man, i feel like a woman!

when you reach what feels like the end of your transition, what comes next is anything but clear.

Last December, I began the painstaking and patchwork process of getting my name and gender legally changed in earnest. I’ve been going by Gwen for about 3 years now and identified as a woman ever since I found out that was an option. I’ve been on HRT for three years and a month and watched my body morph into something bearable, if not outright beautiful. I’ve socially transitioned in every meaningful way - I use the women’s restroom, I get called ma’am everywhere I go, and the other day my boss at my new job told me he had no idea I was transgender until he hired me. For me, getting legal documentation that reflects my real name and gender felt like putting a roof on the house I’ve been building for as long as I’ve been alive. But it also feels sort of like getting dumped off the bus at the end of the line and told “good luck” right before I fall on my ass. When there’s no more roadmap for being transgender, what the fuck do I do now?

I started planning my transition almost as soon as I discovered what being trans meant, sometime in like 2013 in my Tumblr days. I did exhaustive research (I found a WikiHow called “How to Be Transgender) and consulted all the experts I knew (I asked random transgender women on Tumblr what to do). I made a pretty simple plan - I would come out to my parents and then the rest of my life would be smooth sailing.

When I cdid out to my parents at age 14, it went pretty bad. My parents were convinced I had some sort of weird fetish, or that I was confused and hadn’t thought of the larger consequences, or that I needed to go to church more. We don’t want you to do something you’ll regret, they said. When you’re 18 and don’t live in our house, you can do anything you want but as long as you do, you’re going to be a man. I counted myself lucky that I didn’t get kicked out. For the rest of that summer, I wasn’t allowed to see any of my friends and I was forbidden from using social media. I apologized to my parents and promised to be their perfect son. Clearly I hadn’t thought it through, I said. I retreated inside myself and plotted my revenge. While I pretended to be a cis guy to friends and family, I changed my pronouns and name online. I went by a few different names - Daphne, Drew, Daisy, Alex. None of them really fit me, but with the social media revolution in full swing, I could craft a completely new self at a moment’s notice. Like Neo in The Matrix, I lived a double life - one in the real world as a cisgender guy and one online as the woman I knew I was inside. In the vast infinity of a digital ocean, I could swim as far as my arms would take me.

I finally got to start HRT through the clinic on my college’s campus. I was lucky enough that the school had a dedicated trans healthcare practitioner trained to diagnose and treat gender dysphoria. I was able to discuss my transition goals - things that all felt far off and sort of unattainable at 19. We talked about what it might be like if I wanted sexual reassignment surgery (I didn’t) and what sort of things I’d expect in the next 2 - 3 years. The informed consent sheet felt like a set of instructions for how to become a woman and piss my parents off in the process. Instructions have always felt comforting to me — when I was a kid I got so excited to build Lego sets for the first time, flipping through the instructions meticulously. Sometimes I’d skip several steps ahead or look at the very last page and imagine what I would have to do to get there. Starting HRT felt freeing obviously because it alleviated my dysphoria, but it also provided a jumping off point with branching paths that all ended in concrete, achievable goals. I saw myself as yet another Lego set, a complex sum of parts that would look exactly like the box. It was up to me follow the instructions, or skip through the pages and figure out what to do myself.

What I thought I would look at the “end” of HRT was basically some sort of bimbofied Barbie Doll, but like, scene. I wanted really long blonde hair for some reason, boobs but not huge boobs. I didn’t understand what HRT would and wouldn’t do at first. A lot of people think that it changes your voice (it doesn’t - only testosterone can) or feminizes your face (to an extent - hormones can’t move bones). I thought HRT would take a sledgehammer to my male form and transform me into a beautiful woman overnight. Instead, my male exterior was gently chisled away, slowly but surely, revealing the soft, feminine form underneath. I trained my voice, learned to feel when there was a ‘buzz’ in my throat which meant I was going too low. I watched videos on changing the way I walk - shorter strides meant it was less ovious that my shoulders were broader. Tucking - the act of learning to push my penis between my legs - made it easier to swim. Between HRT and endless scrutiny of myself, I learned to cloak myself in womanhood. Eventually, it started to feel less like a costume and more like my authentic way of life. I started getting gendered correctly everywhere. A doctor asked me how regular my periods were, and I had to awkwardly explain that they were irregular because I didn’t have any. Even though I didn’t follow the instructions to the tee, I look at myself in the mirror and occasionally feel surprised at how I ended up. Am I the spitting image of a cisgender woman? Absolutely not! I still get clocked occasionally and when a weird visibly gay guy asks me what my pronouns are, I know I’ve been found out. But when I look back on the darkness of my pre-transition days and how unbearable it felt to just look in the mirror some days, it all feels like it happened to someone else. Transitioning literally saved my life.

