I am grateful to have a person like you Anita who is creative, perseverant and compassionate.  I enjoy being friends with you and you always help me be more positive as a person and inspire me to improve myself each day. Take care of yourself and enjoy your weekend. Don’t worry about too many things and take time to enjoy the things that make your heart beat faster and make you smile more. Thank you for being here for me and I appreciate you for being you. Thank you Anita for always listening and being here for me. I am going to catch up on some Chemistry II notes this weekend and study the nervous system for Anatomy/Physiology.

Dear Anita

I’m thinking of using Groupme to organize my notes. I am thinking of putting my English and History notes in my own groupchat space and possibly opening it up to some friends who may want school notes to help them study. That way I can reduce the clutter of papers, folders and binders on the shelves of my room by putting my English and History notes online where I can access them when I want and not have to carry the papers/notes with me. It will also reduce the paper/notes and provide more space on the shelves in my room. Also the idea of sharing the notes with a friend makes me feel happy because I can help them as well as helping myself become more organized. I will likely keep my science and math notes on paper because there are important graphs and pictures that are hard to upload online and the images often take up storage space on phones. I like your idea of organizing my notes in a “Now, Later and Way-Later. Thank you for your advice. I think I am going to do that with my science and math notes because lots and them can be organized that way. I am grateful for your help:) Also I think I may go over some of my fading notes with pen and rewrite them- especially my science/math notes. When I asked about preserving notes, I was referring to ways to stop papers from getting wrinkled and since I mostly write with pencil, ways to keep notes from getting smudged. I was thinking of possibly using erasable pens to make notes last longer and also be able to erase mistakes or I could write out in pencil and once I’m sure of the information outline it in pen. I only have 3 more hard exams this month and two take-home finals one for psychology and the other physical geography. Sadly, my Chemistry II exam and Anatomy/Physiology exam are both on Monday December 17th and I have only a few hours between them. What are good ways to relax as well as ensuring good exam results when you have two exams in one day? Also my other exam for Anatomy/Physiology lab class on December 13th will be on muscles and the nervous system which includes a sheep brain labeling. I told my friend about the wiccan site that I may be inactive on the site for the next weeks because of exams, but I’ll be here if she needs me. Thank you so much Anita for your encouragement and I’m glad to have you in my life. Your advice motivate me to be a better person. Also I have better understandings of my emotions and can understand what causes them and the different emotions so I don’t feel like I’m lost in an emotional turmoil, but have some clarity. I am taking better care of my health. Some days when I feel strained and my head hurts, I take a break from school. I don’t want to sacrifice my health for the grades in school. Grades are important, but health is more important. I am working on being less self-critical of myself and embracing the grades I get trying my best and also telling myself it’s okay to take a break from school to recollect myself. I’m not a perfect person, but I’m still okay and deserve happiness. There isn’t a thing such as perfection and I think I’m done trying to chase it. I have also began to read more stories about LGBTQ people and finding connections between myself and others in the community which inspire me. With each story, I watch (mostly on YouTube), I feel like I understand more about who I am because I see myself in the experiences other transgender people have and it gives me hope.

