Hey all! Long time no see.
So, I'm dealing with a problem that I can't find many other people having online and I thought I would ask you very well informed people.

So, I recently got a double mastectomy, went from I believe C cups to an extremely flat chest.
Since then, I've had quite the trouble with shirts, specifically t-shirts.

They never did this before, but now, the shirt collar rides up on my throat every few minutes. It doesn't seem to matter too much what the size is, large or medium(the 2 sizes of shirts that I regularly wear).
Of course, they also fit looser, but I expected that.
Is this causing the shirts to ride up? Is there any way I can fix this?
Additional, may or may not be relevant details:
I have been on testosterone for 2 years, so could it have something to do with mass increase around my shoulders/neck?
My weight is around 210lbs, and I'm 5'7/5'8.

If anyone knows anything, or could point me to a better place to ask this question I would really appreciate your insight!

Hi! I would like to take a moment to expand my understanding of an aspect of queer culture that I have some trouble with. I'd like to preface this by saying that, while I consider myself to be queer in the broader sense, I also pass as a cishet male. That being said, I'm going to express myself honestly in the hopes that someone will be able to give me an honest to what might read as bigoted. Putting everything else in a detail box:

Said to my friend while we were minding our own business yesterday when walking from A to B in the city. For this old bigoted man that we happened to walk past, simply (gasp) looking at a trans person was too much for him. How dare she go outside while being transgender? Nope, gotta call that out! Gotta tell this stranger that I find her disgusting! That's super important and I am doing the right thing..!

At least, that's what I imagine his train of thought was like. Who knows.

Blows my mind that people can't just keep homophobia/transphobia to themselves. For reference, there was no pride event or anything, like we weren't dressed in kinky outfits, we weren't waving dildos around or something. Not that being dressed a certain way would have excused his behavior, but it's just to say we were wearing very normal clothing and looked decidedly ordinary and neutral. The only thing that revealed to this guy that my friend is trans is that she hasn't done voice training. She passes perfectly fine outside of that, and so do I - we've both been on hormones and transitioning for 3-4 years.

So perhaps the crime we committed was to make him think we weren't transgender? And then he heard her voice, and felt fooled? I suppose to him, it's the end of the world if he was accidentally attracted to a trans woman if even for a second.

My friend thankfully doesn't let this kind of stuff get to her. She grew up extremely conservative (her family still has a "don't ask, don't tell" policy for example) so she's always had nerves of steel to deal with everything, and I'm glad for her that she can shut this kind of stuff out. I really admire her for how strong she is and how she's able to always persevere. She's probably already forgotten about it but for me, I need to work on similarly not letting this stuff get to me. The man wasn't even talking to/about me but I think the reason I'm so upset about it is that it may just as well have been said to me.

I'm trying to focus on the good, and to not let one vile person ruin it. Because me and my friend had such a nice day together.

Growing up I knew I was a cute kid. People were nice to me despite my confusing style of thinking. I know now reaching what I would call early middle age, that everything kids say is confusing. So I know they didn't really care that I was autistic and any of how that affected me. People were nice to me. Things began to change as I went from an awkward cute kid to an awkward fat teenager.

I was never good at being a boy. I always assumed being male would just come to me, like all the other things that happened automatically during puberty. There was nothing normal about that either. I developed breasts as I started middle school(age 12-13 for me) and gained a lot of weight in fat. My father made me work out with him, and it never took. He tried to force me to be a boy in many ways and it hurt me a lot. He paid for a gynecomastia surgery that removed my breasts. He took me to confusing and incredibly painful therapy sessions that drove my feminine identity deep into a box at the depths of my mind. I lost my identity during puberty, before I ever got a chance to find it. He encouraged it, and along with the absence of my mother they sealed that scared little girl away.

Despite how ugly I felt, people still seemed to see something in me that they liked. Suddenly I had girls asking me to be their boyfriend, when I had no idea what that concept meant. The parts I learned about were abhorrent to me. I was not a good boyfriend and believe me, I tried to be good at it for over twenty years. I was acutely aware each time I had failed my partners in life. I spent a lot of energy trying to understand my failures and how I could improve in a way that made me feel like I was still someone I could call "Me." Every time I had a problem in a relationship, I would always assume that at least part or even most of that problem had something to do with whatever was going on inside me. Whether it was mentally, physically, or emotionally, I would do my best to try and fix or understand it.

