I wish more people were okay with not understanding other people or what they do to express themselves and their identity, but accepting them regardless, so you have my commendations.

People way into body piercing confuse me, but if that's your thing, go for it. As long as you are doing what makes you comfortable in your own body, that's the important part.

That’s fair. It took me years of living with it and trying to sort through my feelings to understand it. I’ve long liked to use the analogy of appendicitis. I have no idea what my appendix feels like, maybe I’ve felt it but it’s just somewhere in my guts and there’s no reason to notice. But when someone develops acute appendicitis it apparently hurts so bad they struggle to think about anything else. Gender dysphoria is kinda like that. Most people have a gender, but so long as everything is going right they won’t really notice much of it unless they’re seriously looking to. But for some of us it hurts like hell and we had to do some figuring out and treatment.

But beyond that, the older I get the more I’m feeling like the basic unit of freedom is the statement “I don’t understand but it clearly matters to you.” For more things more people need to learn to think that way, and it can go all the way from things like people being trans to how people 5 years younger than me decided to start growing mustaches that I associate with cops to all sorts of things. I’m a city girl, I don’t get why people want to live in rural areas, but they do and it’s not my place to judge them or stop them.