On the eve of starting T, I felt the need to reflect on how I got here. This
isn't going to explain why I'm starting T - the answer to that is simple; it's
that my body feels wrong and I think T may help to correct that. This is going
to explain how I figured that out.
I'm writing this partly to share my story, with trans* people and non-trans* people alike, in the hopes of fostering more understanding for everybody – but I can't deny that I'm also trying to justify to myself something that feels unreal and unbelievable. A year ago, I had no inkling I'd ever want to transition. I'd had my doubts about gender, but identifying as trans and wanting to transition to the other sex were things that I never thought would happen to me.
There might have been a few flickers, when my trans male friends spoke of their transitions, of breast binding, of the end of menstrual periods - there may have been flashes of "Whataboutmecouldthatbemetoo?" Which were promptly quashed because no way, I was cisgendered. Just because I disliked having breasts and a period and having a curvy body instead of a flat, muscular one and wanted to pass as a guy sometimes but couldn't because of my curvy body - that didn't mean I was trans. I was just - not that feminine. Maybe genderqueer, because I didn't "get" girls and had no interest in acting like one or being one.
Well, unless it was to dress up like one occasionally to get the attention of boys. Boys liked it when I dressed up as a girl. They didn't like it when I dressed macho. They liked my chest and couldn't get why I exercised constantly in an effort to make it smaller.
Ever since I started caring about boys (junior year of high school), my outward presentation and even my self-image were a war between what I wanted and what I thought others wanted of me. I tried to deny what I really wanted – to wear cargo pants and be tough and macho - to make myself more desirable to others, particularly to straight guys.
There were gaps where my own desires started to claw their way out. A year of singlehood during which I owned that I was very "macho" and decided I needed to date women, because I was too macho for a man to accept. I felt my dissociation from the female gender so strongly that when I did end up dating a man after all, I told him, the night of our first date, "I'm not a girl." I thought he accepted me, with my cargo pants and my macho tendencies, but gradually I found he preferred to see me in a short skirt. Well, that's just what guys want, I figured. They like girls in skirts. And it was fun to play the girl. That was when I felt really desired. Being myself? No one wanted that version of me, so why bother?
And then I met someone who did want to see the real me, and that's when it all came crashing down.
I don't know why it was that in June 2014, a blog post, a text conversation and a google chat suddenly ripped my body issues wide open. Maybe it was the explosiveness of years of repressed feelings spilling out into the light when they finally found an audience who would not judge, condemn or reject them. Not just any audience - for most of my friends are people who would never judge someone else's gender or body feelings - but my primary romantic partner. I was used to hearing (or picking up from subtle clues) what I had to do to make someone else happy. But my partner told me to do what made me happy.
At that time, I didn't know what would make me happy. I only knew what made me feel terrible - my chest. I suddenly loathed it more intensely than ever before and wished it would go away. I suddenly understood those frightening scenarios of trans people who are driven to amputate body parts, because that's how badly I wished my chest would go away.
I didn't, of course, cut off my chest, but the next day I put on a sports bra and felt some relief. It was less visible; in fact, I was remarkably flat compared to before.
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In the midst of my angst, my partner had asked me, "So do you think you're still a girl, or are you genderqueer or trans?" And I replied in anguish, "I don't know!" I hesitated to admit to myself that what I was feeling was dysphoria, that sense of discomfort or dislike or hatred or anguish toward one's own body that I considered characteristic of being trans. How could I know what dysphoria felt like, how could I claim to be experiencing it? That was for trans people, and for me to claim it felt appropriative. Because I wasn't trans; I couldn't be. I would know if I was trans. I would just know.
Genderqueer, though - that was an identity I had toyed with for a long time. Surely, the sense I had that I wasn't a girl, and now the way I hated that mark of femaleness, my breasts, qualified me as genderqueer. Surely I could safely say, I'm not a girl, so…I must be no gender at all. Genderless. Nothing.
So I set about trying to live as nothing. At least ostensibly, I tried to present myself as neutral. The trouble was, people kept perceiving me as a woman no matter how hard I tried, and that bothered me. I experimented with clothes and hairstyles and tried to find a look that would be perceived as "ambiguous" or "confusing," that would prompt people to wonder, Is that a man or a woman? I called it my "balancing act," and it was an extremely anxious time for me.
