Tina's not-so-secret diary 📓🔓

February 28 2025

[18:49] Today, for the first time, I wished I hadn't transitioned. I haven't been so confused since I started seriously thinking about HRT back in 2022, and today I discovered that all the queer support groups around here are LGB only. I've never felt so isolated before. I guess it started this afternoon when the new girl and her generic boyfriend moved into #1. She's pregnant, of course. Only pregnant women ever move in there. I thought about how the word "boyfriend" in this state only refers to 1 kind of man: white, shaggy brown hair, 2 weeks' worth of beard growth, baseball cap, tall-ish, aged 21-34, with a generic white-boy voice. I thought about how I never fit that description. Except for the shaggy hair, I was too fat to fit that description, and my voice couldn't get generic enough, even putting on my best "republican from greater Nebraska" voice. At the same time I was watching them move in, I discovered my Kohl's order arrived, so I tried it on, but instead of making me feel cute, they just made me feel like a man in drag. I started thinking about how I used to look just different enough from the 5 or 6 generic "boyfriend" types around here to look like a threat. I didn't act the same, I was always quiet and tried to blend in with the grocery store linoleum as best I could, and I could get away with it as a middle-school and high-school kid, but as an adult, that just made women really tense. So, for this and other reasons, I decided I had to transition, but now I hear that feminist influencers are telling cis women that AMAB trans people are even worse and more threatening than your standard "love 'em and beat 'em" cisgender man. So, I'm a threat no matter what I look like. As a man, I look like I'd knock you down in a dark alley and rape you; as a trans woman, I look like I'd... I dunno, rape you more? I'm not sure how that works. How does the pregnant girl in #1 figure into this? Truth be told, I always thought I'd have 3 or 4 kids by now. I thought I'd live in a nice flat with a nice girl and go to a nice job everyday so I can provide for my family. I don't know what "nice" means in this context, but I never knew what most of my thoughts meant back then. But now, I turned 34 this month and the last girlfriend I ever had was in college. We had nothing in common but I convinced myself I loved her. My logical brain is saying "no, don't have kids now; look at how terrible everything is!", meanwhile my monkey brain keeps pointing at school busses and grunting "me want that many". All the while, my HRT split the difference in the wrong direction and most likely has sterilised me. So we arrive at the original dilemma: today, for the first time, I wished I hadn't transitioned. No kids, no companionship, no understanding, no possibility for any of the above, and I start asking myself "is staying alive just to spite the influencers really worth it?"

[01:08] Sorry if i seem a bit spacey this week. After having major impostor syndrome a couple days ago, i found out yesterday that a friend of mine converted to catholicism. that sounds like a joke, but it fucking isn't. she's such a dear, sweet person but she's been having trouble with her depression and BPD lately, and she's been going to mass pretty regularly in order to deal with it when medicine wouldn't help. but last week she thought she might be transgender (but didn't strictly come out, which is why i'm still using she/her); and then, this week, she gets baptised or whatever it is they do and is now 100% catholic. I feel like we all failed her, but me especially. I never said anything, I never questioned why she felt The Church was the answer, because i didn't think it would be appropriate. I felt like that was the last thing she needed and, if i said anything, she would just withdraw more, cut more, starve herself more, whatever. I still don't want to sound like a bad friend, so i still am not going to bring it up, but converting to catholicism isn't going to help anyone with any problem at all. If she feels like she's got no control over anything right now, she ain't seen NOTHIN' yet. But if i feel so strongly about this, why didn't i fucking SAY something? I know i'm not her closest friend, but surely even her best friend can see what I can: The Church will only make her worse. She's already a couple different stripes of LGBTQPIA apart from trans, so i guess she wants all that drilled out of her brain. What, do you want to join a fucking convent or something?! Holy shit! What could POSSIBLY be so wrong that you think the goddamned Catholic Church— THE corporate feudal theocratic complex— is going to be even 1 iota of good to you?! What's it going to take to get you to realise what's going on? They're using you! Just like they've used untold millions of others for the past 1500 years! Why do you want to pal around with these starch-necked altar boy rapists? Damn! Damn... I'm sorry. I should have said something while I still had time. I should have done more to help.

