Date: 2025-06-22
It’s been nearly five years now since I began really considering my own gender and started transitioning, and seeing as both of my girlfriends have written blog posts discussing transition and what it has meant to them (Mia’s post, Brooke’s post), I figured I’d follow suit with a post of my own.
Brooke’s post starts off with:
I’ve noticed that I can be far too quick to assume that the experience of others matches my own.
And I’ve certainly been guilty of this as well, but realizing that all three of our transitions (and feelings around it) have been quite different, I figure it’s worth sharing mine as well. To be honest, it can be a little intimidating to write about a subject like this, because of how much there is to talk about – where even to begin? For this blog, I’ll stick with the obvious place to begin: the beginning.
While gender dysphoria has been something I’ve dealt with at least since puberty, I couldn’t really put my finger on what was wrong until I started really looking – which began around five years ago. I had been acquaintances with some trans folks before then, but had always been too shy and afraid of asking personal questions to have anything really click.
During the summer of 2020, peak quarantine, I reconnected with an old friend of mine, and met his partner at the time, who was nonbinary and starting to question their gender. It was through many many late nights of hours-long conversing that I began to understand that gender was something that I, too, could play with and take in whatever direction I wanted.
I’ve never been one to make huge decisions all at once, and as such, transition never really was an all or nothing situation for me. I began with the simplest of things: letting a friend of mine paint my nails – with simply a layer of top coat. While it was (objectively) such a small thing, it symbolically meant much more to me. It was the first time I had stepped out against the perceived lines of the gender prison I was restricted to. And it felt wonderful!! I had no idea where I was really going at the time, but I knew to trust my gut, and my gut said that it was right. I then progressed, onto all kinds of colored nail polish, and various makeup products. It was around winter break of 2020 that I begin to realize that all these collective actions had a theme, one that I then began to grapple with the reality of what all these “fun little things” meant.
Rewinding a bit, as a boy, I had always felt that label Bisexual never fully quite encapsulated the entirety of how I felt, but I had a very difficult time pinning down why. I spent a long time thoroughly analyzing the intricacies and qualia of my attraction, completely oblivious of how my own gender plays into it. I went back and forth on being aromantic, demisexual, and a variety of other microlabels. Whether or not any of those actually apply to me, the exploration ended up mostly just being my own distraction from the elephant in the room: my gender. Unbeknownst to me, factors like gender envy, dysphoria and anxieties about my own gender would have a much bigger role than I could have anticipated in explaining how and why I feel the way I do.
In fact, in the midst of all this, I got some advice from a friend that (unknowingly) pushed me to start transitioning:
Don’t worry about figuring everything out in your mind – just focus on doing what feels right.
This mindset shift for me got me out of a loop of anxiety and uncertainty, and helped me live in the moment and not worry about every single detail. Living in this way has shaped my view on labels – that they are helpful in helping you understand and validate your feelings, but that they aren’t a requirement for you to start living your best life. It is better to f*ck around now and find out later, than to never f*ck around and never find out what you really want in life.
Back to winter break of 2020, I had been trying things for months without thinking about exactly why I was doing it, or what it all meant, but that was starting to catch up with me. When I learned about HRT and realized I wanted to try it, I knew I needed to find a justification to my friends and family. It would be nice to live in a society where people could do whatever they like with gender without justification, but unfortunately we aren’t there yet. I ended up playing around with the terms ‘Nonbinary’ and ‘Transfemme’ to try and categorize how I felt to others, namely my parents. While this gave justification for my desire to go on HRT, it came as a bit of a shock to my parents when I mentioned that just a week after telling them that I was “questioning my gender”.
This sparked a lot of intense conversation, discussion, and debate, absolutely none of which I was ready for, emotionally or educationally. Because this effectively put a block on my ability to start HRT, I began on a search to look for other ways to explore the labels that I had now attached to myself. My first real (semi-permanant) body modification, beyond the aforementioned things, was dying my hair bright purple and giving myself a crude undercut. While it wasn’t much, and arguably didn’t actually make my presentation more femme, it was a freeing departure from the logistics and planning blocking my desire for HRT.
