I actually got yelled at for sitting to pee in preschool funnily enough because "boys don't do that"...

lol. When I worked at NASA there was a guy I knew who used to work on filtering the waste out of astronaut's urine in order to re-use the water on the international space station without needing continuous supply missions to the space station to keep the astronauts alive. He loved to tell people his job was to get people to drink their own piss.

I am a research physicist. I've worked at several major government laboratories on everything from manned mars missions to sonar technology, and currently work on studying electron precipitation into the ionosphere during solar storms.

I've literally worked on the MOXIE device that was part of the Mars Perseverance rover, and am working on a PhD at the moment.

Most of the physics I do is funnily enough, computational (most of the stuff I do with solar storms is python coding and data analysis, and pretty much the entire reason I got the sonar project job is because I know digital signal processing in MATLAB). If that's already a thing you're interested in physics is an option (but you'll totally have to go to college, and probably grad school as well. At least grad school in physics is free though, plus you get paid to do it as part of a TA agreement).

I'm not the only trans woman in physics either, and there's even a trans *faculty* member in the physics department where I'm doing my doctorate.

That blows my mind. When I was in high school the worst incident we had was one kid wearing a shirt with profanity on it in Spanish. That was pretty much it...

The kids i went to school with were fairly ambitious and driven kids. we had alumni of the robotics teams who went on to work on the uber self driving car program and the Perseverance Mars probe, theater kids who ended up writing for Jimmy Kimmel, and even the football team captain got his masters and now works in medicine as a physicians assistant.

Heck, i think the former captain of the girls cross country team is now an attorney.

And I think the worst life outcome we had was basically just a failure to launch case of a guy who was basically just bartending at 30. Nobody went to prison, got in legal trouble, etc.

That's what I've been trying to say the whole time. I apologize if I was unclear or gave a mistaken impression.

Yeah. Your mileage may vary a lot with teenagers depending on where you live.

Yeah I am lucky I suppose to have been raised where I was. But it still surprises me to hear about experiences like yours because it's just so different from the districts I have been exposed to in Jersey and New England.

Yeah that's a Pennsylvania problem, not a teenagers in general problem.

I should point out that Pennsylvania ranks fairly poorly nationally in k-12 education in general. Cross the border into Jersey and things are light years different (excepting maybe places like Camden and Newark, but...)

And my boyfriend works with high school kids here in New Hampshire as well and things are nowhere close to the kinds of things you are describing.

NH is ranked 6th In the US in k-12 education and NJ #3. PA is around #30.

You mentioned Philly though as being the same as where you are though so that's why I brought it up.

But again...not only was that kind of behavior not a thing where I went to school, but it also isn't a thing where I live now in New Hampshire either...nor was it a thing where my boyfriend went to school in Massachusetts..

Did you consider that this might just be an issue in the general area you live in? Or areas like it? Because again...i promise that this isn't remotely universal.

Lol. That's why. You worked in a crappy district.

I promise you that this isn't as common as you seem to think it is. The whole US school system doesn't resemble inner city Philly.

I have a similar issue of looking very young for my age. I have a daily run/jog route that goes near the high school and have had teenage boys try to hit on me.

It's flattering that I apparently look so young, but kids, I'm old enough to be your mother. You don't want to hit on me.

See, I'm always surprised to hear stuff like this because I went to a public school in an affluent county in north NJ, and we had *none* of that happen. Ever.

Quite the opposite in fact, we were so freaking competitive that a 3.8 GPA wouldn't even put you in the top quarter of the graduating class, and at least half a dozen to a dozen kids would get into ivy leagues every single year.

I think you may be overgeneralizing your experience, because I can assure that not all public schools are like this.

see, I grew up an affluent area and teen bad behavior was never an issue for me growing up. But as I got older I definitely started to notice myself increasingly seeing them as childish and immature.

meanwhile I'm nearly 30 and look 16, which is weird as heck. I've had high school boys attempt to hit on me and it's like... you kids know I'm old enough to be your mother right?

for what it's worth you're not.

