Transitioning 101 - My Thoughts On Various Topics...

As I've mentioned here before, during the last 12-18 months I've spent a lot of time on Reddit; and of that time most of it has been on the AskTransgender subreddit (henceforth referred to as ATG).  I tend to stay out of the debates there, and instead try and focus on sharing my thoughts and experiences where I think they might be helpful.  I wouldn't call it dispensing advice as each and every person is different and as such each and every person's experiences are different.  But I do know that as I chose to transition I personally found it helpful to read about other people's experiences about various things, such as choosing a therapist, going to court for a name change, what to expect from HRT, and so on.  Since I feel I benefited greatly from reading about others experiences I've always felt that I should at least try and "pay things forward" by sharing my own.  Hopefully at least one person somewhere found at least one thing I've shared helpful.  That's also part of the reason I started this blog back when I did.  It's not the only reason, in some ways it's sort of an "online diary" for me, but in reality the main reason was to share my experiences for anyone who might want to read them.

So what's my point with this post?  Well, the drama over at ATG has picked up again - the second time in less than a year - and I'm really tired of it.  For those to who don't hang out there, the long and short of it is that apparently the moderators can't get along again and the two newer ones (of the four that there were) have both quit very publicly and what followed were diatribes and plenty of post/comment deletions to the point that things were spilling over into other subreddits.  Frankly it's a shame that it's occurring at all, but to happen for a second time in less than a year is really inexcusable in my mind and I've had enough.  So rather than continuing to wallow in the mess that is ATG I've decided to focus what time and effort I was spending there back on this blog.

With that being said, rather than spending time there commenting on certain posts/topics that may catch my eye, I'm going to start a little series here - Transitioning 101 - that will contain my thoughts and experiences on certain topics that were common questions on ATG.  While this little corner of cyberspace doesn't have anywhere near the reach that ATG does, there are a few advantages to this forum.  Among them are no space limitations, most people who run across this will be actively searching for things versus simply trolling, and as I'm the "moderator" here I've got all the leeway I need to write as I see fit.

As I said in the first paragraph, everyone is different and each of our experiences with anything are going to differ.  As such, these topics will be a very YMMV.  Just because something worked well for me (or didn't), or because I had a good (or bad) experience somewhere, well it doesn't mean that's how it will be for anyone reading these.  However, that aside, I do hope that at least one person will find at least one useful thing in this little series of articles and if so then that will have made it totally worthwhile for me.  And if nobody does, well that's too bad, but I'd still rather dedicate my time here than continue to hang out in the mess that is ATG these days.

In any case I've got the first couple of posts in the series already written, so at least I'll be a touch more active here than I've been the last couple of months.

- M