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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 2nd, 2024

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  • CW: self-harm

    I enjoyed self-harming and feeling pain when I was dissociating a lot, I think there are clearly examples where people inflict pain on themselves for non-sexual and non-religious (i.e. not for punitive / atoning) reasons. Besides some kinds of self-harm, eating spicy food seems like a clear example of this. Pain releases endorphins, you can get high on pain. For what it’s worth, I also have enjoyed every physical trauma I have experienced (being hit by a car, being thrown over the handlebars of my bicycle at speed and my face hitting the asphalt first, etc.).




  • Since I transitioned I’ve been thinking a lot about how little I knew about trans people until I realized I was one and then took much more seriously educating myself.

    It makes me feel ashamed because of how little I understand so many other oppressed groups, and how little true empathy I have. Even if on the surface I have respect for people and consider myself an “ally” to various groups, I feel I should do more than just signal respect and support. Maybe it’s an unrealistically high bar, but my conscience certainly thinks I need to do more to empathize with and better understand other groups.

    I can’t help but feel my default tendency is towards a kind of accidental tribalism - I understand perspectives I choose to engage with and understand and this results in a cultural cloistering, an accidental in-and-out-grouping because of how I naturally do or don’t understand someone’s life experience based on my own. Unless I go out of my way to do a lot of work to understand other perspectives, I otherwise won’t be likely to do that.








  • The general advice is if you are wishing to avoid a pregnancy that you should assume HRT won’t make you sterile (and use protection), and if you are hoping to have kids that you should assume it will make you sterile (and get fertility services like freezing sperm before starting HRT).

    Estrogen also causes penile atrophy[1], so the phallus may not be as capable of penetration as before HRT.

    From the OP’s inappropriate title, I assume they are coming from the context of pornography, where the actresses are using methods to prevent penile atrophy (most porn involving trans women do not show women with penile atrophy), but in those contexts they are also likely taking steps to avoid pregnancy so the question clearly veers outside of the initial context.