Cleveland-born, Purdue-trained, Detroit-toughened trans woman, engineer, and author.
I like football and when Detroit wins stuff.
I swear a lot, I write a lot, and I drink coffee a lot.
So as some of you might’ve noticed, I have deactivated my account on Twitter. I did so pretty much with zero warning and that was because I knew if I didn’t just rip that bandaid off, I’d tweet on the matter but then not actually do anything, finding a reason to stay on that gods-forsaken site to my own detriment.
Twitter was a personal hell and a personal heaven to me. Connecting with many other queer people and exposing myself to issues brought up by people outside of my bubble was amazing, and I am certain made me a better, more authentic person. I was always amused when I was accused of “living in a bubble” by folks who lived in towns 98% white and christian, with no visible queer people, that had never changed one iota over the last decade except to get older and more stubborn.
But twitter was also awful. I think that is an uncontroversial statement. As much as I loved queer celebration, as much as I loved the community and the networking, the whole thing was such a drag. A constant deluge of negativity, hate, and algorithmically generated news feeds to stoke outrage and fuel hopelessness.
I worked extremely hard to minimize the hate I received on the birdsite. My DMs were closed, I often used features to minimize who replied to my stuff. I avoided weighing in on touchy subjects, or getting into the replies. Twitter too had automatic features to filter out what they considered too vulgar or angry. But they were always just a click away, and there were so many false positives…
Recently, I’ve noticed a trend online that I’ll describe as emotional self-harm. I think most of us have done it, hell I’d argue that sites like twitter and facebook thrive on their users constantly subjecting themselves to at least a low, baseline level of emotional self-harm. I know for a fact that there exist queer people who seek out queerphobic spaces to see and read the hate and vitriol not as a way to understand, not as a way to be informed, but actively as a way to hurt themselves. Not in the way that I think many people thing, as a way to seek attention, but rather as a way to feel anything. Negative emotions carry so much more weight than positive ones, and when you’re in the throws of depression, that negativity might be the only thing you can feel at all.
So I, like many people, just got used to that baseline. The waterfall of negativity that existed whether or not you sought it out. The bad news. The shootings. The laws. The debates. The discourse in general. It erodes your sense of worth but you’re addicted to it after a while. You’d rather feel bad than feel nothing.
Which sucks.
Twitter was a wonderful place for many of us, as fraught as it was. Sure you might have random TERFs or bigots show up in your mentions to call you a rapist and a pedophile because you were happy that you were gendered correctly, and sure when you reported the person who called you these things and misgendered you the moderators would always reply back with “they did nothing against the TOS”. But we found each other.
And yeah, I’ll admit, I was 100% “horny on main” on twitter. I don’t give a shit. There’s a lot of hot people floating around out there who are willing to be horny on main with me.
But the new ownership seems dead-set on hurting trans people in specific, likely because the new ownership has a vendetta against us born from his own ineptitude as a partner and as a father. He spent $44B to deadname his ex’s current partner and his own child. To let the monsters back onto the site to drive engagement and push fascist ideology.
And so I left.
I made the decision to leave after reading the news that Trump was being reinstated.
I read the news, went to my settings, and deactivated my account before my mind could justify a reason to stay. It was an impulsive act of self-restoration and self-protection, and I can say I need more of those in my life.
So to all my followers who are almost certainly not reading this: sorry it was so abrupt, but I’m not sorry to be free.
You can find me on mastodon, there’s a link to the right of this post. I am being more cognizant both of who follows me and who I follow. Do not expect follow-backs. Right now I am trying to limit that as much as possible.
I am also on discord, where I moderate several servers, including the Northern Guard Supporter’s discord. That’s probably the best way to find me. My DMs are limited to people who share servers with me. I am not in the mind to hand out my handle here.
You’ll also notice that my contact me page, while still a thing, is no longer accepting mail. After all these years, it’s been 99% spam, and the last 1% was 50/50 hate mail and stuff that actually was meaningful. I don’t think anyone will miss it.
And with that, I think that’s enough. Birdsite bad.
Hello and welcome all to the ninth annual Detroit City FC kit post! Whether you’re new to Detroit City or new to this site, each year I do a run down of the previous Detroit City FC season, review the out-going kits the club wore, and I mock up three potential kits for the upcoming season – home, away, and a clash/charity kit.
There are probably people, mostly people whose personalities are born and bred on the birdsite, who will consider 2022 a not great year for Detroit City. Whether for the impact USL-C had on the club and supporter culture, for the growing pains that popped up throughout the year, the bitter cold of those first handful of games, or for the “disappointing” (heavy emphasis on the quotes) result.
I must attest that, at least on the pitch, I was extremely satisfied with the product and the results the club put out. Moving from NISA to USL-C was a move up in more ways than one, and I was expecting a season where we attempt to not be embarrassed more than actually attempt to win. However, the NISA All-Stars put out quality games. Sure, we didn’t make a deep run into the playoffs, but back in March I wasn’t expecting to make it to the playoffs at all. So that’s a massive success already, and it means that the club has a strong foundation to build off of.
The next few years are going to be so exciting for Detroit City. I can see us really becoming a power house over the next few years, especially with the right signings and coaching. We’re so close. We can do this.
Meanwhile, a lot of controversy was going on off the pitch – mostly in the stands. I will not comment on every event, first because it’s not the point of this blog, second because I don’t remember them all, and third – I don’t want to come off as an authority. Generally though, my opinions run from unhappy and rebellious to unhappy but pragmatic.
Personally, I think my time in the midst of all the smoke and the pounding of drums might be reaching its conclusion and thus so too my pontificating on the matter. Perhaps I am getting bougier, perhaps I am getting older. It is very likely that it’s a combination of those things, but also a subtle shift in what I want out of the game day experience. The Niamh of 2023 is quite different than the person who was going in 2012. Less is the need for tribal belonging and aggressive venting, and in its place a need to be seen, to enjoy, to exist outside of my home office, to have my cocktails and catch up with friends and perhaps throw eyes at potential new friends.
Starting next year, I will be in the VIP section more than not. I basically consider it pre-paying for about $300 of drinks and food, which I do regularly get each game. My plan as of writing (October of 2022) is to coëxist both in the stands and the VIP section, but generally, I expect to make those retreats when needed.
But what about the kits?” you might be asking. “I’m here for the kits” to which I might reply, “Oh! Kits! You said Kits. Sorry, I misheard you. I thought you said- you know? Never mind.”
The 2022 Detroit City kits will always be the kits from our first USL-C season, which in-and-of-itself is a big deal. Potentially that is enough to make them something special, though I am hesitant to go all-in on that idea. Looking back to the 2020 kits, those aren’t exactly the most memorable set, but there was a lot going on in 2020 that might’ve prevented them from solidifying in my mind.
Detroit City donned four kits across 2022 – home, away, and two charity kit designs (one for the women and one for the men) and from those four it’s hard to pick a “best” in the worst possible way. It will have to fall to either the home or away because… sublimation, but outside that I think all four kits are less than great.
The home kits – all rouge with a rouge-colored sash was an interesting choice for a follow up to one of the best DCFC kits of all time. I like the sash as an element, but I think these kits fall into a serious uncanny valley of being needlessly complicated? I never really thought of the two-tone kit this year as anything other than just solid rouge, if that makes sense. I think the lacking piece was the Adidas piping being the same color as everything else. You might as well have deleted the piping and left them as is. The sash never popped in such a way to stand out. Even my wiki kit mockup was pretty plain, and we all know I hate plain. In that way, the 2020 and 2022 home kits share a bit in common – I forget that they had anything going on at all.
I think, on paper, the 2022 away kits would’ve made more sense if the home kit had been stronger. I just legitimately have zero attachment to the away kit at all. The design elements make sense, but again, there’s not much going on. Had the home kits had more, been better, the away kits would’ve snapped into sharp focus. They definitely meet the definition of “clean” I constantly bandy about on this site, but… I don’t know, they just didn’t mean much to me. Maybe it was the lack of trophies? Maybe there was a malaise over the entire season, coming out of the libertarian madness of NISA and into the corporate mundanity of USL-C that just subtracts from these two kits. Maybe if we won more. Maybe if we lifted more trophies. Maybe if something these kits would’ve magically worked. Inevitably the kits both define and are defined by the season. A great season can bring great meaning to a kit. But a great kit can make a mediocre season memorable. And that’s the problem. We had a good season, we broke expectations in mediocre kits, and that leaves them both unmemorable.
Lastly, and leastly, the charity kits. I hated both of them? They were awful, cacophonous messes of sublimation. I’m stoked we raised money for great causes, I’m so happy we got to do good with them – just wish we had looked good in the meantime. I assume this signals a trend – the custom Admiral kits for charity and the Adidas kits for the “main” kits. Part of me wishes we’d return to a special kit for the charity, still Adidas, but just a little bit more off the beaten path. I wish we’d consider another go like 2019 with a full third kit. We’ve shown that we can do stuff like auctioning off normal kits. But as we get bigger and are able to get more out of Adidas, maybe that won’t be the case. Perhaps we’re nearly at the point of considering another supplier.
Perhaps I am overusing “perhaps” in this post.
We live in a time of uncertainty. A time of ‘perhaps’ when we need certain answers.
I have no certain answers for you, dear reader, only thoughts and conjecture. I read the tarot of the kits. Some things are clearer than others. However; somethings are obvious:
I don’t work for the DCFC front office
The DCFC front office fucks with me
Kits shown here are not official direction
Logos, league, and sponsors are used without permission
Sponsors and league are not official nor necessarily endorsed by our front office
I refuse to include the Chevy logo on my work, deal with it
The reality of 2023 might be very different than what I predict here
The Home Kit
The 2023 Home Kit Prediction – Rouge with horizontal pinstripes and gold trim
I went through a lot of iterations on my home and away kits this year, slowly honing in on something that worked for me. Like the club, I usually alternate between years with a lot going on and years without so much. Last year for the home kit, we had the hoops, this year pinstripes.
The 2021 Kits were something amazing, and I want to build off that more. Some clubs are defined by features as much as colors (e.g. Celtic and green/white hoops, Newcastle and black/white stripes), but Detroit City isn’t one of those clubs. We can have hoops, sashes, pinstripes, nothing at all so long as the kits are that lovely, rich rouge color. Making the gold trim something that all home kits have going forward would be amazing, and draw a serious line of continuity even as features come and go. I’m not sure if I want to see bigger gold features, for example, a gold sash, but I’d at least be interested in seeing it.
This is what I mean by the difficulty of designing a home kit. I can’t imagine having these difficult discussions regarding the away kit. Want a gold sash? Done. Want a rouge band? Done. There’s no problem there. But when you talk about making a serious change to the home kit there’s a hesitation I feel in my gut. Will this be something that adds to the history of Detroit City kits? Or subtracts from it? I’ve done mockups with, for example, gold hoops and I cannot help but feel that it’s not a Detroit City home kit. A training top or a one-off charity kit, but it’s not a home kit.
So perhaps this is a “safe” design. Clean and simple. Three tones of rouge (the base, the lighter piping on the shorts and hems, and the darker stripes), but I think it is a strong design balancing everything I’ve talked about above.
The Away Kit
The 2023 Away Kit Prediction – White with a rouge and gold chevron
Working on the away kit is always a ton of fun, and I often get caught up in making dozens of potential designs, many just iterating on one strong design, drilling it down to something amazing. In previous posts, I’ve talked about wanting to do an homage to the 2013 kits with the rouge band across the chest. The 2013 away kit was the first DCFC kit I’ve ever bought, and I absolutely love it. It’s a fun kit with a variety of elements: the white body, the rouge band, the champagne sleeves.
Here I went to a sort of parallel homage – substituting a multi-colored chevron for the rouge band. Sure the sleeves are still white, but the champagne is captured in the piping and the chevron. Rouge piping on the shirt hems and on the shorts with a little two-tone going on in the collar.
Part of me wants to start a completely alternative discussion to the one above? Is it time to consider having a bit more fun with our away kits? White makes up the majority of our away kits despite us being the rouge and gold, so my gut is thinking do we move more permanently to champagne? Or do we let go all together? Can Detroit City pull off an orange away kit? Or a purple one? I Legitimately don’t know. Something about having both home and away kits fit the club’s color profile is uniquely American to me, a carry over from gridiron. But maybe that’s not actually the case, maybe I just don’t know because I’m used to clubs in the EPL having a very solid home design and the away kit having a bit more variation. Newcastle United has shown this over the years.
But what I do want to reiterate is what I said above – you gotta have at least one kit knock it out of the park, and I feel like the 2022 Detroit City kits didn’t provide. So for 2023 we need a strong slate of kits. Which brings us to my favorite kit to work on…
The Clash/Alternative Kit
The 2023 Clash Kit Prediction – Black with rouge sleeves and socks
The clash was the third of the three kits I started on and the second I came to a final decision on. It started with black and pastel pink. But as I played around with the options and variations, I really couldn’t shake the Inter Miami vibes, which was extremely disappointing. When I eventually moved on to the black/rouge combination.
I wanted a look that would be instantly iconic. I think I hit the bull’s eye with this design. We’ve seen some black and gold kits but something I’d like to see is black and rouge. When the two colors are so close together, you’re going to have to take steps to really emphasize them, so here, instead of just piping or some small features, I went with the sleeves and the socks. The more heavily contrasting gold comes in as piping on the shorts, in the collar and sleeves, and the hem of the top.
This sort of design, one that fits in with the rest of the options is perfect for an alternative or clash design, not just a a charity match or two.
There are some kits that years later folks still talk and think about, those ones that made bold choices and stuck to them. I think the black and gold third kits really embody that, or for another example, the Kitman Moy kits from the same year. I don’t think we’ve had a design since that really bucks the convention and gets not just talked about, but used. I might sound a little curmudgeonly here – but I’m fucking sick of the one-off sublimated kits. I really am. Let’s see something with some meat.
Three amazing kits, I think! There’s a lot that makes them different, there’s even more that ties them together!
The Sketches
The sketches for this year’s trio of kits.
Despite the ending in Memphis, 2022 was an extremely memorable year for Detroit City FC. Our first season in the USL-C, our first playoff spot, our first playoff loss. I for one certainly did not see it coming, though I dared to hope. I dared to hope quite a bit through the 2022 season – whether it was a playoff hosting spot or even just a playoff spot at all. The club and the staff really rose to the occasion on the pitch and despite growing pains off the pitch, I think we saw a lot of progress and improvements.
As my time as a “hooligan” comes to a close, my involvement with the club only grows. First with the 2022 Prideraiser campaign, which many of you contributed to and made a massive success. And now as a member of the Fan Advisory Board. I hope to continue to support and represent all fans, but especially queer fans, as the club continues to grow.
I have high hopes for 2023.
Hit me up on Twitter or Mastodon with your thoughts about 2022 and 2023, what did you think of the kits in particular and what would you put Detroit in for the upcoming season? If anyone wants to commission me, I have a portfolio and pricing page on this site. Feel free to drop a line.
