Discontent

Shi scratches hir face, frowning as hir hand runs across the still too human contours of hir jaw. Shi looks at hir hands and rubs them, sore. Everything was coming up fine, according to hir doctors. Things proceeding slightly quickly, not outside the error bars of the average range though.

Hir ears were pointed, longer. Shi flexes on the nascent muscles, flipping hir ears slightly downwards, and utterly dislodging hir glasses. Hir glasses clatter to the floor, luckily undamaged.

Shi sighs, and picks them up. It wasn't clear if they were going to be necessary forever, since hir eyes were going to be changing over time. That timeline was fuzzier than shi would like,between 2 months and 10 years(whenever the stem cells feel like it essentially).

And from now until then there would be a lot of problems, the glasses will need to be adapted for the nose as it is, then as it will be. Everything will change.

This state has no name because it is intermediate between two more substantial ranges of appearances. But most of all, it's not a state that particularly lends itself to seeing hirself as shi wants to be, the features that shi wants gone most are still upon hir, while the things that have already changed feel disharmonious.

Shi wants to like what's happened so far, but all it has done is turn hir into a wookie. It's all intermediate steps, but, it still doesn't feel good to be somewhere that doesn't feel like it's closer to where you want to be.

Human Replacement Therapy

"So," My dad says, "you're really sure you want to go through with this? I understand that it has effects that are irreversible past a certain point" His eyes are full of concern. It is misplaced concern, I think, but I can tell he is trying to be as kind to my ambitions as he can manage.

"I've wanted this my entire life." I say. He nods and swallows, looking back and forth between myself and my mom, she was concerned too, but I had talked about it more with her. She's the parent I always confided in.

"Well, your mom and I can help you with the cost for now." He says.

It was one of the easier discussions I have had with him.


Informed Consent

The clinic was full of posters that sent tingles up my spine, medical conditions relevant to people such as myself, that were leaving the human species behind, genetically at least, socially, well, that seems more like a longer term arc.

The doctor looks between me and the paperwork that I had signed. I wish I had known that it was informed consent sooner, and the thought of that fills me with regret. "You understand the basic risks here, that there are changes that will not revert over time? That the treatment may cause blood clots?" I nod twice, the second concern was more common in the previous generation of treatments, but it seems easier to say yes than point that out. "Alright," She smiles at me and hands me a tablet, "There's a lot more options here than in human-biased gender dysphoria treatments; fill out this form, then we'll go over the risks of the specific treatments together."

The options were impressively diverse. Species, hybrids, and sex and gender characteristics of course. A disproportionately large number of therians, myself included have issues with that too. It was easy to select the species, but the other options had me flushing imagining the scenarios I could never have fulfilled as I am right now.

I went with a more 'feminine build', dual wielding.

The specifics selected, I hand the tablet back to the doctor, she reads over it, "Your libido will most likely be substantially different in general. The specific options you've selected with regards to digit structure may result in greater susceptibility to repetitive stress injuries, and ergonomic issues with common products. The changes in your skin will result in substantially decreased sweat production, which may lead to hyperthermia, so you will need to take effort keep cool. Your wings will result in increased shoulder and back strain, and you will need to be registered as an ultralight under FAA rules if you wish to fly in controlled airspace."

"Sorry, what?" I ask.

She looks at me very seriously, "The wash around helicopters and fighter jets is very dangerous so you don't want a run in with that sort of thing... Your reproductive cycle will result in periods of high libido coupled with high fertility so plan accordingly. There are no mechanisms that will prevent self fertilization so Plan Accordingly with sexual acts involving penetration. Is that all acceptable?"

I blush at that, is this really a life I want to live? It doesn't sound bad, or like I have to do anything that could result in that.

"Alright, I'll get your prescriptions delivered to your home—" She looks at me with a bit of concern, "You are in a place where that is safe for you, right?" I nod.

"Alright, I'm going to teach you how to do a subcutaneous injection and an intramuscular injection. Do you do know how a suppository works?"

If I'm honest, I love it. I feel like an experiment; tell me what to do so I can be your bat~


I am at home in my bathroom. The syringes and needles are out, the first one is a medicine sold as Pteroperine which apparently treats some unimaginably dire disease in cishumans, the sort of thing where if you come out of it with wings you're still grateful.

