Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

I recently met two old friends and colleagues for dinner at a distinctly old school restaurant. We each talked about the effoorts we'd made to end up where we were in our lives that day. I suggested that I finally felt free of the people holding me down, like the Lilliputians who tied Gulliver down to the beach. My condition being held down Of Human Bondage was developed by parents, siblings, family, lovers, children (who I hold blameless), society, systems, careers, promotions, expectations, norms, heteronomativity, cisnormativity, etc. If you have enough little people, and enough tiny threads, you can hold about anything down. I went to OpenAI, first time I've used it. My prompt was: create image of older mature femme transgender woman Gulliver, dressed in transgender colors, wearing purple hair, being tied down by LIllilputians I did not get the purple hair I asked for. I'm sure there's nuances in prompt engineering, but this one certainly served well, and b...

I think there's a peverse danger in too-eagerly pursuing a femme presentation, expecially for the NIT (newbie in transition). Most women aren't high femme; many dress in ways that aren't very different from androgynois or male-expressing people. Think: t-shirt, dungarees, dark shoes, a Columbia or NorthFace jacket. In my initial attempts at expressing myself, in trying to show the outside world what was going on inside of me, I swung into attempting moderate-femme: hair dye, facial cosmetics, lipstick, earrings, heels, stockings, skirts. It certainly signalled I was non-standard, but I'm not sure it was effective or good for me. Now I've seen: that's not what most women my age are wearing. Most women my age are wearing some sort of hiking shoe like Merril; they're not wearing makeup; they do wear jeans and polos, windbreakers or wool coats. Certainly, they accessorize and present nuanced clues as to their gender identify, but they're not wearing C...