Content Warnings: Adult language, dysphoria, transphobia, transphobic portrayals of trans people in media, 4chan, homophobia, pornography, suicide , talk of sexuality, and anatomy
The last year since I’ve written about my transition has been a very, very active one, and quite different than the year that preceded it. With COVID not quite so “defeated” but rather, more an unfortunate part of modern life, there has been a return to appearing in public. No longer is my transition something that happens purely in private, rather it has become something that is, that I celebrate each time I step outside or I make the decision to put on makeup or not. I am, and always will be, “trans”, but over the last year I’ve been growing into other labels as well.
Maybe I didn’t expect it to be so quick, you know? I thought “trans” was going to be everything about me for years and years, possibly the rest of my life. At one point it seemed like I had an infinite number of things to say about the experience. Now? It’s feeling mundane.
And I think that’s a good thing?
It’s normal now for me. I just am who I am.
That’s probably why, in a rare act of decent foresight, I decided to do the thing where I doubled the time in between each update on my transition. You won’t be getting another one of these updates from me again until 2024. I sure some of you are thrilled at the prospect.
The last years has brought many changes, most of them personal, some are physical, others social. I still call myself “Nick” from time to time out loud, though I rarely think it, which I find to be rather backwards. But progress is progress and I’m making it!
Full Steam Ahead
When we left off last year, I had been on patches for a while, had started progesterone, and was recovering from the switch from spiro to bica Since then there have been a few changes on the HRT front. Actually, a lot of changes. The last year has seen significant changes to my HRT regimen, but it has all been for the better in my perspective.
Firstly, I’ve switched from patches to an estradiol cream. The patches were not getting me the levels I needed and they were a pain in the ass to apply and keep on. They’re great, I suppose, if you’re a homebody or not very active, but I was active back then and remain so now. The dosage of the cream got bumped a few times during the last year, and while my levels were very promising, we’re waiting for another blood check that will happen a few days after this is posted before making any more changes.
Secondly, another big increase, was upping my progesterone from 100mg a day to 200mg. Progesterone has really been helpful for me, both from a feminization standpoint but also the improvements to mood modulation and just how much better my sleep has been. It’s so weird to be sitting here having gotten a year where most of my sleep was really fucking good. That alone. Fuck. That alone is worth it.
Lastly, on the HRT side, I’ve been taken off bica!
“But Niamh,” you might be asking, “Don’t you need an anti-androgen to combat all the testosterone you make?”
Why yes, reader-being-used-as-a-rhetorical-device, I did have to take an anti-androgen to combat all the testosterone I used to make. Here’s were it gets fun – I don’t make testosterone anymore, so I don’t need to take bica.
“Well doesn’t that mean…?”
Yep! I had my orchiectomy in June! I no longer have testes so it’s not a problem. Funny enough, it took both my surgeon and my GP insisting that I can stop bica for me to finally stop it about a week and a half after my surgery. And even after they both did I still finished up the week. There was a legit fear of backsliding after the disaster of last year.
The surgery itself went super smoothly. The recovery was actually shockingly easy. I have said this to people, but I’ll repeat it here – the recovery from my orchiectomy was significantly easier than the recovery from my vasectomy, which was already pretty easy. Pain was minimal and I only took a small fraction of my prescribed painkillers (just high-doses of otc painkillers, nothing unsavory). I was walking the same evening of the surgery and was even at a DCFC game four days later.
The orchiectomy has done its job as far as I am aware (writing this before my blood test). Despite not taking bica, I am noticing no backsliding at all. In fact, it’s only been progress.
The Changes
The last year has been amazing.
I’ve put on a not insignificant amount (roughly 10lbs) of weight. It’s almost entirely been fat. My breasts have gone from a healthy B to being a prominent (but low-volume) DD. Generally a C or D cup bra works perfectly fine, but the simple bust minus underbust method says I’m a DD. Growth has come in spurts, but the longest lasted from August of last year until like April~May of this year. Since then breast sensitivity has been down and nipple pain nonexistent.
Even if this was the end, and I saw no more growth here on out (and I doubt that, given that like last year, I’m noticing the inklings of the return of growth pains), I’d be extremely happy. I got far more than I was told to expect and so I have not really been considering breast augmentation the way I had even just a year ago.
My bursting bust is probably the most noticeable of the changes but there have been others.
Hair changes have continued. Laser and electrolysis have made it so that after a close shave my face is practically shadow-free and super smooth. I am continuing both of those, though laser is certainly coming to an end (for now, more on that), so there’s more of an emphasis on electrolysis. More than once the results of concentrated electrolysis has left in (good) tears – watching a particularly bad patch of shadow just vanish under the careful eye of my trusted tech.
Same shirt, same girl. Left: 12 August, 2020; playing around with color corrector and concealer for one of the first times, recently shaved Right: 19 July, 2022; after a full day at the office, in light concealer, shaved several hours previous
Staying with my head, I have seen, especially since the orchi, a noticeable filling out of hair on my old hairline. It’s legit amazing to slowly and steadily see more and more. Plus now my hair is super long and luxuriously soft. I love it so much. I have a problem with twirling it in my fingers or running my hand through it throughout the day.
On my body hair has continued to thin and grow lighter. My chest is far from hairless, but it’s a soft, white fuzz like on any woman. Same with my tummy. My thighs are still catching up with that and I’ve even noticed bald patches on my calves, which is legit shocking. My arms are still pretty hairy, but I’ve also never really let it grow out far enough to know what they’re like any more. Overall, though, I shave so, so much less. It’s a euphoria found in not doing something.
My libido had been pretty crazy over the last year. I’m not sure it was the bica… but I’m pretty sure libido on bica is different than libido on spiro and my libido now. My libido is now fully driven by estrogen and progesterone and it’s wild. I absolutely love it. Erections are effectively a thing of the past now. They were possible and happened on bica, but with zero testosterone, I just can’t do it anymore.
I don’t think men truly understand what they’re missing. I don’t think I’ll ever trade back. Testosterone horniess sucked. Testosterone orgasms sucked. Estrogen horniess is everything I could ever want. I love the feeling of butterflies that explodes across my chest when I have naughty thoughts or when a partner is telling me what they’re going to do to me. Thinking about kisses, even, melts me. I love that it’s mental. I love that there’s no shitty erection. I love that I get wet, actually. Is it exactly the same as if I had a vagina? No. But it is waaaay different from a simple erection.
The one constant over the last two years is just how amazing it all is. You rub a cream into your thighs once a day and take a pill at night and BAM your body does the rest. I want to emphasize that before the next section that yes – this has all been my own body so far.
The many faces of transition! Bottom Left: 3 August, 2020; freshly shaved and in very light makeup plus lipstick (21 days before starting HRT) Top Left: 15 May, 2021; no makeup, recently shaved (nearly nine months on HRT) Top Right: 13 August, 2022; full makeup, thin concealer, just shaved (just shy of two years HRT) Bottom Right: 14 August, 2022; no makeup, still running off the same shave from the top right (just shy of two years HRT)
Where to Next?
My next update for this series in the blog is two years away, a lot can change in two years and I do have some plans, though they are not fully concrete yet. Obviously I’ll still be on HRT, that’s never going to end, so if nothing else, there will be plenty of changes with regards to more boobs, more ass, more thighs. But as I alluded to at the end of the previous section, I’m starting to bump against the limits of what HRT can accomplish and what I want done. And that means surgeries.
I mentioned that while laser might be wrapping up for my face, it’s probably not done. Well, that has to do with prep for bottom surgery. I still need to have a consultation with my tech, but the plan would be to begin hair removal down there in prep for the bigger surgery. It takes about a year to clear off all the hair and it would require getting used to shaving places I’ve yet to shave.
In my last update, I emphasized that I did not want bottom surgery, so clearly something has changed. Honestly, I can’t really tell you what. The orchi might’ve helped. One of the first things I did once the pain was gone and the swelling under control was tuck myself into a gaff and throw on some panties. The feeling of having a nearly perfectly flat front was exhilarating. I can’t really describe it. But seeing it made me realized how badly I wanted it.
Over the last few years I’ve been waffling between no surgery at all and vulvaplasty. Vulvaplasty is a form of bottom surgery where the exterior vulva and clitoris are made, but the vagina itself is not. Sometimes this is referred to as a “zero depth” surgery as penetration is not possible.
But a niggling feeling has been creeping up, and that has set me on a new path mentally and physically – I kinda want to get fucked? Like, still by women, but I really need to get bent over a table. Anal isn’t really a thing for me for a couple of reasons, so if I want to get fucked, I need a vagina – that’s just the long and short of it.
Since I’ve had the orchi, though, there’s a little less to do for the vaginoplasty (creation of both the vulva and vagina), but it’s a seriously major surgery, requiring disability time to recover. The whole process is equal parts amazing miracle of science and gruesome testament to surgical wonders. I’ve now had a few friends go through both forms of the surgery at a variety of places so I’m using that to collect data points. I’ll almost certainly stay local for the surgery, though travelling is not unheard of for this surgery.
Waiting times and approval periods are usually measured in months going into years, so hopefully for the two-year post I’ll have an update on that front and hopefully be entirely don with it!
There is one other surgery that I’ve been contemplating and honestly it feels much more optional – facial feminization surgery (FFS). Many trans women seek out FFS to contour the face permanently for a more feminine look. Usually this means reduction of the nose, reduction of the brow, reshaping the jawline, and shaving down the Adam’s apple (among other things).
I’m not fully sold on FFS and if I did, I probably wouldn’t get the whole package, rather just work on specific things. I’d want subtle changes, not radical, and admittedly, I don’t really care for the usual package that seems to be sold to trans women. Firstly, because I think I’m pretty damn hot as-is. Secondly, there’s a certain aspect to my queerness that I’m not really interested in erasing, as weird or self-sacrificing as that might sound.
One’s relationship with their queerness is not a universal thing. We each experience it differently. Part of my experience is as simple as owning the phrase I am queer. And part of that is that I look queer. While I think that I passed through peak trans-ness back in 2021, I’m not sure I’d enjoy going fully stealth. Maybe that will change as things get dicier for trans people, but my goal has and remains being true to me.
All that said, I will admit the idea of getting FFS and passing ever-so-slightly more is tempting. Say nothing of the omnipresent pressure on women to conform to social beauty standards. I spend a non-zero amount of time considering things like the fat on my tummy, or how big my nose is, or how prominent my Adam’s apple might be, and how they make me look to the outside world without considering how they make me feel.
In the end, I am queer. There’s no doubt about it. And it’s not just about being trans, it’s all the letters I’ve collected over the last few years.
The Rainbow Experience
One thing I wanted to focus on in this update was that I am more than trans. Yes, being trans is a massive part of my life, how can it not be, but it is not my life. It is not me in my entirety. I am more than trans. Hell, I am more than queer, but that’s for a different time and blog post.
For folks who fall into multiple boxes within the LGBT+ rainbow, there can be a pressure to adopt one. Like you’re trans first and lesbian second, or aroace first and an enby second. Or do you really need all those labels? You’re just collecting them for attention! You’re just trying to be trendy! And no, absolutely wrong. Apply this to anything outside of the queer community and it falls apart. Oh so you’re a man and you’re white? Come on, dude, pick one. Oh, so you’re Christian too? Wow. Trend surf much?
I have three main labels: I’m trans gendered (the gender I was assigned at birth does not match my gender identity), I’m a lesbian (I am a woman* attracted to other women*). And I am polyamorous (I prefer multiple, open intimate relationships). Each of these labels is a part of me, inseparable. None of them come with increased support or understanding from broader society. In fact, of the three, only one is even value neutral. Two of them carry quite a bit of baggage and can be difficult to unpack, even with queer friends.
* Yes, I will get there.
A phrase I’ll have to define is homonormativity, which is a play on the phrase heteronormativity. “Normativity” is about the assumptions that we make regarding what is default or what is normal. Things that fall outside of normativity are thus not default or not normal. It is not a small leap then when what is default is considered “good” or “right” or “natural” while that which falls outside of the default is “bad” or “wrong” or “unnatural”. Normativity plays into everything, not just topics of queerness. We can consider who is and is not considered “default” or “normal” when we consider how we approach accessibility, for instance.
For example, ADHD is really only an issue because we’ve built a society around a school and work environment that requires long stretches of intense, unbroken focus. ADHD is natural in that it naturally occurs in humans, capitalism is unnatural in that it is a social construct invented by humans. Yet normativity frames capitalism as the natural order and thus ADHD as a disorder.
Homonormativity, then, is an extension of heteronormativity – arguing that monogamous homosexual partnerships are equally valid as monogamous heterosexual partnerships, while doing little to argue for gender identity rights, or rights of polygamous folks. It is a facet of respectability politics, thinking that if you act “normal enough”, you can have rights. Respectability politics in the queer community looks like upper-class, usually white, monogamous couples who think that marriage rights are the final stop and want to move out to the suburbs to get a house with a white picket fence and have two-point-five children.
This will not work in the long run. The cracks are already showing. There exists no number of other queer people that anyone can push under the bus that will guarantee our rights. Heteronormativity never ceded any ground. You aren’t normal just because you’re cis. You have to be cis and hetero. Then you’re normal. But only if you follow all the other rules that our society erects.
Perhaps it doesn’t need to be said, but I am trans gendered. If you hadn’t put that together, then, um… welcome to the finish line, every race has a horse in last. Today that is you. When I tell people I am trans I get a variety of reactions, some positive, some neutral, some negative, some negative but pretending to be positive. Actually, I get a lot of that last sort.
A lot of folks react with “whatever makes you happy” or “I don’t care what two people do in bed”. For the former, there’s a certain dismissiveness, the normativity, that seeps in. “Sure whatever, just do it over there.” The missing second half of the refrain is, “…and doesn’t bother me.” And that happens. My existence can and will eventually bother them, and then their support evaporates. The later is completely missing the point, being trans gender is not about what I do in bed.
It’s who I am.
And so when someone says this, no matter what they mean by it, it’s normativity – “I am normal, you are a subcategory on pornhub.” The implications cannot be heavier. Because when someone sees you as a category on a porn site, they’re already convinced that you’re a problem. Step out of line and they will need to erase you. And the line is thin and constantly moving. Step over it and suddenly even the most progressive liberal is nodding contemplatively as literal fascists call you a pedophile.
We’re a useful wedge that way. Paint us as an easy target to hate, get all the centrists and liberals concerned about midterms, and then watch as they abandon us.
And that sometimes happens within the queer community too. HER – a queer women’s dating app that was made to include trans women receives tremendous hate from transphobes. Tinder too, you learn to pick up on the quiet exclusion. “Females” is usually a giveaway, a favorite dog whistle of lesbian TERFs. “Proud Gryffindor” is another, though just Harry Potter in general is usually a sign.