I thought what I wanted, what my identity was, was to be neutral, but even more than that, I wanted so badly not to be seen as a woman. And so, I learned what it felt like to be misgendered. The starkest example is when I went to a friend's birthday party, and she introduced me to someone as so-and-so's sister. Sister. The word made my stomach sink. How could I be someone's sister when I wasn't a woman? The next day I told the relevant people that I preferred the term "sibling."
Already in June, too, I experimented with something I'd wanted to try since college - passing as male. Although I called it "dressing up as a guy," because since I didn't see myself as male, it didn't make sense to me that I should pass as such. My first attempt was June 20, 2014, at the Agalloch show at Empire. I was incredibly nervous about it. I texted my partner, "I don't know if I'm more nervous about passing or not passing." If people actually took me for a guy, what would I do? And what if people saw through me - read me as "a girl dressed as a guy"? But I got there very late (a couple songs into Agalloch's set) and only talked to a few friends afterward. They didn't seem to notice anything different about me, even though I didn't generally wear baggy shorts or button down shirts before then. My first attempt at passing as male was a flop.
The next time that I tried - at the MoCo Ag Fair on August 11 - went a little better. Early on, a ticket seller addressed me as "ma'am," which made my confidence in appearing male plummet. But later on, a food seller refrained from addressing me either way, even though he called my (cis male) friends "sir," all the while giving me a friendly smile. I don't know what he saw, but at least he didn't address me with female terms - which is still the best I can get most days now.
That was also when I started learning and consciously trying to walk and stand "like a man" and to use a lower voice. One of my friends gave me a great deal of advice on the subject, some of it helpful, some of it disheartening. (The best advice, though, came from my friend J at MD Renn Fest in September. They key to moving "like a guy," it turned out, was moving so as to avoid squishing things. You know what things I'm talking about :P)
The corollary to trying to pass as male was that I started to have a strong sense of crossdressing whenever I dressed overtly feminine. The most extreme case was when I wore a bikini to the beach in early August. When I removed my shorts and tank top to reveal my very skimpy bathing suit, I felt so intensely crossdressed that I was sure someone would see through me, see a man in a women's bathing suit, and come over to me waving their finger and saying, "You shouldn't be wearing that!" It was the last time I ever wore something blatantly feminine in public.
Going out as male also forced me to come up with a different name - for I could hardly try to pass as male, but then introduce myself with my female name. But since I thought of myself as genderless, I wanted something neutral, so I used the name "Sascha" at first. I only used that name a few times though. By the end of August, I couldn’t bear to introduce myself by my female name, even when I wasn’t trying to pass as male. I felt like I was misrepresenting myself, and setting other people up to misgender me. Yet Sascha was never a name I intended to use full time; it wasn’t quite me enough. I still wanted something ambiguous, though, because at the time I still didn’t think of myself as male. And then one day I remembered how a college professor had made fun of Finnish researcher with a name that’s male in Finnish but female in the U.S. It was a name from my heritage and there were family reasons, besides, which made it a fitting name – so I decided to stick it to that professor and use that name.
In August, I finally changed my pronouns as well. It happened very publicly and suddenly. I was at the birthday party of a close friend on August 17, and the friend’s spouse (also one of my best friends) said several things about me to the gathering using female pronouns. It felt so wrong, I couldn’t bear it, and then and there asked my friends not use female pronouns for me anymore. That evening I made an announcement on Facebook that I wished to be called “they” (or “xe” for anyone patient enough to learn an obscure pronoun).
By the end of August, it became clear to me that I was expressing myself in more and more masculine ways. I had stopped wearing anything remotely feminine – capri shorts, women’s sandals and sneakers, any hairstyles other than a “guy” ponytail or simple braid – and attempted to wear male attire as much as possible, especially to my office job, which was the only place I had really worn feminine attire to begin with.
With this tendency toward masculinity, I suspected I might be transmasculine – but I couldn’t find a justification for that, since it’s not defined by presentation. Women can express themselves masculinely – wearing male clothing, acting in a masculine manner – and yet still be women; that’s the very definition of butch women. The difference, I felt, was that I figured butch women would feel proud of the fact that they are women. I felt the exact opposite. I felt that I wasn’t a woman, felt pained whenever anyone perceived me as one, and felt self-loathing whenever I contemplated my female body parts. But still, did that make me transmasculine or just plain old genderqueer?
