Laurentide

True, but it's still the right thing to do. At the very least it will force some members of Congress to clearly and undeniably declare themselves as supporters of tyranny.

Unfortunately, honest questions are indistinguishable from the horde of transphobes spreading misinformation and sowing uncertainty under the guise of "just asking questions" (sealioning).

If you are genuinely curious, then I recommend starting with the Wikipedia article on puberty blockers, and also reading the one on precocious puberty which is a condition in very young children that is treated by the same drugs. (Tellingly, this usage is non-controversial and exempted from all of the new laws banning puberty blockers for trans children.)

If zero kids on puberty blockers decide not to transition that would be pretty telling.

Maybe, if that were anywhere close to what is actually happening. In reality, there are more cisgender children taking puberty blockers than there are trans children taking them, so the number of kids deciding not to transition after taking blockers is >50%. Your speculation is baseless.

Yes, I meant no negative or unintended consequences.

Thank you. It doesn't feel like I've done much journeying, as I was essentially trapped in emotional stasis for most of my life and circumstances have so far prevented me from doing anything with my newfound knowledge, but at least I know which way is forward now.

If you feel like a man, like being a man, and enjoy having man parts, you're probably a man. Your interests are not your gender, and dancing isn't exclusive to women. Even ballet has male dancers.

Still, a little bit of exploration never hurt anybody. If you are trans, if living as another gender would make you much happier, wouldn't you want to know sooner rather than later? And if you aren't trans, you might still learn a thing or two about yourself that you never would have discovered otherwise. Most people go their whole lives without ever questioning their gender or closely examining what it means to them, and I think they're missing out. There is power in truly knowing yourself.

Do some thinking. Ask more questions. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. What do you like about being a man? Can you imagine not being one? How does that image make you feel? If you could instantly become anything, with no rules or consequences, what would you pick? Don't shut anything down; there are no wrong answers. Allow yourself the freedom to explore.

It may help you to stop thinking in the binary terms that society imposes on us. Gender isn't just a question of Male or Female; there are many different kinds of men and many different kinds of women. There is a large area in between where the two overlap and the lines get fuzzy, and even places that aren't on the same spectrum at all. I myself am a demigirl. My gender identity is mostly female, but also a little bit male and a little bit something else. You don't need to feel obligated to be what anyone else is.

As for how I found out, I've already posted that elsewhere in this thread. It looks like you've gotten a lot of answers from others as well. I wish you good luck in wherever this journey takes you.

This was my experience. I was raised in a very conservative, very religious community where I was never exposed to the concept of transness. I was fully convinced that I was a boy and could never be anything but a boy. And yet, I could tell I was different from the other boys.

As I got older, that feeling turned into an ever-present sensation of wrongness. My body felt tainted, somehow. Unclean. Contaminated. It possessed an inherent grossness that could never be washed away. I lived with that feeling every day for 25 years. No medication, no counseling, no hard work ever did anything to alleviate it or the severe depression that was my typical mental state. Then a bunch of things happened all at once, and I started questioning my gender. A few days later I shaved off my beard and rediscovered what joy feels like. That's when I knew.

I was never a boy.

And you can't just dismiss all their worries, either. Seeing a military vessel in a civilian sector can be genuinely worrying for some crews that aren't used to having converted ships around, especially if they've had encounters with pirates in the past. I get that, I really do, but I'm not trying to scare anyone here. I just want to drop off my cargo and leave, and this is already way more stressful for me than it needs to be.

I was raised Evangelical, and this guy sounds a lot like a true believer struggling to reconcile the actual words of their messiah with the culture and beliefs of the fascist death cult that has co-opted said messiah as tribal identifier. My guess is, he has since become either the chillest agnostic you could ever meet or a literal domestic terrorist.

Yeah, and sometimes your meat ship comes with the wrong parts installed but if you ask to swap your torpedo launcher with a scanner module they say you can't possibly have a science vessel because only battleships come with torpedo launchers. Then you try to explain that your ship really isn't designed for combat and you don't even have any torpedoes on board but they just send you into battle anyway and then get mad at you when your shields fail.

I fucking hate Meatfleet.

I think you replied to the wrong person? I drink a cup of coffee every morning. Sometimes it wakes me up and sometimes I end up napping on the couch right after. I also drink a ton of water every day.

Something I have noticed is that, whenever I want to get rid of a stim or a habit, I can't just stop doing it. The impulse can never be destroyed, only shifted to something else.

Hey, that's farther than I've gotten! I've only recently discovered that I'm AuDHD, after a lifetime of failure and then the pandemic completely wrecking all of my (terrible) coping mechanisms. I also fidget with my dice and my character is canonically narcoleptic now because I can't show up to sessions on time to save my life.