I had something vaguely (very vaguely) similar happen a bit after I started taking progesterone. At around that time, I started getting a random stiffness/weirdness/almost-pain at the front of my right leg, maybe a third of the way down. It did feel a little bit like a muscle cramp, but localized to a very specific (and consistent) area. I only ever noticed it when walking.

Touching and massaging that area didn’t hurt or feel any different, and there wasn’t anything visibly different either, other than it being the location of a fairly noticible vein. Since it wasn’t a particularly strong sensation, I never went to the doctor. In the end, it just kind of stopped happening at some point.

This probably isn’t that helpful to you, but wanted to describe my experience since it at least had a couple things in common!

There’s definitely just some variance in terms of how much it bleeds and whether it hurts. I haven’t really noticed any pattern in terms of injection site; I think there are a lot of factors. Holding the vial and maybe rolling it between your hands can help warm up the liquid, which makes it a little bit easier to both draw and inject.

The needle size will affect these things too – the thinner the injection needle the less blood I’ve seen, but then it takes a little longer to inject. Do you know what gauge you’re using to inject with?

I found the whole process very stressful for the first several weeks, but eventually it just became routine!

When you’re ready to make big changes, definitely look into threading as an alternative to waxing, a lot of folk find it less painful in the long term. (But it still really stings at first! :) )

Having thick/full eyebrows can be an advantage, since you have more to work with. I have the problem that my upper eyebrows are a bit too sparse, which makes them much more difficult to shape.

Sure, that’s kind of tangential to the point I’m making. Something can reflect transphobic ideas without explicitly being about trans folk.

I’m curious how these modern takes on One Piece will deal with the Okama and related characters (assuming they get that far!)

I haven’t read the manga, but the anime at least comes off super-transphobic in how they’re played for laughs at times. I think that’d necessarily be cut from the live action version, but less hopeful about this for another anime adaptation.

I can’t think of anything less trans-friendly than mandatory pronoun marking.

I quite liked this quote from Isabel Fall (more about identity than pronouns specifically, but still related!)

“We make boxes that seem to enclose a satisfying number of human experiences, and then we put labels on those and argue about them instead,” she says. “The boxes change over time, according to a process which is governed by, as far as I can tell, cycles of human suffering: We realize that forcing people into the last set of boxes was painful and wrong, we wring our hands, we fold up some new boxes and assure ourselves that this time we got it right, or at least right enough for now. Because we need the boxes to argue over. I do not want to be in a box. I want to sift through your fingers, to vanish, to be unseen.”

For me, what helped initially was not to focus on whether I was trans or not, but on specific questions like whether I wanted to start HRT.

Because when I read the list of changes it caused, none of them seemed bad, and many seemed really desirable!

That helped reduce my dilemma from a complicated question of “identity” (“Am I trans? Am I nonbinary?” etc), to a more specific choice I could proceed with.