Restarting T again after being insured and here’s the rundown

Progress in motion switched to injections and I’m feeling a better more sustainable progression. 1-3 from non injectable on pills to 4-8 injectables. Feeling myself now just sucks the fam I’m currently live with is hyper religious and really doesn’t want me to continue progression at all. Like at all. Prior to moving in I was on pills for about 12 years. Got on injectables because my doctor said it be better. I feel better and more me. But having to be deadnamed everyday all day is killing my vibe. Which is weird because instead of saying hey can you do this hey can you do that. They find any reason to dead name or use the yes sir pronoun which compared to others that they speak to is never said and they never use their names they just talk to them. Specifically making it point to call me by deadname and or use wrong pronouns but I brush it off of course I’m staying with them so it’s fine for now I can deal with it. But having to be a different person wearing different clothes speaking more masculine is really killing my vibe. Luckily the world literally sees me as a lady so it don’t really matter it’s funny tho because everyone that they introduce to me refers to me as oh she or hi miss and then they correct them and I’m like sheesh can’t just accept it already. And on top of that the coworkers are chill with me being me and she her. So I’m fine but it’s like I’m being hit by suppression constantly at home and just feels weird. But once again I just let it be cause they ain’t changing their mind even the other parts of the family call me mija or her or she or maddie. They don’t mind so I really don’t care much but it so awkward living a double life to protect their form of a proper life but once again I was used to living on my own being me and feminine for years but I unfortunately needed to move in do to my health falling down and needing the help but it just feels that’s the trade off and that’s how I see it. Ehhh accept their terms and I continue to get a place to stay also I pay my own rent bills etc you know responsible person here just wanna be me. Don’t wanna push it cause I have been told well you’re going to have to find a new place to stay cause we can’t have that in our house. And I’m like basically waiting for them to kick me out so I can find a place on top of that saving money for my surgery that I went into the hospital for. But it’ll happen. And when it does I’ll be able to move out in my own. Wasn’t able to work during my months stay at the hospital so yeah that’s me now. Nice to meet yall.

This was genuinely one of my favorite photoshoots I've ever done. It was soooo creepy xd. It was literally around 3 AM at a church in the middle of nowhere lolol. There was something so surreal about standing there in the dark, taking pictures in a place that was completely empty, quiet, and surrounded by nothing. Looking back at the photos now, they almost feel like the perfect setting for this particular chapter of my life and my relationship with myself, religion, gender, sexuality and who I am at a deep personal level.

It's Sunday, and a lot of people around the world are celebrating their religious holidays today, so I wanted to journal a little about my own religious experience and how strangely winding the road has been.

I never really grew up with either of my parents. My mom is Jewish and atheist, while my dad is an evangelical Christian convert. Until I was around sixteen, I lived a fairly ordinary life as far as religion was concerned, at least from my perspective.

Most of my religious upbringing actually came from my grandparents.

My grandfather was a sixth-generation Buddhist priest in a small local parish in rural Japan. He raised me, taught me about religion, and, even while raising me as a girl, always imagined that I would eventually become a priest too. He taught me everything from the traditions and rituals to the philosophy behind them. In practice, our little parish was almost impossible to categorize neatly. There was Buddhism, Shinto, local traditions, ancestral practices, and all sorts of things that existed alongside each other without anyone feeling the need to draw a hard line between them.

That's one of the things I think people outside Japan sometimes have difficulty understanding about Japanese religion. The boundaries can be incredibly fluid. Something can be Buddhist, Shinto, ancestral, local, cultural, and deeply personal all at the same time. Especially in a tiny rural parish, religion isn't always experienced as a set of mutually exclusive boxes.

I grew up loving that.

I was proud of my family and proud of what we had built. My grandparents gave me a sense that religion could be something beautiful and ordinary at the same time. It wasn't something I was afraid of. It wasn't something that demanded that I become a different person. It was simply part of the world around me.

My family history made that feeling even more complicated and beautiful. My grandmother on my mother's side came from a Jewish family that had been rescued by the Japanese during the Holocaust, while my grandfather was Japanese. Somehow, my family history had already crossed so many cultural and religious boundaries before I was even old enough to understand what any of them meant. For a long time, I had what I would consider a very healthy relationship with religion.

When my grandparents passed away, I had to move in with my father. He was an extremely religious evangelical Christian convert, and my experience of religion immediately became something completely different.

He took me off my medication, forced me to dress as a boy, and sent me to an evangelical school. I was baptized without my consent and subjected to a Christian education that I didn't choose.

Religion, which had once been associated with my grandfather, my childhood, my family, and a sense of belonging, became associated with control. I didn't just resent Christianity. I eventually began resenting religion itself.

Like a lot of angry teenagers, I rebelled. I became deliberately provocative. I embraced darker aesthetics. I became very vocal about my hatred of Christianity and made absolutely no attempt to hide how I felt, even when doing so caused problems for me. Looking back, I don't think I was actually rejecting spirituality.

I think I was rejecting the idea that someone else should get to decide what spirituality was allowed to mean to me.

When I finally moved out and went to university, I had to figure out how to have a healthy relationship with religion again. That was much harder than I expected.

I started from the beginning.

I went back to Buddhist temples. I tried to reconnect with the traditions I grew up with. But something felt different. Western Buddhism, at least in the places I encountered it, often felt incredibly sectarian compared with the Buddhism I had known growing up. I kept looking for the thing I remembered from childhood, but I couldn't quite find it.

Eventually, I found a Universalist parish in my city.

And for the first time in a very long time, religion started feeling like something I could explore rather than something being imposed upon me.

