it's silly but the biggest reason why im not into t yet is bc im so afraid of losing my hair. do you have any solutions/tips for it?
first of all, i donāt think itās silly ā itās natural to be worried when hair loss is talked about by so many people as likeā¦one of the worst results of aging for men. listening to my dad talk about how much he hates balding definitely did not make me feel particularly good about the knowledge that i may very well be joining him someday. iām not saying the fear is right, because i donāt think hair loss is something awful that we should avoid at all costs, but itās an understandable fear given the beauty standards weāre working with, and itās one that a lot of us (myself included) feel.
one thing thatās helped me is justā¦paying more attention to the guys that i interact with on a daily basis. iāve learned two things from it: 1) hair loss is super fucking common. iād say itās much harder to find an adult man who isnāt balding at all than it is to find one whoās completely bald. and 2) if you forget everything youāve been told about how bad hair loss is, youāll realize that quite frankly, every single one of those guys looks totally fucking fine. it doesnāt ruin their appearance and make them ugly, it looks totally natural and isnāt really even something youād notice if you werenāt looking for it. we put so much weight on it but itās really just not that big of a deal. iāll hear my parents talk shit about men in my family who are losing their hair when i didnāt even notice a difference last time i saw them. itās one of those things (like so many other appearance-related things) that you really only notice at all because youāve been taught that youāre supposed to care about it.
this isnāt something iāve done personally, but if you really want to desensitize yourself to the idea of it, embrace the time-honored queer tradition of just shaving your whole damn head! find out what youād look like without hair, find out how you feel about it and what you can do that makes you feel good about your appearance without hair, test the waters while itās still a temporary change and not something permanent. that way, it wonāt feel like this big scary unknown, and youāll actually have a frame of reference for your feelings about how you look without hair rather than accepting the societal assumption that youāll inevitably hate it. if you donāt want to actually shave your head, you could also just fuck around with bald filters or photoshop and see what happens.
oh, and if youāre attracted to men, keep an eye out for guys who are bald or balding and also hot as fuck. in my experience, thereās no insecurity or potential future insecurity that being gay for other men hasnāt helped me with. just off the top of my head, i can think of a couple actors who i think are absolutely fucking gorgeous who have helped me get over my fears about losing my hair. despite what our anti-aging-obsessed world might want you to think, there is no such thing as a physical feature that automatically makes someone less attractive, and while making attractiveness less of a priority in your life is good, it canāt hurt to also give yourself some proof that actually, you might lose your hair and look hot as hell doing it.
basically, entertain the possibility that it wonāt be a bad thing at all! whether thatās just because it turns out to be a neutral thing for you or because you end up actually liking it, itās not an inherently bad thing. iāve ended up liking a lot of things that were āsupposed toā be bad effects of t ā i love the weight iāve gained and the new shape it gives my body, i get a lot of gender euphoria from the fact that my acne is now on parts of my face that i saw a lot of guys in high school get it and iām not complaining about the scars i get from it either because iāve always liked the added texture that acne scars give my skin, and so on. i think thereās a lot of joy to be had in the changes weāre taught to fear, once we look past that conditioning and actually explore how we feel about it.
but if itās something you really donāt want and you just want to improve your chances of not having to deal with it, itās not like thereās nothing you can do! products like finasteride (oral) and minoxidil (usually topical but i think there might also be oral versions) are pretty commonly used among trans guys, for the purpose of avoiding hair loss and for other reasons, and there are plenty of other anti-hair loss products out there (though i donāt know how effective any one of them might be). if itās a big enough deal for you, you can just decide that youāll go off of t if/when you start noticing signs of it, since no longer having higher t levels would stop the process in its tracks. and if you donāt find prevention options that work for you so it ends up happening, you can always explore different hair styles (judging by the pattern of hair loss i see in my family, i suspect that keeping my hair long would make it less obvious if i started losing mine), find your preferred method of covering it when you donāt feel good about it (personally i love a good beanie generally and would probably wear them a lot more if i didnāt have hair to worry about because my main complaint is the way they press my hair onto my neck), or just shave it all off if you donāt like the look of the partial balding but donāt mind a shaved head. the point being ā you have options!
