Holy shit, I’ve been on the girl-goo for five whole months! (If transmascs can make people squirm by referring to testosterone as ‘boy-juice’, then I reserve the right to call my estrogen gel ‘girl-goo’. If I’m gonna be going to hell anyway, may as well have some fun on the way down.)
There’s so much to talk about.
Part 1: Instinctive and ravenous joy
I can be such an overthinker, it’s extremely useful for me to notice moments of unreflective pleasure. They hit me upside the head, and are pretty unequivocally the most valuable data my instruments are capable of capturing. So here, then, is something small and great:
A few weeks ago, I was walking to the grocery store, and the light hit a store window in such a way that I could see, just for a moment, noticeable breasts. I’d certainly been tracking developments in private, but this was the first time I’d ever really seen them in a public context. The angle was just right, the late-afternoon sun was perfect, and for that moment they were unmistakable. This was me, and I have breasts. And here’s the thing. The instant I saw it, my heart just fucking leapt with joy. No time to think. No time to talk myself into or out of anything. I was just confronted of a surprise vision of myself with breasts, and the instinctive animal of me roared with approval.
Maybe that doesn’t surprise you! But it has honestly surprised me a bit. I didn’t start HRT hoping to grow breasts. I knew that was part of it, but prior to starting, I genuinely couldn’t muster up any feeling about physically growing breasts other than a sage neutrality. I wasn’t against it, but it also wasn’t really what I was hoping to achieve. What I was most hungry for were the mental and emotional changes: the sensation some trans women describe of the fog in which they’ve lived their lives – fog which seemed excruciatingly familiar, and which I’d always accepted as permanent – suddenly lifting. I had never been able to access any opinions about what kind of body I might like to have, but those mental and emotional changes? I was capable of wanting those. And it turns out that they’re what’s allowed me to want things for my body – allowed me to want a body at all – for the very first time.
(There’s a goofy paradox lurking here. “Don’t know if you want to try hormones? Try hormones and then you will!” Which is both logically fallacious and, for me, true. But I guess a lot of things are like that, really. A lot of experiences can’t be understood in their fullness until you’ve had them. A lot of feelings can only be produced alchemically in response to certain real-life stimuli. It’s embarrassingly obvious to me now that I could have pondered the issue for 50 years – thought about it from every possible angle – and not realised that I’d actually be really psyched about growing breasts. Which is a real blow to my love of philosophical rumination, but a fucking life lesson.)
Transitioning hasn’t solved all my problems; of course it hasn’t. But it has helped me care about solving them. A concrete example: I’ve been complaining about the criminal precarity of my sham-contractor transcription job for years now. Now, just a couple of days ago, I finally got a new job, also in transcription, but which will pay me a real full-time salary with benefits and paid leave and everything. Even though I’m leery of working full-time, and it’s not what I hope to be doing forever, I’m honestly really proud of myself for having finally made the move. That’s the kind of thing I’ve always found hard. Part of what I can now recognise as dysphoria has been my tendency to act like a spectator of my own life, leading to long periods of passivity and stagnancy and sorrow.
To be clear, it’s not as though I took hormones and suddenly was some go-getter applying for a dozen jobs a day (there are other reasons why it recently became particularly urgent to get a new job) – but I do think it’s connected. Taking hormones is me wrenching a bunch of rusted crusted gears into motion to actually try and fix something that wasn’t working in my life. It makes sense that it would help some of the other gears start turning too.
Part 2: The roughs
Hormone replacement has not, admittedly, all been roses. My body’s reception to estrogen has been wild, with waves of short-lived but intense symptoms that were genuinely startling to my endocrinologist. We recently found out why. She’d started me on a quite low and introductory dose of estrogen (1.0mg estradiol) in the form of one sachet of Sandrena gel that I’d rub onto my thigh once a day. The assumption was that at our follow-up appointment she’d probably need to increase the dose to get into the female range (some trans women end up needing four gel sachets per day to get to that range), but it was worth starting out small and cautious. But when I got my blood tested after three months, it turned out my E levels were already through the roof: higher than upper end of the cis female range. My endo was genuinely boggled. She had no explanation for it other than that my skin is unusually good at absorbing things?
