymore? do i seriously, seriously, have to start my freshman year of college fighting the administration to let me have some reasonable fucking housing options, because OU thinks it's even a little bit feasible for an 18 year old to have undergone SRS?

and how MUCH srs, huh? cis people don't know fucking anything about it. does meta count, or does it have to be a phalloplasty? is top surgery enough? are they going to actually ask me to provide documentation for significant, extensive surgery to live in a dorm? absolutely clueless. like, seriously, ~6 months on T is enough for tons of guys to be passing, reliably, without question, and cis people think it's reasonable to make them live with women because they have a vagina, as if it isnt the most moronic thing in the world.

all of this is on top of some general apprehensions about myself and my life i've been having lately, but i'm almost 100% sure these doubts were induced by my parents and compounded by my masochistic binge-reading of transphobic parenting blogs. what if i'm not really trans? what if i've been lying to myself all this time, what if i'm just looking for an easy-out from some terrible societal experience, what if i'm doing it for oppression points? i haven't been; i'm not; and if i were, i would've just stayed a girl. i know this. i know i'm trans – i've known i was trans for a long time! just because my parents never saw the signs when i was a kid doesn't mean they weren't there. i remember them. i remember wanting boy toys but being afraid to ask for them; i remember running in gym in elementary school and wanting to be a boy, be like a boy, athletic and cool (constantly comparing myself to boys, always, ahtletically, academically); wanting to be on the boy's side when they did boy vs girl games; i remember the mortification and dread of growing boobs, the uncomfortableness i've had since day one of wearing a bra, of needing one in the first place. i remember hating my long hair, not knowing why. i remember asking my friends if i looked more masculine with or without my glasses. i remember "pretending" to be a boy on the internet. i remember my i-hate-pink-and-all-things-girly-actually-i-secretly-like-them-sometimes-but-girls-like-them-and-i-dont-want-to-be-like-"other"-girls phase.

sure, you can experience these things and still end up a girl, i guess, because people's experience of gender is varied and fluid, but you don't experience this and go on to wish, in secret, for cancer to give you an excuse to cut your boobs off and your reproductive organs out, if you're a girl. you don't watch coming-of-age films and get pangs of wistful longing for an explicitly boy's childhood you never had. you don't watch any film and see normal-ass dudes, not even particularly attractive or interesting ones, and think to yourself, "why don't i look like that?". fuck, you don't think to yourself "i love being a boy" when you put on nicely fitting guy's-section clothes. you don't really think "i love being a boy" at all, probably! so that's that. i'm a boy, and therefore transgender.

despite this certainty, the doubts plague me.

last but not least: i continue to struggle in school, in every subject, constantly and forever. it makes me sad. i hate school.

so, a lot of negative in my life despite the positive. (a sliver of positive despite the negative?) i'm not looking forward to writing a strongly worded email to OU, i'm tired of having to constantly repeat my mantra of validation, and school is... soul-sucking, but that's not abnormal. maybe come february (and with it, t!) things will start looking up again. i can only hope.

9:18pm

my parents and i have a weird relationship where neither of us know how to like each other or be normal for any stretch of time, so most of our communication ends up being utility (what do you want for dinner? when will you be home? do you need a ride?) or incredibly stressful (i dont support you as a person because you're not enough of an adult to me). there is very little in-between; the best we ever manage anything resembling how normal, regular families talk is in car rides, or occasionally family dinner, but family dinner is more often than not used for quizzing me on how my life is going, which always feels like an interrogation to me, so i'm not really super into it. or into it at all.

this only really bothers me when i'm confronted with the fact that other families do have normal conversations about normal things that don't devolve into passive-agressive remarks about each others failures. other kids actually live in their house and not just their bedroom. other kids go to their parents for emotional support. all of these are things i understand to be normal, and yet are just baffling to me. what do you mean, you and your parents actually like each other as people outside of your familial ties? you enjoy their company? i don't get it. my parents and i are so unlike each other.

anyway, yesterday i finally went to the doctor to get my t prescription written for me, and it went well. in the next two weeks i need to make my way to the clinic again and get my blood drawn for labs, i need to pick up my prescription from the pharmacy, and if all goes well i should get my first shot on the 27th! 14 days. it's a tuesday, which is nice, because 't-shot tuesday!' has a good sound to it. march 27th isn't the best date ever, but it's fine when reduced to numbers: 3/27/18. there's a lot of symmetry there.

initially i tried to keep this appointment a secret from my parents, but it didn't really work. it didn't even occur to me that my parents would remain as the numbers to contact for reminders about appointments i have, so my dad got a message about it, and he brought it up on the way to school the next morning, where he told me that this he and my mom hadn't forgotten i was transgender or anything, it was just that they choose not to see me as legitimate because its an adult decision and i'm not an adult, or something stupid and worthless like that. he didn't forbid me from going because my parents aren't complete assholes and do realize i actually am fully capable of doing whatever i want to my body because i am, indeed, an adult, but it was still kind of awful to hear. its not like i expected support from them at this point anyway, after how excessively clear they've made it that they're just not interested in this mess, but...

a week later i went to the appointment and lied about where i was going to my mom and my dad didn't say anything, so i kind of figured he forgot. but after the appointment i went to dinner with my friend and his sister and then he dropped me off at home and i went to bed, and the next morning, my mom sent me a text message from her plane ride, asking if i'd gone to the doctor yesterday, and i said yes, and i said i was seeing [physician, not therapist] and she said ok, and she asked me if i'd started "treatments" yet, and i said no, which is true, but maybe not the full truth.

so i scheduled my follow-up for the 27th and asked my brother if he'd take me to the pharmacy when he got back from vacation and i'm thinking that, to further prove my independence (because their real hang-up is that they think i'm not independent because i don't drive) to myself if nobody else, i'll take the bus to the clinic for my labs on my own.

as for college, after (another) excessively stressful conversation about a month ago, turns out OU might not be on the list. i'm awaiting word from my first choice, and i'm anxious it'll be a no... i should've applied early action, sigh. i'd just dismissed it as an option by that point because it's out of state. oh well. hopefully i get in. if not, maybe i can transfer later.

i've decided to put my feeling today as the shades emoji because even though things are kind of rocky and weird and i hate living at home so, so much, i'm really so happy that i'm starting t soon. i'm so happy. i've wanted (i've needed) this for years, and it's finally happening. i'm starting t, i'm graduating soon, i'm going off to college in the fall... the future is so bright.