#i think this might be helping?

[blushweddinggowns]

Prompt number 2 bc I’m praying for more jealous Steve content. Bc Eddie can be so oblivious and Steve can be such a bitch and those things are so important to me

Eddie was a glutton for self-punishment, that was the only reasonable explanation he could come up with on what the fuck he was doing here. Sitting at some random gay bar as he watched the man he loved dance the night away with his bestfriend.

He just had to volunteer to be their designated driver. Maybe it was stupid, but Eddie thought that y'know, a gay bar meant that no he would not have to watch Steve flirt with some randos. But he forgot the small detail that bisexual people existed. And he had seen at least three damn girls slip Steve their number.

Which was just...so fucking cruel. Why did life always have to do him so dirty? Eddie had thought that maybe...if they went to this type of place together Steve's mind would open up a bit. A stupid fucking thought honestly. Based off of nearly nothing. Like, okay sure, Steve was all touchy feely with him sometimes. When he was high or drunk suddenly Eddie became his personal chair. And he would say just...the sweetest shit. Going on and on about how happy he was to have met him, how he's so glad he's alive and well, how funny Eddie was, how nice and sweet and pretty and...and all of it had sent his traitorous brain into a tailspin that had him thinking he actually had a chance with a straight guy.

And the fucked up part was that Eddie had really tried to start doing the right thing. He put a little distance between them when he figured out that he was past a silly crush. No he was head over heels for the guy and he needed to get over it. Fast. And if he could just start saying no when Steve called to get high or have a few beers together he probably would have made some progress by now.

But no, he was still to eager for contact with him to say no. Which made him feel like a creep, always waiting around for Steve to be a little out of his mind just so he could get a hug.

When did he become so pathetic?

The only slight comfort he had tonight was the fact that he wasn't alone. It really wasn't fair to bring a straight guy to a place like this, but at least every guy who had eyes on Steve was going to have to suffer in silence with him.

And some of them were kind of cute. Cute enough for Eddie to try and use one as a distraction. He was sitting next to a preppy looking guy, talking to him a little bit. Maybe he shouldn't have set his eyes on someone that kind of looked like Steve, but fuck it. His name was Andrew, and he was nice, a good flirt. The perfect diversion for when Eddie could tear his eyes away from Steve.

And things were actually getting a little interesting with him. He had his hand on Eddie's arm, leaning in to loudly whisper everything he said in Eddie's ear. He was smiling at him, close enough for Eddie to see the pretty gold flakes in his eyes.

They weren't as pretty as Steve's but they'd do.

Andrew tucked a bit of Eddie's hair back behind his ear, leaning in again. But he didn't go for his ear this time, no, he was zeroing in right to Eddie's lips. Not that he was complaining, he let it happen, a sweet, light kiss that had zero time to escalate to more.

Because suddenly, someone was tugging at his arm, hard enough to force Eddie's whole body back, nearly out of his chair. He blinked, more than a little startled to see Steve coming out of nowhere, clinging onto him with that stupid, gorgeous smile.

"Eddieeee," Steve whined, completely ignoring Andrew's presence, "Robin ditched me to make out with someone in the bathroom."

Eddie couldn't help but smile a little bit, despite the fact that he was definitely interrupting what was probably the first good thing about this night. He glanced over at Andrew, who was staring at them, wide-eyed before saying, "Uh, I didn't know you had a boyfriend."

"I don't-"

"I can't hear you in here," Steve loudly interrupted, looking adorably confused, "Come outside with me?"

If Eddie was smart, he would have gently pried Steve's hands off him before sending him off to find Robin. But...a drunk Steve was also a very cute and cuddly one. So fuck it, Eddie could find a rebound for his non-existent relationship next weekend.

He shrugged at Andrew, mouthing a quick apology at him before Steve started to drag him outside through the back door. Eddie half expected Steve to do his usual routine when he was toasted. Sweetly asking for a piggy back ride that Eddie literally could never refuse before falling asleep on his back. Then he'd get him in the car, wrangle Robin from wherever the hell she was, and they'd be off.