So no, I don’t think that coming out as trans has helped me be more popular or accepted. It certainly wasn’t chasing a trend. It didn’t even help make me more popular with segments of the LGBT+ community!
One question that pops up time and time in trans spaces is “I’m a trans [gender] but I like [same gender], am I gay?” This question exists because at some level the person asking the question has internalized transphobia. They are articulating the disconnect between their gender and being associated as that gender. But the answer is pretty straightforward – yes, if you’re a trans man who likes men, you’re gay; if you’re a trans woman who likes women, you’re a lesbian.
My sexuality has been in a bit of a crisis lately.
Well, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration. I’m a lesbian, there’s no question about that, but as I hinted with my asterisk a section or two back there’s more going on under the hood. I’ve suggested in previous updates that I leaned somewhat pan, and I’m not going to walk that back entirely, I definitely can feel some sexual attraction to some men, especially a specific slice of feminine men. But my romantic attraction to men is zero. “Pansexual but homoromatic” is the usual refrain.
I actually get a lot of schtick for this. I’m apparently not lesbian enough, which I find rather hysterical. I literally crossed a gulf of gender to be a lesbian, fuck off with the gatekeeping.
The asterisk is that the question “What is a lesbian” has a lot of answers and some of them are complicated because we live in a cisheteronormative patriarchy. The answer “a woman who is sexually involved with other women” is an answer. But it’s not the answer. On the other extreme you have “non-men who love non-men”. That is another answer, but I refuse to say that it is the answer.
Because in the end, the real lesbians were the people we ate out in dive-bar bathrooms along the way.
Okay, but seriously. Strict definitions of any queer label start to sound like cishet bullshit, obsessed with genitals and how they are squished together. Broad strokes, don’t get lost in the details. Focusing on sex erases asexual folks. Focusing on romance erases aromantic folks. Focusing on genitals erases trans folks. Focusing on gender erases non-binary folks. How about, instead, we listen to the people who approach us in good faith?
Why am I a lesbian and not pansexual? Or omnisexual (as was pointed out to me by a friend)? Because in the end those labels don’t matter to me as much, don’t speak to me as deeply, and do not fill me with the sense of community and pride the way that “lesbian” does. That’s what makes me a lesbian.
Honestly, though, if pressed which of my three labels I have the most trouble talking about, and it’s going to be polyamory (quick aside: I fall in the group of folks that uses “polyam” instead of “poly” as the abbreviation, as “poly” is often used by the Polynesian community and that sort of thing matters to me). Firstly, it’s the label that’s the newest to me and thus there’s a certain level of learning I need to go through first. Secondly, it just is the one I feel the least empowered to talk about even within the queer community. There’s a lot of internalized phobia there. It’s definitely not feeling “normal” to me yet, though it definitely feels right.
Polyamory, for the those not in the know, is sometimes referred to as “ethical” or “consensual” non-monogamy. While the general perception is that additional partners are sexual in nature, I will use the term “intimate” as there is more to it than sex, though that can definitely play a part. For me, there is a focus on building multiple intimate partnerships outside my marriage. These partnerships include an emotional aspect, the same as any partner, and have both over-lap and uniqueness to them. The result is not that you “divide” your love, that’s not really possible, but you spread out the pressure you exert as you accept pressure from others.
No longer is one partner responsible for everything. And thus where a partner might not be able to provide, whether because of personal choice or circumstance the others step in. If anything, it has helped me, even in such a short amount of time, improve my relationship, especially my relationship with Brigid, in pretty drastic ways. When you are no longer expecting everything from someone, their limits are no longer “negatives”, they are simply the personal boundaries of a complex human being with their own needs.
The set up looks different for everyone and there’s a lot of cute terminology I’m still getting my head around. As of writing, I have Brigid (wife) and two potential partners, though I don’t think anything is official-official yet, though by the time this is published things might’ve changed. I’ve gone on one date (it was very lovely) and have another one coming up that will be over by the time this posts.
Compersion is the feeling of joy at the happiness your partner(s) get from romance and sex from other people. It is, in a way, the opposite of jealousy and is a feeling that I have been training myself on. At least one of my potential partners has partners of their own, and it’s comforting in a way, to know that I am not alone in supporting this person, and yes – joyous even in the happiness they show from interacting with those other partners.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not even saying that I’ve mastered it. Just that it intrinsically makes sense to me.
But chatting with other queer folks, there can be a real rift. It’s fractal, the discussion of queerness not being about sex. We spend so much time trying to convince larger society that it isn’t a sex thing, that it isn’t a fetish, whether that’s being gay, or being trans, but now the fight is against a much bigger institution – monogamy – and the discussion is now within the queer community itself. Homonormativity has us worried that if something is a “sex thing”, it’ll harm the movement.
And here’s the problem – it’s okay if it’s a sex thing. We as a society need to be okay with that. Yes, I am trans for more reasons than sex. Yes, I am a lesbian for more reasons than sex. Yes, I am polyam for more reasons than sex.
But I’m also all those things for sex. I’m sick of pretending otherwise.
Like I’m some chaste little nun going through labels and stuff. Sex is better in my body as a trans woman. Sex is better when I approach it from the lens of being a lesbian. Sex is better when I can share my needs and desires with enthusiastic partners and not just string along one poor person.
Being embarrassed about sex and our relationships to it is really fucking hurting our society. Sex is an amazing thing, but folks are so dead-set on being fucking embarrassed by it. Stop it. Seriously. We can’t have conversations about having it. We can’t have conversations about not having it. We can’t have conversations about who we do it with or why we do it at all. Cishet society looks down at having sex then also finds asexuality so foreign as to literally be incomprehensible. Like, folks, sex is great, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. And it doesn’t need to be deeper than that!
If you’re reading this, I want you to consider who you feel comfortable talking to about sex and why. Who do you feel uncomfortable talking to about sex and why. Consider also if people are comfortable coming to you to talk about sex. If they are, why do you think that is; if they aren’t why do you think that is?
More than intimate partners, what about your friends? What about people you share discord servers with? What are your lines and boundaries?
I’m not asking that the world change overnight or even that you, dear reader, change overnight (or at all), but I want you to at least consider that level of comfort and interrogate the why.
Two Years
I suspect that over the next two years I will have plenty to say about being trans, about being a lesbian, and about being polyam. Probably enough to make more posts about it. This last year has been pretty crazy, and I expect that the next two will be even crazier. So much is happening and changing. I can’t possibly not talk about it. I hope that when I post again in 2024 I’ll have a new set of genitals and have had a bunch of crazy sex that I can talk about here.
I also hope to keep having those conversations outside of this blog. In person, on discord, wherever. Please feel free to reach out. I’d love to talk to folks about any of this, especially if you’re questioning if you fit into any of these labels!
The next few years are going to be especially critical for queer people, as it will be for women in general and people of color as well. The precipice of fascism looms over us all. My previous post, as I had suspected, had pulled some folks out of their comfort zone and they confronted me by saying the post-Roe world we live in now wasn’t coming. That I wasn’t being a good enough “pick me”. That their support of me was conditional on my silence and coöperation with fascism and did not extend to queer people in general.
This isn’t that kind of blog and I’m not that kind of trans person.
I end this post once again with a call for us all to consider how we can be accomplices and not just allies. In the struggle against patriarchy. Against white supremacy. Against imperialism and settler states. Against queerphobia. Against fascism and authoritarianism. A better future is possible.
So this is going to be a difficult one, both to write and to read, just assume it’s a massive cw and move on, I don’t even really understand why I feel compelled to write this other than to get a lot of confusing and oppressive feelings off my chest. There’s no plan, I suspect it’ll end up a long rambly mess and I’m sorry. I appreciate those who do stick around to the end. It’s going to be personal and I assume it might offend some people in my family. There’s a lot of red-hot anger here.
When I was around six, I remember my paternal grandfather once said, in reference to seeing a purple Ford Ranger in someone’s driveway outside of a modest home in the inner suburbs of Cleveland, “Only a [n-bomb] would buy a purple car.”
Twenty-seven years later, I still have to fight my internal association of the color purple and African-Americans. A stupid, hateful throw-away line, said with such steadiness has fucked me in the head for my entire life. To him it was a perfectly legitimate thing to say to an impressionable six-year-old. The literal, textual meaning of his words remains only conjecture to me, but the real meaning, the emotion behind the words lingers with me to this day. It was purely, blindingly hot hate.
My paternal grandfather was a white supremacist. And while I think he did his best to hide it, I know that at the end of his life he was less reserved about it, lashing out at colored nurses and needing to be coddled into comfort by white people. In private, in the years leading to his death, he confided in me that he wasn’t just your average bigot, but an old-school one. His definition of whiteness excluded the Irish, Italians, and Slavic peoples. When in private with me, he talked down on my maternal family, hinting that they were likely Polish or worse, Jewish. He often called my maternal grandfather, whose surname is Martin, a name of ancient Scottish and Irish extraction, Martinski, a surname that I am almost certain literally doesn’t exist.
I think I was twelve or so, maybe older, when I remember him telling my parents that the problem with selling your house to Jewish folks is they’d sell their house to African-Americans. I’m just glad I was old enough to not have that turn into some horrid and permanent intrusive thought.
When I was sixteen or so, I slipped out from his grasp, mostly, though I remained close to him. One of the few people in the family who did. I kept quiet around him, tolerating his hate, or letting it in one ear and out the other, but the accusation that my maternal family was “Polish, actually” haunts me to this day. It was the point when I realized, “Oh no, this is advanced bigotry” and I quickly lost a lot of respect for him, though engaging with the racism he had implanted into my head is an ongoing project, one that I don’t think will ever be over.
I remained close to him, in the end, because there was an ever-growing rift between me and my parents, over a lot of things, but my paternal grandfather has always presented himself to me as being on “my side”. And when you’re young and impressionable, or later when you’re young and seeking independence, having an adult of considerable social standing unambiguously on “your side” is a powerful boon, even if it really only feels that way.
In talking with my brother around the start of the pandemic, he asked me if the things he had been told about our paternal grandfather by our mother were true. At the time I had only recently cut off contact with my parents, and my brother was dealing with his own relationship with them, complicated by the birth of my nephew. Michael, if you’re reading this, I didn’t lie to you, I just told you half the truth.
Our paternal grandfather was a monster.
It went beyond just his favoritism and his unfair, unjust disdain for you, it was so much more. I like to think you escaped learning his hate because of his hate. He was mean. And a liar. And manipulative. And, to be frank about it, a fascist. Brazenly racist. Openly authoritarian. Constantly railing again the rights of minorities and harboring paranoid delusions that his son had married “down”. He was everything mum said and so much worse.
There was a moment following the 2020 election where I was able to take a breath. Not much else, really. But having freshly exited the closet at the sunset of Trump’s term, I briefly thought that maybe I’d have maybe four years or so of peace. To grow as a person, free and in the open. That opening twitter might not be the awful shitstorm it had been. Shitty? Yes. Stormy? Perhaps. But not the 24/7 shit storm.
Clearly I’ve been very wrong.
Trans people have become the battleground. Our rights. Our visibility. Our everything. It’s all up for public debate and public lambasting. The hate and vitriol whipped to a froth thanks to the success that US-based and backed transphobes have had in the United Kingdom, imported back to the US as the new culture war. The new thing for half the country to hate and spit upon.
America’s imperialism is now the exporting of hate movements for cultivation overseas and then re-importing what works the best.
The last few months have been very hard. Work is burning me out and seeing the hate is eroding my mental well-being. Depression has been hanging over me again. Worse than ever. The joy in everything sucked out and left grey.
It’s mostly a feeling of worry. I am apprehensive. I don’t know what I can do or how soon I should be doing it. I’m afraid. Very, very afraid. I have shared these fears with friends and close family. I’ve shared them with my place of work, where on multiple occasions I’ve had to turn down projects or positions that would’ve moved me into areas I consider unsafe as a trans woman. I’m not sure how much longer Michigan or even the United States will be safe for me. I often catch myself considering my options. Where can I go? How will things work out? Can I easily continue my transition there?
A lot of cishetero allies considered the matter settled in 2014 with the supreme court ruling on same-sex marriage. It was a goal post that trans people had long fought against, exactly for the reason we’re seeing. Allies are fickle and they want struggles to be over sooner than later. And the American “liberal”, obsessed with process and decorum, assumes too much good faith from the conservative and too much bad from those they deign to “protect”.
So too did a lot of queer folks. Middle-class, white, cis homosexuals taking their newfound rights and fucking off to the suburbs, waiting for a trans person or a person of color to look at them wrong before descending into being life-long Republican voters.
And let’s not beat around the bush here. It’s Republicans.
Democrats are impotent, lazy, patronizing shit-heads, but the Republicans are the ones going on twitter to casually call for the extermination of trans people.
Democrats are debating if we’re worth protecting, but the ones showing up to do harm are still Republicans.
And that counts for anyone reading this. I’m sorry, but if you can still stomach voting Republican, you need to understand that I don’t trust you, and am actively wary of what you do and what you say. Platitudes of kindness are meaningless when you continue to vote for and enable bigots who actively look to kill me. And they do plan to kill us, given half the chance. Whether through “lone wolves” or through state-sponsored violence and oppression, they don’t start insinuating that I’m a pedophile or a “groomer” purely based on the incongruity of my gender and my genitalia without a bigger end goal in mind.
In the months leading up to me coming out and cutting off my parents, my father’s twitter account had gotten more and more unhinged. He was sharing material from increasingly open white supremacist and fascist groups, including groups that consider LGBT+ people legitimate targets for political violence, as well as just the usual smattering of pro-Trump bullshit. He used his account to harass people of color and spread anti-vaccine misinformation, including lying about statistics in a way that I knew that as a life-long professional engineer he understood. His account disappeared after January 6th, after saying he was moving to one of the social media sites preferred by Neo-Nazi groups.
This was on top of all the openly racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and queerphobic things he and my mother just said straight to my face. It was those sorts of things, like my paternal grandfather before them, that told me it was time to move on. Time to cease communication.
It wasn’t “politics”.
I had disagreed with my parents on “politics” for a long time, both when I was a social democrat and still at the end when I found myself increasingly disillusioned with the future as a concept and was slipping into queer anarchism.
A disagreement on “politics” is a good-faith disagreement on the policies that will improve the lives of all people. It’s at least believing that the other side wants what is best, but is misguided, wrong, or working off incomplete information. Perhaps they are selfish and putting their own needs first, while not necessarily wanting to actively harm other people.
Problem is that my parents openly advocated harm for other people, both in big and small ways. At the level of systemic harm, and at the level of interpersonal cruelty.
I haven’t really talked about this openly for two years now, and I’m sure if anyone in my family actually reads this far it’s going to cause a stir. But I said what I said. I stand by it. And getting it out there kills the allure of the secret. Perhaps I can stop having nightmares about them now.