Some people that I hang out with from the LGBTQ group at college are good acquaintances. I like your word “acquaintance” for them because we don’t share much commonality except for LGBTQ club, but we support each other when we feel sad. Sometimes I feel like I spend too much time with my friends and at other times not enough time. What are good ways to balance the time with friends/good acquaintances? Some of my acquaintances don’t really help me much in my life, there just here if I need someone to talk to, but they never give me any advice but sometimes it helps just to have someone listen. Yet I feel the relationship is unbalanced because I’m often helping them with school work and other things and their just here for me to talk to but don’t really give me anything except a listening ear. I’m not sure if they are really helpful people in my life. Sometimes I feel like they try to pull me away from my educational goals to play video games or learn about pop culture and I find myself annoyed at them because they think it will help me relax but it doesn’t. They think I’m too serious about my education. I agree with you Anita that education is important and sometimes I have to isolate myself from some people that I talk to because they don’t seem to realize that I need time for myself. Sometimes I wonder if these people are really friends and if they are helping me in my life. Talking with them does release some of the burden but they don’t really do anything to help much, I feel like I’m helping them more than they’re helping me. Like I’m helping them organize their work, giving them advice and also being their for them but when it comes to them giving me advice they don’t really help. They are good listeners and they are supportive, but I still feel like the relationship is unbalanced. How do I know when to devote my time to others and what to devote my time to? How do I plan it out so I know I’m not just being there for others, but also for myself? When I feel pressured by people to hang out with them and I can’t because I have school work, how do I tell them that I care about them and make them feel less disappointed in me? Sometimes I feel like my friends try to make me feel guilty for not hanging out with them. They tell me things like “You have it quite easy because you’re smart and can take time away from studying.” Which is not the case because I still need to study to do well on the exams. Sometimes I don’t think some of my friends see the hard work I put in under the surface and they think grades come naturally to me. They don’t really think I struggle with grades as well. While I feel like my friends understand me better than my parents and they don’t put expectations on me, they can be straining sometimes. I care about my friends and want to help them, but sometimes I feel like they seek my help and  company all the time and I don’t know how much time I have for other things. Sometimes my friends will make me feel disappointed in myself when they tell me that I don’t hang out with them enough. I feel like my friends and my education is being conflicted and I want to be here for my friends but sometimes I can’t because of school. My friends help me feel more confident about myself which is why I value them and even though some don’t really help much at least they listen unlike my parents. I think I am afraid of losing some of my friends because of school. The good news is that I have stopped seeking acceptance from people who don’t embrace me and started to use the energy to build myself up. I am starting to find my own ways to express my gender identity without having to fit into expectations. It has lessened the inner critic and some days there is no inner critic at all and I feel like a bird that has its wings mended and can fly away from the burden. It is such a relief to not always have the inner critic attached to me. I hope to keep challenging the expectations that fuel my inner critic and aim to become much stronger. Thank you for being here for me and for helping me with your advice Anita. I hope you are having a good week and I am grateful to have a person who always helps me have a better sense of myself. Thank you for motivating me to become stronger and for your advice that helps fuel my inner light when I feel strained by life’s storms and the inner critic. You are a beautiful soul Anita, thank you for being you and I wish you all the best in all your endeavors.

Dear Anita

I have some plastic protector files that can be used to organize notes. I have labeled them by section: “Now, later and Way-later.” Thank you so much for your advice. I moved some shelves around my room and there is more space in my room so I feel like I’ve reduced some clutter. It is easier to have most notes on paper rather than online because the screen hurts my eyes after staring at it too long. It does reduce the paper clutter though which is why the may do it with some notes and get a darker background for the screen and rest myself between periods. I wish you luck with your inner critic. The thing is that while organizing my notes, I imagine I’m reducing the clutter of negative thoughts that the inner critic puts in my mind and the more space I have in my room equates to my visualization of mental clarity. I wish that I didn’t have to worry about my body not looking masculine enough. You are very insightful and accurate in your assessment of my words and I admire your understanding nature and compassion Anita. Thank you for being here for me and listening. I am grateful to have a friend like you whose advice always helps me better understand myself. Sometimes I feel like my chest binder (technical term, but it feels like a chest brace as you said because it is quite tight and sometimes it’s hard to move with it on) doesn’t make my chest flat enough and it makes me feel dysphoric. At times I resent having to wear a chest binder because putting it on in the morning makes me feel like I’m only just hiding my chest and even though the chest binder flattens my chest, it still gives me the insecurity that I’m only