(My personal headcanon, of course, is that my body is simply extravagantly hungry for estrogen. RAVENOUSLY TRANS. That’s not really a thing, but it’s fun to imagine. All my beleagured body cells who’ve always had to deal with asshole male hormones throwing their weight around, suddenly seized with the fire of rebellion! Guillotine the testosterone aristocracy! Long live the estrogen revolutionaries!)
Naturally, we’ve lowered my dosage now, and it already feels more normalised. But I tell you what: beginning with such an unusually – accidentally – intense blast of estrogen has been a real mixed bag. My breast growth seems like it’s been a bit more than most trans women report at five months, which has absolutely been neat. But the downsides have been rough:
- Early on (about week 1 to week 3), I was needing to pee more than a dozen times per day. It was insane. My bladder was the same size as ever, but it was like the signals to my brain letting it know when I needed to pee were just completely scrambled. Constantly feeling like I’m busting when barely anything would come out. Slightly hellish.
- Then there were the nightmares. From week 2 to around week 8, I was having the worst nightmares I’ve ever had, an absolute film festival of my emotional traumas and most panicky terrors, and they were bad enough that they’d wake me up, like clockwork, between 4 and 5 am every morning. Every single morning for a month and a half. I didn’t get a full or undisturbed night’s sleep for that entire time. Just grim violence and acute shame and hot sweats in a cold bed. It was like I was a criminal in the year 2600 receiving psychic punishment for deviant future-crimes. I cannot describe how terrible this was. (Interestingly, I looked into it a bit, and it does seem like female hormones have a marked statistical relationship with nightmares, with pubescent girls reporting an uptick in the vividness and memorability of their nightmares. And while I did find some evidence of other transfemmes experiencing nightmares connected to HRT, the sheer volume and scale of mine does seem pretty unusual.)
- More recently (since changing my dosage), I’ve been experiencing an unusual amount of orthostatic hypotension: the thing where when you get up after sitting or lying down for a while, you suddenly get a bit dizzy and woozy. This really isn’t so bad, and based on everything else so far, I’m assuming this will level itself out given a bit of time. But it’s still worth keeping an eye on, I think, as it’s something that used to happen to me occasionally, but now happens almost every time I stand up.
If nothing else, I guess take the above as evidence of how miraculously good the more intangible benefits of HRT have been for me, given that stopping has never occurred to me as a serious possibility. It’s pretty wild to think that I can be peeing 12 times a day and having batshit-vicious nightmares every night and still be like “yeah, this rules actually. Obviously gonna keep going.”
This is a body and a person that badly wants to be estrogenised, is the only conclusion. I was genuinely incapable of accessing that want before I started (only the faintest notes of it, a hum when everything else was very quiet), but now it’s non-negotiable. Hot coals, spike pits, dungeons full of demons – I will, it seems, put up with a lot just to put my body on this different track.
Part 3: Aren’t clothes funny?
I used to love dressing gowns. They were my favourite item of clothing, and I (family-famously) once got a Saturday detention for wearing a dressing gown to school on a casual clothes day. Now, though, I find I never reach for them. It’s as though they used to be a way of accessing something – some relaxedness, some ease, some softer kind of masculinity – that I now simply have way better ways of accessing.
Similarly, my winter wardrobe used to revolve entirely around sweaters/jumpers. I have loads of them, all colourful and eccentric and warm. And I still like them! But in the recent cold weather, I haven’t been wearing them as often, because … well, it really clicked for me in the last few months how much high-waistedness is the key to so much femme fashion (high-waisted pants, wearings skirts fully above the navel, etc). Most of my sweaters are too thick to tuck in, so they just hang down over the high waist, negating the effect. I feel like my sweaters have been almost wholly usurped by cardigans. Cardigans are holy garments, who never fail to soften any outfit, and who actually accentuate any high-waisted effect by droopily framing the waist-line on both sides. Who knew? (Tons of people, clearly, but me only recently.)
Money’s been punishingly tight recently, so I haven’t been able to expand my wardrobe much. Luckily, I’m not in the position some transfems are of ‘suddenly needing a whole new wardrobe’. I’ve been a nonbinary queerdo for the better part of a decade, so I had a lot of femme and femme-adjacent clothes already. And with just some subtle differences in styling (e.g. wearing stuff high-waisted, accessorising, colour-coordinating), even clothes that before used to read as kinda masc can be femmed up in all sorts of ways. I’m really interested in the prospect of making tactical cuts to a bunch of my old beloved T-shirts to make them a more femme style … though honestly, with high-waisted pants/skirts and a cardigan over, most of them work perfectly well as is. Cautious experiments in that area to come.
