The decisions you make always have consequences, and your decisions become more consequential when you do something about them. For, yes, there are many decisions made with nothing to show for them. These decisions tend to be those not to upset the status quo. To be given a choice and to do nothing. If you are at a crossroads, where the road divides into Right Street and Left Avenue, you can always choose to just sit down. You can choose passivity or rather passivity choose itself by default of not choosing. Yet, if you act passively, you can be said to have actively chosen it inactivity.
Many people make the decision not to decide on matters that are “important but not urgent”. Whether to transition from male to female is often one such matter. As a matter of the heart, inner world and soul, it is easy to deny its urgency in a world that is rational, external and mundane. Distract yourself with worldly matters enough and we can silence your inner world most of the time. Most of the time…
YOUR REAL INNER VOICE ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH, NEVER SHUTS UP AND IS VERY QUIET
However long delayed or hidden, the messages that come from within are always waiting to be heard whenever the mundane world goes quiet. This is why you lie awake in bed wondering if you’re really truly a woman deep down in the most honest layer of your human onion. The question is always there, of course, but is often drowned out by the urgent but not important things that impose upon you to take up most of your life. Still, choosing not to choose is still a choice. It has consequences because the context of the decision evolved despite your passivity. How? Well, in the most obvious way: every day you delay taking the decision seriously is a day you are older. It’s a day you lose in living on the other side of the decision. So, being passive does not freeze the circumstances of the decision. Time passes. Stakes change. Priorities shift. New things are learned. New experiences occur.
The gravity of the decision may magnify or decrease while you’re waiting to decide. If you are coming around to making a choice and taking your time, the new circumstances in which you have to decide when you’re ready can be a shock. This often triggers another round of passivity. Indeed, the opportunity to make the decision may have evaporated altogether – thus casting the dice for you for better or for worse. That all said, I am betting that your decision to transition or not is not one of those decisions that evaporates if left unaddressed (even though the possibility to transition may eventually disappear).
Choosing not to make a choice on a decision like this costs you time and potential. This is a dead loss. And dead losses are to be scorned. If there is anything worth hating it is the dead loss of time. Our lives are already so short and limited. You don’t get a do-over or any more time than you have already been allotted.
I WAS 38 BEFORE I COULD MAKE THE CHOICE TO TRANSITION
Yes, I chose to start transitioning when I was 38. All the images of me floating around that are older than two years are from when I was a gender dilettante or gender novice. Before I was serious. While I was still hoping I would not have to face the difficulties and burdens of taking myself seriously. I began transitioning socially at first and physically later. It is likely that neither has a final degree. The work will go on. One does not “transition”. One commences and then continues to transition. To say you have “completed” your transition is like saying you are complete and life has nothing more to show you. So, I started transitioning when I was 38. Then I stopped.
Why? Because I was cast to be an extra in Furiosa, the new Mad Max movie (due for release in May 2024). I had to stop the hormones that were kindling the development of my breasts as I was cast as a shirtless male character. Now see, there is a long run-up in HRT before the changes begin to tell visibly. The engagement to be shirtless on set was for up to four months. I was well advanced into the run-up phase when the role was offered. The decision to stop HRT and lose all that hormonal steam that had been abuilding was easy. The opportunity to be in the movie was a unique thing. When my engagement to hang out on the set of the biggest and coolest movie ever made in Australia ended, I resumed the oestrogen patches and now added testosterone blockers too. By then I was 39. I intentionally chose to forfeit my last months of youth to take up a time-sensitive and classically once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Because, as we have already said, transition is not a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It is permanent and ongoing. If you choose to do it, you will always be doing it. if you choose not to do it, you’ll always be wondering if you should have.