That didn’t get sorted out for a long time. What was clear to me was how I wanted to present myself and be perceived by others. By September, I no longer wanted to hear anyone call me, or more importantly, introduce myself to anyone by my female name; and I found that being called “they” wasn’t enough, and that I longed to be called “he” and to try to pass as male every day. So on September 11, I came out my friends by asking them to call me by a different name and male pronouns through a post on Facebook.
I thought that that was the end of it, for at that time, I had no wish to physically transition. I did wish I could have a deeper voice and more masculine musculature, but I didn’t want facial or body hair. That changed at the end of September when I met some people from DCATS who had been on T for years. Before that, almost all the trans guys I knew were just starting T, and so this was my first close-up glimpse of the potential power of T. These guys looked like men. That’s not the most PC way to say it, but that was my first reaction upon meeting them. These are trans guys? They look like men!
And so, later that evening I lay on my bed and daydreamed about having a male body, and thought for the first time about starting T.
It took me months to sort out whether to actually do it, though. Even now, on the eve of starting HRT, I still have my doubts. (Is it safe to admit that?) I still think sometimes, what the fuck am I doing? Do I really have to do this? But the pang every time I'm misgendered, the discomfort at the thought that other parents at school see me as my daughter's "mom," the way I can't stand to look at or think about my body or fully share it with my current romantic partner, these all tell me that, yes, if I want to happy with myself, then I have to. And I keep in mind the words of that person who helped me through my first dysphoric crisis, once I started changing my life: "Think of how awesome you feel now. Feeling awesome is always better than the alternative."
It took months, months of fighting self-doubt, and the fear of change and of coming out, and internalized cissexist attitudes - and I will likely go on battling those things for some time. But I have a fairly definite idea now of what makes me feel awesome. Accepting and taking pride in the fact that I am a man, even though I was born with female anatomy. Living as a man, and being perceived as one by others. And finally, I think that inhabiting a male body, being able to live as a man more thoroughly, to be more consistently perceived as one, will also make me feel awesome.
Some people know the endpoint of their gender journey when they start out, but I didn’t. I still don’t know where it will take me – how things will go on T, what changes I’ll pursue after that. For me, it’s a journey of exploration. There may be a destination, there may not. As long as I'm feeling more awesome about myself, it's all good.
I'm writing this partly to share my story, with trans* people and non-trans* people alike, in the hopes of fostering more understanding for everybody – but I can't deny that I'm also trying to justify to myself something that feels unreal and unbelievable. A year ago, I had no inkling I'd ever want to transition. I'd had my doubts about gender, but identifying as trans and wanting to transition to the other sex were things that I never thought would happen to me.
There might have been a few flickers, when my trans male friends spoke of their transitions, of breast binding, of the end of menstrual periods - there may have been flashes of "Whataboutmecouldthatbemetoo?" Which were promptly quashed because no way, I was cisgendered. Just because I disliked having breasts and a period and having a curvy body instead of a flat, muscular one and wanted to pass as a guy sometimes but couldn't because of my curvy body - that didn't mean I was trans. I was just - not that feminine. Maybe genderqueer, because I didn't "get" girls and had no interest in acting like one or being one.
Well, unless it was to dress up like one occasionally to get the attention of boys. Boys liked it when I dressed up as a girl. They didn't like it when I dressed macho. They liked my chest and couldn't get why I exercised constantly in an effort to make it smaller.
Ever since I started caring about boys (junior year of high school), my outward presentation and even my self-image were a war between what I wanted and what I thought others wanted of me. I tried to deny what I really wanted – to wear cargo pants and be tough and macho - to make myself more desirable to others, particularly to straight guys.
There were gaps where my own desires started to claw their way out. A year of singlehood during which I owned that I was very "macho" and decided I needed to date women, because I was too macho for a man to accept. I felt my dissociation from the female gender so strongly that when I did end up dating a man after all, I told him, the night of our first date, "I'm not a girl." I thought he accepted me, with my cargo pants and my macho tendencies, but gradually I found he preferred to see me in a short skirt. Well, that's just what guys want, I figured. They like girls in skirts. And it was fun to play the girl. That was when I felt really desired. Being myself? No one wanted that version of me, so why bother?
And then I met someone who did want to see the real me, and that's when it all came crashing down.
