Queer Stuff

Gender Song

Black Room Boy by Above & Beyond isn't my favorite song, but it is the song that best describes me and my relationship to gender and other people.
I first heard this shortly after it came out, as a baby 11-year-old who'd been on the Internet for as long as I could work a mouse. This song speaks to escapism. You can be yourself or someone else. Whatever! The level of possibility is only matched by the level of fragility. You can just log off and never be seen again, with no one calling or coming to your house for answers. Before the Internet, you'd have to move to another continent. This appealed to baby me, trapped in place. It still appeals to me, who wants to keep every part of my gender and relationships a secret. If it's all secrets, you can control how each person sees you, and lose nothing if that aspect of yourself changes. No knocks on your door, no missed calls. I--and many other trans people--often wish I could go be by myself for a few years while this transition works itself out, and emerge fully-formed. Unfortunately, rent is too high for anything like that lol

Queer Things Meaningful to Me

I trust this guy with my life. Also he has an archive of hanky code and non-fetish leather gear. I adore the aesthetics, feel and look of leather, and it has a lot of aesthetic overlap with my other communities of interest.
"According to Gabi Delgado-López of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, the duo who adopted an aesthetic of black leather and military paraphernalia in the early 1980s was inspired by the male homosexual sado-masochistic scene and is not meant to represent 'machismo ideology' but part of a 'role.'"
The website gallery is down :(. So, Internet Archive it is!
"I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it." I want this, both on the giving and receiving end. Obvious penetration imagery here, which appeals to me too.
I re-read this book every couple of months, and every time I find something new. I was assigned Lorde by my lesbian high school history teacher, who knew I was 1. bisexual and 2. of Black Caribbean descent. I did my final project on a few poems by her and also read Zami for the first time. Her relationship with Muriel was eerily similar to what I was dealing with at the time--my first lesbian relationship and first serious relationship overall. "Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful." I find this notion common in queer relationships as a whole. We think that access to the forbidden and desired will fix everything. That there's really greener grass. That's not always how it goes. As she says, you can't free yourself from the problems of the dominant society by being part of a sub or counterculture.

Pronouns.page

Names

Julian: "Possibly a contraction of the Old Latin personal name *Iovilios (“descended from or pertaining to Jove”); see Iovis, or from Ancient Greek ἴουλος (íoulos, 'downy first beard hairs (of a young man)')." Picked for the mouthfeel and the doctor Julian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I'm not a doctor, not even close, but I do identify with his soft-hearted, clueless masculinity and theatrics. It feels intuitively "me."

Pronouns

he/him

he/hymn

they/them

ae/aer

Flags and Terms

Transgender

Trans Man

Transmasculine

FTM

Transsexual

Nonbinary

FTM Lesbian

Straight

Lesbian

Asexual

Greyaromantic

Words

Honorifics

mr.

comrade

mx.

sir

Person and Family Descriptions

boy

guy

man

person

dude

bro

sib

Compliments

beautiful

gorgeous

handsome

pretty

hot

sexy

cute

Relationship Descriptions

boyfriend

friend

partner

husband

boo

beloved

lover

prince

Calendar

I started HRT on March 17th, 2023.

I started injecting HRT on October 9th, 2025. Nowhere near as scary as I thought!

Articles and Resources

Hot Allostatic Load
Tea Fit for a Queen Top or Bottom: How do we desire?

This one I've read a couple times, but it's still too big-brained for me. However, a friend of mine was able to articulate one of the article's points well--wanting to bottom for someone lower on the social ladder than you is wanting to bottom without actual vulnerability.

DIY HRT Wiki.

A classic.

Trans Mutual Aid

What I've Been Told About HRT Self-Injection

Standard disclaimer from my health pages: I am not a doctor, nor am I your doctor. This is civillian-to-civillian communication.

My doctor said that it's best to draw up the medication into the syringe using a larger gauge of needle. It's not impossible to do so with a smaller gauge, but it is slower. So don't be scared by the big needles if they give you one--it's likely you'll get another that's a much smaller gauge.

A pharmacy tech at my hospital said that if doing an intramuscular injection, aim for big muscles. This includes the gluteus medius, gluteus maximus, the deltoid, and the muscles of the thigh. He preferred that I do the gluteus medius, as there's slightly more risk of hitting arteries/nerves the closer you get to the gluteus maximus. The needle needs to be at 90 degrees. Avoid bubbles. The vial--if you have a 10-dose vial--can keep for 28 days after puncture. If it's a single-dose vial, throw out after puncture.

I then got formal injection training from a nurse. The process they showed me was as such:

  1. Wash hands
  2. Pop off the top of the vial
  3. Rub it with a 70% alcohol swab for a few seconds, then allow to dry, setting it on a flat surface
  4. While allowing to dry, take a separate alcohol swab, locate injection site, and rub the shit out of it with the swab
  5. Screw on the drawing needle to the syringe, careful to screw it tight. Try not to touch the parts where the syringe and needle connect (not the end of the world if you do, though)
  6. Once screwed on, uncap the needle used to draw up and stick it in the vial
  7. Hold the vial up to the light with one hand and hold onto the syringe with the other
  8. Making sure that the tip of the needle is in the fluid, draw up the medication. I overshoot it by a little bit!
  9. Check for bubbles. You can flick them out or re-draw
  10. If no bubbles are present (there's usually a big one right at the top of the syringe, don't worry about that one), slide the vial off the needle and set it down
  11. If your needle has a safety guard, tap it over the needle against a table
  12. Unscrew the drawing needle
  13. Screw on the injection needle, making sure as before that it's tight
  14. Uncap the needle
  15. Prime the needle, which means pushing out a tiny bit of the medication until it beads at the needle tip
  16. Check the bevel. The bevel is the slanty edge of the needle. Make sure that wherever you're injecting, the bevel is downward. It won't kill you if you don't do it, it just hurts a little more.
  17. Relax the area you're going to inject
  18. Position the needle at a 90 degree angle to the injection site
  19. Push in the needle. Speed is up to you.
  20. [OPTIONAL BUT I DO IT]Pull up on the syringe a little bit. This is called aspiration. If blood wells up in the syringe, pull out the needle and start from step 5
  21. If you only pull up air (it'll look like little bubbles) or choose not to aspirate, push down on the syringe plunger, ideally using the same hand you pushed it in with. Speed is up to you.
  22. Pull out the needle
  23. Cap the needle. 
  24. Apply a band-aid to the site. You did it!

I was able to draw up with a 25-gauge needle, but only once I drew up the medication very slowly. I would've used the 18-gauge they gave me to draw up, but VanishPoint syringes don't have exchangeable needles! >:( They also automatically retract when you push the plunger all the way down, so I had to try a couple times with a new syringe. They apologized profusely and agreed to send me the correct syringes/needles, so I would watch out for that.

Blinkies, Stamps and PNGS