Six-year-olds are impressionable. I don’t think this is a controversial thing to say. Six-year-old me heard my paternal grandfather say something very racist once and has been plagued with an intrusive racist thought for the rest of her life since.
A lot of six-year-olds are being told that trans people in specific and queer people in general are pedophiles, rapists, and groomers. A non-zero number of them will accept this information. A non-zero number will not. A non-zero number will be left wondering why they have this weird association in their head that they wish they didn’t, forced to actively confront their own bigotry forever. This is on top of denying queer people the language and understanding of our own place. Bigots don’t care if children are “sexualized” by trivial matters such as mentioning what gender they are or suggesting that two opposite-sex toddlers are “dating” or being aware that they have parents who are married so long as what they are being taught enforces cisheteronormativity.
But you see it in adults too. I do.
I’ll be on a call and some dude will be talking about his wife and what they’re up to, but I mention “my wife” and there’s a little intake of air. Like I had made a dirty joke or something.
A man mentioning he and his wife going on a date is “normal”. A woman so much as mentioning her wife regardless of the context is on the verge of “pornographic”.
Nevermind if I mention that I’m trans, which almost universally illicits a reaction like “I wish you hadn’t told me that”, even if the words are friendly. We can hear it. We can notice it.
Because even if someone isn’t openly a bigot, there’s a connection, implanted into their brain around age six, between being trans and being a pervert. Between being trans and being a fetish. We’re not the ones bringing our junk to the table, honestly we’d rather never talk of it again. But I also want to talk about my hardships openly just as if they were any other mundane hardship. I want to be able to feel comfortable knowing people are comfortable around me.
And this completely ignores the fact that children do understand, feel, and even become apprehensive of notions of sex, sexuality, gender, gender conformance at these ages. I’m not saying teach’m how to fuck, I’m telling you the truth of the matter. I knew I was sexually attracted to women well before I had ever seen a woman’s genitals. I knew I was a woman well before I knew that being trans was a thing or that I could even transition.
When I was around six, I had my first inkling of being trans. I wanted to be a woman so I could marry my best friend and we could be best friends forever. That’s a pretty innocent thing, all things considered. A misunderstanding of sexuality, gender, and even friendship. I drew myself in a wedding dress, but I got the feeling from the reaction of my friends that something was wrong. That I was weird. And so, following the social cues, I buried that deep down inside.
When I was around thirteen, I dealt with issues that are now, very clearly gender dysphoria. I had no word for gender dysphoria, didn’t even know it was a thing and that not everyone felt it. In what I consider the most blindingly obvious trans thing ever in my life, I had made a pair of prosthetic breasts out of K’nex, not knowing much about breasts at the time, simply to feel the weight of them on me. To see my shirt tent the way that the girl’s did at school. Not because I wanted to see them, but because I wanted desperately and unknowingly to be one of them.
We try desperately to shield children from adulthood, more often than not to their own detriment. It leaves us all unprepared. Lost. And confused. And we do it time and time again, creating generations of lost and confused adults, forced to rediscover reality for themselves. Moreover, we completely ignore mental illness, both in children and adults. We, as a society, despise talking about what we feel. I learned over and over again as a child how to recognize quick sand or what to do if I ever caught fire. As a teen I got taught over and over again how to recognize gonorrhea from syphilis from herpes, but wasn’t taught how to recognize depression, or burn out, or how to work through my feelings in mature ways.
I felt a lot of things growing up. A lot of those things were queer. A lot of them were not. One thing I didn’t feel was supported. I was constantly alone in my head, afraid that the things I felt were weird. When I was eighteen I told my mum I had been thinking of killing myself. Her reaction was a mix of incredulity and of being burdened with that information.
I still have intrusive suicidal thoughts to this day.
The first time I experienced transphobia directly, by my reckoning, was when I had a vasectomy, some five years before coming out publicly as trans. I talked about my experiences with choosing to be child free on reddit and twitter and experienced a large amount of hatred for such a tiny and personal decision. I was told that I was “lesser” and that I was “not a man” for having an out-patient surgery on my own genitals that affected no one but my wife and I.
I wonder how many of those accounts would spew abuse at me now. Telling me that I’m “lesser” and “not a woman”. I assume all of them would.
And I want to end on this, there’s no confusion on their part. They’re not hypocrites. They are consistently bigots. They consistently attack anything they deem as a threat to cisheteronormativity. I can be both “not a man” and “not a woman” to them, because they’d rather me be “a corpse”.
I don’t know how long this post is going to be. Originally I thought I’d do it as a twitter thread, but I actually have an app that limits how much time I can spend on that hellsite.
Detroit City kicks off its first game in the second tier of American soccer in roughly two hours as I finish this up. Founded in 2012, Detroit City has consistently pushed what it meant to be a community-led capital-C Club, one invested in the community, not one invested into by the ultra-wealthy as a form of bread and circuses. Owing the idea of a “zeroth” anniversary, this is actually our eleventh season, but a decade of City is worth talking about.
It’s particularly worth talking about for me because I have built a weird parallel with Detroit City since the first season. I graduated on an off semester from Purdue University at the very end of 2011 and soon after got a job that moved me to Detroit working on the edges of the automotive industry. My first day at work, if I recall correctly, was the 28th of January, 2012, months before Detroit City kicked off.
I found Detroit City searching for MLS in Detroit, as I had read that there was interest in bringing a club here at the time. At Purdue I mostly just followed EPL and when I didn’t it was because I was following Newcastle down into the Championship. My roommate had an MLS team, Chicago, and I vaguely followed the Seattle Sounders because as an aerospace engineer, I assumed I’d be moving to Seattle sooner than later.
My first game was the 16th of June, 2012. According to Detroit City historian Michael Kitchen, that was a three to nil win over FC Buffalo. I have two pictures from that game, one taken by Brigid of my friend Zak and I. We showed up with some shoddy flags and custom t-shirts, driven by my own need to recreate what I had seen elsewhere. To build.
It’s not quite ten years later. But it’s getting there. Brigid and Zak didn’t catch the bug the way I did. I started going to games alone, which for an extrovert like me means I started talking to people, which meant I soon got caught up in the nascent Northern Guard Supporters.
City means something in particular to me because it has become so intertwined with me over the last ten years. I’ve been to secret meetings. Sold Darren McCarty a scarf after drinking a pint of whiskey. Met countless people from all over the world. Carried a drunken footballer out of a bathroom. Invested in two major campaigns to grow the club. Lit more smoke bombs than I think most people ever even see. Traveled to states I wouldn’t’ve otherwise. My first tattoo was for Detroit City. And City got me interested in playing, so much so I helped re-found a beer-league team that is playing an international friendly in a little more than a week!
Detroit City has impacted a lot of who I am, is what I am saying. And the big this is that the community around City has greatly enabled the biggest change of my life.
I’ve talked at length about being trans, I’m not going to rehash too much of that here, but as the meme says, there is a direct line between fatefully looking up MLS expansion on wikipedia to searching on google to learn more about potential teams and finding Detroit City to joining the NGS, to meeting amazing people and building a support structure, to getting involved with more LGBT+ folks, to eventually my coming out as trans back in 2020.
Isn’t that crazy? Like if I were to go back in time and be able to pull ten years younger me aside and point out onto the pitch and up at the smoke and go “That. That is what enables you to finally come out.” I don’t think twenty-three year old me would’ve been able to grasp it, even fully understand the enormity and the utter correctness of that statement.
Detroit City means a lot to a lot of people, and like a fractal faceted diamond, it reflects and refracts all of us at once, and the sparkles dance in our eyes forever. Over the next few months and years and decades I expect we’ll see a lot of emotional posts like this. Of people who found City because of some cheap tickets or a quick blurb in ESPN and in doing so find a life-changing community. They, like me, will find themselves swept up in something amazing.
Here’s to many, many more years of Detroit City Football Club!
Welcome, welcome to my eighth annual Detroit City FC kit post. For those new to the site, new to Detroit City, or both, let me give you a quick idea of what this yearly even is about: when a Detroit City kit reaches the end of its life, usually at the end of a season, but sometimes at the end of the year (this time it’s both), I do a review of the out-going kits and design a set (home, away, third) of new kits for the upcoming year/season.
If you need a handy guide to my previous updates, here you go!
2021 was an amazing year for Detroit City, quite possibly the best since the inception. An utterly dominant season that technically started in the fall of 2020, Detroit City won everything that we could. We were so dominant that to keep up appearances and competition, buys and spots in the finals were consistently given to a number of teams with a growing number of asterisks behind their names.
I helpfully updated this graphic for NISA when they tried to hand-wave away that every possible path to the Championship had actually been seized by Detroit City. But I don’t think the league appreciated my efforts.
In the end, though, City saw it all the way through to the end, beating LA Force and gaining that fabled star over the crest. It was an emotional moment for all of us, but for the team it was the plateau that would hold through the end of 2021, when we won our third consecutive NISA “season”-thingy.
It really is hard to emphasize how much of a powerhouse Detroit had become, and instead of the tide lifting all ships, things seemed to get worse. Bad teams just upped the chippiness and physicality, taking advantage of NISA’s unpaid refs and willingness to let red cards just be forgiven with no real fall-out. With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that Detroit City chose to fauxmote to the USL Championship, a move that is rather fraught, so let’s start there (because this really is as much as season retrospective as it is a kit post, despite the title).
My thoughts are mixed to say the least, when it comes to this move. USL has long been a bogey in the dark, looming over Detroit City since our early days and the on-and-off proxy battles with Dan Duggan and the Michigan (now Flint) Bucks. Their model, especially in 2013 and 2014 was MLS but not as good, going as far to act as an MLS stand-in during these battles.
The closed system. The high fees to enter. The countless MLS 2 teams. USL was not where anyone wanted to see Detroit City, and I assume there are folks who continue to not want to see us there, and I won’t fault them that.
While Sean Mann has assured us that our IP is safe and that the gameday experience will almost certainly not change, the latter still needs to be proven, and I’d bet many people will remain apprehensive until the end of time, because if anything, the USL has proven to be as fickle with rule enforcement as NISA has. Lastly, when talking about USL, is how did we afford it to begin with. Word is an angel investor stepped in, one who wishes to remain anonymous, but I don’t think that soothes anyone’s minds. Really, it only bristles us more. So now we have a league that could, at any time, step in and fuck with how we do things and an anonymous owner who could step in at any time and fuck with how we do things – either through direct action or inaction.
On the other hand, we had clearly outgrown NISA and all the worrying warts that made us sigh or roll our eyes aren’t as forgivable two years into the experience, especially given the arbitrariness of them. COVID doesn’t stop NISA from living up to its own rules and its own disclosed values, but shitty league owners do. NISA is “independent” but independent seems to have less to do with not fucking with teams and fans (which NISA is happy to do) and more like “letting certain owners get away with whatever they want so long as they throw a big enough fit”. Plus vetting is apparently non-existent as a number of vaporware teams appear in equal standing with Detroit City, threatening to water it all down for us.
Sure, for many of us NISA was the equivalent of the Titanic in the vicinity of Liverpool circa 1912 – but we’re not in Liverpool anymore, we’re off the coast of Newfoundland and given the choice of staying on the Titanic or jumping over to the Carpathia, some of us see the choice as easier than others.
Does it make hypocrites of all of us?
Unpopular answer – yeah, yeah it does. But you roll with the punches knowing that’s the only thing folks got on you and keep on supporting.
Luckily for me, the kits are a much easier topic to tackle. I absolutely loved both of our primary kits. I especially loved that the squad itself grew so attached to the away kit they were requesting to wear it for big matches and the championships. They couldn’t’ve have picked a better kit to win trophies in, except for maybe the home one. But that’s just me.
The home kits were a perfect example of a clean kit – a phrase that I’ve used in contrast to a plain kit quite a bit on this site. Like pornography and art, sometimes you need to see it to know the difference. A plain kit comes off the rack, or does nothing to look like it didn’t. Whereas our home kits used the gold adidas striping to frame the otherwise “plain” shirt, giving it an extremely intentional and professional look. The gold trim is something I had wanted to see for quite some time, I hope we stick to it. While the all-rouge or rouge-on-rouge-on-rouge kits are okay, I’d rather keep that for elements like hoops or stripes while the gold details can be kept.
Meanwhile, the away kits were absolutely gorgeous. Gold bodies with white sleeves, gold trim on the sleeves and shorts kept them unified with the home kit. And boy did those kits get plastered everywhere on the media. Every time we needed to lift a trophy, there they were. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few new comers who didn’t wonder if we were really Le Champagne. A little-noted feature of all three kits that I adored was that the crest changed to match the kit it was on – rouge and gold for the home, champagne and white for the away, black and grey for the charity kit.
And while we’re on the charity kit – they never grew on me, quite the opposite really. Intricate, sublimated designs aren’t my thing. Plus it required us to use Admiral kits which probably meant that more could go to the Give Merit charity, but eh. I don’t like kits as picture canvases and prefer that designs stick to the old limitations even as everything becomes sublimated now.
Anyway, my usual list of disclaimers, which I’m just copy-pasting from last year because why the fuck not?
I don’t work for the DCFC front office
The DCFC front office fucks with me
Kits shown here are not official direction
Logos, league, and sponsors are used without permission
Sponsors and league are not official nor necessarily endorsed by our front office
I refuse to include the Chevy logo on my work, deal with it
The reality of 2022 might be very different than what I predict here, I love the challenge regardless
Before we got to the designs, I want to talk briefly on process, because I often touch upon it when writing these posts anyway. Since I am a stickler for very traditional designs, I often “sketch” kits in wikipedia format before scaling them up. I mentioned this forever ago in a post about working on the first Harper’s kits. Recently, I made a photoshop template for free-hand sketching wiki kits, so I don’t have to rely on the finicky template system, instead allowing me to potentially churn out dozens of designs with little or no trouble.
And as of late, that’s where I’ve been starting for bigger projects like this. Getting my thoughts out and on a piece of digital paper allows me to test things out, or get a better grip on the reality of what I’m thinking. Some designs die here because their flaws become obvious or seeing them for real makes me aware that they don’t really look like a Detroit City FC kit.
I’ve been finding this process to really help, especially when it comes to broadening my designs, proper framing, and getting ideas out and on the page without committing too much energy to them. That’s the best thing – the experimentation. Since I’m working in a tiny format with barely any resolution, I can sketch an idea, see it sucks, and move on all in like three minutes, instead of thirty. It means I don’t rely on crutches as much, even though, a favorite of mine is about to appear again.
This year one of the designs to not make it was a throwback to the 2013 kits, with the rouge stripe through the chest on the away kit. I was conceptualizing what a “better” version of that would look like. It just never worked and I knew it wasn’t working without feeling committed to the design. I moved on to another idea I had and it looked much, much better. So that’s what you’ll see here.
And with all that out of the way, let’s see some kits!