The other injection is a modulator of that to alter its expression a bit. The suppository was for the reproductive stuff, weird how that worked out huh.

I pushed the needle into my upper thigh, initially not getting much sensation, until suddenly a lightning bolt travels up my spine, I push the plunger in. Nerves aren't fun to hit. The subcutaneous injection is easier. The suppository just feels weird. Is that really the best way to take it? Searches on Internet 3(The one where you can mute America) found plenty of stories expounding how it worked sufficiently well swallowed, and also a few papers that said as much.

I rub at the area, the bleeding stops quickly. The site feels a little weird, but I haven't received enough injections to know if it's exclusive to this medication or not.

There still wasn't that much literature on the timeline that this stuff worked over, as the other uses were very uncommon and money for researching the needs of therians with it had only recently started to become plentiful.

I head to bed, with the dreams of what might become swirling in my mind.

Being Trans in a Fascist Wave

The last few days have been more stressful than can really be accounted for. But, I am seeing them pass anti-transgender legislation, bathroom bills, and I'm honestly afraid of what comes after that. What escalation can happen at that point?

And I was realizing that I'm in a weird position. I'm able to pass as a cis-man if I want, my usual wardrobe isn't very gendered so they don't provide signals. But then I'm invisible and yet still liable to fall afoul of persecution. I don't want to be invisible but opting into open persecution feels insane.

We live in insane times, so a little insanity seems apropos, and I'm starting to get tired of not correcting people. I'm tired of living like I've already lost this fight, and I'm tired of not feeling serious about my transition. I'm tired of accepting glares from people who believe that Jewish space lasers exist(and somehow also think this is a terrible thing rather than yet another confusing development in geopolitics). I'm tired of getting run off the road for having a trans license plate holder without even feeling like I'm allowed to be all of me.

And I know that if I stay quiet, should persecution come to pass, all my "sins" will still be brought against me, and I will have lived a cowed life for nothing but ephemeral convenience, never getting the respect or dignity I know that I deserve as a human being. And I can't help but think that when I come face to face with Omega in such a case, I will feel regret for not having asserted the life that I wanted.

Not the life that I wanted, the life that I got after realizing that I was just making excuses for not living the life I wanted, for not changing my body when I was younger, for not doing any voice training at all, for not adjusting my wardrobe, for living in fear of what a bunch of mean, unhappy people believe. If I let them control my behavior then I have already lost.

I can't live my life to appease people who are hostile to my life and my identity. So that that leaves me violence, and I don't like violence. Violence is the chance for trouble, for life ruining trouble. Violence against people is the logic of the guillotine and, besides the obvious legal ramifications, I don't believe in contributing to that kind of a world. Violence against the systems that empower people who want to destroy me is all I can try, but such things are also risky, protests are sometimes just shot up these days, other kinds of protests run other kinds of risks.

But before I must deal with all that, I must reconsider myself here and figure out the first form of protest, non-conformance. And for that I have to figure out how I want to present my identity, and my identity will be a small stake in this set of protests, but it will be my ever-present effort. My exertion of self is the exertion of protesting the invisible social systems.

If I am not out, there will be people like I was, who never thought that options like transitioning were even possible, let alone worthwhile, and I know what it's like to wake up when you're 26 and realize that you've pushed off something you've wanted to do explicitly since you were 14(this may just be me, not every trans person feels like that and you shouldn't feel bad if you didn't 'always know'). That all those goals you wanted to achieve before risking everything to be who you want to be would have gone better if you had just done this one thing.

It sucks to realize that if you had simply been braver, the world would be a better place for you. That you would be a better place for you.

Bravery is contagious because there is safety in numbers, but it cannot make us safe when we don't assert our safety and achieve justice.

The Village beneath the Flower

Beneath the sky flower where posthumans lived free of constraint of form or life was a village as old as the flower itself, though Laura, as she would have preferred to be known, thought that the village looked a bit dingy and run down. She wasn't sure that it had an age of former glory, but that age wasn't now.

She inhaled deeply, feeling her all too wrong rib cage expand. She looked at the shrine again,

But the posthumans loved freedom, and their own numbers, and so they ensured that it was the right of every person to ascend to the flower and wherever else their journey took them from there. She waved to two people from the village, carrying a container of water between the two of them, suspended from a board between them. She only got a response from one of them, the other was distracted with some screen he was using.

