If you were in my home office at this moment you wouldn’t read me as male. You would probably see me as something akin to feminine, though I do very little to enhance the traits about me which align with a cisgender concept of femininity. Largely because I’ve never actually felt like a girl, woman, what have you, despite inhabiting a form more traditionally attributed to one.
I’m sitting here in a fleece robe my mother gave me years ago. It’s black with hot pink stars on it that I’ve taken to calling my Joestar robe, rather than admitting that it was initially “intended” for a young woman. The stars are irregular, much like the birthmark on the back of the neck of Jonathan Joestar’s descendants in the manga/anime Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. I’m fond of the manga so reinterpreting this robe is easy.
I’ll miss the robe when the worn spot under the left arm eventually rips open.
My hair is longer than I’d like it to be. I lose myself in work for weeks at a time (evident in the nearly month-long break between posts on this site) and stop thinking about routine haircuts. I’m also recovering from a failed attempt at a bleached-white stripe and have let it grow longer than I would because it’s easier to remove it all at once with an entirely new style. Before I decided to let it grow some I had a semi-pompadour.
I’ve been aware of my gender not corresponding with my outward appearance since childhood. I didn’t have words to describe it to anyone until high school, and by then self doubt was creeping in. I told one friend who responded with support but also the typical early-2000s sentiment of “it’s too difficult to be transgender” and “you don’t understand yourself completely yet.”
I don’t think anyone truly understands themselves. No amount of therapy, psycho-analysis, and deep reflection can reveal the whole of a person since we do change throughout our lives. In my near 30 years on this planet I’ve changed tremendously.
I used to despise asparagus. Now I eat it every day. I swore to myself I’d never get fat. I failed on that front but am working to fix it. I thought I would never listen to country music. I’ve had Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” stuck in my head for weeks now. I used to convince kids at recess I was a time lord just minutes, days, weeks away from transforming into someone new but still entirely me. I haven’t consistently watched Doctor Who in years.
But the one thing that hasn’t changed is the dull ache I feel when someone say’s “little lady” “ma’am” “her.” I felt that ache for the first time in 3rd grade when I could see my body starting to shift away from the lean boyishness my friends possessed and have felt it with increasing severity since then. Third grade was the height of my Doctor Who obsession as well. I wanted to believe that everyone could change, live different lives, have different faces, but still be who they truly were inside.
I feel that dull ache right now as I think about how much I don’t pass. I take a public stance that treating gender expression like a strict binary is self-defeating. I know my aspirations of masculinity cannot and will not be perfectly identical to a cisgender man’s masculinity. And, philosophically I accept and argue on this point. Inside, it’s different. I am such a firm supporter of varied gender expression because I want to cut out the part of me that aches when I think about my childhood or talking to my boss about finally calling me Hadrian like everyone else does.
It’s probably curious why I sit here less than a month away from my 30th birthday, so vocal about transgender issues, so supportive of diversity in self expression, and yet have not worked up the nerve to go to an endocrinologist. I know who I am, what I am, and what I need to do. I can wear this robe with pink stars and wear the occasional women’s sweater but know full well that I am a man. But self-doubt and terror sink in the more I approach fully realizing who I am.
For years I used my circumstances as a reason why I wasn’t fully out or working harder to transition. I scoffed at the idea that I was on some cis-approved timeline for proper masculinity. I continue to reject jettisoning emotion to fit in with men around me so warped by cultural toxicity. I was too busy with school, making too little money, or generally too at risk of losing everything to do the one fucking thing that would shut up my brain and stop the ever-growing ache.
I let the ache stop me from looking in the mirror. I let the ache stop me from caring how I behaved or dressed. I let the ache twist into nihilism rather than doing anything to stop it. Until I had to face the reality that the pain wasn’t going to stop until I took action and, as many transgender people can tell you, the action your brain thinks is easiest in that moment is not the one that prolongs life.
