1 year HRT anniversary
CW: misogyny, transphobia
When you start transitioning, the most common fantasy that slides into your brain rather insidiously is the hope that you can just disappear for 3-4 years and pop back out into society, fully formed as a passing woman. This is the lie we tell ourselves—that if we can just hide it long enough with loose fitting hoodies, keeping a completely separate wardrobe or maybe a box locked away with flowery dresses and secretly, magically voice train—we’ll be able to assimilate without any hurt or harassment.
It is such a terrible lie.
Gender dysphoria is a spectrum. For me, it didn’t really hurt that much and I was rather content with daydreaming daily about being a woman for hours on end rather than confronting what I was actually feeling. Perhaps I’d been disassociating my entire life without realizing. Certainly, the option to become trans didn’t feel possible. I didn’t know any transwomen. I didn’t know transwomen existed. Or rather, I knew. I knew of the ‘ladyboys’ in Thailand. I knew that we called them 人妖 – 'human monsters' in Chinese. I knew that Hollywood had multiple serial killers or abusers in movies who secretly dressed up as women when the camera snuck perversely into their rooms.
And then, years later, far too late, I was exposed to the existence of trans people. Funny, interesting, proud and flat-out incredible people who also happened to be trans. That was it, nothing more.
A friend of mine recommended the movie Nimona a few weeks later. I was halfway through the film, watching her transform into whatever she wanted—there is a specifically poignant scene for me when one of the main characters asks if she’s a boy and she said, ‘maybe I am today!’—before I felt my heartbreak. Right then and there, I knew.
Internally, I was crying. Ah, but I was a ‘man’ and I couldn’t show any emotions. So I screamed inside. I cried over and over again. I wanted out—out of where, I didn’t really know, this shell perhaps, this violent jail that had killed me without realizing it—but whatever it was, I wanted out, no matter what it takes.
For a few more months after, I debated actually transitioning. That’s when the fantasy slid in. I just had to…move somewhere. Somewhere nobody knew me, maybe work some online data entry job and just survive until the hormones did their work. But I’m a social person. I crave community, love, touch. I need people, I need to talk and connect.
So I came out.
My friends were okay with it. I think. Look, I did it online and didn’t really give them any way to properly respond. Quite a few people did end up cutting contact with me. I'd say that I've got a very large friend group but this is nothing more than a symptom of keeping in contact with everyone you’ve met in your life which is how they tell you to ‘network’ when you’re young because you never know who you might need!
Whatever.
My mother started blaming herself. Either she didn’t raise me up right or she hated herself for not giving me the right body. The fact of me being trans was…probably just not acceptable. It’s been over a year now since I came out (I did it before starting hormones) and I think she’s come to terms with it. It doesn’t stop some of the abusive things she says, but I think we’re making progress.
My father used to be homophobic. Used to be. He’s the kind of person who wanted to have children but didn’t want to be a dad, so I will leave that there.
A year ago, on this very day, I started hormones. In the community’s eyes I think I am still a ‘baby trans’. Certainly, I’ve been told repeatedly that you are a mentally different person in year 1, year 2, and so bombastically changed in year 4 and onwards and I believe that. I think transitioning allows you to explore and see yourself fully and not shut yourself off from the most intimate parts of yourself. I went from hating my genitals and getting all the consultations and papers ready for a SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) to just going—hey! I’m fine with what I have. It’s kinda nice, actually. There was—and perhaps still some lingering remnants—of feeling like I had to be fully a woman, as close to emulating a cis person as I could, in order to be a woman. I knew, of course, that the moment someone tells me they are trans, they are the gender they say they are.
I know that.
I know that.
I just have trouble applying it to myself.
What is it, you might ask? The perfectionism? The people-pleasing part of me? The imposter syndrome? The crushing weight of society telling us we’re not worth anything unless we’re productive and rich?
Perhaps all of that. I still feel that my existence is ‘lesser’ sometimes. A lingering part of me thinks—despite being told right from the start loudly and with all the evidence to the contrary—that I would only be ‘real’ if I passed. I wanted to be accepted more than anything, I think. It didn’t matter if the community accepted me, loved me, told me I was worthwhile in my existence, the issue was that I didn’t live in that kind of community. I lived in society. You know the one; it practices cruelty.
