Tag: MTF

Groceries, Breakfast, and Transgender in Public

Wolsey2 Comments

Yesterday we went to a business/restaurant supply Costco. You can use your normal membership to go to the business/restaurant supply Costco. It’s just a Costco that doesn’t have all the electronics, clothing, and home goods, and instead has the food in bigger quantities, and restaurant supply stuff. The reason we went is it opens at 7am and is practically empty, with easy parking. We get up really early, and hate crowds so it’s super nice.

We spent a lot at Costco, and filled our chest freezer with restaurant quality crinkle fries, salami, lunch meat, hot dog sausages, a sliced cheeses, and corn dogs. Just about everything you could need for the next six months when you have non-cooking days.

While I like to cook everything from scratch, I am not always physically up and running. On those days, I like a quick and dirty meal and ready made food is a part of that. As my condition progresses, I have had to make peace with the fact that while I have the skills and prefer 100% from scratch cooking, concessions will have to be made. I focus on those items I really love to make, and make do with store bought for the rest.

Arguably, the best greasy spoon on the west coast.

We then went out to eat at one of the best kept secret diners in our area. The staff is amazing. The food is 110% Americana diner food that is well made, affordable, and with portions that are bigger than I ever eat.

However, going out in public these days is always risky. When my wife went to pee, some lady complained to staff about a “man” in the bathroom. My wife looked damn good in her little floral skirt, doc marten’s and top. She has boobs larger than my head, and her hair color was killing it. To call her a man at this point in her life is just literally being a bigot. She may be identifiable as transgender, but she looks NOTHING like a man.

We live in such a blue area that this was a non starter with the staff. The staff member cleaning the bathroom completely blew her off. When my wife left the bathroom the lady had gotten her husband to come stand with her by the door to the women’s room. Apparently, not content to just wait and come back after my wife, she wanted a man person to come menace my wife.

I should remind everyone my wife is 6’2″ tall. This apparently matters to the cis men she towers over. He couldn’t look her in the eyes when she smiled and waved at them both, and came back the the booth. This has been happening more and more. The amount of times my wife has been challenged by some lady in the bathroom, who then goes and gets a man to come help her threaten my wife with either implied or overt violence is just insane.

To be fair, the silver lining to this madness is the number of cis dudes that completely look out of their depth and back down when my wife shows up. Size really matters to cis dudes when height and threats come into play.

Oh, and can I be petty? My wife looked more feminine, had better fashion sense, and was just factually more beautiful than the nasty tired old lady freaking out?

The real challenge of this all was actually just being in public. My wife can’t leave the house without something happening right now. Those bigots seem thrilled there is a minority they can unabashedly attack because they feel they finally found a socially acceptable victim. Don’t be mistaken, these same people are probably racist antisemites, too. They just found a new group that isn’t fully protected by social convention and are gleefully on the attack. The Venn diagram for transphobia, racism, sexism, antisemitism, and all the other ‘isms, is pretty much a circle.

The most insidious situation is the picture taking. People will just take my wife’s picture like they saw Bigfoot. They are not as discrete as they think when they even try to be sneaky. Some assholes use it as a way to harass her by outright getting in her face to do it.

I live in a large city. My wife, is legit not even the weirdest thing I see driving to get donuts at sunrise just last week. Have you seen a meth head wearing a feather boa and nothing else at a bus stop dancing? I have! This is not a really rare occurrence because we live in a city that has a rep for that kind of drug use.

I mean, there are so many more pronounced situations going down at any one time in my limited time outside my home, that to pick my slightly gothy transgender wife to target for photos is just people being assholes.

It’s a risk whenever we go out these days, and while I am a transgender man who can “pass” as cis, my wife cannot. I worry for her safety a lot these days because the uptick in violence is very real, and you never know if you are going to run into someone that has been wound up by the media and is just foaming at the mouth to hate crime someone.

I truly wish this wasn’t a concern we had to work with just to go get breakfast and groceries.

Post-Surgery Food Roundup

Wolsey2 Comments

My wife had surgery on the 9th. It wasn’t a huge surgery. She’s had, I think 9 of them in the last 4 years for her transition from female to male. She’s one of the craziest strongest recoveries I have ever seen for surgery. When I was a nurse, in my first career, I did medicare units with post surgical recovery on and off, and so seeing my wife recover this strong is impressive to me.

For instance, she didn’t take anything much for pain the last couple days. She never does. She hates narcotic pain medication, so she switches over to Tylenol or something over the counter really quickly.

I think part of the issue is my wife has ADHD, and I am not sure if it’s related, but meds just hit her different. Stimulants put her to sleep. Every time she has general anesthesia she is incredibly busy until it wears off in a day or two. The night I brought her home, she was so chatty I had to tell her to be quiet at midnight so I could sleep. She was happy and up, but I was exhausted from getting her to Seattle and back and getting all the details taken care of.

For the bigger surgeries, she is more out of is and sleeps, but every little one like this? She practically doesn’t notice.