But the second they were stepping outside Steve was straightening up and stepping back, to Eddie's immediate confusion. He leaned against the wall, glaring at Eddie in a way he had never seen. Or at least directed at him.

"So," Steve started, his tone way too close to how he sounded when one of the kids pissed him off, "Who was that guy? You looked pretty cozy in there."

Eddie's brain was still struggling to catch up to the change in atmosphere here. But he tried to answer anyway, "I mean we were but-wait. Why are you not drunk? You were literally just-"

"It's called acting dipshit," Steve mumbled, crossing his arms in front of his chest. Which ow, rude. But his next words hurt even more, "Not like I have a choice, since you only seem to like me when I'm fucked up."

Eddie could feel his heart stop in his chest. He didn't-oh no. Oh god. Steve figured out he was a creep. A creep who was probably moments away from getting his ass handed to him.

Eddie swallowed, at a loss for what to say. But he still tried, "I-look dude it's um, it's not like that. I didn't- I wasn't trying to make you uncomfortable-"

"Then why the fuck would you kiss another guy right in front of me?"

Okay. That was enough of that. Yes, Steve could be mad about him being creepy, but no he couldn't be mad over having to bear witness for a gay kiss at a gay bar, "Well if I had known that you were apparently only okay with seeing girls kiss each other I wouldn't have come out tonight at all! Honestly Steve, how can you even say that? Like that is some real dumbass levels of homophobia, even for you. I thought the King Steve thing had died-"

"Shut the fuck up oh my god," Steve hissed out, "Are you really that damn dense? That's what you think I'm upset about? Are you fucking kidding me? And I'm the dumbass?"

"Then why are you mad?" Eddie half asked, half yelled.

“I’m not mad," Steve seethed, like he didn't look about five seconds away from choking Eddie out, "I...I just think you can choose better people to kiss.”

Maybe he really was drunk after all. Because now he wasn't making any damn sense.

Eddie pinched the bridge of his nose, beyond frustrated, "Who Steve? Like, I'm sorry to break this to you but not all of us can fucking look like you do alright? We're not all charming, golden Adonis basketball players okay? And sometimes you need to take what you can get. And there was nothing wrong with Andrew-"

"You think I look like a golden Adonis?" Steve interrupted, a weird expression on his face. He looked almost...hopeful? But that didn't make any sense.

"That's what you got out of that?" Eddie asked, exasperated, "I-come one dude. You know you're hot. But that's not my point."

"Well it's mine!" Steve groaned. He was biting his lips, a very distracting nervous habit that Eddie had picked up on, "Because what the fuck are we even doing? You think I'm so hot, so charming, so great, and you decide to kiss someone else in front of me? What the fuck is that? Do you like seeing me jealous? Do you get off on me pining? Please explain."

You see, that was the funny thing about Eddie's brain. One second he was lost, staring at Steve's red, bitten lips, and the next he was desperately trying to catch up with what just came out of his mouth. All of it the perfect blend to effectively shut his brain off completely.

Eddie stared at him, his words as dumb as how his face probably looked, "I-what? Huh?"

Steve narrowed his eyes at him, "Are we really doing this? Are you going to pretend like it's all in my head?"

"I-no. I just-please explain," Eddie is pretty damn sure he had never stuttered through a sentence that hard in his life.

"I've been coming on to you for months and you just keep giving me all of these mixed signals and..." Steve sighed, looking away, "I'm so sick of it Eddie. If you don't like me just say that! Stop whatever this is. Because it's mean and you know it. If you want a better option then just take it already and leave me alone."

He-what-that didn't even- Steve was straight, wasn't he? And now the stuttering had invaded his thoughts. Because if he actually understood all of that then...

He was the biggest idiot on the planet.

And his stunned silence was not helping anything.

Steve sighed, pushing himself away from the wall. He turned away, "I'm going to find Robin. We can just...act like this didn't happen I guess. I'm done."

Eddie had to give himself on thing, at least his body was working a lot faster than his brain. Steve barely had time to take a single step away before he was shooting his hand out to grab his wrist, stopping him in his tracks.