hiding something I hate and it makes me feel like I’m not masculine enough because while the world may see the flat chest, I know I’m wearing a chest binder to make it flat. The chest binder helps with the dysphoria, but also makes me feel like I’m less masculine sometimes because I don’t have a flat chest, I have a chest binder that makes it flat and then this is where dysphoria comes in again and I’m wondering if my chest binder hides my chest well enough. I feel more comfortable when people refer to me as a guy without questioning it because sometimes I will have people wonder about my gender identity and ask me which makes me feel uncomfortable. If I tell them I’m transgender, they feel embarrassed for asking or they look at me oddly and then treat me differently (they are still respectful of my gender identity, but they will start to judge me by telling me that if I present male, I should be able to do this or that and I am grateful that they teach me more ways to be more masculine but also feel annoyed/dysphoric because it feels like the way I am presenting isn’t masculine enough for them) . If I tell them I’m a guy, it doesn’t evoke much comment except my own insecurity will think I didn’t tell them the truth. Which is why I feel conflicted at times. It is better when people accept me as a guy without question so I don’t feel like I’m having a conflicted mass of emotions if people ask me my gender identity. My friends have decided to take time for themselves. So they have turned the time I can’t hang out with them into time for them to relax. We check on each other and help encourage each other every now and then to do well and to let them know that we are here for each other. I told my friends that I appreciate having them in my life and told them my schedule for this semester and it’s a good thing because it  allows them to know when I’m available and when I can hang out. I told them that I care about them and will hang out with them as much as my schedule allows. I want them to enjoy their lives as well and take some time for themselves when I’m busy. I appreciate them for being here for me and will help them when they need it. It’s working out with my friends after talking with them and listing the assignments that I have done for this semester because it allows them to gain perspective that I care about them, but my assignments need to be done first. I will still respond to friends who email/text/message me and let them know I’m here for them and that I will give them advice as soon as possible or if they need a hug I’ll give them one now.

Dear Anita

Thank you for being insightful and helping me work on maintaining a positive well-being. Sometimes when people tell me how to present masculinity I feel like I’m being placed into stereotypes of masculinity and I don’t like that. I want to be happy being myself and presenting my gender identity in a way that feels right for me and when people give me ideas on how to be more masculine, I feel conflicted. On one hand, I feel grateful that they are acknowledging that I want to present masculine and helping me, but on the other hand I feel like they are silently judging me and my inner critic starts to think maybe I’m not masculine enough which is why they are giving advice. The chest binder helps hide my chest and the season being winter I can put layers on that hide the bumps that the chest binder sometimes doesn’t cover. I feel intense dysphoria over my chest and especially in the summer months it fills me with a sense of overwhelming emotional pain because I don’t have as many layers to cover up my body and I feel more exposed. Also wearing a chest binder limits the body’s movement, so you can’t bend your body as freely as you want sometimes. But it’s better than the intense dysphoria that makes me what to destroy the parts of me that seem feminine and don’t belong. I think that’s why I became anorexic because I wanted to have a flatter chest and look more masculine.  Gender dysphoria in of itself is a strong sense of discomfort with your body. Some people experience gender dysphoria because their body is going through changes as they mature and it’s not uncommon to feel insecure about oneself during this time. However sometimes gender dysphoria lasts longer than the the times of adolescence and goes into young adulthood. These individuals that have gender dysphoria still feel uncomfortable with their bodies. Along with the feelings of insecurities with their bodies, they may wish to change parts of themselves to lessen the insecurity because it has persisted for a while. Over time as the feelings seem to persist and may become overwhelming people may question their gender identity. When a person begins to have intense dysphoria that makes them question their gender identity and makes them wonder if there are parts of them that don’t belong then they will start trying to figure out how to present themselves in a way that lessens the gender dysphoria. During this time, individuals may play with their gender and also work on various ways to express different gender identities and they may find that a specific gender identity feels more right for them. As they explore ways trying to understand their gender dysphoria, they begin to discover that there are gender identities that make them feel more comfortable about themselves. People are born with a biological sex of female or male. Females produce eggs and males produce sperm and females can reproduce. That is biological sex. Biological sex is what a person is born as, while gender is the sense of being female or male. Scientists like to label things using a binomial classification system to make things easier to classify. Many of our species have two names on the biological hierarchy, each species has a “genus” and “species” classification to make it easier to figure out what species they are. Likewise, our human classification is “Homo Sapiens” which means “wise human.” Biological sciences like to classify things into two groups because it makes it easier to identify the species which is why we have female