Swimsuit Season

There are a lot of people for whom swimsuit season sucks. Trans people are, more often than not, part of those people. Just for different reasons. Swimsuits, public showers, and swimming pools are a special brand of complicated for trans people.

For binary gender trans people- there are loads of concerns depending on how far/if you’re transitioning medically. A trans woman who is consistently read as a woman, has taken estrogen to grow breasts, but still has a penis- well, you can imagine how much fun crotch-tight swimsuits are for her. For a trans man who has breasts, he has to wear a binder and then likely wear a shirt that won’t show the binder over it. Also, finding a packer that works with water is fun-times.

And for non-binary people, it’s often just complicated.

I’m bringing this up as a person who’s gotten top surgery… but still has scars. They’re a lot better than they were, but one of my nipples looks really weird thanks to the #@$#@$@ surgeon. I’m right now staying with people who have a pool (being poor and staying with rich people is… really weird). My partner won’t be using it because of their own dysphoria. I want to… but. But I don’t know if it’d be okay for me to just wear my swim trunks. I don’t really want to have to wear a shirt in the pool, I’ve never liked that. It’s an awkward question to have to ask.

Communication styles collide

Yesterday, I was sitting at a table with my friend, a person I’m pissed off at, and some random white girl going on about how awful it is for white people because they’re afraid of terrorists. Not the safest place. At some point, the conversation got onto foreign students that express negative views of the US, thinking that they either shouldn’t come or shouldn’t do that (apparently about a specific student who sayst hat USians are too ignorant to teach her so she’s getting nothing out of this, which I did not know). My partner is a foreign student that expresses negative views of the US.

I reiterate about it not being a safe space. I’ve also got some issues that meant hat I’m not tbe best at communicating when I’m pissed off and, quite frankly, hurt that she’d say such a thing. I leave the table to try to cool down.

My friend takes this as me not respecting her, because I left to cool down rather than bringing it up right then.

If someone knows they’ve upset me and doesn’t do anything about it, I feel that they’re disrespecting me because they dont’ care that they’ve hurt me enough to try to fix it.  My friend has not done anything about it.

The reason? My friend is now taking her own time to cool off so that she can talk about it calmly (believe me, this pisses me the hell off).

I’m not really sure how this is going to turn out, particularly because my partner hates being in the middle even though our drastically different styles suggest a serious need for a mediator, but you can imagine how incredibly badly this would’ve turned out.

My friend would have finally cooled down, and in the time that it took her to do this, I would have gotten more and more upset with her thinking that she didn’t care. The resulting conversation would, most likely, not have gone well.