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Time: 8:07 PM
Weather: Rainy
Listening to: ビビビビ
Topic: Gender, social media

I mentioned in the current iteration of Youji's page that dysphoria has been on my mind a lot lately. Though it's more apt to say it's gender in general. I'm used to having shifts in my exact feelings since that's been pretty standard. As a child I don't think I really understood gender in any meaningful way. It's only once I started getting older and saw divisions getting stronger between my classmates and peers that I started feeling out of place. Lately I've been going through a really strong masculine preference that I haven't felt in quite a while.

I've always seen my body as not really fitting me. There's that thought experiment of "would you press the button and have a cis male body?" I've never hesitated to press that button, regardless of the specifics of my feelings. My body preferences are consistent even if my presentation and fashion styles shift around. Still, the changes I've been feeling lately are a little puzzling to myself. I heard other trans people describe that the further you get into alleviating other kinds of dysphoria, the worse others can get. That's been happening in my case. I never really considered bottom surgery at all. Now I've been doing a lot of research and getting an idea of what my options are.

One of the things that's been kind of tough as my bottom dysphoria has gotten worse is the feeling of isolation. Most depictions of trans sexuality (in a SFW and NSFW sense) is of people who have less severe dysphoria than I do. I've had a difficult time finding variety even when actively looking for it. There's also the issue of fetishistic depictions, of course. If I was to sum up the feelings I have simply, the art I've been able to find is strangely reductive. There's so much variety in the experiences and feelings of actual trans people I talk to but the art I find is repetitive and shows only one type of experience. Which means I need to do more to refine my search, look in more niche places, and actively put out the stuff I want to see.

I feel like my own body is a shell I'm carving my way out of. I grew up with a lot of religious based transphobia directed my way. But I like turning back harmful metaphors into encouraging ones. If my body is a temple, I should remodel it into one that houses divinity better. I shouldn't live in a space that feels painful to exist within.

That said, the situation of the net is really concerning me lately. Reddit has actually been a key resource for bottom surgery research. The biggest subreddit with years of information regarding bottom surgery recently went down. There's been replacements and efforts to get it back, but it shows you how scarily ephemeral the net is. And now we have the issue of the Reddit API changes and blackout. It's kind of scary, but the loss of Reddit would mean the loss of massive amounts of information. I feel increasingly like social media is a source of friction. Instagram recently changed how the search functions and there's literally no way to view posts chronologically in a hashtag. I went into the tags of a fandom and where I could find hundreds of posts the previous day. I could only see 10 after the changes.

I use social media now almost exclusively as an art archive. I browse recent posts, download everything I like, and back it up. But sites keep making it harder and harder to do even that much. I don't think of myself as being afraid of aging. I'm not afraid of my body changing, losing beauty, losing physical strength. But lately I've run into the issue of things key from my childhood becoming lost media. I've tried to find accounts of artists I used to follow only to discover they're deleted and unarchived. The net moves so fast and hostile changes keep threatening to wipe out key resources. The surgery research I've tried to do, only to run into the possibility that years of information will be deleted and lost in an instant, really scared me. It's been a catalyst to put all this back on my mind. It's impossible to save and archive everything out there. I think that's the thing I find scariest about aging and time. How many things will be lost because they weren't thought to be saved? How much will be lost due to the stupid decisions of a single CEO? Or just a few shareholders?

I've been thinking about my approach to art lately. If I feel frustrated by a lack of something, I feel like I should use my skills to create it. There's more media than anyone could possibly hope to see across multiple lifetimes. Yet so much of it is hidden or at risk of loss. There's simultaneously so much variety and so much repetition.