So I’m sitting here at an antique typewriter desk with a cat scrunched as close to my iMac keyboard as possible, wearing this robe and fighting with my overgrown hair on National Coming Out Day reaffirming my determination to stop the pain that’s consumed my judgement and senses for 20 years. I’ve encouraged others, defended others, endured therapy sessions and helped raise funds for others as a way of feeling better about my situation. In the moments I help someone fight through the pain they’re feeling I can ignore my own and lend them the confidence I once had.
I made the decision to finally see an endocrinologist in November a few months ago. I’ve missed some of my goals since making that decision (primarily weight loss but I’ve resigned myself to it being a slow process) but still fully intend to keep my mid-November appointment. I am fortunate to have access to one at-will clinic that will allow me to seek hormone replacement without approval by a therapist. At some point I’ll discuss my hatred of gatekeeping identity with therapy but others argue that point far more eloquently than I ever will.
Much like 3rd grade me, I am thinking about the magical idea of suddenly being different but the same. I have one shot at this, seeing the transition from a blobby feminine-adjacent form into something more male-adjacent. I wish it could be as fast as the Doctor, that I could confront one end and wake up with a beginning and a new face.
A friend once told me after he’d been on testosterone for months he had a moment like this. He knew he was undergoing some changes in skin and voice and musculature, but he didn’t truly see the changes until one morning he looked in the mirror and truly saw himself. In that moment his face had changed. Thousands of slow progressions culminated in a face familiar yet foreign, in the manifestation of who he’d been so sure was lingering just beneath the surface.
I want to be as confident as people think I am. Most of my social interactions are performative because I’ve spent a lifetime performing femininity. I’ve broken down several times because of this, which has cost me an entire career path and a large amount of economic security. I realized that no matter what I’m wearing, saying, or doing, the core part of me that demands to be expressed is always here. If only I could break down the barriers that humanity erected to distance people from one another I wouldn’t have to go to such trouble just to be recognized as myself and not the person others think I am.
I want to work toward that reality, where we stop being so intensely tribalist about the proper way to love, live, and express ourselves. But until then, I know I need to change the face I see in the mirror before too much longer. I have to make steps to express my identity in the way most comfortable.
But even when I wake up and my face is different, I know I cannot deny the path I’ve taken. I cannot change the experiences I’ve had or forget them. I don’t want to lose what it felt like to try to be a good daughter or a good teenage girl. I failed at being a girl because I wasn’t one. I rejected bullshit social norms because they didn’t fit how I felt or what I was going through. Spending so long staring down reality but denying it allows me to help others by using the ache as a weapon against self-doubt.
I don’t regret taking this long to properly transition. My social transition happened three years ago, but as I said at the beginning of this you might not notice. Being considered female and having interacted with the world from this perspective is important. It is the whole point of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando just from the reverse perspective. At 30, Orlando wakes up and is suddenly a woman armed with the life experiences of a man. At 30, I long to wake up a man armed with the worldview of a woman and the desire to use that knowledge for good.
Interestingly, I completely forgot that Orlando was published October 11, 1928. The Tilda Swinton film version of the story had a profound effect on me as a child. The idea of waking up the same person but in a different form collided with my developing sense of self the same way Doctor Who regenerating did. Mix this with Julie Andrews in Victor Victoria and the entirety of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I was armed with primitive tools to face transition, gender subversion, and inner identity long before I had words to describe the pain.
God if I were a better writer I’d scrap this whole piece and focus just on the Orlando aspect, on how I’d unintentionally just Orlandoed myself this year in an attempt to seem cleverer than I actually am. In some way I think I did remember which was why Orlando popped into my head at all.
And in my childhood, Jimmy Somerville’s voice in the Orlando end credit song “Coming” dulled the ache with the words “We are joined we are one with the human face.” Because we are, no matter your face or your identity.
Anyway, thank you if you read this rambling descent into the making of a thoroughly queer person. From now on I’ll just write updates as I fully intend to keep my scheduled appointments and stop dwelling on the past.
But if I can find a replacement robe identical to this one I’ll wear it forever. We have to stop giving a shit about the gender associated with articles of clothing and inanimate objects.