The Home Kit
The 2022 Home Kit Prediction – Hoops with gold trim
I’ve often said that the home kit can be hardest, though perhaps the better word is it can be more daunting. There’s a lot of focus on getting the home kit right and folks can be much more picky about what is and isn’t on it. This year I wanted to return to a focus on kits that can be produced by a company like Adidas, after a few years of allowing some slips into the sublimated hell that is dominating US kits right now.
After such a stellar year, I wanted to go back to a reoccurring Detroit City kit – the rouge on rouge hoops. City has worn hooped kits twice before: 2014 and 2017. Of the two, I think the 2017 did it better, and not just because it was Adidas over Nike. The darker “base” with the lighter “hoops” just looked overall better to me, and I wanted to follow up on that. I also wanted to keep the gold framing – we are rouge and gold after all. Having both colors on the kit at once is a good nod to that. I kept it cohesive with little light rouge touches in the shorts, using an extra little line to break up the vertical stripes and at the hem of the shirt, which gives good definition to the overall makeup of the kit.
The Away Kit
The 2022 Away Kit Prediction – Half-and-half champagne and white
Champagne is a difficult color to work with, admittedly. Generally, it doesn’t come out looking like “gold” so much as sandy tan, while “gold” is usually just a highly saturated yellow (think the Packers). Such is the disconnect when working with a color named after a shiny metal. The alternative, for Detroit City, would be white, which is our usual away kit color. Personally? I prefer the champagne, I think it looks better, it’s not a common color for kits, and again, we are the Rouge and Gold, so it’s nice to stick to that.
But as in many things in life, it can sometimes be important to compromise. Gold? White? Why not both. And thus we arrive at a staple design that rarely makes its way to the United States – the half-and-half. Here I’m working with a base of champagne, with the right half of the kit colored white. The sleeves are both champagne, as they are often a separate “item” to be colored on sites like Adidas, with no option to split them. Like the home kit, I wanted to showcase both colors, and so here I use rouge as the framing color in the cuffs and the stripes. And bucking previous trends, I went with the champagne socks – something unseen since 2012.
The Clash/Alternate Kit
The 2022 Clash Kit Prediction – Verdigris
The template I work with is admittedly not that impressive, but it is cheap and it does work for someone who is more of a spirited amateur than a professional. A few years ago I turned off the layers that are intended to add the photorealistic shading and texturing to the kits, in favor of this more cartoony/sketch look. One of the downsides to that was when you made clean kits it effectively came out looking like a romper, with nothing dividing the shirt from the shorts. But this is an actual design concern and this year I wanted to address it with the hem at the bottom of the kit.
Verdigris, the color of oxidized copper, has been a popular recommendation when I seek them out. The Spirit of Detroit, the statue that is at the heart of our crest, is in person a large copper statue and is, in fact, verdigris. It goes without saying, then, that this would be a fantastic choice for an alternate kit, though I think the color would be hard to do in reality. I used gold and black to frame the kit, leaving it otherwise unblemished by design elements. The sleeves have some vertical elements that I saw in my head as going partway around the sleeve, so it wouldn’t just be the ones visible.
The Sketches
The wikified sketches I did before kicking off proper renders.
I mentioned above that I use tiny wiki-sketches to get my ideas down on paper first, so I wanted to include the actual sketches at the bottom of this post. There are some differences for sure – for example the solid bar gold tops of the rouge kit wandered over to the clash. Part of that was just about look. The verdigris kit also had a slightly different collar look, with the gold not completely surrounding the neck, but I just couldn’t get it to look right in the render, so it was dropped. Otherwise, I think I stayed pretty true to the original sketches, and they look amazing in miniature, if I do say so myself.
A fine trio of kits!
So that’s that for the 2021-wrap up and the 2022 kit post. As you can see by the sorry state of my site, I don’t really post much to it but this annual shindig, but hey – what can you do? 2021 was a hell year, just like 2020 and there wasn’t much for it.
As always, if you’re interested in commissioning me, you can check out my portfolio/commissions page for what to expect. Have a lovely holiday everyone, and I hope to have more stuff to put on this site eventually other than just “I’m trans” and “I love kits”, but honestly, that’s probably all it’ll be for a while!
Content Warnings: Adult language, dysphoria, transphobia, transphobic portrayals of trans people in media, 4chan, homophobia, pornography, suicide , talk of sexuality, and anatomy
It’s an honest question. I had never considered it before, that might’ve been the privileged of having been assigned male at birth, but changing my name was not something that was ever seriously on the table for me. Even when I considered going through the legal process of having it recognized – the same process I’ve only just finished, it was only going to be to the nickname that literally everyone already called me.
How long does it take to forget your name? The name you had been using for more than thirty years?
It is hard to say, but a year in, I’ve gone from constantly perking up at it, to “only” having a strange semi-conscious bias toward it. I remember having gone by it at some point in my past, but it’s becoming nebulous, tenuous, even. And then, one morning, after spending an hour explaining how to spell your name to a receptionist at a doctor’s office – it pops up.
I hadn’t even used “Nick” in months. It’s always been “Nicholas” because I’m generally dealing with matters that require one’s legal name. And yet, just before the month of August began, I called myself “Nick” when baby-talking with the cat.
Brigid and I both caught it nearly immediately. It felt, weird, admittedly. Wrong. But it came out naturally, so I can promise you, it takes more than a year to forget your own name. Your old name, as it were, because as of August 17th, neither “Nick” nor “Nicholas” is my legal name. It’s a ghost lingering behind me.
It just isn’t me.
Especially the first name. Especially your pronouns. When you think about the countless people (mostly women) who have changed their last names, consider what it means to change your first name. The trepidation to ask someone to use not just a new name, but a new set of pronouns. And not just a new name like when a friend of mine asked for us to stop using the diminutive of his name, but to completely up-end it. I’m not “Nick”, I’m “Niamh”.
In the six months since my last update, I’ve mostly settled on the pronunciation “NEEV”, one syllable, easier to get across, and I’m more consistent with it. Perhaps it was my Dungeons and Dragons group, a group of folks from the UK who did in the two-syllable pronunciation. “Niamh” (with one syllable) is a recognized name there, and so there was no explanation needed. It just was. It’s comforting to log in and hear the lads all going “Hello, Niamh!”
I’m tearing up just thinking about it.
The last six months have been marked by periods of comfort and periods of excruciating pain, almost in equal measure. So maybe I’ll give a brief overview of those months.
Two Months of Hell
I last updated you all in February. Around then, I had just gotten done with a bloodwork exam and my injection dose had been increased from .5ml every other week to .6ml, despite me asking to go to .75ml. I had been doing laser hair removal since September, and that was going well. I had been presenting as female since November and it was becoming more and more usual. I was putting off starting my name change.
But I was finding the injections too much to handle. After each one I would black out, most likely because I was tensing up so hard to get through and even thinking about the injections now makes me sick. I’ve since called around and there are no pharmacies around here that offer injection services, which is ridiculous. I was legitimately told to hire a nurse to come by once every other week and inject me for god knows how much. It has just crossed my mind, though, I never thought to call the urgent cares in the area. (I just did – the answer remains “no”.)
I cannot imagine how much that hurts other people’s ability to take their drugs as prescribed.
I got both my vaccines and eventually I went and had another round of bloodwork done in early May, arriving with a laundry list of things I wanted changed. First – I wanted off injections. Second – I wanted on progesterone. Third – I wanted off spironolactone and onto bicalutamide. Forth – I wanted an orchiectomy. Let’s break that down.
Item 1 – Off injections. This was easy enough. I explained my predicament, my doctor agreed, we switched to patches – .05mg/d transdermal patches. Marvelous.
Item 2 – My doctor waffled on this, and suggested we wait for the 1 year mark. I laughed and said that I assumed that’d be the answer, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t come out of no where at the 1 year mark and get kicked to “the next bloodwork”. He said that wouldn’t be the case, that he’s a big proponent of progesterone as part of HRT, but obviously doesn’t want to prescribe expensive drugs if they aren’t desired or needed.
Item 3 – My side effects with spironolactone were getting pretty bad. First, I constantly had to pee, and it was starting to effect my sleep quality as I was constantly fighting the feeling of urgency when laying down even though I was taking it in the morning. It got so bad, I was taking a UTI medication every night for relief and that was getting both expensive and also just needlessly taxing my liver. The alternative was bica. I got prescribed 50mg/d of bica and was told to start the bica one month later in June, that way if there was a reaction to the patches, we would know the source – and similarly if there was a reaction to the bica, we would know the source – because I hadn’t started both at once. I asked if we should overlap the spiro and the bica and was told “no”.
Item 4 – I was told that I needed to wait to the 1 year mark as the cis gatekeepers of trans healthcare looked for that when deciding if I was “mentally sound enough” to have the procedure done. For the confused, an orchiectomy is the removal of the testicles. It would allow me to quit anti-androgens like spiro and bica all together. It would also mean that if I suddenly ran out of estrogen, I wouldn’t begin to detransition – an issue I was about to become very acquainted with.
Something felt wrong almost immediately. I had joked with some folks that on injections there was this weird feeling of not doing enough to be trans. Like on the pills each day you took a pill and you felt medicated, but the injections? They were once every now and then. In my head I felt like I could order more. Inject more. The patch, though, was there, all week, and I could touch it, see it, and feel like it was working.
But it didn’t feel like it was working.
All the things I associated with transitioning – the sore breasts, the thinning body hair, the dead libido, the complete inability to get an erection, hell just the way I saw myself, started to slowly slip away. My body hair was getting thicker. I was waking up to painful morning wood. My libido was quickly reëstablishing itself. I emailed my doctor and shared my concerns. They were noted but otherwise we kept moving forward.
In June, I switched from spiro to bica, right on schedule, and everything got worse. So, so much worse.
My mood completely collapsed. If you ever ran into me during June or July, understand that I was completely falling apart behind the scenes. I couldn’t even cry, the estrogen well had so thoroughly dried up. Hair was growing again up my chest, across my breasts, and onto my shoulders again. I was shaving my legs like weekly again, after only needing to do it monthly. I hadn’t felt breast growth pain in months. So I reached out to my doctor again and insisted things were going south quickly and it was agreed that we’d pull up my August bloodwork to later that week.
The one good thing was that I was prescribed progesterone immediately, but we’d wait on the other results before making any other changes.
And those results were stunningly bad. I was basically at cis male levels of E and T. I had been detransitioning for two months and it was torture, literally killing me mind, body, and soul. We upped my patch dose from .05mg/d to .1mg/d, added the 100mg/d of progesterone, and kept the bica the same.
The .05mg/d patch was far too little it seemed and the bica had lagged. By the end of July I had actually noticed that I was way more tired during rec soccer than I had been in May or June, which leads me to believe that the blocker had taken a month and a half to start having a noticeable effect.
Since changing, things have felt better and that gets into a while new discussion: how do you know? Well that’s hard to answer, right? It’s internal. You can never be totally certain of how I feel. You have to trust me. And if you already don’t trust me or already have ideas on what trans people are and why we transition, I can’t convince you otherwise. It’ll always be a lie. An excuse.
What I do know is the two months I was effectively detransitioning were two of the worst months of my life, stressful and constantly filled with dread. I absolutely hated it, and seeing hair growing on my chest again and having to shave my legs every week again was killing me. It was horrific and I felt awful, I could hardly look at myself in the mirror and I can actually see it in my google photos timeline.
For the first time since starting my transition, I took fewer photos in July. A lot fewer. Because I wasn’t taking selfies and I wasn’t taking selfies because I absolutely hated looking at myself again. All that self esteem had been sapped and I felt lost without it. Anyone who says “HRT isn’t life-saving” has never seen a trans person panic when they’ve thought they’ve lost or misplaced it, or gotten the call from the pharmacy that it’s been delayed, again. Never seen me in the midst of despair as I feel it all slip away.
The Changes
That whole episode of detransitioning led to some awkward conversations, both with lay folks around me and my doctor. When you live in your body, you become accustomed to the ins and outs of it, and you can tell you feel off, I think most people understand this, but what one might not understand is what that feels like when you’re undergoing hormone replacement therapy. The number one thing that comes up when discussing it with cis people is “Wait, that changes?”
And yeah, the list of changes is pretty long and sometimes weird to talk about. Some of them are just awkward in the abstract, because it’s weird to be 32 going on 33 and talking about your second puberty with people, but at least this time it’s a puberty I like and I am at least mature enough and aware enough to understand the consequences.
Clockwise starting with the bottom right: 29 July, 2020 (a week after coming out to Brigid, about a month before starting HRT and coming out publicly; no makeup and recently shaved) 31st of July, 2021 (11 months and 1 week after starting HRT; no makeup and recently shaved, also glasses!) 30th of July, 2021 (11 months and 6 days after starting HRT; makeup and glasses!)
I’ll get it out of the way quickly – the biggest change was obviously that I got glasses! This was something I should’ve been up front about earlier, but it’s important to note.
Actually, no joke, I had been wearing protective “anti-bluelight” glasses for a while before this, but Brigid and I finally got to the eye doctor and were diagnosed with various sight issues. Even though mine are rather slight, I’ve actually noticed some pretty big improvements to my quality of life and a reduction in issues such as auras and silent migraines.
All joking aside it’s hard to take stock at the one-year mark when significant portions of that year were spent with bad levels or even effectively detransitioning. However, they are numerous and they have been very fulfilling and affirming. A lot of it is just internal, even, the way I feel about my self and about my body. I’ve talked at length about the mental changes, having self-esteem for a change or better control of my libido. Even with progesterone added to the mix, I still have better control over my libido than I did on testosterone, which is crazy. I’m interested to see how the combination of orchi and progesterone will go, once all the T is flushed out and any off side-effects are gone.
Physically, I’m definitely more curvy. Most of the changes have been slow, subtle, as one would expect for hormonal changes, but my thighs have definitely grown some, waist has pinched in ever-so-slightly. Butt has grown a bit as well, and the fat on my belly is more femme as well, not quite the beer-gut shape any more, but certainly still there.
I have tits too, those have been pretty nice, I’ve even gotten pretty good at how to puff them up a bit for the camera. Are they massive, earth-shattering knockers? No. But they’re mine and they’re doing their best. Actually one of the signs I got that my levels were bad is the pain that had been plaguing my breasts and nipples almost constantly since December/January dried up. That has since returned.
Most of my muscle mass that was lost was lost pretty early. My arms still have a bit of tone to them, but even then it was nothing like before. I’ve also lost a lot of fat and muscle over my shoulders and neck, so I look much thinner now and there’s more of a boney look now.
My face has changed a bit. Seeing fat buildups on my cheeks and away from my chin and jowls. Despite not picking up my father’s genes when it came to hair, my hairline has seen improvement. Not sure if I’d call it a “drastic” improvement, but especially up over the temples it’s been slowly creeping forward again. I wasn’t really expecting any changes with that, but it’s welcomed regardless.