By the time I came out to myself, I had turned myself into a model girlfriend in every aspect except my presentation. And at that point, I had become a husband. My wife and I couldn't understand why we loved each other so much but had so much trouble being a married heterosexual couple. We loved talking. We loved digging into the people we had become and who we wanted to be. We thought that we were really excited about the couple we were, and we thought we wanted to be this way forever. That "ugly" feeling started to return. I took on some of my wife's ongoing coping strategy of dealing with it through alcohol instead of working through the feelings of not belonging, and settled into my role of absorbing my partner's emotional confusion without much relief, once again.

Things really started to change when I began transition. Suddenly, I was allowed to feel beautiful. It was wonderful, even though I couldn't honestly say I actually looked beautiful at the time, or that I ever expected to be. I knew what I looked like, and I expected that to largely stay the same. Up close, the changes Estrogen made to my body were immediately noticeable. The testosterone blockers made my muscles wither away faster than any other transition experience I've read about. Early on, I felt sure that I'd done something horrible to my body. I was sure that I wasn't getting the estrogen properly, and that my bones and body would wither and die. It took a long time to think that I might actually get a positive result out of transition, at 35.

The months that followed were a series of incredible milestones. Since my surgery at 16 to remove breasts, my chest had been mostly flat. I didn't even have much muscle volume there. That didn't stop my odd body, though. My development on estrogen went at a breakneck pace. I went from using a mastectomy bra with inserts to natural breasts of the exact same size, with no signs of slowing down. The high fat diet I had always gravitated toward suddenly made perfect sense. For the first six months it seemed like I was aging in reverse. My wife and I had both been able to transition into our true selves: happily married gay women who love each other dearly. Looks didn't really mean much to us because we were so happy together at this point. The progress we made emotionally translated into us both not drinking anymore. The need to cope just wasn't there anymore. We lost over a hundred pounds combined before we decided to start an exercise regimen.

I had a lot of support from my wife's family. They called me beautiful, pretty, brave, all the complements you expect to give someone leaning into transition. They did it all right from the start. I left the closet as soon as I realized I was in one, so I had my ugly duckling phase very publicly. These complements mostly rolled off my back, because I didn't see what they saw. I saw a person dripping in ugly, unworthy of their complements. I didn't feel brave, I wanted to give up constantly. Even when I started to really feel pretty, I still had a hard time shaking the feeling that it was just lip service. That it was basic support, and I'd have to pay to get the professional service.

Over time, I noticed something change in the way other people treated me. People who didn't know me. First was the strange behavior. When I would go to the store in a dress, I found people would just get in my way for seemingly no reason. They mysteriously found themselves in front of me while I walked down an aisle or stood at a clothes rack. This behavior had no pattern I could discern. People had patterns, and this fell well outside of what I was used to. I expressed frustration to my wife, who told me "Honey, they're treating you like a woman." This took me aback because I didn't really know how people treated women other than what I had observed directly or heard second-hand from women I had known. I chose to believe her, but I was still skeptical that they weren't just treating me like a dude in a dress.

I'm now just over fourteen months on hormone replacement. I've had a lot of chances to experience platonic bonding with my friend group of women who knew me before transition. I wholeheartedly believe these experiences contributed to a psychosomatic benefit to my physical transition. Every time we would hang out, I would see a huge boost to my physical and emotional progress. I would always feel that much closer to seeing that woman in the mirror that all trans girls hope to one day see, that some of us still might never see. Lately, I've noticed something new. People smile at me when they pass me. That's new to me. I don't make much eye contact with people I don't know. I don't smile unless I do it manually. When I do it now, even accidentally, it disarms people in a way I haven't seen since I was a child. It was never this easy to get around.

This brings me to the title of the post. It shouldn't be this easy for me. I grew up feeling like I would never properly exist, much less exist in a way that was pleasing to others. According to others now, I'm hot. It happened so fast, I didn't have time to prepare. Why did I deserve this and not someone who went through far worse than me? I didn't even realize I was a woman until a little under two years ago. I have a gift I don't properly understand how to utilize. My transition has been a jackpot. I've checked off most of the boxes I see trans women hoping for. I've scored most of the changes so many women pray for, cis and trans alike. I don't feel like I deserve it, and exploring that feeling doesn't relieve the sorrow I have for the gap in mistreatment between myself and so many others. I don't even feel like I deserve to be sad about it, because society considers it a sin to deny the biological gifts you're given. You aren't supposed to look at the women who don't get that privilege and wonder, "If I deserve this, why don't they deserve it too?"

