8 Hormonal Transition Changes WAY More Intense Than Growing Tits

Non-transgender people have a very skewed perception of transition; unsurprisingly, people mostly seem to care about my transition in the context of their own narrative. When I hear people talking about “the transgenders”, we fit into their narrative as either:

• Seducers of men, invaders of women’s spaces and groomers of children who represent the downfall of civilization and must be defended against at all costs

OR 

• Vulnerable, misunderstood victims that must be defended from the outside world (and it just so happens that arguing on our behalf make you look better)

Sometimes in combination with:

• Fetish objects that are acceptable targets of hatred and lust in equal measure (usually hatred early in transition, lust afterward, then hatred again right after orgasm)

People can see what’s happening to our bodies, but the physical changes are actually pretty minor compared to what’s happening mentally as a consequence of taking transition hormones. As I’m celebrating my rebirth-day (one year on HRT June 10!) I’ve been taking stock of how much has changed for me - it’s been INTENSE. Everyone’s experience is different, here’s mine. 

1. “Living Life Through a Pane of Glass”

I had a nightmare recently about a doctor in a lab coat reading the most embarrassing parts of my browser history to an auditorium filled with my friends, family and coworkers. I woke up and texted another trans friend; she responded “yuuuuup”. I’m not going to go into too much detail about sex stuff, it’s awkward AF. If you’re curious, go check out Natalie Wynn’s AGP video - her experiences are pretty close to mine. However, weird sex stuff is only part of the trans experience and wasn’t the main reason I chose to get on hormones - the main reason was the much lesser known “biochemical” dysphoria. This blog covers it in detail, biochemical dysphoria presents as a complex array of mental disorders that make it impossible to feel really “present” or “connected” or “there”. Dissociation/depersonalization were the biggest two (on top of a decade of suicidal anhedonia, but that’s why I have a therapist now 🤷‍♀️). I don’t feel like anyone who knew me pre-transition really knew me that well - I just couldn’t connect in meaningful ways to the people around me. In retrospect, a lot of how I lived my life pre-transition has been about trying to feel something (dear god, ANYTHING) through that pane of glass. 

With hormones, my neurochemistry started working properly - the pane of glass dissolved and I feel like I’m now “actually there” in ways I could only feel while severely intoxicated pre-transition. It’s not like I’m happy all the time now, more like I now have the ability to feel happiness - playing with my cat or drinking the day's first cup of coffee is more intensely satisfying than attending a pre-transition music festival. I suppose I could have tried anti-depressants, but it’s not just the one dimension of “sad vs. happy” - my memories from pre-transition feel like they’re in black and white because I have so much emotional information lacking. The issue wasn’t that I was disconnected because I was sad, my problem was that I was sad because I was disconnected.

2. People Are More Interesting Than Things

The best part of fixing my neurochemistry has been the ability to make meaningful connections with other people. I’ve become much more extroverted - I still have days when I’m too tired to get out of bed, but I start getting antsy if I have more than a night or two in by myself. People’s emotions and interrelationships are really interesting to me now in ways I never cared about before. 

The weirdest way this is impacting me is that I care much less about things and ideas for their own sake than I used to. Pre-transition, only highs that happened “behind the pane of glass” really registered for me - intoxicants and natural highs. One of the strongest ones was the problem solving high - the little dopamine kick you get when you solve a difficult problem or learn something new. That feeling was mostly responsible for my engineering degree - it’s way easier to learn when your brain is rewarding you for learning and muting everything else. Now I still feel that problem-solving high, but the stimulation of a good interpersonal connection is overwhelmingly more powerful.

To be very clear - I can still do math, science, coding and smart stuff. It’s just not as intrinsically appealing as it used to be. Code used to be this exciting, vibrant thought exercise… now it’s cold, dead, flat and too abstract to be motivating. That may be conflated with burnout though, six years of nonprofit work has been… demanding to say the least 😐.

3. Everything Everywhere All At Once

I feel like this starts getting into some VERY political territory so I’ll add like 30 disclaimers:

• These are just my experiences
• These are subjective
• I’m not making broad generalizations about men vs. women
• You shouldn’t read this as a generalization about men and women
• You should probably disregard everything I’m saying after this as whimsical fiction
• None of this applies to anyone else and there are no deeper patterns at work here

The neural changes from hormones have been WILD. On top of the “pane of glass” dissolving and ability to make connections/feel feelings, I feel like my brain is rewiring for parallelization. I understand a lot of my pre-transition thought patterns as very serial - “one track mind”, “one thing at a time”, “goal oriented”, whatever the phrasing. My brain did one thing at a time - or at least felt like it did (most likely I just wasn’t aware of the many background processes going on). Now it does many, many things all at the surface of consciousness simultaneously. I’m getting way better at parallel processing - reading faces, detecting/reacting to multiple levels of emotional nuance in a situation, and assembling disparate design elements into a coherent whole. I wouldn’t say I’ve gotten worse at serial processing - I can still do complex tasks - but it’s harder for me to get into the serial processing “headspace” (I don’t hit “Flow” state nearly as much as I used to). It’s like my default neural arrangement has shifted from “mostly serial” to “mostly parallel with the ability to go serial if needed”. This changes when there’s emotional urgency to a task - if I care about something and get into a Flow state, that state is much more intense and lasts for much longer.