I gained a bunch of weight during college and had been unhappy with it and used the time I saved commuting to work exercising with a daily run/jog instead. lost so much I have stretch marks on my gut now, but I haven't been this thin since around the end of high school.

I was also in second grade at the time. I also lived in North Jersey and my father was a NJ state trooper at the time who literally watched the planes fly into the twin towers from a rooftop in Hoboken and was helping people evacuate Manhattan into NJ that day.

I literally remember coming home from school and my mom telling me that planes hit the twin towers and my dad had to go help out.. That was a scary moment in my childhood.

Coming from *that* background it is *weird* to see kids have no idea it happened or what it was about.

why would a pedophile go to a club for sexual reasons considering everyone there has to be an adult?

my boyfriend works with high schoolers in his job. He was asked recently by them what music he listens to and said stuff like Fall Out Boy, Green Day, Linkin Park, etc... the kids said that he was really old when they heard that, and only *one* kid knew any songs by them, which was boulevard of broken dreams.

The kicker? My boyfriend is 22. High schoolers have an extremely rapid turnover for popular music.

I pass appearance wise perfectly as cis, but vocally I can still do a perfect voice impression of the Yugioh Abridged version of Marik Ishtar. It's on my to do list to go to a convention doing that voice impression cosplaying as Marik possessing Tea Gardner.

I literally had a doctors appointment the other day and when asked "do you have any questions" I pulled out my "old man from scene 24" impression and asked "what is the average airspeed velocity of an unlaiden swallow?"

Definitely got a "woah I was not expecting that" look from her.

finasteride is an anti androgen. Male pattern baldness is largely caused by DHT, a form of testosterone, and finasteride basically lowers that count. It won't feminize you, and worse case scenario you might have some issues maintaining an erection until you get off it.

It's prescribed to cis people all the time.

Yes it's a bad idea. Doing cross sex hormones on a cis person will just cause severe gender dysphoria, and that famously made Alan Turing suicidal. At best it might give you an idea what it's like to be trans and experience gender dysphoria, but that's not something I would recommend to a cis person. Heck, it's not something I'd wish on my worst enemy.

For trans women we have female brains and our brains are wired for and expect female hormones, so female hormones are good for us, but female hormones would totally mess with the head of a cis guy in a bad way.

Plus, going on female hormones would basically give you a female puberty. Do you *really* want to go through a girl's puberty which *will* involve growing breasts if you're on it for a significant amount of time?

It can but only a little bit, usually around 1-2 inches. I only lost an inch and ended up 5'7" after starting at 5'8".

You will probably go to maybe 5'9" or 5'8" and id be surprised if you got much shorter

for what it's worth I'm 5'7" and absolutely nobody seems to clock me these days. 5'7" is not *that* tall by cis girl standards. Shit, it's only a hair taller than the average for women from the Netherlands.

I think a straight trans woman whose extremely passable might feel differently than how I do.

I'm like 5'7" but extremely passable and straight, and *damn* do random guys sometimes scare me.

Like... just because I'm straight doesn't make the random catcalls or guys coming up to me during my daily jog going "hey baby you need a ride?" any less creepy.

I'm tall enough that I'm on the tall side for cis women standards but short enough that it's not *that* out of the ordinary and most cis guys are taller and bigger than me anyhow.

Ironically I had the opposite happen. It took me longer to solve problems as a kid so I was labelled slow and given an IEP. What the adults ignored was while it did take longer for me to process the information...i would always solve the problems correctly, and I had an extremely large capacity for retaining information.

...I ended up as a research physicist who worked on the perseverance mars probe and now studies solar storms for a living. Not too shabby for someone who was told by my high school guidance counsellor to not bother majoring in physics as I would fail out almost immediately...

Also fame isn't necessarily what you may want out of life anyways. By 28 I've realized that I'm totally fine eithout my name ever becoming super well known. I just want to live comfortably and do something with my life that will make the world a little better than how I found it.