If you were to change your gender, even if you are certain you aren't transgender, do you have a good idea of the kind of person you'd hope to look like? I can't guess, but I figure most people have standards on that type of thing. You wouldn't want to be an unhandsome man, or an ugly woman, especially if you already consider yourself one of those. Society isn't nice to those people it perceives as "inferior" in this way.

This "beauty" is not just skin deep, however. Society has an uncanny way of seeing inside you, drawing out your true feelings. It learns who you are under a mask of care, and discards what it doesn't like to hear. It churns up young people in this age. The trouble is, society says you're an adult when you're 18, or 21. It lies, and says that's some kind of hard limit people reach. Society says that age is where childhood ends, where we're supposed to know who we are and what we want or need to do with ourselves. Some of us have it figured out by then. Most of those have opportunities the rest of us don't. Some of us get it by twenty, Some of us by thirty. Some of us are not capable of figuring it out, and some have the ability taken from them. Some choose not to do it, and spend years forcing everyone around them to deal with it instead.

Regardless of when it happens, for all the time until then our society chooses to exploit these children. We do it ruthlessly. We make these children work themselves ragged to prove their worth as a person. We do it in exchange for a seat at the discussion table. We force them to abandon their childhood and their freedom to discover who they really are. We take their incomplete ideas and ridicule them. We cut them down before they have a chance to see what they can properly do with their lives. Society hates self-reflection, because you can't get a leg up on everybody else when you're busy figuring yourself out. Showing this side of yourself to people with skin in the game invalidates their progress. It makes you an enemy.

After everything I've experienced I'm left with only one choice, really. I could easily pass under the radar. I could slip into quiet happiness away from the fear of society's hatred for whatever crime my cells committed before birth. I could stealth, if I wanted to. I sometimes do want to, but I know that's my "ugly" past grasping for a life preserver that it definitely already has. That's someone else's help I'm reaching for. The only thing I can think to do is wave my trans flag as high and as hard as I can everywhere I go, because of course, silence is death. If you got this far, thank you for reading.

(Edit: redundancy)

I sorta think pretty much everything else have been a downward spirel since this millennium was kickstarted with 9/11. Just a random thought! The speed with which trans women moved from being perverted men to moderately tolerated members of society is staggering. Anyone here know why and when it happened?

If we look at Google Ngram for 'trans people' we see an upward curve after 2000 (the internet I guess) but it really took off somewhere after 2010.

I'm pretty high on the cis het side of the scale, but I'm an understanding and individual freedom loving person. I believe "to each their own" and support that strongly.

I'm an elder millennial. While we used LGB slurs casually, I never really meant them as slurs against the community. It's just how my peers spoke. Trans was never on my radar at the time. (Maybe a little, but I figured it was much rarer than it appears to be)

Homosexuality was always easy for me to understand. From a particular instance: "Do you like girls, Jackie? (Nod). Me too. That's cool." End of need to understand. Plus it was about a butt, and a butt is pretty sex/gender nonspecific.

I also always felt honored when people came out to me.

I just feel like I'm having trouble empathizing with trans individuals. I cannot imagine myself in that position like I can with homosexual or asexual individuals. The pronoun thing also wracks my brain. I'm more accepting of "they" as an object, but "they" as a subject for an individual feels so horrid to me.

First and foremost, I don't personally know anyone trans. I'm not sure how to change that without being weird.

Thanks for your support in my learning!

Hey all, so I'm a trans woman and, like a lot of other people, my biggest point of dysphoria is my facial hair. I've been going through electrolysis for the past five months. I love it when it works, but the speed of the process is really getting me down. I do one hour every two weeks (I'd do more if I had the money), and after five months of solely working on my upper lip the progress just isn't where I was hoping to be.

What are y'alls experiences with electro, and what was the regiment that worked for you? Did you do something other than electrolysis, how'd it work out? Other general hair removal tips to look as clean as possible?

I'll share one of my own:

• The Finishing Touch Flawless Razor (Walmart link) has been the best, and most affordable electric razor I've found that gets an extremely close shave without too much skin irritation (I have the most irritated skin in the world). Highly recommend!