Are you getting hormones from a doctor? You should be able to ask them for a referral, either for a scan or just to a specialist if they’re not the right person. (Unless there’s something specific requiring a specialist, breast health screening is often done by GPs/primary care, at least in the US.)

Out of curiosity, is most of your exposure to people doing voice training for trans folks online?

My default assumption would be most providers are cis, but I have approximately zero exposure to online voice resources and my limited exposure to IRL professionals has been entirely cis people. (A quick google does not tell me whether the authors of The Voice Book for Trans and Non-Binary People are cis, which seems to be the “modern” book rec.)

It’s true that I’m only familiar with two country’s legal systems (and both are common law jurisdictions), but as I understand it, your “legal gender” in the UK is only well-defined if you acquire a GRC, which is something only trans people do, and plain old doesn’t exist in the US. (To be fair, I imagine if you brought a discrimination case on the basis of gender in the UK your gender might be established as a result, but among the long list of things I am not is an attorney (anywhere, never mind in one of the UK’s multiple legal systems).)

Amusing, the letter that comes with the GRC asserts that it should suffice to establish your gender for any interested entities, which is decidedly false overseas.

Both “biological sex” and “legal gender” are considerably more nebulous than you’re assuming.

Let’s say you define “biological sex” by genotype, seems unambiguous enough, right? It’s a pretty good bet someone is 46,XX or 46,XY based on sex assigned at birth, but generally people don’t actually know for sure.

Likewise, in many jurisdictions, you don’t have a legal gender, you have a collection of gender markers. Ironically, trans people are often the only people who actually have an explicit declaration of their gender by a court or other legal mechanism. For cis people, the fact that it’s a fractured mess generally doesn’t matter.

I’m not just referring to the, uh, directional aspects of medical transition, though, but gendered experiences more broadly. For example, when I was in junior high, a social worker at school taught me to put on makeup. The WTFness of that is something that I’m going to want to discuss primarily with people who were perceived as gender non-conforming girls as teenagers [edit: including those who grew up to be women]. Being afab is not a requirement for that experience, but people with that experience or similar are going to be overwhelmingly afab. I get something different from talking about gender with trans people with experiences that are substantially different to mine (both people with different genders to mine, people with different experiences of gender pre-transition even if their actual genders aren’t all that different). I’m not saying that people aren’t prone to overgeneralization (there sure as hell are a lot of people out there acting like all non-binary people have genders that might be described as adjacent to “woman”), nor that gender assigned at birth isn’t something that people aren’t prone to overgeneralizing about, but your claim that it’s wholly irrelevant is preposterous.

If you want to make your assigned sex at birth a part of who you are, I won’t stop you, but to me, I’m not comfortable doing it. Being comfortable with your assigned sex is literally just what being cis is, and I’m not even remotely cis.

You realise this is saying “Well I guess I’m more trans than you”?

Please don’t. If there’s some of particular interest, link to it with some commentary.

I think you’re dismissing their point too readily. It’s true that there’s nothing I share with every other afab person on the planet other than a box that got ticked by looking at our genitals when we were born, but if I’m looking for someone who shares a particular gendered experience, my best bet is probably another transmasculine person, particularly one who transitioned at a similar age. It’s reductionist and transphobic to argue that one’s socialisation is determined by gender assigned at birth, but it’s also reductionist to pretend it’s irrelevant.

What does stealth mean for you? What aspects have you worrying that it’ll result in isolation?

I’ll be honest, I have a bias here – I do find being in situations where I feel I can’t talk about being trans isolating and find/found stealth (or even the state of “waiting to make up my mind”) fairly unhealthy. But my definition of stealth is something like “willing to take steps to ensure others do not find out one is trans even in scenarios where safety isn’t a consideration”. I probably fit some people’s working definitions of stealth, though – I generally tell people I’m trans in two scenarios: it’s immediately relevant or I feel like our relationship has become close enough that I would like them to know. That has been how things have evolved naturally as I’ve gotten further from the “active” phase of transition and moved around the country. I actively talk about being trans at work (okay, that’s maybe no one’s definition of stealth), but only in diversity-focused contexts, so do my immediate coworkers know I’m trans? Nope, they don’t show up to that stuff. I personally value having trans friends/community, but if that’s not important to you, you’re not obligated to seek out trans people in a new place (and, honestly, a lot of trans spaces are very transition-focused by necessity, so finding community can be hard if you’re in a more steady-state transition-wise).

