This could be the biggest step that was hard for you to start. Or maybe there was a particularly stressful time during your transition that really weighed on you.
How did you overcome this and what did it teach you?
-Olivia ✌🏻
Honesty it’s not super positive but learning to accept that I’ll never undo male puberty.
The bad memories, the growth, a lot of the hair, the sort of in between socialisation and so on. All these things are with me for life, I can’t undo them and I’ll never have the body and life I wish I had, or even the body and life I might have had if I’d been able to transition earlier.
Given that, I can carry around resentment for the rest of my life and keep waiting to “be myself” or just move on and accept that there are limits to what hormones can do and limits to how many things I can afford to do and live as I am.
Funny as it might sound, the appearance of Karlach in BG3 makes me feel a little better about how male puberty made me grow and being a bit taller/broader. I think I’m okay with being big and muscle-y, in a less-masculine framing.
The hair is a damned nightmare though. It’s curley and things… snag.
Starting HRT. My pros and cons list told me I absolutely should, but I kept worrying about what others would think, wondering if they’d see me as too rash or unjustified on doing it. That and imposter syndrome made me feel like I wasn’t allowed to take HRT, that’s for Real Trans People™. I started 2 months ago and it’s the best health decision I’ve ever taken.
I’m still relatively new to my journey. Just under 6 months of cracking my egg and 7 weeks of HRT.
Cracking my egg was probably the hardest part for me to be honest. It took years of trauma therapy and peeling back many layers of self inflicted injuries to finally see the real me.
There was a good decade before my egg cracked that things started to spiral out of control. A need for pain management for chronic pain grew into addiction. My long term relationship (been together 15 years now) with my highschool sweetheart started crumbling due to my lies and inability to open up to her.
I learned to hate myself to keep pushing forward. Which wasn’t hard because I was always so critical and mean to the “man I had become”
Things would get a little better here and there, but it was on a downward trend. Relapsed into addiction after my son was born. I had an identity crisis and couldn’t see myself as a father. I never had a good blueprint for what that was, but I couldn’t even envision myself as one. I felt like I needed to push this all down, take another pill for the pain and be the best I could for others. Never acknowledge my feelings or thoughts. I didn’t deserve to figure out who I was. I would rather burn myself to the ground supporting my family than to EVER give myself an ounce of love.
Came to a crossroads of sort. My wife and I had many talks when our son was asleep. Our marriage wasn’t working. I was spiraling into depression and we both knew I wasn’t going to live much longer. For a while I accepted that fate. Because it was all I knew. But seeing my wife crying on the kitchen floor because she didn’t understand why she couldn’t reach me… That was not my plan. She always saw something more in me that I refused to see. And she was pleading with me to let it out.
So I did. For my wife, my son, and for the first time in my life - I did it for myself.
A year of sobriety from narcotics. Years of trauma work in therapy going as deep as I could remember. Searching deep within myself to finally ask the question. Who am I? And I heard a voice in the distance say “My name is Olivia”
That was my egg cracking and I’ve been getting closer to that voice every day since ❤️
That was a really touching story to read, I hope that you are feeling better now. Out of curiosity, how did it play out with your wife?
We are doing better than ever! Thank you for asking. Coming out to her and myself means that I can finally show her all of me.
On a sillier note. It also helps that she has realized she’s more lesbian than “bi” like she thought. Turns out she was just waiting for me to stop cosplaying as a boy 😘
For me, the biggest hurdle was reconciling the changes I wanted to see in myself with the fear that they’d destroy the life I already had. I wanted to start HRT as soon as possible, but I was worried that developing visible breasts would cost me my job and my relationships with my family. I wanted to be referred to with different pronouns and a different name, but I was worried I would be “asking too much” of my friends, and demanding too much attention for myself. I wanted to fet rid of all my body hair, but I was afraid people would react negatively to me when we go out swimming, etc.
