still generally distressed by the idea that certain GC people have that there is such a thing as "true" trans people... my dysphoria began at around age four and was totally debilitating for over a decade but i never conceptualized it as anything other than a mental disorder.

i had magical thinking about it for a little bit during early elementary school, wishing for reality to spontaneously change, but i understood the cognitive dissonance by probably like fourth grade, lmao. and i found out about "gender identity disorder" online not long afterwards

by the time i was in 2nd grade, I was starting to find it almost impossible to connect with my peers as a result of autism, despite having been quite sociable earlier in my life, and i started to be prescribed various medications that really exacerbated the feelings of dysphoria.

i remember Adderall doing this, in particular, but all of them really caused a bizarre disassociation from my body and definitely facilitated the development of AGP feelings. it wasn't until I was in my twenties that i actually felt heterosexual sexual desire for the 1st time...

i had had three or four serious crushes throughout elementary/middle/high school, and obviously into college, but, yeah, it wasn't until i went off aderall as a sophomore in college that my sexual desire wasn't, like, "auto" -- self-directed, or whatever?

i have no idea how the trans community ever exploded into what it is now without people realizing how much of a hotbed it is for mental illness and toxicity. i remember exploring it in the earlier days of the internet (seventeen years ago, or whatever) and just seeing nothing but

obviously insane, violently perverted, genuinely scary people. and my experiences engaging with the trans community in college were almost entirely with FTMs, but they were all genuinely cruel to each other and completely unwell mentally/emotionally.

this thread is just a hodgepodge of a bunch of different thoughts i've been having this morning, lol. i'm never going to be very good at twitter because i'm not good at linear articulation of ideas, and generally just spiral out into different directions simultaneously.