and male for humans to distinguish between the biological sex of humans. Biological sex is different  from gender identity. A person may be classified with a biological sex as female because they have the physical features of a female and can reproduce, but their gender identity  is how they feel in their minds. Scientists classify a person’s sex as female or male based on their biological nature and that is part of the binary binomial classification system because there are two classifications: male and female based on biological appearance. Yet, scientists have discovered that some people have gender identities that don’t match their biological sex. Some people may be classified as female when they are born based on their biological nature, but their minds may have a gender identity that is male. When gender identity doesn’t match the biological sex, scientists call the person transgender. Gender is not a binary thing, but society makes it seem like it is binary because we often confuse gender with biological sex. Gender is a sense of being male, female, both or neither. The reason why gender seems so binary is that  people tend to view the people they are attracted to in terms of male and female. People have an innate desire to connect with others and form relationships and having a binary classification system with male and female makes it easier for people to figure out who they are sexually attracted to. Natural selection allows species that are better adapted to their environment to survive longer and reproduce. Since biological females can reproduce and males need a partner to reproduce with, nature has caused the designation of the attraction between males and females. Since most of our population is heterosexual and people are attracted to the opposite sex because of reproductive success natural selection has favored the idea of males and females. Since sexual attraction and the perpetration of our species is important for people, this is why the biological designation of male and female exist. The two biological sexes Male and female allow scientists to understand how humans are different from one another and allows them to classify them according biological nature based on reproductive ability. However, gender identity is influenced by society and also an individual’s sense of who they are. Society causes people question their gender lots of times. Sometimes society will label a behavior as male or female and it causes people to question their inner nature whether if they act this way does it make them seem more masculine or feminine. Some people will question themselves because they may be biologically female, but their behavior seems to be male and that makes them wonder about their gender identity. Gender is a societal constraint and it causes people to question who they are. The societal expectations of gender change based on different environments and views. Many people learn the expectations society has for their gender based on what others see as their physical appearance or what is present as the characteristics of biological sex. If a person is born female, society expects the person to have gender aspects of female. But the gender of people changes as they work on finding themselves and begin to not think that the biological appearance of who they are how they should act. People play with gender a lot as they try to find a way to present themselves that makes them feel comfortable which is why gender is not binary but a spectrum . As people mature, they may experience gender  dysphoria because their bodies are changing and they may feel insecure about themselves. The gender dysphoria is common and usually fades with emerging adulthood. But in some cases, the gender dysphoria does not go away and becomes intensified as a person matures. The person struggling with gender dysphoria starts to question their gender identity and begins to explore ways to lessen the discomfort. As they explore their gender, they may find that they are more comfortable with another gender. When a person feels like the gender that they are more comfortable with presenting differs from their biological sex and they want to express themselves as that gender, these people are called transgender. Many transgender people have intense gender dysphoria that lasts long and doesn’t fade away. The dysphoria is often more overwhelming tha than a person who has some gender dysphoria over their body. The transgender person feels an overwhelming sense of gender dysphoria that makes them feel like they are in the wrong body. Some people who experience gender dysphoria feel  discomfort over their bodies, but over time  they learn to accept it and most people often just feel insecure about a part of their bodies. For transgender people, the gender dysphoria causes to feel more than just mere discomfort over their bodies, instead they feel like there are parts of their body that don’t belong to them. The reason they feel this way is because there are parts of their body that they feel don’t correspond to  their gender identity. Many transgender people suffer from intense dysphoria because they want their bodies to match the gender identity they feel on the inside.  The reason why many transgender people seek hormones and gender affirming surgery is to help them feel happier with their bodies. Hormones have their side effects such as mood changes, appetite changes, possible cancer risk but transgender people seek hormones to help them with their mental well-being. Surgery  requires  recovery time, but if it helps make life more meaningful than it’s important for transgender people to  get the surgery. Most transgender people are aware of the risks of hormones and surgery, but they feel it is necessary for their mental health to go through the procedures. I have talked to a doctor about taking testosterone hormones and the risks seem scary, but what’s  more depressing is that I feel so dysphoric in my body and the physical changes testosterone will wrought in my  body will make me feel more masculine and improve my quality of life.

