Part of the thing that compelled me to begin taking the transition question seriously was being fed up. I was fed up with my preoccupation with my gender identity. It felt like it was just taking up pointless amounts of time and mental energy. I needed to end the mismatch between who I was and who I was being. It was a monkey on my back. And you don’t get monkeys off your back by hoping they’ll go away. You do it by taking action. By grabbing the monkey, wrestling it around until you are face to face with it, and then interrogating it to find out what its deal is. So I started doing that and I realised that I would just have to try transitioning. I would just have to see whether life in a more feminine mode “fit me” better.
THE LIKELY OUTCOMES
In considering what would happen if I tried transitioning, I foresaw four possible outcomes:
- That I’d try it, find that femme life not did not fit and revert to being an occasional crossdresser.
- That I’d end up as a non-binary but still masc person.
- That I’d end up as a non-binary but largely femme person.
- That I’d end up as a cis-passing woman.
The day I made these four scenarios up was the day I bought my first prescription of HRT medication, and the day before I took the first dose from that prescription. I weighted the likelihood of each of them thus: same – 40%; non-binary masc – 25%; non-binary femme – 30%; cis-passing woman – 5%.
I went into the transition with the same goal I have had for all the things in my persona that vex me. I wanted to nullify their teeth and claws. To take away their power to disturb my peace of mind. I wanted to find a way to make them humdrum.
I still had fears about what life would be like as a middle-aged transwoman. I still have those fears. Merely having fears is not a good enough reason to respect those fears. But still, I imagined deeper and thought about whether I would end up a withered and lonely 75-year-old “he-she” with saggy tits and a bald head. I often think cruel and insulting thoughts like this about myself.
WHAT YOU CAN’T IMAGINE
“Wizened freak” is a scenario I could envision. What’s worse are the fears of things you cannot imagine. When you feel fear but don’t really know what you are afraid of. It is the classic problem: fear of the unknown – which is all that you can imagine might happen plus all you cannot imagine – versus the fear of the known, which encompasses all that you have some mental familiarity with. By mental familiarity I mean either you went through it (memory), you saw someone else go through it (empathy) or speculation (you can conceive of going through it).
TRANSITION IS NOT RUNNING AWAY
Transitioning physically has a lot of unknowns – a lot of things that are inconceivable before they happen to you. However, one thing I learned is that you won’t – indeed, you can’t – lose yourself by changing yourself. If you transition in the hope of running away from something inside you, know this: you will get absolutely nowhere. You can’t fix rust by painting over it. You can’t address your mental issues by dressing differently. No matter who you are and how you present, your character remains the same. Your you-ness remains. If you crossdress as a holiday from your life, it is your life that needs work, not your gender identity. And if you still like crossdressing after you have done that work, then maybe it’s time to explore your gender identity.
OUTSIDE THE ZONE
If you get to that point, then the first dose of HRT is a crucial step outside your comfort zone. And it is all the more discomforting because nothing happens at first. Or for months. With the new hormone regime coursing through your veins, you are in a new epoch of your life but there are no signs of it. You are in the new epoch by faith alone. The only reference point for knowing where you are is your own petulance. You know you are “different now”, but there is no evidence. You look the same and you feel the same – and it is like this for months.
The night of my first patch, I drank champagne to celebrate and went to bed. I slept poorly. I woke up about 3 am with questions racing through my mind. Is this right? Safe? Rational? Is this even okay? Nothing for it but to hold fast and press on. I knew I had no way of getting these answers other than time, experience and introspection.
I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN, ONLY THAT IT HAD TO
I eventually realised that to be half alive is greater than being half dead. To live painfully in a harsh truth is better than to live in the false comfort of a convenient lie. I’d squashed my real gender identity into a tiny titanium box and hidden it from the world and myself for my entire life. Now that I was opening the box, I didn’t know its true proportions or what shape it would take.
The harsh truth I have now chosen to live with, get used to and make mundane was that my feminine side was the greater side of me. To transition was thus the right thing to do. It was rational. It was okay. Was it safe though?
SAFETY SUFFOCATES YOU
Well, safety is a funny thing. When it stymies growth, you have too much of it. So, is transitioning the safer option in the sense of minimising discomfort and danger? No. Is transitioning the safer option in terms of avoiding the much more severe risk of dying without living? Yes. And on realising that, I could shrink all the fears I felt about starting HRT to their proper size. I shrugged in the right way and the monkey fell off my back. I began ending the mismatch between who I was and who I was being. I began being me.