I don't know why it was that in June 2014, a blog post, a text conversation and a google chat suddenly ripped my body issues wide open. Maybe it was the explosiveness of years of repressed feelings spilling out into the light when they finally found an audience who would not judge, condemn or reject them. Not just any audience - for most of my friends are people who would never judge someone else's gender or body feelings - but my primary romantic partner. I was used to hearing (or picking up from subtle clues) what I had to do to make someone else happy. But my partner told me to do what made me happy.
At that time, I didn't know what would make me happy. I only knew what made me feel terrible - my chest. I suddenly loathed it more intensely than ever before and wished it would go away. I suddenly understood those frightening scenarios of trans people who are driven to amputate body parts, because that's how badly I wished my chest would go away.
I didn't, of course, cut off my chest, but the next day I put on a sports bra and felt some relief. It was less visible; in fact, I was remarkably flat compared to before.
In the midst of my angst, my partner had asked me, "So do you think you're still a girl, or are you genderqueer or trans?" And I replied in anguish, "I don't know!" I hesitated to admit to myself that what I was feeling was dysphoria, that sense of discomfort or dislike or hatred or anguish toward one's own body that I considered characteristic of being trans. How could I know what dysphoria felt like, how could I claim to be experiencing it? That was for trans people, and for me to claim it felt appropriative. Because I wasn't trans; I couldn't be. I would know if I was trans. I would just know.
Genderqueer, though - that was an identity I had toyed with for a long time. Surely, the sense I had that I wasn't a girl, and now the way I hated that mark of femaleness, my breasts, qualified me as genderqueer. Surely I could safely say, I'm not a girl, so…I must be no gender at all. Genderless. Nothing.
So I set about trying to live as nothing. At least ostensibly, I tried to present myself as neutral. The trouble was, people kept perceiving me as a woman no matter how hard I tried, and that bothered me. I experimented with clothes and hairstyles and tried to find a look that would be perceived as "ambiguous" or "confusing," that would prompt people to wonder, Is that a man or a woman? I called it my "balancing act," and it was an extremely anxious time for me.
Channeling Ari Koivunen \m/
I thought what I wanted, what my identity was, was to be neutral, but even more than that, I wanted so badly not to be seen as a woman. And so, I learned what it felt like to be misgendered. The starkest example is when I went to a friend's birthday party, and she introduced me to someone as so-and-so's sister. Sister. The word made my stomach sink. How could I be someone's sister when I wasn't a woman? The next day I told the relevant people that I preferred the term "sibling."
Already in June, too, I experimented with something I'd wanted to try since college - passing as male. Although I called it "dressing up as a guy," because since I didn't see myself as male, it didn't make sense to me that I should pass as such. My first attempt was June 20, 2014, at the Agalloch show at Empire. I was incredibly nervous about it. I texted my partner, "I don't know if I'm more nervous about passing or not passing." If people actually took me for a guy, what would I do? And what if people saw through me - read me as "a girl dressed as a guy"? But I got there very late (a couple songs into Agalloch's set) and only talked to a few friends afterward. They didn't seem to notice anything different about me, even though I didn't generally wear baggy shorts or button down shirts before then. My first attempt at passing as male was a flop.
The next time that I tried - at the MoCo Ag Fair on August 11 - went a little better. Early on, a ticket seller addressed me as "ma'am," which made my confidence in appearing male plummet. But later on, a food seller refrained from addressing me either way, even though he called my (cis male) friends "sir," all the while giving me a friendly smile. I don't know what he saw, but at least he didn't address me with female terms - which is still the best I can get most days now.
That was also when I started learning and consciously trying to walk and stand "like a man" and to use a lower voice. One of my friends gave me a great deal of advice on the subject, some of it helpful, some of it disheartening. (The best advice, though, came from my friend J at MD Renn Fest in September. They key to moving "like a guy," it turned out, was moving so as to avoid squishing things. You know what things I'm talking about :P)
The corollary to trying to pass as male was that I started to have a strong sense of crossdressing whenever I dressed overtly feminine. The most extreme case was when I wore a bikini to the beach in early August. When I removed my shorts and tank top to reveal my very skimpy bathing suit, I felt so intensely crossdressed that I was sure someone would see through me, see a man in a women's bathing suit, and come over to me waving their finger and saying, "You shouldn't be wearing that!" It was the last time I ever wore something blatantly feminine in public.