With my body in order, it felt like time to have my legal documentation reflect who I was. I was tired of having to use my deadname at the bank, for insurance, when I applied for a job. I put it off for almost a year because it was expensive and I didn’t want to go to court. Last December, some friends generously put together money to cover my court costs to get my name and gender changed. I filed earlier this spring and it still took about 3 months to be approved. What shocked me was that Texas, unlike a lot of other states, doesn’t require you to have had any surgeries or live as your preferred gender for a certain number of years before getting your gender marker changed. For a state that’s so anti-trans, the actual legal system doesn’t seem to care. I got my driver’s license changed not long after, and I’m currently in the process of getting a new social security card and birth certificate. (This process is such a headache because you have to get each thing changed one at a time. So right now I have a Social Security Card that has my deadname, but a driver’s license that has my new name on it. We love patchwork government don’t we folks!)

Holding my new driver’s license in my hands feels like a fever dream. It feels like I’ve reached the finish line of my transition. I mean, if the United States Federal Government recognizes my name and gender identity, whose to tell me otherwise? I win, transphobes! It also feels a little bittersweet. Looking back on the journey, it was so fun, if not awkward, to see myself grow and experiment with my newfound freedom as an out and about trans person. It’s been confusing because I’ve pretty much made it, and I’m very happy. So what comes next?

Of course, there’s still things I could do. I’ve given SRS some serious thought, although I’m not sure if I’m really all that interested in getting a vagina. The surgery itself, the cost and the recovery time seem really daunting, and I’m not sure that I’m really up for it. I’ve also entertained other various gender affirming surgeries, ranging from boob jobs to facial feminization surgery. These would definitely make me feel good about myself, but I don’t know if I really want them enough to go through with them. I’m afraid of things going wrong, and I hate the hospital. These are things that still remain to be seen, things that I have to contemplate, and maybe even work towards.

But what else is left is subtle, and now that I’ve been mulling it over, it feels freeing. I’ve moved on from the real to the metaphysical. With so much discussion in the media about gender and sexuality, and with trans rights squarely in the sights of religious ghouls and conservative freaks, the nature of being trans has been on my mind. Where I was once obsessed with walking correctly, I now really think about what makes me a woman at all. When I moved last month, I had to find a new doctor that could prescribe me my usual regimine of HRT, and I’ve missed about a month’s worth of doses. Without the safety net and predictability of medication, I’ve space to figure out where my own feelings of femininity and womanhood comes from. It’s not necessarily from clothes, or from .75 ml of Estradiol once a week. It’s not really even from being treated like a woman. It’s from the understanding granted to me by others. It’s feeling in tune with my female friends in ways I never have with men. It’s the way I’ve always been seen as lesser than by other men - while men love to say I’ll never be a real woman, in the socio-sexual hierarchy of maleness, I fall right off the scale.

So I guess what I’ve been trying to say this whole time is that what comes next is nothing, and everything. Finishing my transition bucket list wasn’t the end of anything, but a jumping off point for the rest of my life. I’ve moved beyond the realm of tweaking medication doses and learning how to dress and started to think about my place not just in the woman’s world, but in the world at large. I’ve already decided that I’m a woman. My task now is harder than the physical transition, and there’s no instruction manual. Now, I have to decide what kind of woman I want to be.