amethyst

I’m looking for magical girl manga where the girls discover and learn magic by themselves instead of it being granted through some contract

Witch Hat Atelier has girls learning magic by being taught it. It's not really the magical girl genre -- and their mentor is a guy and there are plenty of male witches in the background -- but the overall focus is on a small group of young girls learning magic.

Not sure if that's really what you're looking for, but its at least adjacent! (Also, the art is lovely.)

e: Oh, and there's an upcoming anime of it, here's the trailer

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!

Ok, so the MC gets iskei'd into their own Mary Sue story, but as the villainess... now I really want to know if the author based it on something they wrote in middle school!

The source is referenced in the graph (PRRI survey from 2023, as described e.g. here)

The previous years are a different org's polls (Gallups)

I thought Frieren was still better at suppressing her mana.

Although, Frieren did state in an earlier episode that Fern was faster at getting off spells, which would definitely be an advantage here.

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.”