Going out as male also forced me to come up with a different name - for I could hardly try to pass as male, but then introduce myself with my female name. But since I thought of myself as genderless, I wanted something neutral, so I used the name "Sascha" at first. I only used that name a few times though. By the end of August, I couldn’t bear to introduce myself by my female name, even when I wasn’t trying to pass as male. I felt like I was misrepresenting myself, and setting other people up to misgender me. Yet Sascha was never a name I intended to use full time; it wasn’t quite me enough. I still wanted something ambiguous, though, because at the time I still didn’t think of myself as male. And then one day I remembered how a college professor had made fun of Finnish researcher with a name that’s male in Finnish but female in the U.S. It was a name from my heritage and there were family reasons, besides, which made it a fitting name – so I decided to stick it to that professor and use that name.
In August, I finally changed my pronouns as well. It happened very publicly and suddenly. I was at the birthday party of a close friend on August 17, and the friend’s spouse (also one of my best friends) said several things about me to the gathering using female pronouns. It felt so wrong, I couldn’t bear it, and then and there asked my friends not use female pronouns for me anymore. That evening I made an announcement on Facebook that I wished to be called “they” (or “xe” for anyone patient enough to learn an obscure pronoun).
By the end of August, it became clear to me that I was expressing myself in more and more masculine ways. I had stopped wearing anything remotely feminine – capri shorts, women’s sandals and sneakers, any hairstyles other than a “guy” ponytail or simple braid – and attempted to wear male attire as much as possible, especially to my office job, which was the only place I had really worn feminine attire to begin with.
With this tendency toward masculinity, I suspected I might be transmasculine – but I couldn’t find a justification for that, since it’s not defined by presentation. Women can express themselves masculinely – wearing male clothing, acting in a masculine manner – and yet still be women; that’s the very definition of butch women. The difference, I felt, was that I figured butch women would feel proud of the fact that they are women. I felt the exact opposite. I felt that I wasn’t a woman, felt pained whenever anyone perceived me as one, and felt self-loathing whenever I contemplated my female body parts. But still, did that make me transmasculine or just plain old genderqueer?
That didn’t get sorted out for a long time. What was clear to me was how I wanted to present myself and be perceived by others. By September, I no longer wanted to hear anyone call me, or more importantly, introduce myself to anyone by my female name; and I found that being called “they” wasn’t enough, and that I longed to be called “he” and to try to pass as male every day. So on September 11, I came out my friends by asking them to call me by a different name and male pronouns through a post on Facebook.
I thought that that was the end of it, for at that time, I had no wish to physically transition. I did wish I could have a deeper voice and more masculine musculature, but I didn’t want facial or body hair. That changed at the end of September when I met some people from DCATS who had been on T for years. Before that, almost all the trans guys I knew were just starting T, and so this was my first close-up glimpse of the potential power of T. These guys looked like men. That’s not the most PC way to say it, but that was my first reaction upon meeting them. These are trans guys? They look like men!
And so, later that evening I lay on my bed and daydreamed about having a male body, and thought for the first time about starting T.
It took me months to sort out whether to actually do it, though. Even now, on the eve of starting HRT, I still have my doubts. (Is it safe to admit that?) I still think sometimes, what the fuck am I doing? Do I really have to do this? But the pang every time I'm misgendered, the discomfort at the thought that other parents at school see me as my daughter's "mom," the way I can't stand to look at or think about my body or fully share it with my current romantic partner, these all tell me that, yes, if I want to happy with myself, then I have to. And I keep in mind the words of that person who helped me through my first dysphoric crisis, once I started changing my life: "Think of how awesome you feel now. Feeling awesome is always better than the alternative."
It took months, months of fighting self-doubt, and the fear of change and of coming out, and internalized cissexist attitudes - and I will likely go on battling those things for some time. But I have a fairly definite idea now of what makes me feel awesome. Accepting and taking pride in the fact that I am a man, even though I was born with female anatomy. Living as a man, and being perceived as one by others. And finally, I think that inhabiting a male body, being able to live as a man more thoroughly, to be more consistently perceived as one, will also make me feel awesome.
Some people know the endpoint of their gender journey when they start out, but I didn’t. I still don’t know where it will take me – how things will go on T, what changes I’ll pursue after that. For me, it’s a journey of exploration. There may be a destination, there may not. As long as I'm feeling more awesome about myself, it's all good.
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