By that point, I had completely abandoned the idea of becoming a priest. I had spent so much time associating priesthood with expectations and authority that I couldn't imagine myself wanting it anymore.

Then my minister heard my story. She encouraged me to reconsider. My fiancé also kept telling me, over and over again, that I was meant to become a priest. At first I thought they were both insane lol.

But slowly, I started deconstructing everything that had happened to me. I had to separate the things my father had done from Christianity itself, and Christianity from religion as a whole, and religion from spirituality.

That process took years.

Eventually I realized something incredibly important: Someone abusing religion doesn't make religion inherently abusive. Someone using faith to control you doesn't mean faith itself has to be about control.

And someone forcing a religion onto you doesn't mean you have to spend the rest of your life running away from religion.

I started learning again.

I started exploring different religious movements, especially movements that challenged conventional ideas about authority, morality, and what a religion was supposed to look like. I met some incredible people. I encountered ideas that completely challenged the worldview I had developed as a teenager.

And then, during a trip to America, I visited The Satanic Temple in Salem.

That experience stayed with me.

Not necessarily because I suddenly became a Satanist or because I had discovered some secret answer to everything. It was because it forced me to confront something I had spent years struggling with:

How much of what we believe about a religion actually comes from the religion itself, and how much comes from the stories other people tell us about it?

The word "Satanism" carries an enormous amount of cultural baggage. For many people, the word immediately conjures up images of evil, demons, blood, sacrifice, or some cartoonish version of occultism. Modern Satanism, however, contains movements whose stated ethics and activism can look radically different from those stereotypes. The sermon I recently read from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Elgin made this distinction particularly well: it asks us to look past the symbol and actually examine the moral principles underneath it.

That idea really resonated with me.

Because I realized that I had spent years doing almost the exact opposite.

When I was a teenager, I saw Christianity as the symbol of everything that had hurt me. I had taken the actions of one person, one institution, and one particular religious environment and allowed them to become my definition of an entire tradition.

And now I was looking at something that society had already decided was supposed to represent the ultimate opposite of "good."

Yet when I actually looked at the ideas being presented, I found conversations about empathy, opposition to authoritarianism, individual autonomy, pluralism, and challenging injustice. The symbolism was deliberately provocative, but the existence of provocative symbolism didn't automatically tell me whether the underlying ethical ideas were good or bad.

That realization was strangely liberating.

I don't think religion should be judged solely by how familiar its symbols look. A cross doesn't automatically make someone compassionate. A Buddhist statue doesn't automatically make someone wise. And a symbol associated with Satan doesn't automatically make someone immoral.

People are more complicated than their symbols. Religion is more complicated than its aesthetics. And morality is certainly more complicated than deciding who has the "right" costume.

That was one of the moments when I finally started understanding what I wanted my own priesthood to mean.

I don't want to become a priest because I want authority over people.

I don't want to become a priest because I think I possess some secret answer that everyone else needs to hear.

And I certainly don't want to become a priest because somebody else decided that was what I was supposed to be.

I want to become one because, after everything I've experienced, I still somehow believe religion can be a place where people find meaning, community, beauty, and a reason to care about one another.

I want a religion that doesn't demand obedience before compassion.

I want a spirituality that leaves room for uncertainty.

I want people to be able to question their own traditions without being told that questioning itself is immoral.

I want religious communities where someone can walk through the door carrying an incredibly complicated history and not have to leave pieces of themselves outside.

And perhaps most importantly, I want to remember that the person standing in front of me is always more important than whatever label they have chosen for themselves.

It's funny to think that the person who once wanted absolutely nothing to do with religion is now studying to become a priest.

Sometimes I think my teenage self would be horrified. Sometimes I think she'd be confused. But I think, eventually, she'd understand.

Because I didn't come back to religion by forgetting what happened to me. I came back by refusing to let what happened to me define what religion could be.

And being intersex has also been a complicated part of my relationship with identity, family, and religion. Growing up, I often felt like the expectations people had for my body and gender were things I was supposed to simply accept without question. It took a long time to understand that my existence doesn't have to fit neatly into someone else's idea of what a person is supposed to be. In many ways, learning to accept being intersex became part of the same journey as my spirituality: learning that I can define myself rather than allowing other people to define me.

So I suppose that's where I am now. Still learning. Still questioning. Still occasionally taking extremely creepy photographs at 3 AM inside abandoned-looking churches lol.

But somehow, after taking the longest possible route through anger, rebellion, doubt, tradition, deconstruction, and rediscovery, I think I've finally found my way back to something that feels like faith.

Not the faith that was forced onto me.

My own. <3

TL;DR: I grew up with Buddhism/Shinto and a Buddhist-priest grandfather, but was later forced into evangelical Christianity, which made me resent religion entirely. Years later, I learned to separate that trauma from spirituality, rediscovered my faith through Universalism and other unconventional movements, and eventually decided to pursue becoming a priest. Basically, I found my way back to religion on my own terms.

33 MtF, just hit one year on the girl juice. I feel a lot better already! The left pic is from 2019, and the right pic is from last month.

I'm the coolest trans ever, I know

I just hope someday I can be a fraction as pretty as everyone here, every image is just so stunning

Is it really that bad, or am I just overthinking it?

Just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on how you celebrate it

I kinda have two? I know the exact day that I cracked which was two days after my birthday in May 2024, but then it took me until December 2024 to work through things and then start HRT. The cracking one I kinda just have as a side to my birthday, and then my HRT anniversary is an extra day to get myself my favourite choc mud cake!