Over time the village grew into its own culture, and the terminal that the post humans had set up ages ago had become a shrine to them, it wasn't forgotten that they had dealt with the second moon and made the great sacrifices it took to defeat it. It was adorned with little icons and candles lit by people who had come and gone. There was a 'monk' here. Of course, it was a very small village with a rather collectivist bent, everyone sometimes stepped outsides their usual work, but he was most often here.

The terminal glowed with its own energy. It was a large cube of not quite identifiable material(you could find other materials that were really close in some ways, but you could never put them together like this was). On one side it had a plinth with a hand on it. Supposedly this was how you interfaced with it.

It wasn't like you were forbidden.

It just wasn't done.

Just like what she was wasn't quite a type of person accounted for. Not that anyone knew.

She stepped up to the plinth, considering it for a moment. The monk, an old man, an elder, wrapped in a compromise between a suit and a scapular. She remembers of being a child include the texture of that garment; it's itchy. He clears his throat uneasily, "I wouldn't recommend that if I were you"

"Why not?" she was beginning to think about it, she didn't even have to leave.

"When I was a young man I knew someone who used that and destroyed himself."

She speaks quietly, her voice grating against the filter blurting out that this will make her life harder, "But isn't that what life does to you when you live against your needs? It destroys you."

"I don't know what kind of need you have. I can keep secrets if you would like." He locks the doors into the shrine, granting them some privacy, this wasn't unusual, but most of the time the doors were locked . "Come on Mike," She winces "You know I won't judge you for a need."

"Tell me the story of your friend"

"He wanted power above all else and in the end, pulled between the effects of posthumans ensuring our freedoms and the rest of him, destroyed him. Left him a different person, he ended up leaving, happy, but different. Still a very painful process"

She thinks for a second, considering the common ground between becoming something powerful because you want power and becoming something different because you don't like what you have, it's just that it's seeking to change things, isn't it? "I don't have much in common with your friend"

"No, most people don't."

"Why did he choose to do that?"

"He felt like things could be better. And he was right of course, but you know, you can't force people to do things. Well, in general, you shouldn't at least. That's the trust I believe we preserve by remaining human when we could be otherwise." he sighs, "It's that if you're even just a bit faster than other people can be then you can start to manipulate them if you're not mindful of how you are behaving towards others. He was not much of a mindful person. But that denies his agency, and he made the choices that got him there." He regards her grimly, "Are you sure that you're immune to those things?"

"Probably not. But I suppose that's less important if I leave then."

"But are you done here?"

"I feel like I might be done in general if I stay like I am."

"I can't help if I don't understand."

"Back when I was a kid I was never like the other boys. I was quiet, I was strange, I was never really at ease with the things they did, but was expected to go along with it, like it was normal." She grabs the plinth, running her fingers over the surface of the palm, it was smooth and comfortably warm, like an embrace rather than the blistering heat of some of the computer hardware used in the village, lines of purple light followed the points her hands touched, tracing the history of motion, "And for a long time I thought it was normal to be alienated from yourself, to hate your body, to not just resent the parts that are wrong, but to hate the whole thing because it's entirely wrong. And then you realize that there was a plan for if you were born the right way, the one where I would've been happy, and had a simple life"

"There is no such thing as a simple life." He said, clearly thinking over what Laura had said, "We all must manage the complexity that we find in life, because we can't live life any other way than we have, but the way we live will always be changing... What do you think you'll find on the other end of the terminal?"

"A better body, one that I can choose how I look and how I am."

"What's wrong with how you look?"

"Fine, I'm not a woman."

He rubs his face and shakes his head, "Do you really think we're living in the proper influence of that damned culture war they had a thousand years ago? We have estrogen in the pharmacopoeia, you know that Miss Butcher is an excellent surgeon, and we have transport to places where you could have had this all done outside the village. So why didn't you?" She looks at him blankly, "What? I have a few queer friends abroad, I know how this all works. I guess you aren't much for the internet then?"

"No?"

"Ah, alright." He thinks for a moment, recalling a time when she had been fascinated with foxes, "Is this also about being human for you?"

"Yes"

"Then it really is the only way. Don't forget that you can visit."

After he unlocked the door she activated the terminal, emerging changed before dissolving into a cloud of dust and floating away determined in a particular direction.