(Note: Much of this essay is written in second person ("you") because I like it that way. But readers may consider this as me writing to my younger self. Maybe this is something others can relate to, and maybe not. Every transition is personal and different, and these "generalizations" only fully apply to one person, me.)
Trigger warning: Talk of death.
Next week will mark ten months that I have been medically transitioning via feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT). I am very old by today's trans women standards: I did not realize and accept that I am trans until age 43. Once I came out to myself -- once my "egg cracked" as today's trans social media calls it -- I moved somewhat quickly. Within three months I had come out to my wife, my job, our families and friends. One month later I started HRT, two months after that started using my new name and she/her pronouns, and just after nine months I began the process of changing my legal name and gender.
Along the way I have read a LOT of books about being transgender and transitioning, most of them written by trans authors. But so far only one of them -- "To My Trans Sisters" -- had the things I really needed to hear. The rest that I ran across followed a tried-and-true pattern that went mostly like this:
It's a nice formula, and it works: these books are palatable for everyone, and sometimes they become bestsellers. Plus we are all excited to see a sister succeed and get gorgeous too.
But it's that step #4 that these books skip, and that's what I want to talk about here.
HRT, under the proper supervision of a doctor, is safe, effective, and can bring immense relief from gender dysphoria. It's liberation, a true blessing in the religious sense, entrance to a community that can be deeply spiritually nurturing, and is often the first most important step to putting a broken soul and life back together.
But it can also be terrifying. Some of the changes to your body eventually become irreversible. For a significant amount of time -- usually a year minimum, but potentially the rest of your life -- you are marked as different to everyone who sees you. If you started later in life as I did, each change comes with it an unraveling of the years you were forced to live after the male puberty had stolen so many parts of your body from you. Because the truth is that before your first puberty you had the body that belonged to you -- soft skin, no beard, no hairy body, properly proportioned hands and feet -- and then you lost it. As HRT gives some of these things back to you, you may remember what it felt like from before, and then feel the grief of that first puberty all over again.
And of course the more you feel better, the more the cisgender people around you will show you that they feel worse. But that will be a different essay.
This one is about the transition period I call the Crucible: those months -- or years -- of agony before the world sees the real you.
So what are the hard parts? Let's go through it chronologically.
Your first day is exciting. You take the pills, or the injection, and things feel a bit...topsy turvy. Just for a couple days, you're cottonheaded while your brain gets that sweet sweet estrogen finally. A week later you don't look different, but you feel it. It started with two teeny tiny pin pricks of pressure in your chest, and a small bit of soreness in your groin. Uncertainty comes, but with it a wild hope. You start taking weekly pictures, hoping to see some changes soon.
But changes don't really come. One month. Two months. Nothing.
Your body feels different. You are departing the station of your old life -- the years of the living dead -- but ... you see nothing.
Your sisters now tell you the first hard truth: that what you want most will be what comes last. Your face. Your real face that you have never once seen in your life. It is at least a year away, still. You must learn to keep going, keep pushing into that dark.
A few months in and things start to look really weird. Your face is just ... off. It wasn't what it was, it's not recognizably "you" (or who you thought you were before), but it is still unmistakably a guy. Beard shadow, even after months of laser. At best the facial hair looks splotchy, and you know that a lot of it is finally gone, but it takes just the tiniest smidge of hair to look 100% dude. Worse, as your skin get softer and younger with estrogen, the remaining beard looks more ruggedly masculine. In fact, it looks like the most well-groomed beard over the clearest skin of your life.
People start telling you that you look so much cuter than before. As a guy, that is. Eight months into feminizing HRT and you now look much cuter as a guy than you used to. You look in the mirror, and laugh and say no way, you're getting more feminine, not the other way around!
You smile at yourself. And then you see Him. Your heart falls through the floor. You want to vomit, or cry, or both.
The horror sinks in: if you smile, you look like a guy.
You want to die.
I wonder if this is the point where many of our elder trans sisters fell. It is not in the books. It is barely even discussed online: sometimes as disjointed questions on forums, but never as a narrative flow. (Even here, it is wrapped up in a trigger warning.)