On the top surgery front, I have a friend group who figured out I was trans after, oh, a decade of knowing me. My entire medical transition, including top surgery, took place in front of their faces. I met them at a time where it was a tossup how people read my gender and it was more important to me then that they read me as a guy than that I be out, and then a decade went by and I’d became close to them (i.e. at least some entered the category of “people I actively want to know I’m trans”) and it was like “So, uh, funny story…”

tl;dr Moving as an adult is kind of isolating by definition and you have to rebuild community. If you don’t seek out trans community as part of that rebuilding, odds are you’ll end up as stealth as you want.

It’s worth noting that the surgeons who do top surgery and the surgeons who do mastectomies or reconstruction for breast cancer often aren’t the same people (on top of that, I believe it’s common for the person doing the actual “cutting out cancer” part and the person doing the reconstruction to be separate people)–they’re fairly distinct medical communities. This may be changing a bit in the US now that there’s insurance coverage for top surgery, but they’re still pretty different worlds, afaik. (I actually knew someone who had discovered he had breast cancer as he was preparing for top surgery. It did upend the plan somewhat, but he happened to be seeing a surgeon who actually saw cancer patients, so it was less disruptive than it could have been. I suspect the surgeon I saw would have said “yeah, sorry, can’t help you”.)

Honestly, did we ever de-pathologize dysphoria?

You misunderstand me, I think. I’m not suggesting that you’re relying on stereotypes to conclude your gender is “woman” (I assume)–part of the exercise is explaining how your gender is perceived by others, which is both about presentation and how that presentation interacts with society.

It’s been a long time since I’ve run Gender Gumby. I used to answer the “presentation” question with “I don’t know”, because I didn’t – so much of my day-to-day was occupied by trying to figure out how people were reading my gender for the sake of safety. These days it’s unambiguous–I get assumed to be a man. But my gender identity is the same–it’s off doing its own thing, getting put into a box by society.

Have you tried doing the exercise, including the part where you have to explain to others why you have positioned yourself where you did? Particularly the one about how others perceive your gender. At a minimum, you have to talk about other people’s understanding of gender stereotypes and how it relates to your presentation.

There are routinely people who say “this line is stupid, I’m putting myself somewhere not on the line”, and I should have mentioned that (because it’s a possibility often discounted in the dismissal of the activity), and you may well be one of them. (I mean, I have been running the damn workshop and stuck myself not on the lines, not least because I genuinely don’t know how others perceive my gender.)

It has become someone fashionable over the years to slag off the “genderbread person” as overly focused on the binary. However, long before there was an infographic (or honestly before anyone had coined the word infographic), this was floating around the west coast as a workshop exercise called Gender Gumby, and part of the point was that framing things as a spectrum between two poles doesn’t really work and it’s a fairly futile exercise–no one, cis or trans, is going to end up being able to place themselves on these lines and explain their choices without resorting to gender stereotypes.

I guess it’s not actually a widget, it’s a silent notification (that shows current conditions plus hourly if you expand it). The actual hourly forecast in the app is like that too, but since you can see the percentage chance of precipitation, it’s less annoying. I switched from the Norwegian Met Office to the NWS in the hopes Norway was just rubbish at forecasting the US, but it’s the same–it’s how Weawow maps the forecast data to icons.

I’d take a screenshot, but unbelievably Weawow doesn’t think it’s going to rain today.

The one thing that bugs me about Weawow is that the logic for when to display rain or thunderstorms in the widget is way wrong. It seems to show the rain or thunderstorm icon at the slightest possibility of precipitation.

I believe the Norwegian weather service (which is the default option, IIRC) does worldwide forecasting.

Southern Europe generally isn’t particularly progressive. A number of southern European countries are quite conservative in the sense of “things are slow to change”.

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I normally hate posts like these–they’re almost inevitably too “I’m now the expert” but I actually thought this one was lovely, I think because it was mostly reflecting on the author’s experience.

And, really, part of me aches for the world of fifteen years ago where trans people were ignored. One of the great lessons of my transition was that people are generally decent and will try to do the right thing and treat others well, and I don’t know that that would happen today–clueless cis people can default to being decent, even though they’re steeped in a transphobic society, but a lot of those once clueless cis people now have been primed to actively hate trans people.

That doesn’t mean it’s not tiring.

But also, why does the norm need to be hetero vs “people are varied”. Sure, most people are straight, but that doesn’t mean it automatically has to be the default assumption, that’s just a choice made by a… heteronormative society. Most of the time, we aren’t in situations where we actually need to assume someone’s sexual orientation, so we don’t need to play the odds, as it were.