Oh, I should post some photos of some outfits? I’m among friends here? Fashion show at lunch? Oh, go on then.
First photo: high-waisted skirt + shirt + cardigan has become my new default template of outfit. Such a soft energy. Dig it tremendously.
Another variation of the form:
And another! (This time with a really lovely purple velvet jacket I was able to get on Depop for criminally cheap and a skirt I’m obsessed with.)
Of course, I’m not exclusively operating from that template. Part of the joy of transitioning is being able to play with more masc stuff in a femme way, from a kinda lesbian angle, so I’m also getting to do stuff like this:
(I really like that photo. Who is she to be out on the town?)
A while ago I found a really sick velvet-flowered dress in an op shop that is just the right level of gothy and witchy for me. Which is to say: “only a very little bit.” I am not personally capable of sustaining a lot of that kind of energy, but give me just a soupçon of it – “season 4 Willow” levels of witch and goth – and I think I can cook a little.
Of course, it’s been cold as shit recently, so my outfits have been constrained by the need to be extremely warm! But even so, I love scarves and gloves, I love colour-coordinating everything, and I love being a big cosy rosy cinammon bun.
Finally: the one quasi-big clothes purchase I have made in the last few months is this glorious secondhand plum Gudrun Sjödén corduroy coat. It was really important to me, for reasons that I could not possibly articulate, to have at least one coat of this length-profile. (I suspect romantic comedies set in New York in autumn/winter are to blame.)
Okay okay, that’s quite enough visage. Let’s get to some suffering.
Part 4: Terrible, terrible clarity
I got yelled at by a ranting transphobe on the street the other week. He was walking briskly down a city street, talking loudly to himself, and when he saw me, he started yelling about how “If you suffer from the DELUSION that men can become WOMEN, then you’re WRONG, and you’ll ALWAYS be wrong.” I actually didn’t realise that his contempt was directed at me until I turned around, and saw that he was staring directly at me.
If you squint, it was almost affirming. I wasn’t presenting particularly femme that day (was wearing pants, hadn’t shaved that morning, hair a mess), but this noisy asshole still recognised me, clearly, as some kind of transfeminine thing. Without me really doing anything on the day to prompt it! What a W!
I shouldn’t put on too much false bravado. It was a bit scary. But he really undercut his own threat when he started in on his next line of attack, which is the old transphobic canard that “When archaeologists dig up your bones in 500 years, they’ll know you were a male!” Which is an argument that I find almost charmingly toothless. Like, (a) that’s not how archaeology works; and (b) even if it were … I’ll be dead? The distant prospect of some hypothetical future grad student making an error on some paperwork doesn’t make me want to … live a less fulfilled life in the present?? Why on earth is this argument supposed to have any power over me???
Free tip for the transphobes: you’ve gotta do better than the archaeologist argument. That rhetoric is basically cocoa butter on my skin. Which is all the more embarrassing a failure, because one of the defining experiences of transitioning for me has been realising:
Oh god, there are so many new ways to hurt me now.
So many new and tender vulnerabilities. So many novel weapons. So many aches that used to be dull, but are now sharp enough to run me through. Letting yourself be seen as wanting something is inherently vulnerable – hence why so much dating advice is just strategising how to obscure your own wanting – and when that something is wanting to be seen in a certain way? It’s shamefully easy for people to squash you like a gummi bear. They barely have to do anything.
I mean, for Chrissakes: I’m trying to be pretty, and I often feel ugly! I’m trying to be soft, and I often feel lumbering! I’m trying to be feminine, and I often feel clownish! It is shockingly easy to hurt me about any or all of these things. I didn’t used to try to be perceived any particular way (at least visually), and that position was virtually impregnable, insult-wise. It didn’t provide any easy routes to hurt me. But now?
For so long, “I do not wish to be perceived” is all I had to go on. It was like trying to solve a crossword puzzle where all the squares were black. It’s hard for it not to feel stupid in retrospect, but the ambivalence of that – very little pointing towards anything, only recoiling – made me insensate to the huge red-blinking warning signal that it represented.