Hair is over-all one of those bigger problems with transitioning, getting it where you want it and removing it from where you don’t. My body hair is obviously recovering from the two months of bad levels, where that was some of the first stuff to reverse. Luckily it’s already thinning out again and growth is slowing down. Hair on my thighs has thinned a bit, as has the hair on my legs and arms. I can go pretty long before the need to be shaved and I’ve even started noticing that when I decide the hair is “long enough” to be cut is changing as well, with my tolerance getting shorter and shorter. But still the time between shaves increases.
I’ve been doing laser hair removal on my face for about eleven months now, and my chest for about two. Seen pretty big improvements there, as you can tell by the pictures, my shadow is mostly gone. Cleaning up the last of my my stubborn chest hair is one of my higher priorities along with the last of the shadow. Laser (and soon electrolysis) remain the only procedures related to transitioning I’ve had done, if you don’t count coloring and cutting my hair (which would be extreme if you did). I’m set on the orchi, but that’s probably a ways off. The consultation is at the end of September and I’ll almost certainly need to jump through some gatekeepy hoops before I can actually get it done. Even that isn’t particularly massive. But other than maybe considering breast augmentation in three years or so, I have no real drive for surgeries.
Yes. Including that one.
I’m sort of in the air about that one. I don’t really care one way or the other. The orchi is a pragmatic decision about getting off anti-androgens, preventing future detransitioning, and improving the quality of my tuck. Plus a lot of folks have said they get a little boost to their estrogen effects since there’s no testosterone getting in the way at all.
Lastly there’s a grab-bag of effects that HRT brings. Progesterone has given me some of the best night’s sleep I’ve had in literal decades. After years of sleep problems, progesterone knocks me out cold and I love it. I specifically take it at night because it was actually putting me to sleep during work! My genitals actually smell different… actually all of me smells different, but this is the most notable and was another one of those changes that losing it tipped me off to there being an issue with my levels.
Another one of those effects folks are surprised to hear about is your libido changes and that can be hard to describe without playing into stereotypes of binary sexuality. I can say that it is different, there’s more desire to be held? Cared for? I don’t want to go as far as say the desire has switched from fucking to being fucked, but I’m not turned on just by like raw pictures of nudity, I want and even need some sort of emotion or rationale behind it. I want to feel invested in it and it’s more mental than physical.
Left: 21 August, 2021 (three days shy of one year of HRT; makeup an dressed up) Right: 25 August, 2020 (second day of HRT; makeup and dressed down)
Briefly, I’d like to touch on the actual drugs and methods, because I think that sort of transparency is important for trans folks and I’m sure a number of folks reading this are going to want feedback to bring to their own transitions or to add to the growing pile of anecdotal accounts that passes for trans research in the early 2020s.
Estrogen methods: I am current on patches. I’ve done pills, injections, and patches. Pills and my liver didn’t play together nicely, so that’s completely off the table. I did injections for six months. First 10mg as .5ml 20mg/ml EV per injection every two weeks. Then it was 12mg as .6ml 20mg/ml EV per injection every two weeks. If this is confusing to you, welcome to being trans, where you get to be a lawyer, doctor, endocrinologist, pharmacist, and nurse all rolled into one little dysphoric package! But I personally couldn’t handle injecting myself. So I moved to patches. First a single .05mg/d patch per week, then later a single .1mg/d patch per week.
When it comes to preference, the problem is the act of injecting myself. I asked around the local pharmacies to see what the cost was to have them do the injection and they just don’t, suggesting I hire a nurse instead. If I could’ve had that done, I would’ve stayed on injections no problem. When the pros do it, there’s no worries! I prefer the injections, tbh, I just can’t do them. They last for two week, gave good results and good changes, are easier to change dosages, and they can’t fall off under your shorts. That said, patches have been working admirably and am happy to continue with them
Anti-Androgens: Spiro. fucking. sucks. The side effects were horrendous. Between the brain fog, the constantly needing to pee, the fucking with my sleep, the only good that seemed to come out of it was it completely nuked my masculine libido. All that said, I am way happier with bica, even if there’s like a zone of protection around my junk that seems to still be under the immediate influence of testosterone. I’d rather the occasional boner than constantly feeling like I need to pee and being perpetually tired from bad sleep. Preference is 125% bica all the way.
As for the actual methods: I went from 100mg/d of spiro (taken in the morning) to 50mg/d of bica (taken in the morning).
Where does that leave progesterone? Progesterone is useful both as an anti-androgen and a hormone for transitioning. For all I know my E2 levels are still shit, but the progesterone is over-riding it all. The big downside is constantly being horny again, I’m interested to see how that plays out when I’m post orchi and my testosterone is dead forever. But that’s really the only downside! I am currently on 100mg/d (taken orally about two hours before bed) of progesterone and I love it. Helps improve so much about both my transition and my quality of life. Seriously, the sleep is worth it alone.
A Reflection on Adulthood
For the longest time, I’ve dealt with intrusive and often extremely negative thoughts and memories. HRT has not fixed that, unfortunately. That is an important lesson, though, transitioning has done so much to make me feel better, make me be better – but it is not a panacea. It doesn’t make everything work instantly.
I wish it would, honestly.
My general health and well-being is better now because I care. Because I want to be around for years and years and years to enjoy this new lease on life, but depression and anxiety don’t just disappear. And in a way, I have gained new fears and anxieties, mostly related to the way I interface with a cis world. As I write this, I am dealing with a clinic stonewalling me from trans-related care. Something that should’ve taken minutes has taken weeks, and I’ve given up. I’m not dealing with their bullshit.
But there is one intrusive thought that doesn’t cross my mind any more – that I should transition.
In the last update, I talked at length about what it was like discovering trans people, something I had to do myself and a lot of the information I got was, perhaps obviously, from transphobic people. But I mentioned that when I was nineteen, I actually conceptualized myself transitioning in the post-knowing world. So to sort of wrap up this update, I wanted to expand on that a bit.
One summer, when I was nineteen, I was back home between freshmen and sophomore years of uni. I worked at a local store selling shoes, slept in what before my going off to school was my sister’s bedroom, and I flirted with a really cute redhead at a couple of things I went to.
Before my senior year of school, I didn’t really do much that was co-ed. Especially outside of school. I almost entirely hung out with (at the time) other boys my age. We played lots of D&D, lots of Warhammer, lots of video games, and all that. But there weren’t really girls involved, as stereotypical as that sounds now. I had a lot of trouble dealing with women in general. Partially because of this lack of exposure, and it was something that plagued me for decades. Which is weird, considering my first best friend was a girl.
In senior year of highschool, I got a girlfriend and began going to more social ‘parties’ for lack of a better word. It was different, but if you knew me at the time, you could attest that I was extremely awkward. Purdue, in some ways, was a step back, but only because I didn’t push myself out of my comfort zone. I got broken up with, and alone, scared, and once again surrounded by men, I had a very toxic idea of relationships and people in general. I went to Purdue thinking I would rebuild myself, and as much as I did that first year, there was a lot of progress still to be had.
When I came back home for summer, there were a lot of reunion get-togethers. And my social circle back home had shifted over the year. The people I was hanging out with were not the same I had hung out with before. But it was an easy-going group, and there were a lot more women involved. I’m sitting here thinking about how I interacted with them, and how I interact with women now, and there’s a weird parallel.
As a trans lesbian, or trans panlesbian, it can be hard to distinguish whether what you feel around women is gender envy, sexual attraction, camaraderie, or all of the above. Part of your social transition is breaking these things down and realizing that they can coexist. And today I can look back and see the first sparks of that camaraderie here in this summer. I wanted to belong, not as part of ‘the group’, but as part of ‘the girls’ in particular. I spoke in a way as to disarm myself. Not talking down, per se, rather, as not a man.
The thought that I wanted to transition literally haunted me for over a decade.
My entire adult life has been defined by these thoughts. I had thoughts of transitioning for this redhead, who (to be clear) was not a lesbian or bi as far as I am aware, because it didn’t work out – it remained a whatif in my life, even after I met and began dating my would-be wife and partner just months later. I had dreams and thoughts that I could’ve started sooner, that it had been there all that time and I just didn’t know it and I hadn’t known I wanted to.
During quiet times, when I was forced to be alone with myself for long stretches of waking time, like long drives, or flights, I thought about transitioning. Over and over and over. For years. I was plagued with doubt. Doubt about the results. Doubt about the effect on my life, my work, my relationships. Doubt about myself.
All my life I had envisioned a life for myself and later a life for me and Brigid, but increasingly it felt like I had missed such a major piece in my own life.
One night in 2017 or 2018, after Brigid and I had spent too much time out and on the town, driving back from Ferndale, she came out to me as bi, and feeling the momentum, I came out to her being extremely gender confused. I had effectively told her, and would repeat, that I was trans but not going to transition because of my apprehensions around transitioning.
It was around this time that I had switched my pronouns to he/they and eventually to they/them to little fanfare on my twitter profile (but never enforced any sort of adherence). I was never non-binary, but the increasing detachment from what it meant to be “a man” made he/him more and more painful.
And though the thoughts of transitioning ebbed and flowed over the next two years, they never stopped. Over those two years I met and formed a number of relationships with trans women and today, with the help of hindsight, it makes it feel inevitable.
But I’m hesitant to say it was. In the end, what really gave me the chance to become myself was the pandemic and the permanent work-from-home. I was offered a chance to get this first, awkward year out of the way in privacy, and I took it. I know I am not alone there. I think we’ve all had a chance over the last year, year and a half, to get reflective and strive to build our lives anew.
And so, the end for now…
So it’s been a year. One whole year of medical transitioning and roughly ten months of “full-timing” it. I will admit, I go into my second year slightly apprehensive. The lockdowns won’t last forever; the masks will eventually get put away, but the head start I have should serve me well. In September I return to the doctor for an early follow up to the changes in my HRT regimen that I spoke of a couple thousand words ago.
My next “official” update for you will be next year for my second anniversary! If you hadn’t noticed, the idea what that they doubled in length each time: 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 4 years, 8 years.
Of course, there will be social media and my micro updates there, but these updates have proven a nice way for me to process my transition for myself. I can assure you, if you think it’s drastic from the outside, it’s quite a bit more on the inside.
But here we must end it for now! Remember to continue to support the LGBT+ people of all walks in your life. “Accomplices not allies” and all that! I hope this update was informative for everyone!
To be honest, I actually though I had until this summer to work on this post, which I usually do as a wrap up to the previous season, but noooo~ we’re going to do a mid-season kit change. So here it is fuckers, the kit post twenty-twenty-one
For those new to the site: HI! I mostly post about sports and kits, sorrrrrrry! If it helps I do have something in the works combining kits and trans that will happen eventuallytm. At the wrap up of a Detroit City FC season kit’s lifespan, I do a little write up about the last set, things I guessed wrong or right, and then come up with three new kits (home, away, alt) to get everyone excited for the unveiling of the upcoming kits.
If you want to check out any previous Kit Post, here’s a handy guide:
So in last year’s post I went a little off the beaten path and came up with some designs that were a little different both for Detroit City and for myself. I went with heavily sublimated kits in the vein of Inaria or Icarus with details across the actual bodies of the kits that would require some level of customization on the part of the manufacturer.
I think I was closest with the away kits, in which I predicted a white with rouge hooped kit and off-colored socks, and while literally none of that happened, the actual away kit was white with rouge pinstripes and has very much grown on me over the last year. It is, in fact, the 2020 kit that I own, as I rarely buy more than one. It was in the white kits that Le Rouge dominated the Fall Championship, and in those kits we hoisted the cup, which given the climate of 2020, was an amazing and cathartic thing to see. I, for one, will always associate the image of Stephen Carroll pouring an entire can of Stroh’s into his mouth with the Fall trophy with 2020. Victory in the face of adversity, celebration in the face of uncertainty will always be 2020 to me.
The home kits, however, were frustrating to me, visually, the pin stripes so small as to be effectively invisible from far away, yet so painfully obvious when up close, ruining an otherwise crisp kit. They didn’t do it for me, I guess, and this is obviously a quite subjective take. I think it was particularly rough following the very popular 2019 design, which was very, very clean and of course also came with a lot of baggage and trophies. Somehow, though, I don’t feel like I’m missing out not seeing another trophy or three lifted in that particular design.
And there were no alternative kits last cycle, thanks in no small part to COVID. So Nothing to say here.
Anyway, my usual list of disclaimers, which I’m just copy-pasting from last year because why the fuck not?
I don’t work for the DCFC front office
The DCFC front office fucks with me
Kits shown here are not official direction
Logos, league, and sponsors are used without permission
Sponsors and league are not official or necessarily endorsed by our front office
The reality of 2021 might be very different than what I predict here, I love the challenge regardless
I am pleased that so far Detroit City has resisted the temptation of highly sublimated kits, and happy that they’ve stuck with Adidas. We shall see if that continues (I suspect it will given the respectability and reverence for the brand). Say what you will, getting good kits from Adidas just has a certain something to it, it elevates Detroit City, and that’s not worth nothing, especially when you’re talking about charging $80+ for a soccer kit.
Assuming we stick with Adidas, we can actually have some potential throwbacks to our 2013 kits, though maybe those should wait for 2023, then? I sketched them up in October of last year. It’d also be really cool for 2022 being our tenth anniversary or even this year being our tenth season to see the club release a poster with all the kits so far made by Dave at Historical Kits. That would be a legitimate instant grab for me.
Anyway, we’re about 700 words into this beast, so why don’t we move on and get to the goods? Here are my designs for the 2021 Detroit City FC kits!
The Home Kit
After a couple years of more complicated designs, I wanted to get back to something simpler this year, and that’s the theme of this trio – clean. Clean is a hard thing to describe. Clean to one person is plain to another, and plain is bad, it’s boring. So how does one design for clean while avoiding plain? Well, that’s really hard to say. For me, plain kits have no details, and they elicit little emotional investment. Small details, like the gold cuff stripes on the shirt and shirts, the fleurs de lis on the socks mirrored onto the shirt and shorts in small ways to me builds a cohesive whole.
For the home kit, I went with an old-school design that will be familiar to fans (and enemies) of teams like Arsenal and Ajax. The core of the kit is a darker, more purpley rouge, with the outside being brighter. The cuffs and the collar are the darkest, giving a boarder to it all, and of course small golden lines throughout make it cohesive. I always suspect my home kits will be the most divisive, and that’s no different here.
The Away Kit
I really liked the gold and black kits from my 2020 set, and I started with that here. You might notice the same Adidas stripes turning into a colored inset in the pits and on the sleeves. But I wanted to walk away from the black because this is the away kit, which needs to get tied more strongly in with the over-all colors of the club. So here I went with rouge as was the case for the 2017 kits. Detroit City’s first away kits were gold, and they’ve popped up here and there, but gold is a difficult color to work with in manufacturing. In the end you are effectively left with two choices: sand or yellow? In the past, Detroit City has gone the route of sand, avoiding the garish yellows of teams like the Green Bay Packers.