The cruelest joke of all. To become seen by the rest of the world as a woman, you must first endure seeing yourself as the most attractive man you could ever be.
You stop smiling, again.
You avoid mirrors, again.
You learn to shower without seeing certain things. You learn how to brush your teeth and floss and get dressed without ever seeing your face.
You pull down your pictures online, all of them. Shutdown your social media. Get into books, movies, work: anything that can pass the time until your next doctor's appointment. Every three months you hold your breath, and only exhale when your blood work comes back in the right ranges.
You have no reason to believe this isn't forever. You know, we all know, that not every trans woman comes out the other side. You have seen the stories of those who say HRT has failed them. The ones who want to die every day. Will this be you too?
You start looking seriously at maps of the country, and the world. Where can you live in relative safety if you don't make it all the way to passing and stealth?
You stop talking about trans stuff. Certainly not with cis people, they will never be able to understand. But not even trans people either. People tell you that you are really changing, but you can't see it. You just see Him, everywhere. Every few weeks you find yourself curled up in bed, immobilized, vaguely suicidal, just hoping to reach tomorrow.
Travel through the Crucible is so slow you don't know that you are moving at all. You stop taking regular selfies, because it always seems like six months ago looks more feminine than today. You keep lasering. Your weight keeps bouncing up and down every month. Clothes start to fit a little differently. More colors sneak in to your wardrobe, while the old drab blues, greys, and blacks make their way to the thrift store.
One day you pass by a woman with some of His features, and you are certain that she is trans. But it turns out she isn't. You see an older picture of your arm, and can't believe how much hair was on it once. You are almost run over in the grocery store by a man pushing his cart way too fast. People's eyes glaze right over you. One day while you are out walking, an old man waiting on his dog to do its business looks over, smiles, and waves at you. What?
You have a dream where things went right. You are ten years old, running in the empty lot next door, trying to get your kite up in the air. Unlike when it happened in the real world, this time in your dream you are a proper ten-year-old girl.
You look again at some of your old pictures, and for a brief moment you forget who he was. That's not you.
One day you are getting ready for work, see the mirror, and forget who she is. The person in the mirror isn't very pretty. But maybe. If she could lose some weight, get some skin care going, and a basic makeup routine...maybe she could be pretty then. And for one moment, without a bunch of caveats and grimaces, you finally see Her as you.
You get your legal name and gender documents ready, and go to the DMV to get your new license. The person behind the counter looks utterly confused, almost a bit angry, when you hand them His ID. You calmly explain that you are here to get a new license with an updated name and gender, and you see the understanding dawn on their face.
I started writing this piece at month ten. Now it is almost month fourteen. I am still in the Crucible, and might never come out of it. I might be obviously trans for the rest of my life. But maybe not: weight loss and surgeries could go a long way. But at least I am finally not Him: legally I am me, and female, and I see a "masculine-ish" woman more than half the time in the mirror.
I am overweight, not pretty at all, and have the blessing still of needing to mask up for COVID and hiding my masculine lower face, so I am invisible most days.
Invisibility is a gift for me right now, when trans people are being targeted everywhere. I stay unseen as much as I can: I actively avoid gendered spaces; I use only single-occupancy public restrooms, and steer clear of both women and men in public; I try not to talk in public either, since I have been clocked a few times. I am distant even from other trans people. I am not plugged in to the wider LGBTQ community, except for the Pride network at my job. I know only three other trans women that I could comfortably talk to in real life. I warily watch the world become more aware of us, and periodically update a map of places I could move to if needed someday.
My name is Autumn, yet for me it is still winter. Quiet. Cold.
Calm.
The sunny winter day where you see everything in sharp relief. I have lost my old hobbies, and new ones have yet to appear. I am not really happy, but I am also not going anywhere. Transitioning is no longer at the absolute forefront of my mind. I still have little idea who I am going to be, someday. Like Aaron Burr, I wait for it. Maybe things will be different around month twenty.