It took a while for me to reconcile myself to ‘being trans’. Transitioning, though? Some parts of that were easy. Sometimes there wasn’t even really a clear decision, I just started thinking about ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. Wearing a binder meant that I could leave the house, trying out a different pronoun online made me less tense, and thinking about my future suddenly brought ideas which felt real and possible, rather than insubstantial haze.
But ‘transgender’ and ‘transitioning’ have a lot of baggage. It took some time, but I’ve picked through a lot of that; I kept the bits that work for me, and left the bits that worked for others to them. In traditional terms, I’ve done a lot of my ‘transitioning’, though I’m still on a couple of waiting lists. It’s been twelve years since I first packaged up all my experiences to justify myself to a doctor, and by then I had a pretty good story about gender dysphoria. Since then I’ve been navigating jobs, academia, relationships, endless waiting lists, a lot more dysphoria, coming out (again and again and again), and watching a moral panic develop that has attacked the communities and language that trans people have developed.
It’s still a pretty significant thing, ‘being trans’. But that, and transitioning, have been absolutely worth it.
Keywords: Trans; Dysphoria; Coming out;