I just made the grave mistake of reading “Bridge with Philip Alder” in our local newspaper. And you know what I think? Bridge is the Wackbat of card games. (And Wackbat is the cricket of games invented by Roald Dahl.) What the heck could “ruff the third round in the dummy” possibly mean, if it isn’t some kind of deeply kinky innuendo?
"I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?"
— Ernest Hemingway
It was only in the last few years that I was able to come out to myself as properly gender dysphoric. Why? Feminists. More specifically, the colorful tweenager books they give you when you get your first period. Pages and pages and pages of information on your body. You’ve heard the phrase “mind over matter,” which of course is a maxim of the trans community. But what you learn as a young girl is not that if you work hard enough, you will create a body that you love. You learn that if you work hard enough, you will love your body. Even if your body is obese, or emaciated, or disfigured, you are beautiful. And although I do believe that these messages are important to hear over the noise of Playboy and porn, for a transboy it’s a difficult thing to cope with. Messages that so strongly discourage feelings of body dysphoria can invalidate feelings of gender dysphoria, and most people don’t know to teach the difference. Luckily for me, as I got older, I could earn respect as a person with informed opinions. And slowly, the instinct to conform to that feminism— “They’re my breasts, and I’ll bare them if I want!” eroded, and it became “They’re my breasts, and I’ll bind them if I want!”