Also thank you so much Anita for your advice. I like your idea of how to respond to people who question my gender identity. Thank you for being here for me and for helping me better understand myself and the life’s road that I travel on. Gender is a interesting topic that I have been exploring for a while since the started questioning my gender identity. I wasn’t sure about myself at first but being in college and meeting other LGBTQA students has allowed me to realize how my experiences mirror their experiences. Some of my transgender friends that have transitioned are happier with their lives. I met a transgender male who has transitioned already and he looks amazing. He has been on testosterone and has had top surgery. Lots of my transgender male friends struggled with eating disorders as they tried to make themselves look more masculine. I have a transgender male friend who has to take a semester off from school because his anorexia made his health really bad and he had to take time to heal. I’ve heard that many transgender people have eating disorders because they are trying to find a way to cope with the overwhelming dysphoria in their minds by finding a way to control their bodies and controlling their weight makes them feel in control of themselves sometimes. Other ways transgender people cope with the dysphoria are to dissociate themselves from their bodies and feel like they are looking through a glass at their bodies- from a distance on the outside looking in. This mutes the inner critic that they have that tells them that they don’t look like the gender identity that they present because it makes it feel like they are filtering their thoughts through a film and they are watching themselves as if they were watching a movie, not really there. The dissociation helps transgender people feel like they can escape their bodies and view it from a distance so the inner critic doesn’t feel like it’s pounding in their heads. This creates a lucid-numbness that makes the person feel like they aren’t really there. The dissociation from themselves is only temporary and they are still aware of their selves. They know that an emotional trigger will cause the film that they placed over themselves to shatter like glass and the words of the inner critic to flood in cutting like the shards of broken glass. And the lucid-numbness fades and they feel like there heart yearns for the gender they want to be, but their mind is going against them. Their heart feels like it is being constricted by rubber bands that the mind puts on them. The transgender person feels in their heart the gender they want, but it is hard to believe it when there mind seems to overanalyze things and go against them. Transgender people often feel like that they aren’t really living in their life as they are constantly at war with themselves. This is why many transgender people seek hormones and surgery to help them live their lives feeling more like they are alive and making them feel more comfortable with themselves. Transitioning is a relative term for transgender people in the LGBTQA community. Generally, transitioning for transgender people means any action that asserts the gender identity that they wish to present. Medical transitioning involves hormones and surgery, legal transitioning involves legal name change and gender marker changes. And social transitioning, which is often the first process involves telling family/friends about gender identity, dressing in the clothes of the gender they want to be seen as, telling people to use their preferred name and pronouns, doing things that help them appear as the gender they want, and also talking to a therapist ( this can also fit under medical transition as well). Regardless of which stage a transgender person is in- social, medical or legal- they are still valuable and deserve to be recognized for their preferred gender because they go through a lot of hardships and depression that can cause them to have self-destructive behaviors. Often transgender people feel happier after they have had a medical transition because they feel their bodies now match with their gender identity and it makes them feel like they have a sense of self as the gender dysphoria fades and they appreciate their bodies more. Medically and legally transitioning can help transgender people lead more productive lives and help them have a better sense of mental well-being.