Wife in her housecoat I made for her out of my grandmothers quilt, being stalked by Tally the cat. This is a general picture of them, as I didn’t think to snap pics of my wife yesterday. Plus she’s so busy, it’s hard to chase her around.

Anyways, on to food. My wife always wants Dick’s Cheeseburgers and jelly beans after surgery. I don’t know what the anesthetic does to her, but it’s pretty reliable. Once, years ago before her transition, she had a vasectomy in a town an hour away, and on the ride home, she was so insistent I get her jelly beans I had to pull off and go into a Fred Meyer to buy her a pound of bulk candy.

When we got to the house, 20 minutes later, she once again got insanely insistent, so I asked where her jelly beans went. Turns out, little miss post-anesthesia ate the entire pound of jelly beans without remembering. It made her a bit queasy too, so after that I was much more careful with her demands, and I only got her a small bag of jelly beans, and vetoed Dick’s Cheeseburgers on the way back until I could be sure she wasn’t going to be nauseated from eating.

Sweet and Sour vegetables and rice.

For the first night I wanted to go easy on her stomach, so I made the above, sweet and sour rice and vegetables. I made the sweet and sour sauce from scratch and the green onions are from my garden.

I wanted her to have a good protein-rich set of meals for recovery. We don’t normally eat steak and red meat that much. The costs are prohibitive and we just don’t miss it, but I splurged to make sure she had good recovery food. I should note, I was so tired from the night before, that I got the groceries delivered, and the steaks I wanted were replaced with flank steak. Which is fine, but they looked like they’d been through it. I am a little pickier on my meat selection, so I just cooked them up in the pan with butter, salt and peppers and sliced them across the grain.

Steak, country mashers, candied carrots and Hawaiian rolls. This is my plate so it has all the fat and gristle bits, because I like that.

She woke up well, and I made her a late lunch, early supper with flank steak, country mashers with some leftover potatoes in the fridge, and carrots glazed in honey. She loves rolls, so I bought Hawaiian rolls. Normally they are a bit sweet for our tastes, but it was what was available for delivery.

Later that evening we were both hungry, so I used leftover steak to make burritos with steak, rice (leftover), cabbage, green onion, and cheese. I used some light sour cream for sauce in them. I forgot to get pictures of that one.

Steak, mushroom, green onion, and cheese frittattas with Trader Joes polenta broiled with parmesan cheese.

I made a nice frittata and used it to use up leftovers in the fridge. I used up the leftover polenta as well, broiled with parmesan.

The cheese in the polenta is pepper jack, and cheddar. The only place I buy cheese these days is Costco, in large blocks, and grate myself using a KitchenAid grater attachment. I swear the pepper jack tastes like pepper jack. Some grocery store versions are very bland and not remotely spicy.

I might do more sweet and sour vegetables for dinner. I need to get more veggies into her.

However, she’s been doing super well, and maybe now that she’s good, I can finally relax.

The Current State of Transgender Hate

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With the current level of hatred and politics being forced on anyone that is trans, my wife and I feel very under siege.

I’m a transgender man, so I fly under the radar, but my wife is a gorgeous 6’2″ and visibly trans. She’s 51, but looks 20 years younger than that. She can’t pass or hide being transgender, nor does she really want to. She’s happy with herself, and that really should be all that matters.

Yet, at IKEA last Saturday, my wife used the bathroom, and some boomer aged Karen sidled up to my wife at the sinks, and literally stared at my wife’s crotch until boomer Karen realized my wife was paused in her hand washing and staring right back at her.

In the car, some dude in a truck was staring at her boobs, and kept moving his truck forward to star at her with his jaw wide open.

On the way home from work today, she stopped by her favorite pot shop. There is a gender nonconforming clerk there that has great clothing and nail polish. I don’t know if the clerk is a transgender woman or just gender nonconforming. We politely smile and focus on business because you know how it is.

My wife was being rung up out by the clerk, when some dude holding a toddler entered the pot shop and literally stared at my wife.

He turned to the employee, got flustered, and asked “Is there another staff on duty?!” when the employee helping my wife said yes, he said, “Send him out to my car!” and aggressively stalked off.

An employee went out, talked to him, and he left. His car had one of those racist dog-whistle Gadsden Flags on it. Here’s an article on its shifting meaning these days.

I guess bringing a toddler to a pot shop is okay, you know, as long as none of us trans folks are in there.

It’s just so insane. My wife can literally go nowhere without these things happening now, and we live in Western Washington! Bluer than blue politically, and filled with a lot of generally fantastic people.

The people attacking transgender people also appear to be the kind of people that “aren’t racist”, heavy on the quotation marks, and have issues with gender rolls and probably women. The Venn diagram seems to skew into a circle on those topics.

I have always maintained that these folks have some sort of hopped up in-group out-group psychology, and genuinely like attacking others that are not a part of their in-group. It’s a hobby, a pastime, and they just don’t care. If it wasn’t us, it would be someone else. They are an attack looking for a target.

It’s just a little scary that right now me and my loved ones are that target.