Mattie Schraeder

I’ve been in and out of many progressive, social justice aware, LGBT, and transgender communities throughout my adult life, specifically leading up to and throughout my transition. Some of those communities came and went, others are still around but I grew out of them, and some I’m still a part of but only visit when I’m in the right mood. The only community that I’ve remained a part of through everything is a small group of best friends that all met each other in random corners of the internet, only to eventually settle in the midwest, and all come out as some form of LGBT.

I often talk about pronouns in this blog, but I’m not sure just how much I’ve been able to emphasize how important they, and inclusive language in general, are in our day to day lives. Of course this is an English blog so I can’t speak for other languages or members of the transgender community whose primary language isn’t English. Every language is different, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be for transgender individuals in countries where the primary language is extremely gendered.

Gender euphoria is the opposite of dysphoria. Where dysphoria is the distress and discomfort felt by not fitting in the gender that suits you best, euphoria is the elation and rightness you feel in those moments where everything aligns just perfectly. I never heard the words gender euphoria until long after I started my transition, and to me that’s really sad because if it had been something that more people talk about I might have realized who I was far sooner.

I already talked about my excitement about starting fresh at a new job. It’s been just over two months since then and now I want to talk about how my expectations compared to what actually happened. Along with being exciting and wonderful, it’s been a long and stressful two months. I’ve been moving to a new place, preparing my old one for sale, and getting acclimated in a job that truly feels like I’m being thrown into the deep end. The new job has been amazing regardless of the stress that has come along with it. For the first time I feel like I belong as a part of a team rather than either a cog in a machine or a lone developer doing my own thing.

I wrote a lot about Pride last year, about my perceived failures, and about how hard it was to take pride in myself but how that was changing. Unfortunately, the rest of the past year was marred by even more failure. That feeling of pride and being happy with who I was unfortunatley short lived.

My divorce was finalized, I lost my job, and it took me six months to find a new one. In that period of unemployment depression set in deeper than it had in a long time. It didn’t help that I couldn’t afford all my medication since I didn’t have insurance. As it turns out Abilify is an amazing drug, and no they’re not paying me to say that. Though I wish they would. Depression led to my house becoming a depression nest. My finances took a nosedive. Things got really bad.

It’s been two months since my fresh start. My new job is going awesome, I have a new house, my old one is getting cleaned up for sale, and my sleep schedule has returned to something resembling a functioning individual. I’ll talk more about how things are going in my next blog post, but today I want to focus on Pride, the event.

There’s one experience that I’ve always dreamed of and that’s starting fresh. One of the things that prevented me from coming out sooner is that very dream. It’d be so much easier if I could just start fresh, and have no predefined expectations of who or what I was. Unfortunately for me, by the time I was ready to come out of the closet and realized it was even a possibility I was out of school and well into my career.

I have been unemployed for six months now, and just got my first job offer since I was let go by my previous employer. I won’t go into the specifics about why, because it’s not really important and there are a lot of factors that led up to it, though my gender and gender presentation was certainly a factor. I haven’t been unemployed for this long since I was a teenager, and the job market now is very different than it was back then, despite many factors are quite similar. My gender, however, is a huge change that needs to be talked about.

Today marks my two year anniversary of starting HRT. Unfortunately I don’t have a big celebratory post to go along with the special occasion like I did for my first anniversary. However, I did want to share another timeline photo. I do have a few more blog posts in the works, but they aren’t polished enough to post quite yet.

Thanks to everyone who’s read my posts, sent me comments (both good and bad), and gave me precious upvotes on Reddit.

I’ve always loved the concepts and themes of cyberpunk and transhumanist stories. Many of my favorite movies as a teenager followed these themes, most notably The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell (the anime, not the recent Hollywood abomination). Unfortunately what I loved most about cyberpunk and transhumanist stories were often either extremely minor plot points, or not touched on at all. Rather than focusing on the personal implications of such concepts, most stories that touch on these subjects revolve around bettering the world.

I’ve briefly talked about it in past blog posts, but my childhood in the late 80s and throughout the 90s was a huge factor in preventing me from coming out earlier in life than I ended up doing. That isn’t to say that I knew I was transgender when I was that young, but rather that time frame left me with a deeply seeded binary view of gender and what it meant. Before I could come out as transgender, I would have to break free of that limited notion of gender, and gender expression.