"I didn't know you were an option!" Eddie blurted out, his heart hammering in his chest, "I-Stevie I thought all of it was in my head. I-I thought that you were straight and we were just hanging out-"

"You think I sit in the laps of my other guy friends?" Steve asked, completely unimpressed, "While playing with their hair and calling them beautiful? Really, dude?"

Eddie nodded, sure and fast, "Steve, I had to do my senior year three damn times. I'm not always the smartest okay? And in my defense you never mentioned like dudes-"

"Yes I have," Steve interrupted, "When you came out to me, I told you to your face that I understand. That I could relate about hiding things and not talking about it. I literally said we were in the same boat. What else could that mean?"

Eddie remembered that, crystal clear. But..."I thought you were talking about PTSD, not secretly being into dudes."

"One dude," Steve corrected, but he was relaxing a little, thank fuck. Maybe Eddie could still fix this.

He took a deep breath, using his hold on Steve's wrist to pull him closer. His hands were fucking shaking, bad enough for Steve to almost certainly notice when he rested them on his hips.

This was it, he might as well be as clear as humanly possible, "I am so into you. Like a scary amount. Like I'm...borderline in love with you."

He was completely in love with him, but he didn't have the balls to say that bit out loud. He kept going, "And I didn't know you felt the same way. At all. Like I am dangerously close to having a stroke from hearing all of that. You kind of flipped my world upside down there."

Steve huffed out a laugh. Eddie may have fucked up everything leading up to this point, but Steve was eating his little speech right up. He shuffled a little closer, wrapping his arms around Eddie's neck with a small smile, "Keep going."

"I thought that I had no chance. I mean even tonight, people couldn't stop looking at you. And you got those numbers-"

"I threw them away," Steve interrupted, "You missed that part."

He had definitely missed that part, too caught up in his own head. But that didn't stop a smile from breaking out on Eddie's face, "Good. Because if you want me, you have me. I'm all yours, in any way you want me. Understand? Fuck, Stevie if I had known any of this we'd be the ones making out in the bathroom right now. And I'm sorry about..."

For the life of him Eddie couldn't remember his name, not when he had Steve smiling at him in his arms, "The other guy. But it literally means nothing to me. Not if I get to have you. Do...do I get to have you?"

Steve hummed, pretending to think about it while he played with a lock of Eddie's hair, "I guess that depends. Is making out in the bathroom still on the table?"

"Fuck yes it is."

Steve grinned, leaning up to press the sweetest little kiss to the side of Eddie's mouth, "Then I guess you have me then."

[gailynovelry]

You know those aesthetic image posts that float around tumblr? I'm . . . starting to see a lot on my dash that are obviously ai-generated. Are non-artists having trouble telling the difference between AI images and real photos, or are people starting to stop care about the stolen art that gets fed into those programs?

[stuckinapril]

friend wanted to see my tumblr, and when i told him i can’t show it to him bc it’s basically my personal diary he went “oh so I can’t see it but a bunch of strangers on tumblr can??” he literally does not get me. no one will get me like the people in my phone get me

[inkskinned]

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.

[ew-selfish-art]

Dpxdc AU: consultant groups can be used to outsource problems for companies so why not monarchies?

Danny is listening to the various eyeballs and ghosts chatter on about all the issues that he now has to oversee and advise and make so many freaking decisions on. It’s annoying that it all has to come down to his call because he was a dumb 14 year old who didn’t want his town to permanently live in the ghost zone.

Now 17, King of the Infinite, and a bit wiser to the world, Danny is doing his best to balance his teenage ambitions to not give a shit and his protective obsession to very much give a shit.

Sams parents are making her learn the family business and Tucker is trying to make this internship he’s got with a fancy tech company out of New Jersey into a career without college… so while they’re commiserating with Danny the idea comes up.

Earth has a shit ton of heroes. Like, ever since the Justice League *poofed* the GIW out of existence with the Meta human acts- more and more caped crusaders seemed to be coming out of the wood work. More villains too but still, more people who seemed wise to their abilities and morals. Danny has literally never taken an ethics class.

