After a childhood of being too nervous to ask permission to leave the classroom, I honed the ability to regularly go six to seven hours without needing to use the bathroom. It may be the most useful skill a future trans person can develop in grade school. I’ll be working on extending that six or seven out to eight or nine in preparation for my first real job in less than two weeks.

I’ve trapped myself in a decidedly nonbinary predicament. My name is technically gender neutral, but leans strongly feminine in recent years. …

About 2 weeks ago, I wrote a post about being 3 days from starting a testosterone treatment as part of my transition to a non-binary gender. Due to general screw-ups by me, my doctor, and my pharmacies, I started T today instead. I still struggle to fathom that any of this actually happened.

I’m thinking about throwing together a website that allows people doing hormone replacement therapy (just testosterone to start, because I’m self-centered) to track their changes in one big database to get a better understanding of how testosterone affects different people. I wish I had come up with this idea over Thanksgiving break, but alas, I thought of it yesterday, right after I confirmed my injection appointment time with my doctor. …

Have you ever wondered what happens when you apply to jobs as a graduating computer science major who has a non-binary gender and is starting physical transition?

Me, too. I have no idea what is going to happen to me.

How it all started

I don’t know what the earliest signs of my non-girlhood were. As a child, I took an interest in some trivial, perhaps boyish things — video games, shounen anime, baseball — but I consider the first real indication of my trans identity to be when I got to middle school and the boys in the choir started singing lower than me. …

April 19

I woke up tangled in David’s arms, limbs numb from blood loss, feet cold from blankets in disarray between David and his cat stealing them from me. Around 9 AM, I heard my phone buzz with a call.

“Who’s calling me?” I whined, and didn’t move, because the phone was at the foot of the bed and anyone who called me at nine in the morning on a Sunday was out of their mind and needed to wait an hour.

A curt buzz followed shortly after the calling stopped. “They left a voice mail,” I said. …

I came straight out of the brutal February of 2015 in upstate New York on the coast of Cayuga Lake, but I never felt colder than that night in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, walking around piles of day-old snow, its resultant ice, and neon orange cones and signs to block off the unshoveled sidewalks outside of Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center.

Dad said little more than hello when he came to pick me up. Something about our greeting embrace seemed different to me, but, as is his way, he said nothing of what had happened until he refused the food we had to clear out of the apartment before break. He patted his abdomen and shook his head. I asked him if he was alright and he pulled me into another hug so he could quietly speak the news into my ear. I said okay and ran upstairs to grab only the necessities. I usually eat a snack at around 3:30 after my classes, but I told him I wasn’t hungry so that we could get in the car. …

From a concerned and possibly confused consumer

I recently had to buy myself some more toothpaste and walked into the toothpaste aisle of the drugstore, because toothpaste takes up so much space to display that an entire aisle is devoted to it alone: not “tooth care products”, with toothbrushes and mouthwashes and flosses all joining it like one happy family; there’s no room for them in this house. Here we come to my concern and possible confusion.

There are so many toothpastes. So many! How do three toothpaste companies manage to have that many toothpastes between them?

I don’t say this because I’m a cranky old man who wants to ramble about the simpler days when we just scrubbed our teeth with mint leaves when we wanted them to smell nice. …

An excerpt

I befriended Rhea back in kindergarten because I couldn’t tell what she was feeling. I must have worried she might be sad that no one was playing with her, the awkward, scrawny girl with short hair and bland clothes. Soon, I found I liked to hang out with her because I consistently could not read her. She wasn’t unique in that regard; I do sometimes find people I simply can’t connect with for some reason or other. It just so happened that I found I liked this particular person.

It came to be a problem, though, since empathy greatly impaired my judgment as a child. …