lately i feel like doing more personal writing
so i am trying that with some thoughts on hormones
This morning I was supposed to go to see my endocrinologist to try and get shit straightened out with my HRT, which has been a very frustrating process in the almost three years I have been on HRT: constant start and stop, going from the patch to the pill to the injections that give me panic attacks, levels never right, body never absorbing it properly, everything just very frustrating. As dumb as it sounds, I also think that I am afraid of my hormones now because I feel like they made me an irritable bitch who everyone hated and I may or may not unconsciously blame them for the demise of a long-term relationship because I had no idea how to explain or articulate the microcosmic vibe shifts I was going through. But that’s another story.
As I have done many times before, at the last minute I rescheduled instead of facing how frustrating the whole process of transitioning has been on every level. So I decided maybe I should journal about it because lately I feel like I need to express some things more personally in my writing and maybe someone will find some comfort or relating in my trauma vomit. I don’t know why I picked the image from Smiley Face it just felt like a good representation of me.
Nothing has gone the way that I thought it would go since I transitioned. To be completely honest, I have no idea how I thought things would go. These feelings have lived inside my head for decades now, at the very least consciously since I was 11 or 12, and the only way to get them out of my head was to put them out in the world. But I never knew who I wanted to be or what I was working toward. There was never any image in my mind of the woman I wanted to be, or the woman I wanted to look like, it was just a vague imprecise cloud that would never cohere into an actual shape or form. It all felt so unattainable. It still feels unattainable. It has been almost three years and I don’t feel like I’m any closer to where I wanted to be because I don’t know where I wanted to be in the first place.
I feel like I’m weaker than every other trans person. I get overheated and feel like I’m going to pass out when I think too hard about surgery. I’ve had needles sitting on my desk for six months that I’m afraid to inject. When I’m misgendered I grin and bear it instead of correcting, because I am so terrified of making a situation about myself, of speaking up for my existence, of making a scene: essentially, of being anything more than a shadow cast on a wall. My existence is a mistake I am constantly apologizing for.
I haven’t bothered to put much effort into getting better at makeup because I just sweat it all off immediately and turn into a swamp monster who feels too aware of my own layers of reptilian skin. I’ve dipped my toes into voice training and I immediately give up when I think about how much concerted effort and practice it takes and also, like, what the fuck even is a feminine voice, what the fuck is a female voice, why the fuck am I shrinking myself to conform to someone else’s bullshit standard of whatever is supposed to come out of my mouth. There is this part of me that longs to be more “feminine” but then I start thinking about it too hard and I don’t even know what the fuck that means. I don’t know what the fuck it means to feminize a face. And sometimes I don’t like thinking about these things because before you know it, you realize that you fucking hate your chin or your cheeks or your forehead and soon it’s all you can see and all you can think about and the fact of the matter is I don’t want to think about myself that much. There are a lot of other things in the world to think about besides myself.
I also keep having this thought of, like, what’s the point. I don’t want to stockpile medicine for the apocalypse. I don’t want to go to doctors for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be in pain wrapped in bandages hoping that somebody brings me a casserole. Maybe this is the Mormon part of me that still has had it drilled into my head that self-sufficiency is a virtue of the highest order. But mostly I just want my life to be for myself and no one else because so many years of my life were not my own at all. I want to be able to flee whenever I feel the heat around the corner and not be bound to anyone’s will but the fucking wind.
Sometimes I feel like there is another Mormon instinct that shows itself too, where part of me feels that this world is not my own, that this flesh is a temporary imperfect state, that there are higher planes of existence. But I know in my heart this flesh is the only truth. There’s nothing beyond it. No existing outside of it. And yet every day it erodes and falters and comes closer to the finish line. I feel like by the point that I have the body I want that it will be taken from me, whether through my own demise or the collective heat death of the universe and/or total societal collapse. If an apocalyptic event happens I am probably one of the first to go anyway, but there is that paranoid anxious thought of, why am I becoming reliant on a medication that will probably be gone in a few years when we’re using dog food as currency. Whenever I express these deeper existential anxieties to my doctors they look at me slightly befuddled and I wonder how anyone could live in this world and not feel like it is falling apart.
And then there’s the fucking money of it all. Buying a new wardrobe. Procuring all the items and objects and products that elicit a sensation of “gender euphoria” which is a concept that sometimes smells like a marketing scheme. Laser hair removal and electrolysis that you pay for on endless installment plans that you thought you could keep with when you signed your blood on the dotted line and then surprise you can’t (and of course they don’t tell you that none of it actually really works permanently and everybody’s hair is different and if you’re blond you’re fucked). Insurance and doctors and therapists and if you want to go further life coaches or “body-shaping gender-affirming personal trainers.” It is not a racket or a scam or an exploitative cottage industry in the way that transphobes make it out to be. But I do sometimes get the feeling that there are people, particularly cis people, who appoint themselves as experts in gender identity, whether it be voice specialists or the people designing start-up apps to help you transition or even doctors, who sell us a promise of actualization and affirmation and make their living off of trans folks desperate for answers. I don’t want to be sharing a GoFundMe link for the rest of my life. I don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on surgery when I think about all the weed I could buy with that money instead. Especially because I do not know how I will feel on the other side, if it is actually what I am looking for. I am constantly second-guessing any inkling of certitude. I wish that I could have the end result but the struggle and the cost and the fighting for it all just sometimes doesn’t seem worth it.
I’m not saying this because I’m going to detransition or something. These problems are not problems that I necessarily blame anyone for and I don’t at all want to seem like I am faulting trans people who do think that it is worth it. I just feel torn in two sometimes between my desires and my will to bring those desires into being. Like, I’ll be real, part of my issue is that I’m just too fucking lazy. But the truth of it is, even if I came closer to my desires, I would never truly reach them in the perfect way I want, just like none of us cis or trans are ever truly in the idealized form we wish we could be. Sometimes it feels like the closer you get to something the further away it becomes and you are only reminded of all your deficiencies. Sometimes I feel like no one even believes I am actually a woman and they are just giving me the benefit of the doubt and indulging my delusions.
I remember when I first came out, I often felt this expectation from cis people that I would be different, that I would change. Which is understandable, right? The whole point of transitioning is to change. But I have this horrible innately programmed instinct to play devil’s advocate against myself and whenever I feel that I am expected to do a certain thing or be a certain way I immediately run to the other direction. Whenever I realize that a label has been fixed to me and I have been placed into a category I do everything I can to break it. It was easier to explore femininity when I was still only out to people in my private life and not to everyone and their mother online, because no one expected it of me. When I felt the pressure to, like, pull a fit, I felt bitter and resentful that anyone wanted anything from me. And it’s not like they necessarily “wanted” something, they were showing support, my fucked-up brain just doesn’t know how to accept it.
So I don’t know. Almost three years in and I don’t know what the fuck gender is. I don’t feel like anyone else has my experience of gender, not because my experience of gender is so unique or novel or singular, but because I don’t think *anyone* at all has the same experience of gender. Despite my negativity here, there are moments that I do feel empowered in that in-betweenness, in the middle finger of it all, in that constant ability to say fuck you to the expectations and up-end whatever people imagine me to be. Too often I feel like I try to give people what they want. But in other moments I am capable of extreme defiance. Even if things have not unfolded with my brilliant transition as I had hoped, I should give myself credit for that: I guess my whole life is defiance.
Some things I have written recently: