Post egg-cracking

Signed-off-by: Anne Isabelle "Anya" Macedo <annie@retpolanne.com>

_posts/2024-09-24-post-egg-cracking.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "On being trans – post egg-cracking"
+date: 2024-09-24 22:12:31 -0300
+categories: transgender
+---
+
+Have you ever felt like you started seeing a pattern where there used to be none?
+It used to happen to me when I was a kid – I was once obsessed with a very specific car model and suddenly I started seeing it everywhere. 
+It also happened recently to my partner that the specific model and color of the car we want to buy started showing up everywhere we go. 
+I find this pattern-matching in our brain kind of interesting. 
+
+Once I realized I wasn't a boy, this kind of pattern seemed to follow me everywhere. People I followed were suddenly coming out of the closet. 
+I remember that, back in 2020, Abigail Thorn and James Stephanie Sterling both came out as trans and Abigail released the most beautiful, awesome video
+about it. I was astonished. And as I transitioned further, I started seeing transgender people everywhere, making friends, creating my own trans bubble.
+
+I remember a friend of mine told me about the late Lynn Conway, after I complained that the corporate world lacked trans people. There's an interesting article
+about her [1] called "Through the Gender Labyrinth", which is amazing. She was a computer scientist who invented VLSI (a way to design integrated circuits) and
+some techniques for out-of-order execution on supercomputers. She's an inspiration to me.
+
+To make sense of everything I said previously, I feel like I started getting more and more into a bubble of trans, queer and autistic people. It feels like more
+people are transitioning and that there's more transgender people out there, making great stuff or just going on with their lives. As hard as the world can be
+upon us, we're being normalized, or at least that's what the pattern matching, biased brain is telling me. At the same time, more autistic people seem to come
+out of nowhere, being transgender as well mostly [2].
+
+Talking about my own transition, post-transition has been nice. 
+
+The thing about transition is that you just keep going forward. There are many things I regret not doing earier, but I have no regret at all for the changes I've made.
+It's my body, and I get to decide what I can do with it. 
+
+I've been taking hormones for 2 years now and everyday I wake up and peek at myself in the mirror. My body looks nice, and it keeps on getting nicer. I feel sexier,
+I feel empowered, I feel confident. I don't hate myself anymore (sometimes I do, but not because of how I look/feel). 
+
+And I learned to love myself being a weird, autistic person. I don't want to be like other people, but to be myself!
+
+I take more pictures, I smile more, I don't feel as shy and socially anxious as I used to be. My sense of fashion has changed a lot as well. 
+
+I feel gorgeous.
+
+If you're transitioning like me, if you ever feel lost about it, think about those things I said. Read this and the other two posts about transitioning.
+Understand that you're an awesome human being trying to navigate something so complex such as this. 
+
+Don't shy away from being yourself.
+
+Dear reader, please listen to this song by Nina Simone, I felt like it would fit the narrative somehow. 
+
+<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gMHlvU6inNE?si=19Gjbgwi1jZ4jNVm" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
+
+[1] [Through the Gender Labyrinth](https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Media/Through%20the%20Gender%20Labyrinth.pdf)
+
+[2] [Largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender diversity](https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/)