But rn, Eye-mothy and Eye-Bert are arguing over how Danny as King Phantom is supposed to tackle the problem of some fucking pool acting as a weird trade route with a cult and… ugh it’s just so boring but like also such a fucking problem. But… maybe it can be someone else’s issue.

Opening a portal, Danny escapes into space and gets to work finding the base of operations- Tucker had told him there was a new satellite after all and there’s no way it wasn’t connected to the hero orgs- and boom he flies into the Watchtower.

“Hey- are any of you guys willing to consult on some weird pools of ectoplasm in Pakistan? Green and glowing little lakes of bullshit and magic?” Danny asks into the meeting room of the JL regardless of their startled and alarmed exclamations.

“… I could consult on that.” A voice comes from the corner, and Danny recognizes him as one of the bat people. Or bird? The guy is in a lot of red and clearly wasn’t supposed to be in this meeting based on the way he’s propped in the corner. The room erupts in protest but Danny barely hears them through his excitement and focus on the dude.

“Great! I’ll have him back before the end of the day! Lets go Bird boy!” And with that, Danny grabbed the Bird, chucked them both through a portal back into his thrown room and begins to explain the way these eyeballs are totally trying to trap him into doing more work than he needs to do.

“What do I call you by the way? I’m Danny but you’ll probably hear them call me King Phantom.”

“I go by Red Robin, and honestly, I’ve been trying to get this shit taken care of for years.”

From there Tim becomes a regular consultant for King Phantom- the Bat Family is losing their minds with him constantly going to the land of the dead but also Constantine said not to piss off the king at all costs.

Danny is just thrilled that this dude has a shit ton of insight as well as business sense- like he could legit run the monarchy way better than him despite the fact that they’re the same age.

They end up working together for years, and even when there’s not an active issue at hand, Danny will meet up with the bird just to talk.

Sam and Tucker think they’re hilarious each time they ask if Danny’s proposed yet.

Tim has already planned their wedding but all of that information is in a folder more secured than the nuclear codes- Danny needs to ask him on a date first.

[stil-lindigo]

the way that the iran/israel situation has escalated so fast into potential ww3 is terrifying but its also worth saying that if you care about palestinian lives and holding israel accountable, it's not the time to be muting tags. western media is gonna be doing its best to make iran seem like the aggressor. you'll play a part in upholding the narrative by bearing witness now.

[radishearts]

It’s almost like they’re birds of a — no I shan’t say 👀

Reblogs appricoted :>

[hajihiko]

It runs in the family

[darkeneddawning]

Escaped clone au

You know all those fics where Danny and Damian are twins but everyone first assumes Danny must be a clone? How about an au where Danny is Damian's clone who escaped the League after he was assumed dead. Damian could even have been the one to have "killed" him, back when Danny was a newly created, fully brainwashed clone minion and trying to kill Damian himself.

Danny gets adopted by the Fentons and canon goes on as normal, until Dan. Witnessing what would happen to the world should he turn evil really drove home to Danny how dangerous he is.

Even if he was confident he could be trusted with his absurd amount of power (which he isn't), what if the League of Assassins found out about him? Does he still have programming triggers from his evil assassin clone conditioning?

So, Danny does the responsible thing: he goes to Batman to turn himself in.

Cue Danny showing up on Bruce's doorstep with ghost hunting equipment, intel on the afterlife, and an almost unbelievable backstory. Somehow he still managed to be more well-adjusted than Damian.

More thoughts under the read more

Here's how I'm thinking Danny leaving the League went down:

After surviving his wounds but failing his mission, Danny (then an unnamed potential Damian replacement) knew there was no point in returning to the League. As a failure, he was meant to be disposed of. He even thought of simply allowing himself to perish, since that was what the League would do.

But he couldn't help but feel as though that would be a waste of a resource. Surely he could be of more use to the League alive than dead?

