Turns out I’ve got major gender problems and wish I had been born a girl. [Removed as it was pointed out how problematic and doomer my sentiment was] I'm well past puberty and am very masculine-looking. The dysphoria’s gotten worse over the years though, or maybe the gender affirming feelings have gotten more tempting as I’ve stopped being in denial so much and have explored a bit of transitional stuff — shaving, doing my hair different, less masculine clothing. But I just don’t know what to do next.

I’m terrified by the idea of trying to hormonally transition, mostly because I have a very high sex drive and am very attached to it. Dysphoria about the shape of my genitals aside, I do want my dick to keep getting hard, I want to still be able to orgasm from using it, and I want to still produce cum for my partner to enjoy. From what I’ve read hormonal transitioning would eventually disable all of those, and I feel for me that would be even worse than not transitioning.

I’m also pretty strong and muscular, and I don’t want to lose that muscle and put on a bunch of fat from going on estrogen, which I’ve seen happen to couple friends who’ve transitioned.

So, hormonal transitioning looks too risky for me. Still, I thought maybe I could still achieve a good degree of comfort with non hormonal transitioning, maybe getting rid of all the body hair for a start. But when it comes to non hormonal transitional steps it all feels so incredibly daunting. I’ve been “blessed” with prodigious masculinity, the ability to grow hair all over my body like a beast. Shaving is a pain and I grow hair so fast that my face turns into stubble in less than a day after shaving.

Nonhormonal transitional steps I’ve considered: Shaving all over. Problem: I’ve only shaved a bit of my body and it gets really old and time-consuming really fast.

Laser hair removal. Problem: Supposed to be very expensive, and it works better on people with white skin and light, fair hair, neither of which have I (EDIT: CORRECTION: works better with dark hair so at least I have that going for me). In particular the at-home DIY machines do not work as well in those use cases, and without training there’s more risk of damaging your own skin trying to do it.

Electrolysis hair removal: I had a bit done in the past on my face. It was not super effective, takes a lot of sessions, and was very painful even with a local anesthetic cream. On top of that, while I might be able to have it done on much of my body it is impossible to have done on my face because of Covid — I’d have to take off my respirator and that’s not happening unless I could find a practitioner wearing an N95 in an isolated room with heavy air filtration.

More drastic nonhormonal steps — facial feminization surgery, breast implants — are even more inaccessible because at this point very few healthcare practitioners give a shit about Covid so it’s nigh impossible to see a surgeon or even get to a gender care clinic. Regardless, the uncontrollable hair is a big barrier — I wouldn’t want to consider other options before getting it dealt with in the first place.

Everything seems so painful, risky, and dauntingly expensive to the point where idk how I could afford it anyway.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you, comrades.

I remember seeing someone mention there is a Mastodon instance for Hexbear, but I don't remember what it was called. I got kind of bothered by the one I was on (kolektiva.social has a lot of cool rad people but it also has too many unserious people with "tankies fuck off" in their bio), and someone I want to follow blocked the entire kolektiva instance because he was getting harassed by too many racists from there, so I'm looking to make a new account. Hexbear has proven to be the best part of the fediverse I've found so far and it'd be nice to make my new Mastodon account there too.

I watched the show Avatar The Last Airbender for the first time in my life in 2019 on a friend's recommendation. I was somewhat bothered by it seeming appropriative and orientalist, and how it was basically a show about Western imperialism set in the exotic trappings of Eastern and indigenous cultures. Still, I enjoyed those trappings and the martial arts choreography.

But then early on it did anticolonial freedom fighters dirty yet that was portrayed as a good thing, and that bothered me. I chalked it up to children's cartoons in the mid-2000s having to follow certain tropes about violence and didn't just ragequit there. Then when they did the blood-bender dirty I rationalized it away with "well they're kids who haven't been imprisoned and tortured like she has, they haven't learned that you have to be merciless when fighting merciless colonizers." Then when Aang did some bullshit peace-policing and manipulated Katara into not taking the justified revenge she so clearly needed yet that was portrayed as a good thing, I figured hey, I wasn't raised Buddhist, I don't know how this spiritual system handles things, maaaaybe this is in character... (but it was still very shitty of him to get in her way). And I was very close to the end and wanted to see how this played out and I'd already excused a couple bits of lib shit so I kept going.

Despite those flaws, I persisted in watching and found it pleasant and enjoyable enough. When it ended I wanted more. But the very first episode of Legend of Korra was an utter disappointment -- the liberatory heroes of the first series had just implemented neoliberalism and the setting was some uninspired 1920s new world shit, and the political questions that were being set up seemed utterly boring. So I stopped watching and dropped the entire franchise like a hot potato.

Well, apparently the ATLA story gets continued in comics and I was wondering if they're at all good or not. I want to read them because I want them to be good -- there's enough fun stuff in the first series that it could be and there are questions the show left unanswered I think I would like to know. But at the same time the world-building and rank liberalism in some of the plots make me fear that I would just ruin what enjoyment I got out of the show the first time around. If they have even a drop more of liberal "killing your oppressors makes you worse than them" bullshit in it I feel like it would sour any positive feelings I had about the show.

I guess now that I've typed it out the answer is obvious: Don't bother, there's better shit out there to read that isn't written by politically illiterate culturally appropriative liberals. Still, I'd welcome any comrades' thoughts!