TURNING 40: SOME BUY SPORTS CARS, SOME HAVE AN AFFAIR, SOME COME OUT OF THE CLOSET
Time passed, I stayed on HRT and the hormonal head of steam regained force. The evolution of my body gained imminence. I said I first transitioned socially, and I also said that transitioning never ends. So, for my 40th birthday party, some invitees had to be told upon invitation “I’m a woman now. I always have been, to be honest, but now I am presenting as one too”. All the others at the event already knew I was trans, or, at least, that I often presented as a woman. For the just-told group, my appearance that day would have seemed to be some tragically cliched example of a midlife crisis. But I had started 2 years earlier in a private way, and I’d been a “ party crossdresser” among the right and safe friends and scenes for over a decade.
As my 30s advanced and my mental health improved, my “trans egg” began cracking. The increasing urgency of age – of feeling youth depart, of feeling the booster rockets expend, of feeling the altimeter off my life’s trajectory slowing visibly – played a strong role in sharpening the urgency of my own transition decision. It moved from “important but not urgent” to “important but relatively non-urgent” to simply “important”.
The thing you need to know about “important but not urgent” things is that they are the most reliable source of regrets in your life. Something that you know matters, but doesn’t matter pressingly, may insensibly slip from “later” to “too late”. One day, it will simply be no longer possible to do anything about it, other than philosophise and make your peace. Maybe through advancing age (realising you will never get to be a sexy young chick), or maybe through feeding energy and health (you will never get to climb Kilimanjaro). Maybe through being trapped in responsibilities that, in the harsh light of honest self-evaluation, you value less than the opportunities you have now lost. A dead loss is dead.
I waited until I was 38 to start and 40 to make it irrevocable. Until I was 38, I was not, however, choosing not to choose. I was doing something worse. I was not taking the decision seriously. I was at the crossroads and pretending I wasn’t. I felt I was not able to even begin to face all that I thought transition implied. These are the questions I wish I was ready for in the 20 years between 18 and 38, that long lost period when I was an adult in charge of my own affairs and knowing I had “gender business” to settle:
Are you waiting passively to make the choice to transition or not?
Are you avoiding taking this seriously?
How much time are you willing to lose in waiting?
What will trigger you to take this seriously?
Are you pondering this or simply postponing it?
CHOOSING WISELY
You cannot dip your toe into an epochal decision just like you cannot half-jump off the high-dive platform. Either way, you have committed yourself. You either jump or you don’t. You can’t lead a fulfilling life if you’re stuck on the platform too tentative to step off or climb down. Now understand, I am absolutely not arguing that you should be thoughtless or reckless in making the choice to transition or never to transition. What I am saying is that it will always be something of a leap of faith into the unknown – whichever you choose. What’s the worst that could happen? If you transition, it is a one-way overturning of all you know. If you don’t, you go through a lifetime of regret. So, what’s the best that could happen? You get to move on with your life with the gender question resolved: either to do it or not to do it.
Either way, you commit yourself to a course of action and accept the good and bad that comes. An action taken is irrevocable. It is intention become fact. It changes your world. You have an effect on your reality when you act. The good stuff only comes when you take a step to get it. Every choice carries weight. Every decision today becomes the circumstances in which you will make decisions tomorrow. And tomorrow’s decisions will be the circumstances for your decisions the following day. This is how you take control of your life. And you cannot do that passively. When decision is backed by action, its effects multiply into the future. Your future. To reiterate: the decisions you made today govern the options you have to decide between tomorrow. Bad choices today equal worse options tomorrow.
This means we must be mindful of the decisions we make. All are consequential. All are irrevocable. All carry costs. Some decisions cost more on balance: the ones which take further from your values. To get through the rapids for choosing whether to transition from male to female or not, you must consider the ongoing effects of the “ye”, “nay” or “another day”.
YOUR COMFORT ZONE ISN’T COMFORTABLE
Answer these yourself:
If you choose to transition: What will you lose? What will you gain? What will you forfeit?
If you choose not to transition: What will you lose? What will you gain? What will you forfeit?
If you wait forever to decide forever: What will you lose? What will you gain? What will you forfeit?