at the end of the day, whether you go on t or not, youāre going to see your body change as you age in ways that arenāt always going to be attractive to others or aesthetically pleasing to you. thatās just the reality of having a body. even if you never went on t, youād get older and you might see your hair thin out even if you donāt bald, youāll see your skin start to wrinkle and sag in places that used to be smooth, your metabolism might slow or your body fat might start to gather in new places; hell, you might lose your hair for a totally different reason and end up in the same place but without the benefits of having been on t that whole time. life is full of bodily changes like that. transphobes will fearmonger about the permanent changes of testosterone all day long but the truth is, there is no escaping permanent bodily changes. whether or not you go on t, your body now isnāt the same as it will be in 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years, just like it isnāt the same as it was at any point in your life before now. our bodies are never supposed to stop growing and aging and changing throughout our lives. thereās no guaranteeing that weāll love every single change our bodies go through, but thatās okay! there are so many things in life that are more important than the way our bodies look. even if you go on t and lose your hair and donāt like how it looks, your life wonāt be ruined; plenty of other things will bring you joy and more than make up for the insecurities.
just think about the gender euphoria and relief from dysphoria that t could give you. would losing your hair be bad enough to outweigh all of that? or is it just the pressure of a society that decided balding is bad thatās making you fear one single change despite how much joy you could have if you let that fear go? only you can decide if going on t is worth the potential downsides for you, but i suspect that for most of us, the benefits of going on t far outweigh the possibility of side effects like hair loss happening down the line.
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their question was foreign, I could not understand
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something bad happened to you, and you died, and you came back wrong.
not wrong all the way. the little ways. you forget important dates, stopped going out with friends. it's harder to make you smile. you're apathetic towards things you used to love, afraid of places you used to go to cheer up. quieter. flinching. different.
you came back for love. you're still here for love. what pulled you back was a brightness so loud that even death couldn't outshout it. death heard the call and smiled at you and said okay. go home. somebody is waiting for you.
but you came back different. like lot's wife; you've turned into salt. you used to chirp through life in hops and skips; but now you lose skin just standing up. you have to move slower, skimming across this world without-touching-it. most things feel dull - until they're suddenly all-too-much. life, and being alive just rushes up and over you and you get hopelessly crushed.
you try to explain it to them: it is ugly, but this is what you are, now. the huge golden hoop of your halo now a little bronze ring. you are still watering your plants and wearing the same clothes. after all, you worked hard to come home. this life; so odd and off-color, now that you are wrong.
but they waited for you - it's just that they wanted the "you" that happened before this. the "you" that could sing in the show and hug people tight and look at a blade without breaking down to cry. the you with a smile in pictures. god, holyshit, it's like looking at a completely different person, isn't it. that other-you; the one they actually wanted.
you are the consolation prize. you are the body that forgot the ghost. you are the memory of the bad thing, and the death after; like you are wearing that memory as a banner. you are a fragment, an assembly. simulacrum. you don't make eye contact in mirrors, afraid the light will glance off and your true nature will flash back at you.
you hear them talk about it in their hushed, desperate whispers. sometimes they even admit it to your face; harsh and violent, acid thrown at christmas dinner. god, can you just fucking be normal again. you do not remember what normal is. you had to climb so far to get back here; you are far too exhausted. you want to open the glass door of your heart and show all the gears. can you help resolve whatever got messed up?
you try so, so hard. you came back for them. because you believed they would love you, even when you were so horribly broken. because you believed they would be patient. because you believed unconditional meant "without exception." you cannot do things the same way. you just get tired too quickly these days.
you want to put them on a couch and pour them the tea with hands that shake more than they remember. you want to line them up and draw them a map of where you have had to wander. you want to show every bruise in a backsplash; the little helpless ant of your soul carrying all that weight, over and over. you want to say: yes! it is different! but i did it for love!
you want to say: "i'm not the same, but i'm yours and i'm here. can that be enough?"
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a sleepy town in oregon
(more aesthetic posts here)
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Trans furry fantasies
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when Iām in a soapshipping competition and my opponent is myself
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It's okay if it takes a little longer than you thought.
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i am the wolf & u r
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vergil finds that he can rely on his other half for some things (like uncomfortable social situations)
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He wonders what age heās finally reached. The Time War used years as ammunition; at the Battle of Rodanās Wedding alone, heād aged to five million and then regressed to a mewling babe, merely from shrapnel. Now, the ache in his bones feelsā¦ one thousand years old? Well. Call it nine hundred. Sounds better.
In the same way RTD's 'Doctor Who and the Time War,' where the above quote is from, is a page from a novel that doesn't exist, this is a splash page from a comic that doesn't exist. Time War PTSD, much like the war itself, is multidimensional.
Now available as a print by popular demand!
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