i do acknowledge that i kinda hit the lottery in a sense since i am able to easily grow a full beard, i have a very square jaw, and i'm close to average male height. back when i was attempting to pass as a woman i still always looked kind of mannish

even with hrt, not all trans women are able to develop significant breast growth and not all trans men are able to grow facial hair, just as a couple examples, so it's not like you can just shove yourself back into a character generator to pick all the features you want for yourself, but still

i think a big part of it is the confidence boost from the alleviation of dysphoria but a lot of it is probably just the fact that the way you wanted to look is finally possible and you can put the effort in to achieve that appearance

this checks out. trans people have been anecdotally discussing this kind of thing for decades now, the way hrt affects your thinking and impulses. trans women talking about developing more empathy and crying more easily, trans men talking about experiencing anger differently and being kinkier, etc

Not only did I get context like "po is what you say when you're talking to someone older like your mom" and "there's so many dialects and sometimes there's Spanish thrown in," which were missing from the robo-translator version, but now the character sounds more like a human being rather than a bot.

And this was just for one paragraph. Extrapolate that over the course of a whole book, and you can see why books require humans to translate them, not "AI," which isn't actually intelligent. It's not sentient, and only human souls can make real art.

AI is a worse version of all the resources we already have that don't burn forests and poison all the drinkable water.

anyway i do have to wonder if any of the people who'd ogled me would have thought twice if they knew what was in my pants. hard to say because i wasn't interested

anyway trans men aren't ugly

like imagine you're a woman and a group of dudes is cat-calling you while your boyfriend is right there. that's fucked up, right?

in hindsight i'm kind of mad about that actually