In spite of the logistics required for HRT (I wasn’t able to do informed consent for reasons I won’t get into), I decided to try the next feasible steps: new clothes, name, and pronouns. I ordered a skirt online, and again, the rush of joy hit when I tried it on and gave it a twirl. I narrowed down a list of names, asking my trans friends what they thought fit me, and started off with they/them pronouns, although I would occasionally ask my friends to try out ‘she’ pronouns. Luckily, because I had already semi-intentionally surrounded myself with a group of friends who would likely be receptive to my coming out, the coming out process was completely painless, except for the excruciating anxiety before hitting send on the message.
Following my gut, but still deeply unsure and nervous, I continued, and with the support of some friends, went clothes shopping at the local department store. Especially with the pain of being unable to alter my body, having supportive friends (even if most of them were cis) that could help with the other aspects of transition was something that grounded me and kept me going, and is something I’ll always be grateful for.
Especially with how much I had to assert myself to get where I wanted to go, I was hardly certain that it was 100% the right move, and like many trans people, I had uncertainty to face. How could I possibly be certain that my feelings won’t change 5, 10, 25 years down the road? The truth is, you really can’t. But like many other big decisions in life, like choosing your major, getting married, or having kids, sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith. And a leap of faith it certainly was. It was terrifying and thrilling, but I kept myself grounded by keeping in mind all the experiences over the last 20 years of my life that led me to this point.
The beautiful thing about gender and transition is, you’re never truly stuck. You can always make a change, and even a permanent change just is part of your life and your story. One psychiatrist I met with before HRT told me something that has stuck with me:
Your gender is like a canvas. Each choice you make in transition is another piece of the canvas, and no matter what you end up doing later, you can always add more to it as time goes on.
There is no absolutely right or wrong decisions, just decisions you get to make and evaluate as you live them.
After six long months of back and forth, as well as plenty of logistics and struggle, I was finally able to get on HRT. While you might think that this would be a triumphant moment, it honestly just felt overdue and like I was finally done with the very beginning of my transition. Now I could finally begin the waiting period as estrogen therapy reversed the damage done to my body over the last 5 years of the wrong puberty.
But even after finally trying all the things I had wanted to try in the beginning, ending that chapter, I still wasn’t sure exactly how to place myself. I knew I definitely didn’t feel like a man, that was what I was trying to escape. But I also knew that, at least based on experience, presentation, and my place in society, I wasn’t simply a woman. Because of this, I latched onto the label ‘transfem nonbinary’, as it felt like, through the label, I could sort of give myself freedom from strict labels, by using the more broad label ‘nonbinary’. At this point in my life, I don’t consider myself to be nonbinary anymore, and while you could call it a phase, it was a very very helpful phase for me.
Being early in your transition as a trans woman is absolutely terrifying. All the horrible stereotypes are targeted at you, and you are just trying your best, not knowing what you’re doing, and to boldly declare yourself a woman when there is still (understandably) incongruence, is often met with much more backlash. For me, not having the confidence to declare myself a woman, hell, not even being sure if I am a woman, or what that fully entails, retreating to the more ambiguous nonbinary label gave me the freedom I needed. As time went on, I became more comfortable in the feminine presentation and gendered existence I had created for myself, and while I never really had a “I am a woman” moment, over time the term just became more and more comfortable.
Now, five years out, and having completed numerous steps beyond what I’ve listed here to further my transition, I’ve become much more comfortable in my body, and have been able to live with so much more joy and life than I ever had before. I’ve been able to encourage others to take the difficult steps to begin down the same route, and grow into a community that continues to thrive, despite the increasingly rampant archaic legislation against trans existence. I’m more than happy to say, that all those years ago, my gut was, without a shadow of a doubt, unequivocally correct.
While many trans people may not approach transition the same way that I did, it brings me joy to know that we all followed what we knew to be right for us, and are better off for it. That knowledge gives me the strength to fight for the trans children of the future, so they may have (at least) the same opportunities that I had. 🏳️⚧️