[15:09] I thought sleep would help. It didn't. All I did was think about my first year of college. I remember on the 2nd or 3rd day, after I decided that the dining hall was no place for someone like me, I realised I could leave campus. I couldn't even leave the building in high school without the truant officer or the vice principal escorting me, but I could just get up, get in my car, turn it on, and drive right out of the college campus. The first place I left to was to get lunch at the gyro place across the road from my old high school. I got a gyro and mozzarella sticks, where usually I had to choose between one or the other. This time, I was paying with my own money— that is to say, any Pell grant money that was left over after academic expenses were paid. So I splurged and got both. I sat in my car in the carpark for the playground behind the museum, parking toward fountain (which I couldn't see because of a stand of trees, but it was over there), and ate my extravagant lunch. At the time, I knew it was extravagant, but I hadn't fully comprehended its meaning. After I was done, I took a circuitous route back to school through the country roads (which I was able to map now that I had a Windows XP computer and could run Google Earth). I don't remember much else, but I felt free; free to make my own decisions, free to go where I wanted, free to eat at restaurants, that kind of thing. Well, the next semester, after washing out of radio broadcasting (where I didn't want to be anyway), I ended up in 100% general education classes; basically expensive high school. I started pushing the boundaries of my freedom... how far could I push before I felt any resistance? I stopped going to class altogether and started driving around the countryside instead. Even though I was absolutely convinced that I was being monitored and that the axe would fall eventually, it never did. Those should have been the best few months of my life, but they were the worst. I realised I had no more accountability to anyone, there was no one looking over my shoulder, there was no more truant officer, it was just my money getting flushed down the loo. I was able to pass English 1010 by writing an essay, but I failed everything else because I never went to class. Like I wrote on my blog once: after 12 years straight of the most harrowing psychological torture that white americans can possibly endure, the nightmare ended promptly in June 2009. I never recovered from that. I never figured out what to do after it was over, because I never thought it would end. I thought public school would flow directly into college and into work, but I had no predisposition to what the transitions would look like. I figured it would be like a screen wipe in a television programme. Series 12 ends and Series 13 begins after a break. Without realising it, I had become exactly what all the guidance counsellors tried to warn us about. The most damning part about the whole thing? More damning even than wishing I were still 18 and being subjected to the mental torture that is American high school? I'm still there. Whether I'm physically present there or not, I exist there. It is not linear.

[15:09] No, they can't be bringing someone new into the downstairs flat! They can't be! I'm not ready for this again! I'm not ready to be constantly reminded of my own failure as a human everytime I look out the window! I guess I must like feeling like this because otherwise none of this would bother me. I wouldn't constantly look out the window, scanning the landscape for things I can use to make me feel sorry for myself. I wish I didn't have to seal myself in my flat, I wish I didn't have to actively avoid other people when I do go out, but I have to. I still look like a man, I still dress like one, I still walk like one, I still sound like one. I still look like a man, so I still look like a threat. That's why I decided I had to transition, I was making women uncomfortable no matter what I did; talking, staying quiet, walking, standing still, just existing. Even after I left, they always watched their back in case I was there lurking in their shadow. I can't deal with that. I don't want to look like a threat, I want to look like every other woman down the produce section at Walmart. I want to look like your mom, your aunt, your cousin, someone you can smile at and possibly confide in, not something you have to run away and hide from behind a locked door. I hate looking like this. I'm trying to change, I really am. Until then, I'll proactively protect you from me by never entering your field of vision.

[15:23] Some days, I wish those republicans down the shooting range would come and put me out of my misery. If I'd had a gun of my own, I would have killed myself 12 years ago.

February 17 2025

[10:24] I guess social services hasn't actually let their lease on the flat downstairs expire. They're having the carpet cleaned by a different company than my landlord typically uses, and someone with a lanyard and a nametag had to be here to let the guy in. If it had been a standard vacancy cleaning, the door would have been left unlocked specifically for this reason. Well, great. Just great. I am NOT in a good enough place mentally to have another pregnant high-school girl and her 19-year-old boyfriend come into my everyday life. I barely survived the last time!

[10:41] More to that point, I'm pretty confident that, if I'd been a cisgender woman, I would probably have become one of those cottagecore tradwife enthusiasts. I would have started having kids when I was 16 and would be on my 8th or 10th pregnancy at this stage. I would have been able to turn off my brain and shunt my interests onto a siding, and I would now be firmly entrenched in the fascist, white-supremacy camp. Assuming no change in my personality, my primaeval desire to fill out a school-bus would have easily been able to overwhelm my better judgment and I would have taken the surest route to that goal. I wouldn't have liked being there but I would have stayed there out of a sense of duty to my family and the promise that I'd be pregnant again next year.