Interestingly, one of my roommates is transmasculine and on testosterone. They described it as like “putting blinders on” - this kind of “tunnel vision” where they ignore most of the world around them. I can't say if this applies to anyone else though, these have just been our experiences.

4. Emotional Range (and Neuroplasticity) of a Teenager

OH MY GOD LET’S TALK ABOUT FEELINGS - you can’t know what a cry-laugh is until you’ve experienced one. My emotions are much stronger and there are way more of them in parallel than a year ago. Before transition, my therapist had me start using this feelings wheel - pre-hormones I was at maybe 1 or 2 simultaneous emotions, now I’m usually at 6 - 7 and there are some days when the whole goddamn wheel lights up. When I first started hormones, I experienced them as “something happening to me”. Now that I’ve been on them for a year, stronger emotions (and crazy mood swings) have become my “normal” and I’d feel weird without them.

My brain has also been rewiring a ton - a sudden change in neural function is a great opportunity to work through trauma. Speaking of which:

5. Hello Childhood Stuff! And Trauma Processing! Woo 🥳!

I tried not to think about my childhood too much pre-transition, it’s still not my favorite subject. My parents cared for me and provided well for me materially, but growing up in a small rural town in the 90s no one had any idea about trans issues. There are some trans girls who know what they are from a very young age, but that narrative isn’t accurate for most of us. I’m a bit torn on the decision to write about this at all, but feel an obligation toward the next generation… I’m jealous of the widespread knowledge parents today have about trans issues, but it’s far from a finished cultural fight. So… (ugh) sorry mom and dad, time to air some dirty laundry to the world. Hopefully if you’re reading this and think that kids shouldn’t be exposed to “gender ideology”, this helps change your mind.

I’ve been self-harming for liking feminine things since I was 8 years old and had my first thoughts of suicide when I was 12. I realized that I was nonbinary/genderfluid/something when I was 23, but wasn’t ready to face it so I made the totally-rational decision to uproot my life, relocate to rural kenya and cut all ties with the queer community (there were other reasons as well but apparently this pattern is pretty common among trans folks). Unsurprisingly, running from my problems didn’t work very well.  I transitioned because those suicidal thoughts only got more intense with time; thankfully I had access to therapy when my self-harm spiraled out of control at 27. It took years of work to publicly admit what I am; before I went into counseling, I was planning to kill myself when I turned 30. I turn 31 in a few days and I still can’t shake the feeling of living a “bonus” extra life (complete with the “1-up” noise when you find a green mushroom in mario games). I didn’t choose any of this - I didn’t choose to be born transgender, it just happened. I also don’t feel like I had the choice to transition, it was more of a “transition or die” situation. My parents have been supportive and I’m grateful to them; their intentions were good (preparing me for the outside world) but the unintended consequences of being raised "masculine" - to be tough, unemotional and aggressive (while being generally bad at all those things) - have been pretty severe.

I can’t help but be angry when I hear well-intentioned adults say things like “kids should be able to preserve their innocence before being corrupted by gender ideology” - I missed out on decades of “normal” life experiences because my brain wasn’t working properly. While I was stuck behind a pane of glass, my peers had teenage romances, functional relationships, strong friend groups, all the golden experiences of youth that I wasn’t biochemically capable of experiencing as a teenager. Experiencing these for the first time as a 30-year-old is bittersweet - I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer, but I will never have the chance to experience teenage love. I think many well-intentioned but misinformed adults are under the impression that being trans is a "mind virus" you catch or a lifestyle you choose to live, not something you're born into. I was absolutely born like this, but without exposure to affirming ideas I struggled for a long time to understand what was going on.

Anyway, the main skills I brought with me out of childhood were mastery of emotional repression and a high pain tolerance. Those have been pretty useful, because:

6. Constantly Breaking a Foundational Taboo Forces You to Become a Badass

I moved to Portland for transition so that I could be in a “safe space” - this is one of the most trans-friendly cities in the world. Even with family support, a steady job, saved income, health insurance and a supportive social circle - transition has been FUCKING BRUTAL. Every single day that I leave the house means breaking a deeply-ingrained social taboo. The only way to function is to either hide in your house 24/7 or stop giving any fucks. Rap songs - especially the subtext of “pretending to be more confident than you actually are” - make a LOT more sense to me now. Think about an embarrassing memory - especially one that caused people around you to act with derision and disgust. Now imagine those expressions, from random strangers, dozens to hundreds of times every day. “Fuck y’all, I don’t care what you think” is such a part of trans/drag culture not because we can’t feel the derision, but because it’s the only way to function as nonconformists. Especially early in transition, the attention is not positive.

The weirdest change has been air travel - most flights now start with me being groped by a TSA agent. TSA scanners have a blue and a pink button; when a TSA agent presses the pink button for me, my anatomy sets off the scanner.  Backscatter x-ray scanners (and by extension the people who designed them) don't know how to categorize trans bodies, so they treat us as threats. 