At the very least: I am no longer insensate. Now I’m a bundle of fears and desires and open nerve-endings flapping in the breeze. There’s a vertiginous quality to my wants now: a sense of peeking over into a chasm and – “oh no”. Oh no, I actually do want these things, and I may struggle to ever get them. Oh no, so many of these things cost money I don’t and may never have. Oh no, the acknowledgement of the hugeness of these desires feels existentially overwhelming.
My endocrinologist asked me whether an orchidectomy was something I thought I’d ever be interested in. When you have it – bottom surgery – you stop needing to take an testosterone blocker, because your body no longer produces the boy-juice. And the truth was: I have thought about it, but just never in words, or in a way I’ve admitted to myself, or with the bravery to risk the pain of maybe wanting it.
I have no idea if surgeries are actually going to be a thing in my future, or whether the diplomatic detente I’ve reached with my genitals might grow into a more fulsome and prosperous peace. But I’m forcing myself to actually think about these things now, and the results have been rather dismaying at times. All these systems you think are working fine, and then you finally look under the hood and –
“Oh no.”
My new vulnerabilities are not a bad thing. Vulnerability is the price we pay for everything truly good. But it feels like being peeled out of my casing, soft white onion folds trembling, and rolled out into the midday sun.
Part 5: Renovations
A bunch of cool things have happened recently. I got taken to my first ever lesbian bar and had a really lovely time. (Which is obviously great for the new comfort in identity it represents, but also: probably the first time I’ve ever enjoyed a bar? The simple fact that Beans keeps the music low enough that I can actually hear people alone earns it my undying loyalty.) I went to an unusually great house-party, friends around a fire-pit, and reconnected with a bunch of wonderful Wangaratta folks who made me feel smart and funny and seen. I’m reading at a trans poetry night soon, which will be the first time I’ve done that since the pandemic. The biggest thing to happen for me recently is getting this new job, and that’s where a lot of my stress and energy has been, but there have also been these little seams of gold in the narrows.
It feels strange to talk about alongside the Hideous Vulnerabilities, but transition is also giving me a new confidence. Even my relationship with the word ‘trans’ has palpably changed. I used to sheepishly acknowledge that I was trans (certainly somewhere ‘under the trans umbrella’), and mean by it a desire to be other than the gender I was assigned. This felt like a fundamentally interior thing, shadowy and unknowable, only ever really accessed by trusted intimate partners, and it was hard to hold the smoke of it together into a public identity. But now when I talk about being trans, the conversation immediately and intuitively turns to the practical processes of transition: the specific physiological and social things that are changing for me. Now when I talk about being trans, it’s essentially short for ‘transitioning.’
Obviously, not all trans people need or want medical transition, and that doesn’t make them any less trans. The umbrella is capacious for very good reason. What I’m describing is just my relief at finally giving my gender desires some physical expression, something tangible and visible and holdable, to free them from the foggy prison of my thoughts. In the same way that I couldn’t know in advance that I’d love the experience of growing breasts, there’s a corollary, which is that the experience of having breasts reminds me of what I love and why I’m doing this. Sometimes I just sit there holding them, and it brings tears to my eyes. I’ve spent so long floating outside my body, to actually be in it can be overwhelming.
This is a really dumb comparison, but I’ve been watching The Bear. In that show: Carmy wanted to work in the restaurant when he was a kid, but he never could. Now, decades later, he’s finally able to access it, and he’s working insane hours trying to make it his own: knocking out walls and putting in new wiring and spending money he doesn’t have trying to make it a place where he can do the work that fulfils him. That’s a little bit what it feels like re-acquainting myself with my body: stressed but alive, realising what it’ll take to get it to where I want it to be. (Me, as Carmy, poring over a messy table of invoices: “Laser hair removal will cost how much? Good hair products will set us back what? And don’t tell me that the facial feminisation surgery – no, okay, Jesus, don’t even think about that. Just wear a mask and hope the health inspector doesn’t show up.”)
The Bear is not a trans allegory; I am just wilfully seeing myself in a gutted deli. It’s intuitive to find myself in both the renovator and the renovated: the exasperated owner of a space that holds my life inside it. It’s a place that never quite worked right, that I need to love, and is the only reason I’m here. But I’m gonna make it mine. I’m gonna make it mine.
ada connor 