see, it's a catch-22.

to begin with, i'm never sure if they see axl rose or kurt cobain - or if that's even just exposing a generation gap, and they think i'm like ariel pink or something.

regardless, all of these options are terrible. when i identify as female, i actually mean it. and, if you ask around, you'll realize people eventually figure that out the hard way.

so, in trying to express myself as who i feel i am, people end up horribly misinterpreting me as something that i'm not. and, to an extent this ought to be easy to understand - a youngish woman that works in a library perhaps has a similar wardrobe to a male rockstar from the 90s, doesn't she?

- we both wear skate shoes.
- we both wear the same kinds of blue jeans
- we both wear snugly fitting tshirts
- we both have about the same haircut

so, you can take this costume and put it on a guy and get a rockstar, then take it off and put it on a female and get a librarian's assistant. a little bit of make-up just confuses the point further. when explained in this way, the confusion is maybe easier to understand: i'm trying to present myself as a bookish female, but i get badly misinterpreted as some nihilistic sex symbol anachronism, instead.

and, to the extent that i have a guy side? well, we're all bi-gendered in some sense; gender is a spectrum, so your average cis-female ends up something like 20% male. but, to the extent that the guy side exists, it's the exact opposite of that - it's neither kurt cobain nor axl rose but somewhere between michael stipe and ian mackaye, in that i'm not quite straight edge but i'm pretty white bread and overly nerdy. if i were to ever develop an interest in exploring my male side, the first thing i'd do is shave my head.

so, it's like - you can accuse me of false advertising if you really insist, but you're kind of missing the point.

it would just be nice if my day-to-day interactions with women weren't consistently so hyper-sexualized. that's what i'm complaining about. and, to an extent, avoiding that is the whole point of transitioning.