That tiny bit of rebellious logic is what caused Danny to go into hiding, only living on based on the off chance he would find opportunities to further the League's goals. Obviously, that mentality didn't last long after being exposed to the real world and meeting one Jazz Fenton.

Being adopted by the Fentons was the best cover Danny could have asked for, since any odd behavior he couldn't hide while he was learning how to be "normal" was totally overshadowed by the sheer bizarre eccentricity of his new parents. He was still the neighborhood weird kid, but even that was a major upgrade from disposable tool, so Danny considered it a win.

Anyway, if anyone likes this idea, please feel free to have at it! Interpret it as you please :)

[metukika]

he was feeling brave

[dizzybizz]

mingling memeing for today 🥰

[azukisprouts]

asajksjdjkksjdkk DEAD PLATE

Full painting under the cut!

I am. so normal about these three.

[hychlorions]

a what-if i've been thinking about for forever... trucy knowing the truth before anyone could tell her

[inkskinned]

crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.

i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.

in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.

i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.

i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.

plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.

the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.

we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.

i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.

a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.

today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.

loved beyond thinking.

[transmascissues]

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 don’t think it’s silly — it’s natural to be worried when hair loss is talked about by so many people as like…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. i’m not saying the fear is right, because i don’t think hair loss is something awful that we should avoid at all costs, but it’s an understandable fear given the beauty standards we’re working with, and it’s one that a lot of us (myself included) feel.

one thing that’s helped me is just…paying more attention to the guys that i interact with on a daily basis. i’ve learned two things from it: 1) hair loss is super fucking common. i’d say it’s much harder to find an adult man who isn’t balding at all than it is to find one who’s completely bald. and 2) if you forget everything you’ve been told about how bad hair loss is, you’ll realize that quite frankly, every single one of those guys looks totally fucking fine. it doesn’t ruin their appearance and make them ugly, it looks totally natural and isn’t really even something you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. we put so much weight on it but it’s really just not that big of a deal. i’ll hear my parents talk shit about men in my family who are losing their hair when i didn’t even notice a difference last time i saw them. it’s one of those things (like so many other appearance-related things) that you really only notice at all because you’ve been taught that you’re supposed to care about it.

this isn’t something i’ve 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 you’d 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 it’s still a temporary change and not something permanent. that way, it won’t feel like this big scary unknown, and you’ll actually have a frame of reference for your feelings about how you look without hair rather than accepting the societal assumption that you’ll inevitably hate it. if you don’t want to actually shave your head, you could also just fuck around with bald filters or photoshop and see what happens.

oh, and if you’re attracted to men, keep an eye out for guys who are bald or balding and also hot as fuck. in my experience, there’s no insecurity or potential future insecurity that being gay for other men hasn’t 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 can’t 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 won’t be a bad thing at all! whether that’s just because it turns out to be a neutral thing for you or because you end up actually liking it, it’s not an inherently bad thing. i’ve ended up liking a lot of things that were “supposed to” be bad effects of t — i love the weight i’ve 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 i’m not complaining about the scars i get from it either because i’ve always liked the added texture that acne scars give my skin, and so on. i think there’s a lot of joy to be had in the changes we’re taught to fear, once we look past that conditioning and actually explore how we feel about it.

but if it’s something you really don’t want and you just want to improve your chances of not having to deal with it, it’s not like there’s 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 don’t know how effective any one of them might be). if it’s a big enough deal for you, you can just decide that you’ll 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 don’t 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 don’t feel good about it (personally i love a good beanie generally and would probably wear them a lot more if i didn’t 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 don’t like the look of the partial balding but don’t mind a shaved head. the point being — you have options!

at the end of the day, whether you go on t or not, you’re going to see your body change as you age in ways that aren’t always going to be attractive to others or aesthetically pleasing to you. that’s just the reality of having a body. even if you never went on t, you’d get older and you might see your hair thin out even if you don’t bald, you’ll 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 isn’t the same as it will be in 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years, just like it isn’t 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. there’s no guaranteeing that we’ll love every single change our bodies go through, but that’s 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 don’t like how it looks, your life won’t 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 that’s 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.