[12:58] Well, the US House just passed a resolution to restrict voting rights to exclude anyone who's ever changed their name and I'm feeling trapped again. This has nothing to do with Trump, he didn't make anyone do this, the faux-evangelicals who keep getting elected by cattle and trees are solely responsible for this. They've been introducing this every year since 2014, but they've been thwarted either by an imbalance of liberals-to-conservatives in the legislative branch or by an unfriendly president. This year, it's going to pass and Trump will sign it. Laws are not like executive orders, they take effect immediately and only the legislative and judicial branches can overturn them. The ACLU and others will tie it up in court for years, of course; in the meantime, anyone who's ever changed their name for any reason— transgender people renaming themselves, women getting married or divorced, immigrants Anglicising their names, priests and nuns taking biblical names, people who just wanted to change their names on an official basis, even clerical mistakes like "Dillon" being entered instead of "Dylan"— will at best be turned away from the polls, and at worst arrested for fraud. I'm still my deadname on paper so it won't affect me at all. That's the most damnable thing about the whole procedure of America's descent into a fascist dictatorship; it will never affect me on any level except mental. So why am I feeling trapped? That feeling is reserved for people whose day-to-day lives are going to be profoundly changed by laws like SAVE. How dare I feel trapped, or exposed, or endangered? As long as I remember to forget wearing makeup to the midterms, I'm fine! If SAVE is going to eliminate voting by mail, hey! I walked to the polls in November, and I planned to walk there again anyway, so I'm FINE! If SAVE is going to prevent anyone registering to vote anywhere except in person at the Secretary of State's office, WELL, HEY! I'M ALREADY REGISTERED, SO I'M FUCKING FINE!!! What right do I have to feel all these bad things?! I got mine, so who cares, right?!! WHO CARES, RIGHT??!

[13:44] The answer is: I do. I was brought up being told that the power of the people had the strength to move mountains. The problem is, half the people don't even bother to show up on mountain-moving day, and a quarter of the others are convinced it's a waste of time.

[11:29] Oh right, I forgot. "Frutiger Aero" is as much about the zeitgeist of the early 2010s as "16-bit inspired games" are about actual 1990s gaming. It's designed to make kids feel nostalgic about an age that they weren't around for and for adults to forget the horrors of their youth. You can miss me with that shit. Talk about how the real culture from 2001-2009 was influenced by nothing but jingoism and the war machine, or don't fucking talk. Your precious "Frutiger Aero" is a mass-produced hallucination about an era that never even existed. All nostalgia is gentrified, but "Frutiger Aero" is just plain insulting. Turn your back on the wanton destruction the Bush administration rained down upon Islam, the rise of American nationalism as a requirement for existing in public, paranoia about Osama shaving his beard and blending in with American society, thinkpieces about how the world can never prosper unless everyone submits to American authority, an internet where you never knew if that link you got in your email led to a real Sims fansite or a cartel decapitation video; all so you can look at the Windows XP wallpaper and wistfully murmur, "I was born in the wrong generation. I belong there." That's all the millennium is to "Frutiger Aero": green grass, blue sky, and chunky computers.

[13:34] Believe it or not, that wasn't the Valentine's Day greeting I wanted to give today. Anyway, to all my trans girlies without partners today, just remember one thing: if you don't feel yourself turning into a manga girl, it's too early to cum. Thank you and happy Valentimes.

[14:57] I know this is hella TMI, even for the hidden diary page, but I had to go to the arse doctor yesterday. I won't say what for, but it was really interesting, from the standpoint of being trans: everyone called me "Tina" from word 1, despite the fact my legal name isn't that; the doctor even called me "dear"! No one ever made a big deal out of my name and my clothes not matching each other; and, like, i would have loved to go to the doctor in my new clothes, but like I said, the trousers were just too big. Also the subsidised transport is run by evangelicals and I don't want to risk one of their drivers jumping the wrong way and driving off without me, because the insurance company would side with them, not me. Anyway, it was just nice being treated like a woman for a change. When I got home, I wrote yesterday's entry and then played New Leaf until the fact I had been awake for 22 hours caught up with me. Then slept for 11 hours.