7. Until You’re Suddenly Not Badass Anymore

I like to use the “shields” analogy from star trek when I’m out in public - I can withstand a certain amount of public disgust, but after a long time my shields get worn down and I need to retreat to a safe space. The things people say to me and about me still get to me through, especially because of the whole “increased sensitivity to other people’s emotions” thing. The brutal irony of transfeminine transition is that I am MUCH more sensitive to even mild criticism and emotional nuance - while I’m also enduring the most visceral hatred from strangers that I’ve ever encountered. As a cis white straight dude, people rarely express hatred to your face. I try not to dwell on them, but these are a sample of the comments I’ve received during my transition:

• “Your appearance is disturbing to me”
• “Yeah it’s weird but ok, whatever”
• “Keep the kids away from him” (heard in an airport) 
• “Celui-ci est un travesti” (which ok, it’s technically accurate but still - French people need to update their terms)
• “Fucking weirdo” (in a grocery store)
• “You seeing this?”... “yeah, I got eyes on him” - in a restaurant

And, the “best” one:

• “FUCKING FAGGOT!”... “where?” (shouted at me by two drunk frat bros late at night while I was walking alone in downtown Portland)

There are no words to describe how jarring it is to have all your life experience, all your power, all your friends and history and internal story and struggles and triumphs - stripped from you by a slur. To have your three-dimensional reality instantly flattened to that of a two-dimensional cartoon character, a stick figure in someone else’s world - nothing more than an acceptable target of hatred and violence. Scary doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Then there’s the part that trans people don’t talk about as much - all that disgust, all that hatred towards people who don’t fit the gender norms - that’s not just coming from other people. Most of my friends have semicolon tattoos not because other people are mean to us, but because we’ve internalized the message that we’re “wrong” on a fundamental level. As I write this, I’m wrapping up my eleventh call of the week related to getting Facial Feminization Surgery (insurance is a nightmare and it costs between $30k-$60k uninsured). I’m spending a LOT of time and energy on my appearance, my voice, my walk, all of the million little things that cisgender people never have to consider - all so I can hopefully stop triggering that disgust reaction in myself and other people. I have good days and bad days - some days I can put pictures on instagram, others I can’t look in a mirror.

8. A Working Brain Makes Happiness and Relationships Possible

Phew… that got heavy. There really isn’t a way to talk about transition that doesn’t get heavy. The good news is that I now have the emotional tools to process heavy thoughts. I still don’t know quite what I am - I prefer “transfeminine” or “femme-presenting nonbinary” because the world doesn’t treat me as a woman yet, I’m still a cartoon character to people who don’t know me. Regardless of labels, these are two facts about me:

• I was born with a Y chromosome
• My brain needs estrogen to work properly. It’s been such a night-and-day difference that I would do literally anything to stay on these pills.

I've had a lot of well-meaning people ask me "why do you want to transition?" or "why do you want to be a woman?". That's not really how this works; it's not really a matter of "I want" so much as "I just am". I just am trans and it's out of my control; it's a reality of my life and my body. The more I tried to rationalize it, explain it or think about it, the more it hurts - only by letting go and accepting it was I able to start healing.

Yeah Cool Whatever... But How Does Your Transition Fit Into My Story?

I don’t want your pity, I don’t want to be told I’m brave, I don’t want transition advice. My requests for allies are pretty simple:

• Don’t call me “He” or use my dead name. Every time someone does that, it throws me back into a headspace of internalized self-hatred, which is really jarring.
  
  
• Defend me when I’m not in the room. Be tolerant of people like me who don’t have all the benefits I had, who aren’t as “articulate” or “reasonable”. I want you to treat me as a person, not a cartoon character or a way to score political points. Have the awkward conversations; when you're with a group of friends and someone says they "just don't get the whole trans thing", speak up - silent, polite acquiescence isn't an option I have anymore. I used to be able to find middle ground with conservative people; now, my very existence is controversial.
  
  
• Don't give me unsolicited transition advice. I've had a number of friends and family members try to convince me that I shouldn't get surgery; if you want to be a part of my life, respect my autonomy.
  
  
• If you want to be an ally, hang a rainbow flag. It may seem silly, but I gauge my safety by the number of visible rainbow flags in a neighborhood. If you’re worried about “what will the neighbors say”, welcome to my world - you get to live with a tiny fraction of the stigma that I can’t escape.

I didn't choose to be trans, but I can choose to find positive meaning and joy in my identity. I'm doing better than I ever have been; the emotions that I've been able to experience for the past year have made my life worth living. I try to choose hope, be grateful for each day and find joy in the mundane as much as I can. To quote a lesson from the Buddhist temple I started attending last year - I can't change the past, but I can change the meaning of the past. In one version of my life story, I fled to Africa because I couldn't handle the emotional stress of trans feelings, spending five years single and isolated from my tribe as a result. In another version of my narrative, I had the ability to travel the world freely with a level of safety that no woman could have known; if I had transitioned earlier, I couldn't have experienced so much of the world. I can’t choose my past, but I can choose my own story; I choose to live with hope.