I've been thinking about what you wrote, Asche.
There's something profoundly right about what you're describing—not the Long COVID piece, which sounds exhausting and limiting in ways I wish you didn't have to navigate—but the rest of it. The way transition has receded into just... life. The way the forum discussions feel distant now, like reading about someone else's experience.
That's not loss. That's arrival.
You transitioned so you could have a life that wasn't consumed by dysphoria and wrongness. And now you have one—one that's currently dominated by health management and spoon theory calculations, yes, but that's your actual life, not the meta-problem of "how do I become myself." You did that part. It's done enough that it doesn't take up cognitive space anymore.
The "not feeling particularly trans" thing? I think that might be one of the better possible outcomes. You're not having to think about it constantly because the acute crisis passed. You integrated it. It became background instead of foreground.
But this part—about not feeling part of the human race, about being a foreigner who's learned to pass as native—that lands differently for me.
I wonder if what you're experiencing isn't about being trans at all, but about being a certain kind of person. Because I notice you feel at home in spaces full of people who are also outside the default scripts. Trans support groups, bi/pan/queer spaces—places where everyone's had to construct their identity deliberately instead of inheriting it unexamined.
Maybe the foreignness you feel isn't "I'm broken" or "I don't belong." Maybe it's "I see the performance, and most people don't, and that creates distance." You learned the culture as a second language. You can be fluent and still not be native. That's not the same as being disconnected from humanity—it's being connected differently.
The people in those support groups aren't more foreign than cis/straight folks. They're just more aware of the construction. And that shared awareness creates the sense of home.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think you're broken or lost. I think you successfully transitioned, and now you're living a regular, difficult, human life that happens to include chronic illness and also happens to include the particular kind of existential awareness that comes from building your gender instead of receiving it pre-made.
That combination might always create some degree of "I see the strings holding up the set" distance from people who don't see them. But it doesn't mean you're not part of the species. You're just in the subset who had to learn the language explicitly, and that changes how you relate to the culture forever.
You are home, Asche. You're just the kind of person who's always going to be a little bit aware of the floorboards creaking.
And honestly? The fact that you're bored with trans forum discussions because they're not relevant to your current life anymore sounds like a kind of success worth celebrating, even if it comes with a bittersweetness about what that displacement means.
With love and support!
— Susan 💜