When you have your answers, weigh them against your values. Values being the things you are already dying for. After all, to live is to be dying. So you’re already dying for something. So you need to figure out what those things are and arrange them by priority. That is, literally, by how much you value them. These are thus your values. Compare your answers to the above to those values. And then only take actions that conform to your values or which will be educational in such a way as to not make your future prospects of regret more remote. This is a difficult thing to do. It is one thing to “live without regrets” through hedonism which will actually just dig you into a hole of despair, it is another thing altogether to live without regrets while optimising your lifelong fulfilment. So, work out your real values and stick to them for they are among the few things that probably won’t change your entire life. Living by them you can be sure that you will live a life that is yours. If being honest with yourself is one of your values, then you can see why you need to take the transition question seriously.
To give you some motivation to do this, one value it might be wise to understand is time: the fact that every moment that passes is gone forever – you do not get any of them back. You can never relive something. Everything is done for the first and last time. You may do or experience similar things over and over, but they are not the same things really – neither in particular nor in sum. What happened is done and shaping your present. It has led you here.
All moments are irrevocable. All choices irrevocable are irrevocable. The transition from man to woman is irrevocable. Similarly, the decision not to. Putting off making the transition decision – pausing for self-exploration and self-development, or hiding in passivity or stopping once you’ve started because a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be a blockbuster movie arose – these are all decisions that cannot be unmade. They can only be re-approached under the different future circumstances the original decision has wrought. Even your decision to read this article is in itself an irreversible step towards something. You get to choose that something if you take action and commit to it.
TIME ONLY MOVES AWAY FROM YOU
You, right now, are living forwards in time but always looking backwards. Even your attempts to see forwards or predict the future are just imaginings based on things you remember – facts, mental models, role models, personal experiences, anecdotes you’ve heard, articles you’ve read. And still, I am not instructing you to answer the MTF transition question now. I am asking you to start taking your limited time and your permanent values seriously – thus your priorities, thus the scope of permissible options for a decision. You do not have the time to delay this work. Your days are numbered and the number is small. Welcome the time pressure for the dread of oblivion gives things meaning and context. Death is your reference point for each moment that you live. Use your unique perspective to blaze the path that leads you on a fulfilling journey on your way to the final destination that we all share alike. Through struggle and effort, win your soul from the unexplored and scary corners of yourself. There are peace and answers within.
If you grasp this, grasp why you don’t have the time to waste energy on passivity. You must find your own way – the way that belongs only to you as a unique and never-to-be-repeated incarnation of a body and a consciousness. This journey will be rewarding and it should be utterly exhausting. For if you are alive, you have resources to exhaust. And there is nothing more worthwhile to expand yourself upon. Use yourself up. All of yourself. Right to the end. There is nothing to save yourself for.
STILL WAITING TO CHOOSE
Act with purpose and dedication. Do not let potential pass you by. If you’re still stuck waiting to make the choice to transition, stop it. Stop “waiting”. Do something useful with those precious few moments between now and when you decide to make the decision.
How much time do you really have left to take the transition question seriously? if you make it a vital priority (remember that the word “vital” comes from the Latin “for life”) you have as much time as you need to make the decision. If you leave it in the “important but not urgent” category, you will never have enough time and you always regret not taking it seriously.
If your answer to the question of “Should I transition?” is an honest “no”, this is okay. If it is a dishonest or fearful “no”, then that’s a sign that you have a soul to sort out – your own! What’s more, you have very little time left to do it in.
What are you waiting for? Me? I waited and then felt my youth fading. That sharpened me up. When I’d just turned 38, I had a brush with death (a story for later). But as I lay there sleepless and sedated in an empty Vietnamese hospital, I finally understood that there were parts of myself that were permanent and that these parts deserved to be accepted and respected. The fact that I was trans was one of these things. That night in the hospital is when my egg began cracking.
I understood it was time to take myself seriously for myself could be taken from me at any moment. If I did not do this, I understood that things would continue as they had been going: self-repression in every moment I’d live. And that was not good enough for me. And it is not good enough for you.
When it comes to the choice of whether to transition or not, it really is as simple as: Consider – Choose – Commit – Commence. And the time to do that is now.