February 6 2025

[15:51] I got some new clothes today! Like new new, not like "new as in used but new because i have them now". The trousers I got turned out to be WAY too big; they come up to my bra band and they're still too long. Long I can deal with, but it's just too roomy. I'd have to be 37 weeks with triplets to fill this lot out. The good news is, everything else fits like a charm! I had a real "oh my God, I really am a woman now" moment with my new sundress. I'd love to wear just the dress, but, well, HRT and direct sunlight, you know. Fortunately, it pairs GREAT with the hooded sweatshirt (really less of a sweatshirt than a thick longsleeve teeshirt with a hood). I took the opportunity to get a new bra while I was at it and... yeah, I'm a big girl now. D-cups. Oh, I'm disappointed about the trousers, but they'll be pretty easy to exchange for the right size.

[08:30] Waiting in for the exterminators today. I always wear my red button-down shirt whenever someone comes to the door because I don't know which way they're gonna jump. Today, I also have my sports bra on. Back in the Jury Duty days, I could get away with a sports bra because my boobs were so much smaller back then. UGH! My bra has gotten so tight! When did that happen? Anymore, they make my boobs look bigger (bras support, you know, so they provide lift where you wouldn't otherwise have it). I wish I could afford a new, larger one, but I did some bra shopping online the other week and whooooff!! $35 for a basic bra? No frilly bits or anything? I remember my gran complaining when her Hanes jumped from $2.50 to $3! Still, I'm glad to have the support, even though it's kinda tight here and there. I don't know if my boobs are big enough to affect my back (some say this is a real thing that happens, others say it isn't), but it helps my posture. Not sure what I'm going to do once I outgrow my sports bra... 'cos between the rather insane growth I've seen lately and the fact I plan on starting progesterone followed by domperidone, I figure on having H-cups by the time I'm 40. I have my reasons for wanting domperidone, I'd rather not share them.

[00:30] I'm supposed to email Mike Fucking Hilgers and protest Trump's order to dump financial data on Elon Musk? Now that Scurvy Pete's up the capitol, you can't FIND a bigger Trump kiss-ass than Mike Hilgers. This guy makes pre-9/11 conservatives look like Bernie Sanders in comparison. Don't you get it?! The system can't reform itself! It's going to keep cutting away at the constitution until all that's left is a swastika! This so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" is only the first step. Hitler had one of those too: it was called the Schutzstaffel. Trump AND Biden both ran concentration camps for southern border migrants, only we weren't allowed to accuse Biden of being bad because he was a Democrat. How is it that it always takes a Jew to see the perfectly fucking obvious?! Trump's cult leaders are here to stay forever, and it's gonna take all the armies in the world to get them out.

[01:20] Kayfabe, Tina! Kayfabe! Trump has me convinced that he's the all-powerful dictator in much the same way that the Undertaker convinced his fans that he was some sort of, like, undead priest or something with Satan on his speed-dial. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the two most hated figures in America right now, have been for years. Like I said back in November, right now they're just using each other to escape federal prosecution. They aren't each other's friends, they hate each other just as much as everyone else does, but they have enough supporters who would string them up by their shoelaces if they cut the act short that they have to play nice for the cameras and the internet. If, for example, Trump has Elon assassinated (idk, just spitballing here), all the techbros with cottagecore trophy wives who worship the ground Elon walks on would rise up against Trump's supporters, possibly even Trump himself. It might even be enough for people who support BOTH Trump and Elon to finally deploy their toolshed arsenals and... do something that I would be the target of a Secret Service investigation for if I continued that thought. It wouldn't even necessarily have to be assassination of Elon; it might just be Trump having Elon locked up for something. A cult cannot have two leaders. Back to kayfabe: Donald Trump is playing the character of a political strongman when, in reality, he's so bad at making executive decisions that he's gone bankrupt a dozen times. Elon, on the other hand, is playing the character of a polymath genius when he doesn't even realise just how much data the financial records of 350 million individuals and 75 million registered businesses all across time amounts to. Of course, Elon is also the man who insisted on reviewing printed hardcopies all of the code the engineers at Twitter were working on at the time he took ownership and ended up with 25,000 reams of paper stuffed in his office. Kayfabe, Tina. Kayfabe.

[00:22] Oh yeah? If I cared so little about what other people think of my site, why would I have made loads of tiny small edits to pages after finishing the last entry so I could bury it on my Neocities news feed? And why would I have made up a day so I could put this entry on the January page? Come on, Tina; you know nothing you said just now was true.