Brie

As a general rule, update fairly often and read the arch wiki when you do anything non-trivial

Fundamentally, Arch will break eventually. It's not particularly stable or beginner friendly, but it's always fixable and you'll learn a lot from trying to fix it

Woo, I'm also a patreon of Ela's

I also have AO3 recs but AO3 has been down all day so I'll have to do that tomorrow or something

The first two recs (biting botique and isekai trans panic) are stories that are still in progress and I'm less invested in so far, I more definitely like all of the others. Now to try to sort through AO3 stories...

www.scribblehub.com/series/17156...

www.scribblehub.com/series/14609... (ish)

www.scribblehub.com/series/14774... (mind the tags for this one in particular)

Random collection of SH stories anyway (first), just in case, no order:

www.scribblehub.com/series/15584...

www.scribblehub.com/series/16513...

www.scribblehub.com/series/21884...

www.scribblehub.com/series/90390... (ish)

www.scribblehub.com/series/28887...

Pretty sure I can find recs if you're still looking

As a side note, Monstrous Regiment (which again, great book) actually has some transmasc (ish) vibes from "woman disguising as a man," so I'd be curious for your thoughts on it if you've ever read it

Almost all of the good examples of a transfem character by a non-transfem author that I can think of have been written by a transmasc author. Not shocking.

Yeah, I've read a LOT of stuff with transfem characters, there are shockingly few stories with an important transfem character (e.g., one of the main characters in a romance) done respectfully which are written by a cis person (not that I currently read much from non-queer authors)

I am not a huge consumer of shows/movies/anime, so there might be some actual good examples of "man dressing up as a woman (but not transphobic)"

If you can think of any good examples of that type of plot, I'd be very curious to know what you (or other transmascs) think

I can't think of any stories that do the reverse of that in a respectful way, it's fairly commonly played for laughs in a transphobic way with many of the same problems you identified, and some others (particularly that it's an example of "sexual deviancy"

At least for me, a lot of that appeal of something like Monstrous Regiment is the element of "You were actually a woman trying to suppress that part of yourself because that was what society expected from you. You can be yourself and be accepted for who you are."

That absolutely makes sense.

My initial replies were not very clear (the dangers of not being awake for very long): I wouldn't expect the "woman disguising as a man" trope to have the same appeal to transmascs in the same way that it does to transfems

So going back to the original point of the dichotomy, I'm wondering how much of this is that transmasc and transfem readers like different tropes, and how much of it is that transmasc readers just don't find media with respectful portrayals because of our general cultural attitudes as a whole

I personally can't think of anything remotely like the reverse of Monstrous Regiment (which, as a trans woman, is my favorite book ever)

It's full of jokes, but the joke isn't the character's identity, and it has really strong themes of being yourself and that women are just as capable as men

The equivalent trope to transfem's "women disguising as men" for transmasc readers would be "men disguising as women"

Which, in most examples I can think of, is usually played in a harmful way. The men here are often shown in a way that's transmisogynistic and an embarrassment to themselves.

I have, at best, gone over a couple of different trans people's resumes and helped them improve

And I did manage to refer a gay friend to my current employer, where he was hired, so I hope I've done some good

I don't think I've ever seen a trans person apply to a position I've been interviewing people for

I referred a couple people but idk how many actually applied and I wouldn't be involved anyway

I haven't even clocked any candidates as trans at career fairs, and I've been to quite a few of those :(

There was a girl into me who was 1.5 feet shorter than I am, this was a legitimate impediment

She was kinda cool but it was actually really awkward to talk to her when we were walking around

They specifically announced they're stopping the trans *youth* care

Which is obviously shitty, but I had a moment of panic seeing that and wondering about my own care

I have definitely seen some good NSFW art with trans guys boosted into my feed, although I don't have any specific recommendations off the top of my head unfortunately

My dad would also do this... He's aware that I have written things but I'm unwilling to send him any links

Signal has good defaults. There are other systems that CAN offer good security in abstract, but are so much easier to make mistakes

It is designed for non-experts to use

pgp is a well known alternative. You shouldn't use pgp for organizing. It's hard for technical people to get it right (gpg.fail)

Signal has been thoroughly audited by a lot of people. This isn't perfect, but it's important

It's open source and has a lot of attention and clearly is focused on security as a goal

Signal is less secure than talking to people in person with no technology around you

Signal is more secure than anything else, especially when you introduce multiple people to it

I'm the same way, I get deeply upset in the moment but almost always decide to hold a grudge instead of directly reacting because that will be more effective

And then I have ADHD and forget all about my grudges after a day or two

It's fun to solve a problem by throwing absurd hardware at it instead of coming up with a remotely good solution

Python can use 70 gigabytes of ram (as a treat)

When I was a kid, we got ~3 inches of snow on a Monday and they had to cancel school for the entire week.

(I obviously did not grow up in a city prepared for snow)

Also pretty neat for me personally: it's possible for me to find women's shoes that fit me because of this, that wouldn't have been true otherwise

This is super common for trans women, I went down about 1.5 shoe sizes personally

Estrogen makes ligaments tighter and that can result in height loss and shoe size going down