So I'm drifting into another forum...

[PanoramaIsland]

...but this one is connected to something of, er, greater personal significance to myself.  We'll see how long I last. I've been feeling very disconnected from other genderqueer and trans people, which is weird because I live in San Francisco. There's a local resource center that has stuff for trans youth, but I went to their group for young transwomen and didn't really click, and I'm not masculine enough to go to the transman group. Here's hoping I find some sense of connection on these forums - not as a replacement for real-life contact, certainly, but as a relief at least.

So, I suppose this is the point at which I provide data.

Name: I guess you can call me "Pan."
Age: 22
Pronouns: She/her, ze/hir, bu
Height: Six feet, one inch
Hair: Pink
Ethnicity: Oy gevalt!
Religion: No thanks
Sexuality: Kinky and frustrated, grrrr
Physical sex: XY, with hypogonadotropism (body can't manufacture hormones properly). I've been on estrogen several years now.
Appearance: Gender->-bleeped-<-y and androgynous, often but not always read as female (and I like it that way)
Politics: Come see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!
Hey mang, whatchoo doin'?: Going to community college and preparing for an illustration degree at California College of the Arts. Taking lots of art history, making art, eating, sleeping.
Collections: Books, comics (indie, underground, old romance manga, weird ->-bleeped-<-, experimental, plain pretentious), music (punk, goth, post-punk, deathrock, noise, crust, bitta dis, bitta dat)

'Ello there!

[tekla]

San Francisco, for all it's being very cosmopolitan and all, is very provincial at heart.

[PanoramaIsland]

I haven't had enough time living here to really know, but yeah, that seems like it might be the case. I do love this city, though.

[K8]

Welcome to Susan's, Pan. 

There's a lot of good information and good people here.  Each of our stories is unique but we have a lot in common.  Settle in, pull up a keyboard, and explore.

Be sure to look under the Announcements heading.  There you will find the rules we live by in this little world of ours: "Site Terms of Service and Rules to Live By", "Standard Terms and Definitions", and "Post Ranks".  Look through the other stuff there, too.

Each of us is who we are.  Sometimes who we are doesn't fit well into the categories that are presented to us.  I hope you can find a home here.

- Kate

[no_id]

Welcome to the boards Pan, spiffy intro. 
Have fun and see you around (curious about the pink hair haha).

[cynthialee]

Welcome to the club. Your not alone we have a few genderqueers around here. My spouse being one of them...
This is a pretty good group of people and as a general rule we don't flame eachother unless you need a serious attitude adjustment. 
I would sugest hitting the Referance Library.
https://www.susans.org/reference/index.html

[tekla]

SF is a special place (in all the ways one can use that word).  It shares with a few other locations (NYC, Florida, Texas, LA) a unique, almost pathological sense of self and place. There is a huge almost cult like sense of: Where are you from? Oh, that sucks, I'm from the Bay Area.

It's got a lot of weird idiosyncrasies some of them based on very real type things.  It has a very high level of education and the Bay Area is home to more Nobel Prize winners than anywhere else - so almost anyone you deal with is going to be over educated.  That leads I think to it being one of the places with the lowest rate of TV watching.  It also leads to a lot of early adopter stuff.  I think SF was one of the first places to deep six wristwatches, opting to go with the clock on the cell phone (and in SF even the bums and homeless people have cell phones).  As a result everyone is on the same time, and that's kind of weird.  When everyone sets their own time there used to be a couple minutes swing either way, but no one has that anymore.  It is a very non-chemically smelly place, in that if I smell perfume or cologne on someone I'm almost guaranteed that they are from out of town. It has such a high rate of diversity that no one really stands out anymore.  I can take a bus from where I work out to the coast and hear 5 different languages spoken in that five mile trip, no problem.  Pink hair, oh that's nice, but not that odd.  It shares with LA a very high standard of physical fitness (I think that the average Bay Area person exercises more than anywhere else in the US) and its a very physical place.  Very outdoors.  I get off of work at 2-3-4 AM and walk around there are people jogging.  Really, are they thinking, "Hey, its 2:30am, time to get in a couple of miles?" But non-physically fit people are looked down upon as a result of that.