When designing these, it felt very subtractive, which is an unfortunate feeling. I was removing features rather than adding them and here I was having trouble finding a place to add anything of note. I did bring back the fleurs from the home kit, this time only on the shirt, as I have let the shorts remain more clean, letting the white dominate. It is easy to overpower white, especially in the shorts. And I wrapped it up with tow-tone rouge turn-overs on the socks.
The Clash/Alternative Kit
This one is by far and away my favorite of this year. I took a lot of inspiration from the popularity of the 2019 alternate kits, a keepers kit that appeared like exactly once as far as I am aware, and FC St. Pauli. When you have the word “Ally” written across the chest of every kit, it was hard not to want to lean into that in more ways than one. This kit probably took the longest, had a very strange evolution, and was workshopped a bit more than the away kit and far, far more than the home (I rarely workship home kits).
Pink and black are an amazing combo, it’s hard to do wrong, if I’m honest, and that’s good because there might be some fun stuff with Harper’s dropping soon that I’m very excited for. This kit was the hardest when it came to balancing clean and plain, or clean and over designed. Especially when you introduce the pride flag into things, you have a lot of colors competing for attention, which is why reducing them to thin stripes ended being just what the doctor ordered. Originally, for example, the whole cuff was a pride flag, which then makes the sleeves look busy, which then makes the shirt look paradoxically empty. I think the balance was struck here, and it is certainly my favorite design of the bunch.
Once again folks we have come to the end of another Kit Post. Like I said up top, I thought I had another two or three months to work on this, and with all the other work I’ve been doing lately, I was worried that I wouldn’t have the juice to get through this one on such short notice.
I’d love to hear any thoughts or other idea you might have on twitter, and if you like my work, as always – please check out my commission page for pricing and what to expect, as well as some of my recent designs.
As I’m starting to write this, it’s become known that Rush Limbaugh has passed away, and let me take a moment to say good riddance to bad trash, and if you have a problem with me saying that, you can stop reading and go on and do something else. Save us both a lot of time.
Content Warnings: Adult language, dysphoria, transphobia, transphobic portrayals of trans people in media, 4chan, homophobia, pornography, suicide , talk of sexuality, and anatomy
Back in August I made quite a big announcement about a part of myself that had always been there, at least as far back as I can piece together from the fragmented shards of my memories. On facebook and twitter I came out as a trans woman, beginning a new era in my life that has brought with it drastic changes. Changes I am sure that some, if not most of you are interested in at least hearing a bit more about.
Hi! I’m Niamh. I’m a trans woman who lives outside of Detroit, Michigan.
This is going to be a very frank discussion, so if that bothers you, you might want to move on. I will discuss, among other things, my anatomy, my sexuality and libido, and pornography. There’s a lot of LGBT terminology throughout, including “cis”, which I wanted to define for all you cis folk out there. Subtracted from nuance, if you’re not trans, you’re cis. Cis- and trans- come from Latin and are opposites meaning “this side of [X]” and “that side of [X]” respectively.
I plan to make this a growing series, with updates at six months (this one), one year, two years, four years, and eight years, if I can even remember that long. After that I’ll put it to bed. This post has to set the scene, and thus is very long. There’s more than thirty years to cover to get where I am now.
For those of you who might be catching up, or new, and I have picked up a large number of followers since coming out, becoming, unwittingly, the first generation of people who know me only as a woman, only as Niamh – Hi! I’m Niamh. I’m a trans woman who lives outside of Detroit, Michigan. I work in the automotive industry, and I am a huge soccer person. I watch soccer. Support soccer. I even run a small co-ed team, which shares this website with me.
Come with me, on a journey.
Setting a scene…
On August 28th of 2020, I publicly came out as a trans woman after it being a known secret to those closest to me for about two months before that. Four days before, though, was my rebirth – my first dosage of HRT, where I, personally, mark the beginning of of my transition. It is on that day that my personal calendar first uses “Niamh” and not “Nick”. And thus, the 24th of February marks six months.
But six months of what?
Being a woman? Being trans? Being out?
If nothing, the heart of the trans experience for me is existential, reflective, and deeply, deeply personal. This might not be very profound or new to print, but it is to me. A lot of things taken for granted, institutions and whole constructs once assumed monolithic and immutable, crumble away, revealing the sawdust and glue concoction that it was the whole time.
It is easy, and almost necessary, to then scour your life for the little breadcrumbs of trans-ness. As if that would be enough to make it okay under the immense pressure of cis-heteronormative expectations. We are almost expected by cis folks to say “I always knew,” when, at least in my case, is it’s more “it makes sense in retrospect” and that’s half true.
I think I really came to understand I was trans when I was nineteen. I remember one summer getting involved in what could’ve been a fling, if I wasn’t such a fuck head, and someone remarked that they thought the target of my crush was either bi and only interested in women at the time, or a lesbian. And I distinctly, even twelve years later, remember the pang of thinking “I’d transition for her.” After that it was a rough twelve years, internally. I thought about transitioning a lot.
And when you live in a cis-heteronormative society, getting information, real, honest information can be extremely difficult. Even just learning that trans people were a thing, was a long, arduous journey. Movies like Dressed to Kill or Silence of the Lambs painted a picture of the never-passing psychopathic trans woman, while Ace Ventura: Pet Detective only really gets transphobic in the end, but at least the psychopathic trans woman passed, so progress? A movie that I’ve not seen, only read about and heard jokes and comments about is The Crying Game, which at least from the synopsis seems to be more sympathetic to trans women. I mean she only gets smacked and the protagonist pukes, but they make up and become close? Woo?
The list for trans men is significantly shorter, and if I could venture a guess it’s because trans women are considered significantly more dangerous to society by the cis majority. If you are interested, a more complete list of such films can be found here, but those mentioned above where, for a long time, the “truth” about trans people to me.
You’re not broken. You can’t be trans.
A second wind of “truth” came with my access to the internet and through that, access to pornography. And thus, truly, I start to take an active role in my own journey. Where before I absorbed through osmosis, now I could seek out, explore, and consume on my own.
Pornography is a place fraught with the male gaze. A cis hetero male gaze to be exact, and in 2003 the portrayal of trans women rarely worth exploring. At best she is an oddity, a strange woman-shaped object with a penis who exists to fuck as a man would. At the worst, a projection of a failure of masculinity. A man reduced to a woman. To be fucked, taken, as a woman should.
The exception, of course, is Japanese futanari, which for those of you so uncultured to not consider hentai art, are anime(?) women with penises. And while I shall spare the normies the debate on whether she must have testicles, or must have a vagina, the critical understanding is futanari are almost universally attractive women who have a little bit more. And isn’t that weird? Attractive women with penises? Isn’t it, for lack of a better word, transgressive? Isn’t it disgusting that these women with penises feel attractive? Are taken as attractive? Are sexual and enjoy themselves?
Well, that was the opinion of sites like 4chan, and it was clear that there were two sorts of folks who enjoyed trans pornography – trans people (and eggs) and people who openly hated trans people and mocked the eggs relentlessly.
(Aside: A egg, for the unaware, is someone who is questioning their gender, or is otherwise a trans person who hasn’t come out to themselves.)
Once there was an active thread at the top of which was an image of two trans people: a trans woman and a trans man. Both were shining examples of their chosen expression – the woman curvy and beautiful, with long flowing hair and a large bosom; the man stout and strong, hairy with a thick beard and biker tattoos. The “catch” was that neither had undergone GRS, that is colloquially “bottom” surgery. The image urged users to pick which one you’d have sex with and then defend why it wasn’t gay.
You’re already dealing with internalized misogyny.
Here, I’ll even pause so the trans folks can vent for a second and you cis-hets will probably take a moment to consider the question yourself.
Obviously for OP in a place like 4chan, there was no right answer. You were broken regardless. Whether you were a faggot defending having sex with a dude with tits and a dick, or a faggot defending having sex with a dude with a hairy chest and a beard – you were broken. And you should kill yourself.
The suggestion or the push to kill one’s self is one that pops up a lot, when you are trans. If you have ever seen 41% mentioned around trans folk, especially aggressively, that is the percentage of trans people who attempt suicide when not in the presence of a supporting family. Being tortured literally to death is a statistic that is thrown into our faces as a joke. A snide comment that perhaps we should just end it all. It’d be so much easier. And… it’s not like you’ll ever pass, right?
When I was nineteen, going on twenty, and staring up into the ceiling of my sister’s old room, repurposed to be a guest room while I had been away at Purdue, I really thought about it. The idea of transitioning was tempting, and with it brought great worry and doubt. But also excitement? But no. You’re not broken. You can’t be trans. And yet these thoughts persisted. I mean, something so innocent put it in there. The idea of being a woman and being thought of as attractive by other women was exhilarating. If only I could reach out and pluck it.
“If only” is a phrase trans people say to themselves a lot, I fear. If only I had known sooner. If only I had started sooner. If only I had supportive friends and family. If only I had more money. If only I had better insurance. If only I had known what it was. If only I had known it was even possible.
I was on my journey.
It took a long time to draw the line between knowing what trans people were, and what I was feeling. The first problem, of course, is that being trans is an deeply personal and subjective journey. While some thought patterns are shared or more common than others, there’s really no way to just say “yes, you’re trans” after a brief discussion or a night of reading. It takes a certain level of internalization. And I’m sure, even as I write this, that this is where a divide begins. A divide between those who grew up before the 2010s and those who grew up afterwards.
The difference is that younger folk have grown up not just with the internet, but a mature internet – that is “mature” as in a fully-realized and developed tool. Queer spaces have not just been carved out, but they flourish, and in them you can quickly find many others sharing the same strange feelings of incongruity as you. Even if they don’t match 100%, after reading ten, twenty, a hundred stories, the sum total of overlap begins to build a picture of a new you.
Of a happy you.
And so after over a decade of toying with it, of thinking and hemming and hawing I was really running out of room and increasingly I felt like I was running out of time.
My egg finally and utterly shattered one night while reading a comic on a subreddit for eggs, a place where people coming to terms with being trans would share silly memes, trying to bring a bit of light to a rather stressful and confusing part of our shared struggle. The comic said something along the lines of “If you’re putting off transitioning because you’re afraid of not being a pretty girl – you’ve already accepted that you’re a girl. You’re already dealing with internalized misogyny.”
It was almost instant. Reading the words and it just clicked.
And I realized there was no going back. The boulder was rolling down the hill. I had been pushing it up and over the hump for twelve years. I stood from atop that awful hill and watched as it got away from me, and then after a few seconds, realized that I was expected to follow it and so clumsily at first began running down the hill after it, struggling to catch up.
COVID and the resulting stay-at-home orders have brought discord and pain to so, so many but I sat there, watching the She-Ra on netflix with Brigid, and I could feel it welling up. This amazing chance had dropped onto my lap. I could have like four or five months to transition completely in private while maintaining my job and income. And it kept getting pushed back! Further and further! I might even have a whole year.
It took me multiple weeks to come out to Brigid.
I had told Brigid multiple times of my feelings of genderqueerness, my concerns with transitioning, but I told her that I had thought about it and did not want to do it. She’s always been supportive of my decisions and made nothing of it, though once she did ask if I was interested in dressing more femme and at the time I was screaming “yes!” in my head, but declined, citing what now I recognize as gender dysphoria as why I couldn’t.
But there were multiple times, as we were sitting in bed before going to sleep, that I could feel the urge and drive building to just tell her, and then… I couldn’t.
And it happened over and over.
Then, finally, one morning in late June we were making coffee before catching a few episodes of She-Ra and I barely managed to squeak out the words “I want to transition.”
I honestly don’t remember much from the rest of that conversation, other than Brigid saying “Okay.” After that it’s really all just a blur.
On facebook and twitter I came out as a trans woman, beginning a new era in my life that has brought with it drastic changes.
Not even just that day, rather the next few months went by very quickly as I prepared to come out, start HRT, and at least try speaking with a therapist. After so long of just thinking about it meant that when the time came, I was running, sprinting through whatever popped up. After meeting with a GP and some bloodwork, and some day-of mix-ups at the pharmacy, on August 24th at roughly five o’ clock on a Monday evening, I had my first dosage of HRT. 4mg of Estradiol and 100mg of Spironolactone. I took all three pills at once and regretted that by the end of the night, as it was a bit much for my stomach to process.
The next morning I took one of the estrogen pills and the spironolactone. Nausea came and went through the day and again at night, it spiked, but it was fading. Whether it was the pills or anxiety, I will never really know. It doesn’t even really matter at this point. I was on my journey. And four days later I came out to the world.
Six Months Later…
Niamh. That’s my name. Sometimes I need to remind myself. You refer to yourself as one thing for so long it’s not easy to get over. Same with pronouns. I’ve exclusively used she/her/hers since coming out, but still in my head, my ego, uses the wrong name, the wrong designations because it had for thirty-one years. I correct myself every time. I owe myself that much.
When I first came out to Brigid, one of her first questions was what did I want to do about my name and my initial reaction was to keep at least “Nick”, arguing at the time that it was unisexual for both Nicholas and Nichole.
But the more I thought about it the more that rang as false. I already desperately wanted to change my middle name, which I had grown over the years to loathe, despite using it in a professional sense for quite a while. This is, after all, N H Kendall dot com. There is another Nick Kendall, a professional violinist, who hogs all that precious, precious SEO.
It didn’t take long, but I quickly came to the conclusion I really did want to change my name. I wanted to keep my initials, I knew that much. I wanted to have feminine names. I wanted to celebrate my Irish and German heritages if I could. Niamh is a very traditional Irish name meaning “brilliant” or “radiant”, pronounced like NEE-uhv or NEEV; I prefer the first. Golden-haired Niamh was also one of the Queens of Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Young, a name for the Celtic otherworld. For my middle name I chose another older, more traditional name Henriette, and as of writing, have chosen to pronounce it in French. Is it a shout out to my home – Detroit? Is it a stab at the H I carry, marking bound to my father and his fathers and fathers back to the 1800s? To leave it unpronounced? You tell me. It’s a little and a lot of both. It’s also just pretty.
Briefly I considered ditching my last name, a name that I’ve actually used as a first name for quite a while as it is, a woman’s name. That, however, was a step too far in the end.
The sudden shift is a common feeling now, as my transition progresses. Nothing is sacred anymore. Any feeling or nudge, any deeply held conviction is up for reconsideration. And really, isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Aren’t we supposed to be reflective on ourselves? Reimagine and rebuild ourselves from time to time?
For me, one thing I was immediately interested in confronting was my sexuality. For a lot of trans people there is a period of “Am I sexually attracted to this person? Or do I want to be them?” And once you start on the road to being the gender of your choosing, what really were you feeling? It’s complex and difficult, but I think in a way it’s both necessary and inevitable.
