A Sephi snuggled between my legs.

#caturday

Week 5.5 after GRS surgery... And we've entered the "feeling sorry for myself" phase.

In week 1 and 2 you expect it to be hard, week 3 gives you some great days and a few bad, week 4 is a rollercoaster... But recovery is a long game, an initial 3 month period of having dilation schedule, and good and bad days.

Every good day gives you hope, every bad day shatters the hope. And as the weeks pass I've found the greatest battle isn't eating, resting, pacing, dilating... It's keeping the mental health stable and healthy despite the knock-backs.

Physically I'm doing well, the stitches have healed, there's minor dehiscence (reminder to never Google this and never look at images), I'm still hitting depth, it doesn't hurt. Sure there are days when there's blood, but no real pain as it's just the dehiscence doing it's healing thing.

What there is, is distress and frustration. When you have a good day, a great day, a 1 mile walk (done slowly), and hanging out with a friend... The spirit is lifted so high... The hope feels like a reality "normality is returning, it's all good". Then the next day wipes you out and the blood returns after being clean for a few days, and the shattering of hope bring me back down to earth.

It's an endurance game, and I've re-read my earlier posts and see the want and need for the surgery, I see my relief and joy... But being laid to waste really gets to you at some point and it's hard. 5.5 weeks in to the initial 12 weeks... The mind is active and wants to do things, and the body prevents everything.

Before surgery I'd struggled with finding accounts of recovery... Now I know why. No one really writes the daily grind of this. You just have to endure it and focus on what it will be like in a few months and beyond, and you can't predict each day, maybe it's good maybe it's bad. The good ones we want to bank, the bad ones can we just get past and hope we don't get 2 in a row.

I cannot wait to feel healthy again. I cannot wait to drive my car to the country and do a walk in some woods. Can't wait to surprise my friends with visits. Can't wait to regain my focus and finish soldering those little projects (hah, surgery is no excuse for this!).

Love you all 💜 this post written whilst feeling good (and dilating), but I wanted to capture the monotony of these days in the middle of the first 3 months.

#deevagina

Somewhere I've a several GB video from the Lola Young concert at Brixton... My ears hurt from the screaming. Every voice, at maximum, for every word.

It gives goosebumps.

On a fun note... If you're a woman and never experienced unbridled joy of screaming lyrics with other women.... Get yourself to a Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, Lola Young or similar concert.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8AgE3ES/

I've been at gigs for Oasis and others over the decades, and men singing lacks all joy (sorry guys).

Women singing, all of them, with no shame and overwhelming joy... It's a drug I'm happy to get addicted to.

By far the biggest attack on the web: AI scrapers.

And Cloudflare is really not good at blocking it, but also I don't want to use them. And even with a lot of knowledge and skill at my disposal (I used to lead the DDoS protection team at Cloudflare, and was the person who introduced Rust there to improve the capabilities of the Firewall and DDoS protection)... Still the 11 requests per IP over tens of thousands of residential IPs from mostly real browsers at accumulative hundreds to thousands of requests per second. By the time you see the attack and add a block rule, it's pointless as it just looked like a single client accessing one page, and that client will never be seen again.

There's no real way to defend against that except to make the website private and only allow access to those you validate IRL... Or to shoulder a massive financial cost trying to serve it all.

What a world!

It is a sad thing, but my oss and external websites have essentially been made private or projects disbanded.

Between the UK online safety act, AI scrapers, AI "contributions", various critical vulnerabilities... I've just concluded that running small things in the open just isn't worth the time, and ceased to be fun a while ago. Especially if I'm the primary user and just wanted to share.

I did pass a few things on to others, such as the Go HTML sanitizer, a large community platform, and a couple of other things... But if it wasn't large, it disappeared over the last year.

Yesterday I discovered a few old WordPress sites dating back a decade... It's not worth doing the work to keep them online.

And also yesterday when I installed a couple of new tools... Those became accessible via TailScale only.

The web really got screwed huh.

I would like to install Immich... which of the following should I do?

I want to register my continued disgust that I can't just make the software or apt install it, and that modern software continues to be obsessed with containers when there's no real need for them to do so for local single-host apps.

Does anyone know of a trans woman who froze sperm before surgery, and later successfully had a child via IVF?

Asking for someone else, but the community she's in knows of no woman who has had a child this way... All the trans women we know had children before transitioning.

Boosts welcome. This is asked in a UK specific way, but international replies welcome.

#trans #ivf

GP: are you with a GIC?
Me: I'm with DIY
GP: OMG don't tell me that
Me: I just order vials of oestrogen from abroad and inject it weekly
GP: 🫣

To her credit, she did then recommend a very trans friendly GP under a mile away that's willing to do shared care and takes patients from out of area. If you're within 1-2 miles off Finsbury Park in North London then DM me for the GP practise name.

I got my shork!

@aisling had just gifted me a shork. It's so soft ❤️

Now I just need the Amazon spinny skirt and I'll be properly trans or something.

It took GRS to get a shork 😂

After yesterday's NHS England guidance on trans people and single sex spaces I finally cracked and ordered a RADAR key so that I can access disabled toilets.

Note that the disability access org explicitly encourage trans use of this and are supporting trans people this way. The keys cost around £5 online.

The whole thing is such an upsetting mess, and I've no idea how it's enforceable... They've not appeared to have thought about that at all.

I would like some help obtaining a Euro key if anyone is able to get one for me. Being trans and from the UK I don't meet those requirements, but I would deeply appreciate if someone could help me obtain one and I will happily cover costs and inconvenience.

A Euro key is a DOM IX base key, the patterns can be seen online easily enough https://disabledaccessibletravel.com/european-toilet-keys/

Ok, so who knew this existed and didn't tell me?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/nYMP9yWfbJQgBhcb9?g_st=ac

It's a cafe, where model trains deliver food direct to your table. They even called it Nibbles Railway Cafe.

"Your new passport is on its way. You'll need to show ID to receive it."

Umm...

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@JessTheUnstill/117439956914383391

Any cis woman who wants to be a great ally, this is how.

Just invite us to spaces that are totally normal for you and treat us totally normally... We really don't get to experience this much and it's life changing and lifting every time it does happen. Instant joy that then lasts for weeks after.

I imagine most people who have been through this giggling at the recognition when reading this.

I imagine those who have never been through this being wtf horrified 😂

#deevagina

1 month in, and it's a new day 🎉

You know what that means...

(bouncy, excitement)

New places to bleed from! 🥳

Part of the healing process is thinking you're ok and everything is good, and then waking up to blood. Emailing the GRS team, only to receive the reply "this is normal and expected".

The WhatsApp group of girls is being brainwashed, even we're replying to each other for each new little horror "this is normal".

The definition of normal is now all encompassing.

Past me would find a lot of my daily normals horrifying. But present me is "this is normal".

The blood is from minor tears and dehiscence (never ever search this, but if you do never ever look at the images the search finds). And it is a normal part of stretching things, swelling changing (going down or increasing), and basically movement.

I feel pretty good, slept 11 hours... So yeah, the morning blood is normal.

#deevagina

For the record... The cats in question.

Both on my legs right now, Sephi is on the left and demands a femme voice, Orphee on the right answers only answers to excitement regardless of the character of the voice.

Oh God, I've said that on fedi, a good 25% of you are probably catgirls

Mental trick... You're all my cats now

My femme voice is turning out to be the voice I use when speaking to my cat.