I suppose I could look around for laser hair removal but I’m little worried about my budget.

i had saved up a bit in advance, but not a ton. doing it through a school definitely made that money stretch out a lot.

I was thinking patches, I heard they’re just as good?

they are okay, i used them very briefly when my insurance was giving me shit. too much skin irritation and the dose you end up with depends on how well it sticks to you. plus the dosing on those is more for cis women in menopause unless you use a bunch. to get to a therapeutic dose with those i'd need 3-5 of the largest patches, rotated twice a week. they are also relatively expensive and not always easy to source. compared to that i found sticking myself every 5 days is way easier.

you definitely don't need to start with that, but it's very easy to do subcutaneous injections. i rarely draw blood and barely feel a thing these days. i ended up injecting in my torso because i'm pretty thin and when i was doing it in my leg i'd always be hitting muscle.

It kind of hurts that a huge swath of local LGBT people now basically hate me with basically no hope for them coming back around.

that does hurt, i hope you are able to find some community. i do hope you are reflecting on this though, it's not fun having other people (including other trans people) obsessing over you. if someone in any friend group becomes the focus of someone else’s fixation, the group is going to close ranks around that person.

the reason i say to reflect on this is that if your takeaway is that they're 'haters' you’ll carry that and associated behaviors into the next community and it’ll happen again.

if the takeaway is ‘i did something that made someone uncomfortable and i need to understand what that was and not repeat it,’ that’s a thing you can actually work on. plus it leaves the door open to rebuilding somewhere, maybe even with some of these people eventually.

obsessing over a transwoman

i know you don’t mean anything by it, but in my experience 'transwoman' with no space is the preferred spelling of people who tend to argue that trans women aren't women. not passing judgement, just fyi. i prefer to use trans as an adjective, like 'tall' or 'loud' or 'annoying'.

I intend to acquire HRT this Friday.

good luck, i started via informed consent at pp and it was not difficult at all, but definitely recommend getting your primary care doctor in the loop for running ultrasensitive estradiol bloodwork routinely

i was in a similar situation to you physically, it's really never too late to start. i repped for over 20 years before starting transition in my 30s. i didn't have a huge crashout but hanging out with other trans women made it feel a lot more approachable. it finally got to me and i started hrt.

once you start and get used to hrt, i highly recommend getting on shots if you can tolerate it. multi-day cycles are way better than having swings during the day or based on your metabolism. injectable also doesn't hit your liver and is pretty easy to stockpile.

if you have any way to get laser or electrolysis, i found that made a huge difference in my mental health as well as how other people interpret my appearance and address me. you can find places to do it on the cheap, esthetician schools often let you get that work done for deep discounts. i started doing that as soon as i started hrt, the androgen suppression means you won't get as much regrowth.

eating food is another big one, you will get fat redistribution on hrt but it requires that you have some fat to redistribute. i really had to work through a lot of restrictive behavior patterns that i'd accumulated over the years, but it's been worth it to grow tits and ass.

blue maga hard at work ^^^

don't worry, real life always comes before posting online.

i appreciated the conversation as well, feel free to reach out in the future if and when it's convenient for you.

And more dads need to step the messaging to them to respect women

unless it's trans women apparently.

you are not 'all anti genocide advocacy', you are one person on the internet who is primarily obsessed with defending your favorite youtuber.

you are also not doing 'great work' by any measurement.

this post is about you, i'm just discussing your behavior.

your main community is ChapoTrapHouse who glazed Platner

i'm not hexbear, i don't even moderate that comm. i am subscribed to it because it's their 'main' comm.

they were rightfully roasting CTH for giving that guy any oxygen, the podcast that the comm is named after is more often the butt of the joke than anything taken seriously in my experience.

incredible self-description at play, i never said this is about me, i'm just witnessing pure undiluted projection:

Your sheer arrogance and hypocrisy is off the charts . Not to mention the amount of racism needed to make a genocide about yourself.

the subject of the post is you being banned and i'm speaking to your character and history of behavior.

you are the one using people genocided as the excuse for and to deflect criticisms of your dogshit behavior.

nobody on fucking hexbear liked graham platner and you are incapable of engaging in anything beyond youtuber slop

you wouldn't because .world defederated from hexbear before anything was ever federated.

they have some great ones

hey #1 bad empanada defender caught a 3 day ban and he deserved more.

throwback to him getting banned from hexbear while calling people 'transzionists' for shittalking bad empanada

part of a pattern of behavior at this point. BE uses palestine as a reason to attack all trans people, 'trolling' and people like OP defend it tooth and nail

here's another example + modlog1 + modlog2

it's actually incredibly pathetic to get all your information and positions from one streamer and the fact that you think anyone you're arguing with fucking cares about breadtube speaks volumes about you.

should have been perm banned a while ago.

i ended up going to sleep as well.

I’m curious how the inevitable bad players are prevented from using/abusing/destroying such idealist constructs,

i gotta point out a nomenclature difference here. you're using 'idealist' colloquially to mean unrealistic/naive, however it has a philosophical meaning too and what i'm doing is manifestly not idealist. mutual aid isn’t a utopian vision, it’s a description of something that already exists and has always existed. working class and marginalized communities have always built these networks because the alternative is not surviving. mutual aid as a concept predates the theory, the theory just names what people were already doing.

mutual aid networks deal with bad actors through community accountability rather than hierarchical enforcement, which is actually more resilient than it sounds because the relationships built through the work create real social fabric.

That’s more than little too vague to help. I guess I’m looking for something concrete & just detailed enough to be able to picture it in action.

are you familiar with the black panther breakfast program or food not bombs? here's a short article on the subject of mutual aid in general if that's more helpful, or a pamphlet if you prefer

you may well be right in that there is no return from the dark side.

for me i just try to be realistic about my limitations. i've seen enough electoral cycles to find them draining with no payoff. even if you 'win' there's going to be a deal cut and you don't have any way to really punish the politicians once they're in office. directing that energy to helping people in my surroundings year-round means i can build something that feeds my neighbors and attracts others to continue the work. it's not charity, you don't answer to a board or people with money, you just get together with your friends and work together, everyone takes from it what they need.

why don't you just call me a slur already, you clearly want to and this is all so cowardly

pelosi + co aging out just means a new crop of corporate democrats take over. the machine does not depend on individuals and there's plenty of young ghouls waiting in the wings.

'progressive' is pretty much branding at this point. someone can call themselves progressive while supporting weapons shipments to a genocide and opposing medicare for all because it's 'not politically feasible'

the label does no analytical work at all.

I'm assuming "tankies" are well-versed in this

they tend to be, i'm an anarchist and i've had many mls work with me in a positive way locally over the years.

I'm curious how you see that coming about short of a full-on revolution.

i did spell it out in that same statement, but maybe it was not clear enough.

when i said 'organizing and dual power building' i'm thinking of things like mutual aid as entrypoint. the idea that building networks where people can take care of eachother outside the market both meets immidiate needs and builds the relationships to make future organizing possible.

the ELI5 version would be summed up as 'build things that work outside the market, make peoples lives better now, demonstrate that another way of organizing is possible. 'voting' may be a tiny sliver of your time in the year, but electoral politics takes an inordinate amount of resources and time. despite all that effort any one election can flip the script on decades of work.

i could recommend reading material if you're interested in de-naturalizing some of the operational assumptions of capitalism.