Coming to terms with being a woman also involved unloading a lot of toxic masculinity, which had been smothering me for so long. Simultaneously, coming to terms with being a trans woman who as of writing is still interested in keeping and maintaining the functionality of her penis forced myself to ask some pretty critical questions and confront my internalized transphobia. The process would go like:
If I consider myself a woman, why don’t I necessarily consider other trans women women?
I do! And there’s a lot of hot trans women out there! I’d totally hook up with one (marriage aside)!
Even if she had a penis?
Well yeah.
Then what about men?
Well… I’m not sexually attracted to men.
What if they were non-binary?
I guess that depends?
Depends on what?
The “catch” was that neither had undergone GRS, that is colloquially “bottom” surgery. The image urged users to pick which one you’d have sex with and then defend why it wasn’t gay.
I began to appreciate that my sexuality was not a monolith. It wasn’t a single facet of who I found attractive or even who I was. And once I was able to understand that, I was better able to relate to the people around me and understand my own feelings much better. The way I came to think of it was what I had been assuming was “sexuality” was actually three scales that I could use independently of each other, sort of like a character stat diagram. The three arms were: aesthetic attraction, romantic attraction, and sexual attraction.
Aesthetics are how people look. Who do I find “pretty” to look at? Who do I aesthetically appreciate. Luckily we were watching Bridgerton at the time, and what I discovered was that I found men, women, and non-binary folks as potentially aesthetically pleasing. Thus, at least on this one axis, I was pan.
Romantic attraction, though, is a bit harder to define. For me, it’s who would I stay up with all night discussion life while nude and drinking wine. Who would I, in the absence of sexual intimacy, be willing to hang my arms around and get kisses and fervent glances from. And it’s as wishy-washy as it sounds. There’s a lot of “depends”, but in the end it’s more of a femme thing – women, and femme-presenting non-binary. I’d be willing to call this “pan with preferences” or “pan lesbian”.
Sexual attraction is who do I want to do the dirty with. I think this is the one that most folks will get immediately and it is here that I remain the most steadfast. I’m solely attracted to women and femme-presenting non-binary folks at a purely sexual level. Over-all, I think this puts me in the “pan lesbian” category, but generally I just use the label “lesbian” because if I’m honest, most of the gents falling into that first category are like celebrities at their peaks. I am almost certainly going to continue to reëvaluate this over the next six months.
Finally, I think I’m ready to reach the part that I’m sure brought you all here. The T&A. My six months on HRT. I hope if nothing else, what my cis readers take away is there is so much more to transness and transitioning than the medical side of things. It is a deeply emotional beast. And while it is easiest to measure the time I have been taking some pills and now the injections, my timeline is more about the firsts that come with wearing dresses, presenting feminine in public, being ma’amd, my ever growing, ever changing relationship to the LGBT community, the trans community in specific, and my growing confidence in myself.
HRT is prescribed as a cure to gender dysphoria. That’s what the paperwork says. So let’s start there.
The idea of being a woman and being thought of as attractive by other women was exhilarating. If only I could reach out and pluck it.
Gender dysphoria is a vicious monster. For some trans people it’s extremely visceral, a sort of gender-based panic attack that can leave them unable to function. For me it was very different, almost more insidious, I felt nothing.
And the problem with feeling nothing is that it’s harder to realize that you’ve been carrying it around for years and then decades. When it did actually manifest, it was often in the small things. Like being uncomfortable when my wife ran her hands through my chest hair. It was hard to pin down, easy to ignore, and thus it was more successful in evading treatment.
Explaining gender dysphoria to cis people is difficult, to say the least. More than feeling ugly, or mismatched, more than the awkwardness and the emptiness. It is much worse than the sum of its parts. Draining you physically and spiritually. And at the emptiness, you flail powerless to beat it back. You try to grow buff. You wear a beard for seventeen years. You hope and you pray that you’ll get better, that one day you’ll feel right.
And pray I did. One of the only times I prayed to a higher power ever was in early puberty when I effectively grew very small, but clearly unmasculine breasts. I prayed for puberty to carry me to the other side, or at least take them away. But no dice. I was forced to undergo a very awkward puberty, left without words or definitions to express my horror to those charged with caring for me.
Since starting HRT and presenting female, though, I have felt a strange and intoxicating rush that I can only assume is self-esteem and body confidence. I have found it so much easier to be happy. And I love standing in front of the mirror.
I love the physical changes to my body. Losing the beard and lasering it off bit by bit. I love my little titties and I love that HRT has sucked all the fat from my neck and collar and stuffed it all into my ass and thighs. I’ve lost about 12# or so, mostly to muscle loss in my arms, which are slimming. My fingers too are slimming down, as my jewelry held in place with little plastic forms make me aware. I love makeup. I love getting dressed up and putting together outfits. I love presenting a more honest me. I would even risk saying that I love my voice.
The confidence that has come with embracing my femininity has been utterly infectious. I revel in every cry, every glance of my curves, knowing that all the hair on my back and chest is thinning away. And the hair on my head is so much longer, I can twirl it in my fingers and Brigid can comb it for me at night. The confidence is so powerful, in fact that even with spironolactone essentially completely suppressing my libido, I feel much more sexual in a way. I also feel so much more in control.
For decades I suffered from a libido that was completely out of control, to the point of negatively effecting my life and my ability to even just interact with people. I’ve described the problem as fueling your Ford Fusion with nitro-methane for thirty years before someone finally comes up to you and says, “You can just fill the tank with unleaded gas.”
And there’s the crux.
Testosterone was clearly, clearly not the fuel I was meant to be running on. Physically and mentally, it was killing me. Estrogen is right, though. Everything just works better.
For the first time in over thirty years I feel good.
And so, the end for now…
There is a chance this was not an easy read for you. And that’s how it should be, honestly. It was not necessarily easy to write, but it was, all things told, cathartic. Transitioning has also been very hard and also very easy, and very cathartic all the same. I don’t think there are words I could ever string together to completely convey how right all of this has felt.
I can only keep insisting that you listen. That you read. That you internalize in yourself the words that trans people put out for you. And that you, more than anything, believe us.
In six months I shall return to this and perhaps go deeper into the physical and mental changes I’ve been seeing as well as comment on my experiences as a trans person out and about, if being out and about is something we can do by August. But I felt it necessary to set the stage, to dig to the root of my own transness which even still might be enigmatic to you all.
Hopefully you continue with me on this journey. I look forward to sharing my HRT-versary with you all. If we are diligent, it could even be in person!
This is an editorial written by Sam “Taco” Shrum and edited by myself.
Early afternoon on a Sunday in 2020, I sat in a video call with a small group of friends. The season had passed already for us lower league soccer supporters- a time where the game on the pitch gave way to the metagame of Twitter. The preparations for supporting another year. The analysis of new team announcements, the scraping of social media for little clues about which players were coming and going. We clung to each scrap of info, stretching it out and savoring it while waiting for the sun to return with in-person football.
It was during this chat with my fellow supporters that Niamh became visibly distracted, looking away from the screen with the camera, typing something out. “Sorry- some new account for a new team showed up. Bloomington. I’m giving them business advice,” she said. My ears pricked up. Niamh had been steadily growing out her work doing design work for teams, and was relatively plugged into what worked and what didn’t. If she was talking to a brand new team, the stories could stretch out for quite awhile.
His answers… did reflect a deep well of passion and interest for what he was doing
I pulled up my own tab and began digging through. “NISA 2 Bloomington”, it promised, despite having a pinned tweet promising that USL soccer would be coming from them. I scrolled down further, finding the tweet where they said they didn’t have the millions for USL, and were pivoting to NISA. Announcing an intention to join a league without doing the minimum due diligence wasn’t unheard of, sadly- to pivot within a day was something else entirely. I took it all in slowly.
The Twitter metagame is a strange thing. Not long before, a close friend and I had created fake supporters groups that fooled the team in question and others in the league. Before that, I had once convinced a team that I was their social media manager, and become the official account on the website. Anything new was suspect- and we immediately flagged this Bloomington account as being part of the metagame. A fake. An attempt to get the credulous types to spread it further so there could be one big laugh at the end by everyone who was got.
And yet that was hardly enough to stop interest. One couldn’t even be sure that they would be there in-person in 2021; the metagame was all we had while we waited. I kept checking in, mulling over the possibility of road trips to Bloomington if they did join NISA. A Twitter poll appeared asking what the name of the club should be, and soon “NISA 2 Bloomington” was known as “Bloomington Crossroads FC”. A sensible name; it invoked Indiana’s state slogan of “the crossroads of America”. I wasn’t a fan of using a poll to decide things like this, usually- I’d poked at this Bloomington account during it, annoyed at their other options and that they’d done one at all. In the end, at least a reasonable name had been settled on. And then came the logo.
Gracin turned those Google docs into the bones of Bloomington Crossroads.
The logo would be teased for a solid week. Constantly shown in shadow or in silhouette at least once a day, often multiple times a day. “Get on with it,” we’d mutter, waiting for that next tidbit. And then it finally did arrive. “BLOOMINGTON FC CROSSROADS” it proclaimed, despite the club name being “Bloomington Crossroads FC”. Nobody was having this. I immediately went in and accused it of being a troll account and was blocked for my troubles. “Hater since day one!” BCFC proclaimed, casting me out.
While my other friends went to bat for me and told them they should learn to take criticism, I was left to stew in the interaction. A troll account would surely have avoided blocking me. The whole point of a troll was to garner more reactions. And the logo wasn’t intentionally bad in any way but the wording- the design was clean, and just needed to have its words re-arranged, which happened shortly afterwards. While more people insisted that Bloomington Crossroads was fake, a growing feeling that it was sincere as could be entered into my head. My responses to them were being taken personally, and there was some actual effort being put in.
No, there was something genuine about this. It might not be suitable for NISA, but it didn’t fit the pattern of a troll. Rumors began to swirl that a 13 year old was behind this effort, as the account quietly pivoted to working towards the Midwest Premier League instead. That rumor turned over for about a week as I kept watching, switching to alternate accounts to keep tabs on what was going on. And then one day, a WeFunder campaign was suddenly announced for supporter ownership.
Red flags went up immediately. Every other team that had done a WeFunder had staff and had at least played games, and success was still not guaranteed. Detroit City FC and Chattanooga FC had met big targets with flying colors; PDX FC met a modest goal and was able to continue; the New Jersey Teamsters, despite winning trophies in their previous leagues, acquired no real traction at all in crowdfunding. Nobody was even sure Bloomington even existed, let alone confident in their track record. It still wasn’t out of character for lower league owners to try something like that, but it still gnawed at me. Could it really be a teenager?
The Twitter metagame is a strange thing.
Their biography had once listed a phone number. I took 15 minutes in consultation with Niamh to come up with a list of questions to ask. We’d get the truth one way or another. I called in and the second the voice on the other end answered, I knew the truth- this had indeed been one teenager’s project, a boy named Gracin. Now the question became: what was their actual goal? I began to dig in: why Bloomington? Why the choice of leagues? What on earth was the WeFunder’s budget going to be used on?
I approached the discussion seriously as I would with anyone I wanted to talk to before investing in their business, and to Gracin’s credit, he had answers to each of these questions. His answers didn’t reflect the kind of due diligence you might expect from a dedicated businessperson, but nobody expected that. They did reflect a deep well of passion and interest for what he was doing, a sincere desire to see a club of his own in his town. Once I hung up and had time to think about it, I found opinion changing rapidly, a wellspring of admiration growing up for the young man.
Of course, at the same time there was the concern that he might be accidentally about to commit securities fraud by going through with the WeFunder. We all began to mull that over. The last thing any of us wanted was to see that spark damaged by a public outcry in response to it. I’d used several alt accounts so far to keep track of what Gracin had been doing once he blocked my main account, and I switched to one now to ask him to take it down. This was denied, and then my alternate account was blocked shortly after.
Well, he could be resourceful and stubborn all he wanted- I was also stubborn and resourceful, but with twice the experience. I thought about my options. WeFunder could be contacted, but that might not be enough to deter him from just registering a separate account. I wasn’t interested in whack-a-mole. We didn’t have any contact options for his parents, and I wasn’t interested in attempting to dox a teenager to find out how. And then I remembered that Gracin had said publicly that he’d had discussions with Peter Wilt.
If you don’t know who Peter Wilt is, he’s basically a serial soccer club founder. His whole specialty is getting teams off the ground, connecting with people to build a fan culture, and then moving on for the next big thing. His name being on a project is noteworthy in and of itself, and for Gracin to know this and have reached out to talk to him was one more indication that he paid attention to more than just what was on the pitch. I reached out and explained the situation so far to Wilt, who talked to Gracin’s parents. The plug was pulled on the WeFunder, and Bloomington Crossroads FC shut down its Twitter presence. One more weird chapter in lower league came to a close.
But just because one chapter ended didn’t mean that Gracin’s story within lower league ended. He rejoined Twitter, but as himself (@Gracin_Footy). Niamh and I followed him and cleared the air from my previous interactions, and then Niamh suggested to me that we should interview him on the experience and where Gracin was going next. We worked on a list of questions together, then decided to write this post about the whole experience.
Gracin had an already-established hobby of working on Google docs of hypothetical teams he’d create if he had the ability to. Cities, coaches, players- he would play FIFA and Football Manager at home, and then build completely new systems from scratch on computers without access to those games. One day, these thoughts turned local: why not in Bloomington, which he lived so close to? He loved watching Indiana University games and being around those fans, but what about an actual club to support there?
With the support of his parents, Gracin turned those Google docs into the bones of Bloomington Crossroads. Emails went out, and the Twitter account was born. Local interest immediately came back, reinforcing Gracin’s energy further. The immediate pushback saying that he needed to target lower leagues were all taken in stride. If anything, the thought of his club climbing up the ranks like in FM only excited him more.
Soon, Gracin reached out to an Italian designer and worked with him to understand Bloomington’s culture leading to one of the best crests unveiled in low-tier soccer. It’s unclear to me how involved his parents were in these design decisions, such as funding, but what is clear is that he has a strong eye for professionalism and high standards for his dream. If it had been me at 13, I would have tossed together something much more basic using templates and basic clipart.
Hater since day one!
Gracin’s vision may have been larger than his resources for his age, but he kept working up new answers and learning more about the system every step of the way. He recognizes, now, the WeFunder was a step too far. His parents remain very supportive of his soccer dreams. In the meanwhile, he still plans to keep going to lower-league games, interacting with the community, and learning. Niamh and I are looking forward to seeing what he makes of all that in the years to come, maybe interning in the front office of a local club or collegiate team? You could certainly do a lot worse than to hire a knowledge sponge with boundless energy and creativity.
Sam “taco” Shrum is an avid Detroit City FC supporter. When he isn’t working on the next release of Guardbook or storing history in Archive Le Rouge, taco spends horrifying amounts of time on Twitter looking for the next piece of bait for the trolls.
Home of writer, kit designer, and football-addict Niamh Kendall