[PanoramaIsland]

Thank you all so much for the welcome! Instead of serial-posting, I'm going to go ahead and make a megapost. Here goes!

Bands:
Like any elitist music nerd I love a lot of very specific and carefully-selected bands. Instead of rattling on for aeons about that, though, I'll just give you a nice little bandsalad.

Siouxsie and the Banshees
Christian Death
Discharge
The Birthday Party
Amebix
Bauhaus
The Misfits
Teenage Jesus And The Jerks
Lydia Lunch
Swans
Lene Lovich
Bikini Kill
Crass
Scarlet's Remains
Gallhammer
Khanate
Merzbow
Sunn O))
Millions of Dead Cops
Faith And The Muse
The Vanishing
Red Temple Spirits
X-Ray Spex
Terrorfakt
Converter
Pain Generate Sperm
Wormed
Stupid Babies Go Mad
Naked City
etc.

now then,
San Francisco:
Ohhh baby, yes! I think "pathological sense of place" is very accurate. It's like being Sicilian, or Okinawan - we're very emphatically not Boring Normal Americans here (and I can say "we" because I was born in SF and raised mostly in Marin), and we spend a lot of time and energy constructing that division.
The "over-educated" aspect is fabulous, because I think this is very much a city that values education (as do I), but it is, of course, a double-edged sword. Education tends very much to be a mark of class, and San Francisco strikes me as something of a paradise for rich liberals which is trying very hard to be an all-inclusive Rainbow Coalition of a city, complete with pots of gold and unicorns. And it seems to be relatively good at inclusion - inclusion, that is, of anyone who can actually afford to live her. Herr herr.

That being said, this really is an awesomely diverse city. I live in the Excelsior District, and a white (not WASP, but certainly light-skinned) person, I am a minority here. I like that; it has been an enlivening experience for me. This is a neighborhood of latinos, Philipinos, black folks, Chinese, there's an old Italian fraternal society down the street... It brings up all sorts of questions about class and race that I had previously not been terribly conscious of, growing up as I did in two overwhelmingly white places: Marin County and rural Washington State. I'm going to be moving - either downtown or to the East Bay - in order to be closer to my school of choice, but I've enjoyed this neighborhood, and I'm glad in general to be living in a city in which the PSAs on public transit PA systems are in three languages.

Pink hair:
Yeah, not really  that odd, like Tekla said. Not around here, anyway. I just like it - it's a more pleasing color to me than my native brown, and introduces an element of fun into my daily interactions that might otherwise be missing.

[tekla]

I miss Bikini Kill.

[PanoramaIsland]

Yeah! They're really great. I've enjoyed going over to Goteblud, the hidden little zine shop in the Mission-Valencia, several times, and browsing his huge collection of queercore and riot grrrl zines. He's only open on weekends, but it's a great place to spend some time.

I've been listening to X-Ray Spex a lot recently, perhaps for some of that same energy. I always loved Poly Styrene's gender expression.

[tekla]

Yeah, I like Thrift Town, and there is another used/vintage store up and across Mission when I have the time to hit them up.  I spend most of my time at the theaters and the surrounding areas - so downtown, but when I stay there I hang out in North Beach (my favorite bars are there) because I have a room I use there. And I ride out to the park and the beach when I have time to do it, easy ride from the Fillmore.  And the Inner Sunset and H/A and Lower Haight are pretty nice areas.

[Pica Pica]

 the Bay Area is home to more Nobel Prize winners than anywhere else -
[/quote]

I thought that prize went to Cambridge in England

[tekla]

That may well be true for one town, but the Bay Area includes Berkeley, Stanford, U of Santa Clara, all the silicone valley stuff and Lawrence-Livermore National Lab (the weapons factory).