I found that I was making bigger deals out of these things than they really were. I am extremely fortunate to be surrounded by people who love me, and so the fear of rejection was really something I was just generating in a vacuum. I still have a job I love, and nobody treats me differently with a more feminine appearance and bra lines under my shirt lol. My friends were immediately accepting of my identity, and more than happy to call me whatever I wanted. And truly, nobody gives a fuck how much body hair I have when I go swimming haha.
These fears were things I just had to tackle one at a time to overcome, and it was really hard for me. In the end though, I am so much happier having pushed through them to live as myself, finally.
The biggest hurdle for me was getting out of Texas and into a blue state. Transition never felt like it was a realistic option before I made it somewhere that does informed-consent.
What I learned is that interstate migration is a fucking nightmare that I’d never have been able to afford if I didn’t luck my way into a job offer that included four digits of relocation assistance.
Beyond that, my biggest challenge was one of my partners. He’s almost exclusively homosexual and is not attracted to visibly trans people, so admitting to him that I wanted to start hormone therapy was incredibly difficult for my rejection-sensitive brain. Fortunately, after reminding him that I’m not a trans woman and enby hormone therapy won’t give me huge tits, I learned that he cares more about my happiness than his perception of my sex appeal. 😄
Definitely curious on the relocation assistance type stuff. I’ve heard of jobs like that for GS jobs (US Civil service/federal employee) with DoD but that it’s incredibly hard to get approved for.
It’s wonderful you have a partner like that 😄
Edit to add: Keris in a different post is about to jump ship to a new state and would probably appreciate any wisdom around “getting settled” in a new state. Unexpected struggles, benefits to use, etc.
I’m still not sure how I managed to get so lucky, but apparently some tech corps still do relocation assistance too.
I gave what advice I could to Keris, but my situation is pretty different and I dunno what else to add.
Good to know! That’s probably my way out of Ohio haha, that or getting something well paying and full remote and just… moving outright
Had a feeling but who knows sometimes, the most random things can be super helpful
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I’m afraid I don’t have much practical advice. In my early 20’s I sold almost everything and packed the rest, bid goodbye to my partners, drove to California, and lived out of my car for a month. In the end I went back to Texas because I missed my partners, and it was another 15 years before attempt #2. I’d probably still be back there if it weren’t for the job offer. 😖
I don’t know about “hardest”, but my relationship with my own queerness has been the longest constant that I’ve struggled with during the length of my transition.
Initially, I struggled to embrace a side of myself that I’d been denied. I was trans, but “not queer” because queer community and queer folk were so far removed from my life until that point, that it felt like I was claiming something I hadn’t earned. (Interestingly, I didn’t struggle with my gender identity in a similar fashion)
I eventually got more exposure to queer folks and queer community and realised that they were “my people”. And I learned to embrace my queerness and love it, but no sooner did I do so, than I started to lose it. I was dating men, and people were no longer identifying me as trans when they saw me. Even people I work with sort of “forget” that I’m trans. And that’s the ideal that so many of us long for right? But what it felt like to me, was that I had just found the courage and self love to step out of a closet and accept my queerness, and achieved the goals I thought I wanted, only to find myself involuntarily in another closet.
These days, I’m in a poly relationship with a woman and a non binary bean, so it’s less of an issue, but I still feel it at work, and around strangers, where my queerness is something I have to constantly talk about, or otherwise it’s simply not seen. Even when I wear queer stuff people kinda just “forget” and they assume that I want them to forget, as if blending in with the society that teaches me I have to hide is something I desire for more than pragmatic reasons.
Just yesterday, a woman I have worked with for years asked me why my necklace and lanyard were matching (they both have the trans flag on them). I pointed out that I also have a matching wrist band and shoe laces, and that they’re the trans flag, and she was like “Oh yeah, that’s right, I guess that makes sense”. I hate it…
I’m still struggling with “oh shit. My body’s actually changing. This is for real now.” On one hand, it’s a welcome change and it’s not coming fast enough, but on the other I worry about future health problems and the life I could have had if I would just stop being trans. Change is hard no matter how welcome it is. I’m gonna keep going because it feels right. I feel so much better with T than without.
Also, I had a dream that I was going bald last night. It was kinda funny in retrospect.
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