4 years of transition!

4 years ago, April 3, 2019, at 19:42 CDT, my egg cracked. I was browsing Reddit, and got bounced from /r/lgbt to /r/egg_irl, and that sent me to turn-me-into-a-girl.com.

My confidence that I was a cisgender guy dropped to zero at that point. I decided to explore my gender, picked out the name Katie, and created a new Reddit account.

After a month or so, I figured out that regardless of what my internal gender might be (still not quite sure, probably agender), I was happiest being perceived as a woman by those around me.

So here I am, 4 years later. I'm marked as female on all of my documents, my deadname is almost completely buried, I've had my orchiectomy, and the only future step is full bottom surgery, but I'm not in a hurry to do that. I have a wonderful wife and a lovely girlfriend (both trans) and we are very much in love. 💙🥰💚

To all my friends, especially my dragon bff Scrydan, who helped me early in my transition, I want to say: Thank you so much!! And to those of you who are just starting your journey, I just want to say: Dysphoria is a liar, you are beautiful, and will only continue to get even more beautiful!!

Another name change!?

When I changed my name 3 years ago, I swore I would never do it again. It was such a pain in the ass getting everything updated, jumping through hoops, using a gotdang fax machine to send forms to antequated banks that haven't joined the 21st century yet...

I never really thought I would get married, and if I did, I wouldn't bother changing my name. I didn't really like how my name sounded with Scry's last name (didn't hate it, just didn't really care), and couldn't figure out a way to combine our names. It just didn't seem worth the effort.

On the other hand... Katie Rust? I love how that sounds! So much, that I don't even want to wait until I actually get married to start using it 😁 It's not like I waited until I got my name legally changed last time to start going by "Katie". And this time, I won't be in such a mad rush to get my name updated everywhere because I don't despise my current name, I just think the new one is cooler.

So yeah, you can call me Katie Rust, Kathryn T. Rust, or K. T. Rust. Still haven't set a date for the actual wedding yet, but hopefully, it will be soon™.

I'm super excited!💍

I've been neglecting this blog a bit, so this news is a bit late, but...

💍I'm getting married!💍

We haven't set a date yet, but oh my gosh I'm just so excited! 😁 When I met my wonderful fiancée Andrea in March, I immediately connected with her in a way I've never felt before. A few weeks ago, we went to visit her family in New Hampshire, and they are ✨amazing✨ and accepted me as one of their own.

My fiancée and I are both huge nerds, so of course we got nerdy inscriptions😁. Andrea wanted sudo apt install wife and I wanted assert!(wife.love), but there was a 16-character limit😢. We settled for apt install wife, which works if you're already root, and assert wife.love which is valid Python.

It would have been nice to have actual Rust code on my ring, since my last name is literally going to be "Rust"🤣, but oh well 🤷

Andrea, I love you so much 💓💓💓 and I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with you.

P.S. If you're wondering what happened with Scry, we're still friends. For various complicated reasons, we ended our relationship back in January. He's now living in Germany with his Kobold boyfriend. I'm going to be visiting them later this year, so that's something else I'm excited about 😁

They

Ever since I started my transition, I have exclusively used she/her pronouns. Being called "they" seemed impersonal to me. I would explain it like this:

• Using "they" to refer to someone anonymously is always OK:

  I talked to my friend and she said... ✅

  I talked to my friend and they said... ✅

• Using "they" to refer to me specifically, e.g. in a situation where you would use my name, is not OK:

  I talked to my friend Katie and she said... ✅

  I talked to my friend Katie and they said... ❌

"That last sentence sounds weird to me," I would say. "I'm a girl, just use 'she''!"

Except... now, it doesn't sound weird anymore. It sounds perfectly normal.

"They" is okay. ✅

So, I'm changing my pronouns from she/her to she/they. You can still call me a girl, a woman, a lady, female. I still prefer she/her, but I'll let myself have a little "they", as a treat. 😁

Spam comments

Just a quick update to anyone following: I had to turn off comments due to spam. It wasn't that much, but was still annoying to delete, and nobody has actually commented on any of my posts anyway.

I'm going all in.

I am coming up on 3 years of transition now. For all this time, I have been on the fence about bottom surgery. I was scared of the preparation, the surgery, the dilation, and the fear of complications. I just didn't really have genital dysphoria that bad. My orchi had removed the worst of it. Last year, though, after watching a video by Jessie Gender about her surgery, I came to the conclusion that I probably did want bottom surgery at some point. I just didn't have a definite plan or a timeframe in mind.

But you know what? Fuck it. I'm going all in. Today, I made the call to set up my first appointment to get the ball rolling. I've waited long enough. I know it will be a long process, and like my transition itself, I kinda wish I started sooner. But I'm determined now.

Wish me luck! 🤞

Labels

I've been thinking about labels for a while now. It's difficult to find labels that accurately describe my sexuality and gender. I thought I was straight and male for most of my life, but obviously neither of those labels fit me now. It took me a while to realize I was bisexual, but even that label is broad and doesn't come close to describing the nuances of who I'm attracted to and how that attraction manifests.

I am also on the Asexual spectrum somewhere. I recently discovered a graph that describes the various kinds of attraction: Platonic, Aesthetic, Sensual, Sexual, and Romantic. Someone is Asensual if they don't experience sensual attraction, Aromantic if they don't experience romantic attraction, etc. Allosexual means someone experiences normal sexual attraction.

I am Allosensual, maybe even Hypersensual. I love to cuddle and will 100% hook up with someone just to cuddle them. I'm pretty sure I'm Asexual, though, or at least close to it. In the past, I most likely mistook sensual attraction for sexual attraction. Every sexual encounter I've had has been somewhat disappointing, and how I feel about the experience as a whole depends on how much cuddling we did before and after.

One thought experiment that convinced me I am ace is this: Say you find a genie who offers you a deal. You can have a partner who will cuddle with you every day for the rest of your life, BUT... You can never have sex again, ever. I would take that deal with no hesitation. Whenever I have gone a while without having sex, I don't miss it at all. I do miss cuddling though, and I tend to get desperate if I go too long without it :'(

As for my gender, that's not clear either. I think I'm Agender internally, because my brain doesn't seem to have much of a reaction to either estrogen or testosterone, but I love being feminine, love the effects estrogen has on my body, and I love being a girl socially. So my gender is the word "GIRL" but when you look close, the lines that make up the text are microprinted "Transfeminine Non-Binary Agender".