I wanted to be loved so very badly. Sometimes, I felt like I had to hide my trans-ness no matter what so I could have some small form of connection; this too, is a form of internalized transphobia. At six months into my journey, I would look at cis and heterosexual people and think of how easy they had it. To not even need to question. I wish I could tell you that I conquered these thoughts at this point, but that was also when I experienced my first bout of public harassment.
And then another.
The period between June to November that year was what really broke me. I was rushing my transition, and it just something you can’t rush. You just can’t. It takes time for hormones to work, but I was terrified and scared and I thought, oh, if I can’t rush the medical part, then by golly I was going to speedrun the social part.
I tried regardless. I went to op-shops every other day and I would spend hours trying on clothes. In less than a month, I achieved a fashion that made all my cis female friends look at me and go, ‘damn gurl’. I voice trained over and over again by myself before I finally got a voice coach who told me that I had come to her with a ‘completed’ voice. We had a month’s worth of sessions before she told me that she couldn’t in good faith continue to take me on. She was just taking my money for nothing. I asked to continue, but her response was simply this: perhaps I should know my limitations.
It was devastating.
I didn’t like the sound of my voice—I still don’t. Perhaps I’ll never. But I felt like I wasn’t anywhere close to where I wanted to be. I’d watch clips of my friends and I playing videogames and just cringe horribly whenever my voice came on.
Anyway.
I don’t really know what inspired me to rush the transition. I think, if I had to finger the blame, it might be because I was the standard ‘gifted’ child growing up, and so everyone expected more of me until I started expecting more of myself. I think I still have a bit of that inflated ego—being told that I was always better than my classmates made me set out to transition better than everyone else.
This was not true. All I did was burn myself out. The thing they tell you in psychology is that by the time you feel like you might be burnt out, you already are.
I don’t know how else to emphasize this part: I am burnt out. I am severely, critically, burned out. I feel very little sometimes, stuck in this haze of having all my emotions muted and feeling dreadfully guilty and unproductive and occasional self-hate. I feel tired, broken, and I am only just recovering.
Transitioning is hard. It is perhaps, the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Please don’t rush it. I was crying every single day from when I started hormones. This didn’t stop until I was nine months in when I started passing occasionally, unfortunately this was also when misogyny began creeping in. Going out at night felt horribly unsafe. Sometimes, a group of men’s gazes would linger and probe me in uncomfortable ways. I had a panic attack when a large, muscular man running in the park suddenly whipped around right next to me. I almost screamed. Turns out he had simply reached the end of his lap and was running back. A man in Australia drove his car up to me, parked, and honked at me until I looked at him just so he could check me out.
I am still terrified of walking back down that street.
Eleven months in I started passing more often, though I believe this is mostly helped by the fact that I still mask up in public (COVID is still a thing, believe it or not). I don’t think I’m qualified to speak much on this; look, passing privilege is a thing whether you like it or not. I am very much benefiting from it.
Looking back, I have nothing else to say other than it's hard (it's so very hard) but it's also worth it. You're always going to experience some amount of social breakage. My family has forbidden me to come out to the extended part, nor any of their friends that I used to be in contact with in case I ruin my family’s reputation. It’s weird knowing that I will never celebrate Chinese New Year again (it is simply centred too much around family and tradition and I am not allowed to be part of it anymore). I am cutoff from my home country because they do not allow changing of gender markers without SRS.
But I am learning not to settle because we are worth so much and yet we receive so little. I am learning to love, fully, authentically, in every way that I think others deserve, and I am doing my best to apply that to myself.
And I’m quite proud of who I am. Genuinely, in every single way. I think I’m kind, sweet, gentle, supportive, funny, silly as a goose, and sometimes—if my girlfriend says it enough with that dazzling smile of hers—I think I’m pretty. As slow as it is, my perception of self is changing. That’s probably the most important thing because in the end, the biggest relationship you’ll ever have will be with yourself.
And I would like to be more. I want to be sexier, more confident, charming, and a joy to be around. I want to be the type of girl that makes the room brighter when she walks in.
I think I’m already on my way there.
