"I'm not changing, you are." Four Years of Medical Transition.

HRT has shown me that this is who I've always been.

It’s been 1,461 days since I started hormone replacement therapy to feminize this body.

Four years to the day since I shook the pills into my hand. Four years since I said to myself, “fuck it” and chose to live a life different to the one I had. Most people would say that this is the very definition of “change”. Even going as far as saying everything about me has altered in some way. My hair, my clothes, my voice, my gait, even my height has changed. An inch and a half of posture was lost to the tilting of my pelvis and the estrogen-lengthening of my tendons.

Now you’ll either see the shadow of the man I “used to be”, or you won’t even recognise me at all.

I sat outside a club, reclining on a concrete bollard with a gaggle of girlies all excitedly catching up. Threading through the nearby scattering of men sucking down cigarettes, a woman joined us. Friends of friends of friends. One by one around the circle she was introduced, her hand finally reached out to me, “lovely to meet you!” Taking it, I chimed, “Oh we’ve met before!”

I recognized this particular confusion. Pristine politeness, the furrowing of immaculate brows. The slight tilt of head as she riffled through the mental file cabinet, that unexpected file request for when she last met a six-foot-heavily-tattooed-blonde-bombsell-who-looked-like-they-could-bench-press-her. Backpedaling I sought to let her off the hook, as I knew that search query would result in a “file not found”.

“It was a few years ago!” But of course, my smart mouth is always happy to get me into an awkward spot even when my compassion for alleviating social awkwardness is engaged. “Don’t feel bad for not remembering, I was a man at the time.”

Perfect. No notes.

The silence dropped like wet blanket. The gaggle of girls held their breath, trying to math out if this was an awful situation unfolding or a hilarious one. Thank fuck it was the latter cause my stupid fucking mouth followed up with “Yeah, just try and imagine me with a luscious beard and it might come flooding back.”

Smooth.

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Back on day 986 I shelved this article.

A partner at the time, who fancied themselves as an armchair editor, disagreed with the premise. She advocated for me to not publish. She felt it was kinda ridiculous to claim that “I’m not changing” when to her I quite clearly was in the process of changing everything about myself.

But that’s cisgendered folks for ya.

Don’t feel too bad about it y’all. From birth you’ve been fed a series of deeply flawed metaphors about what it’s like to go through puberty. Which is what medical transition is… Puberty. All these “ugly duckling” tales, all these drawn-out comparisons to caterpillars turning into butterflies?

Utter fucking bullshit.

The ugly duckling is mercilessly bullied and it’s only by conforming to the standards of others that they’re seen as having worth. The caterpillar? Liquefying in its chrysalis only to emerge transformed? So, if I don’t fully realise this body into “passing womanhood” am I still the slime in the cocoon? Or just a malformed butterfly? Is the body I had before transition a “gross bug”? And what of the thing I desire to be? The pretty, yet delicate, insect who only gets to live for the briefest time?

Yeah, there’s some real heteronormative bullshit going on in there.

You want a better metaphor? How about: “Just because the earth was discovered to be round doesn’t mean it was always flat up until that moment.” Discovering the nature of the globe doesn’t mean that it suddenly shifted, tectonic plates slamming together to form the spheroid. Does a sculptor “change” a block of marble into a statue? Or do they just reveal what’s always been there? This act of “creation” isn’t the alteration from one state to another, but the shedding of things that never belonged in the first place. The better metaphor? I’m both the block of stone and the sculptor.

I’m not “changing”. I’m being rendered into existence, shedding what was never meant to be a part of me in the first place. It just looks like change to the casual observer. It just looks this way because they didn’t even know the statue existed within the stone in the first place.

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I suppose it could have just been a lack of poetic imagination on my ex-partner’s part?

I can see why she couldn’t wrap her head around this notion because I HAVE “changed” some things in the very literal sense. I dropped $40K last year to have my lower face and neck removed and reattached. The year prior, a paltry $7K to have two litres of fat siphoned out of my waist. Just last week it was $500 to get my hair done, and another $500 in about 8 weeks or so. It’ll be over $3K in hair care this year alone to say nothing of the brow waxing and lash tints, the laser treatments and skin peels.

I could go further? I could have a neovagina constructed. I could have my penis flayed and inverted. I could grind down the bones in my forehead, in my jaw. I could have my vocal folds lasered to soften my voice and raise my pitch. I could have my ribs strategically broken and set to heal in a narrower position. I could do all of this and still have someone in the street holler “That’s a man!” at me. So how much have I really changed if people refuse to acknowledge that the world is round and always has been? How can it be “change” if the experience is still fundamentally the same?

All these alterations to my body are within reach. It was the same before transition. Packed into gyms with other men, desperate to shape and craft and hone their bodies. Boys, fellas, lads… do you think this is “fitting in”? How different is that from what I’m doing now? Carving up my body and reshaping it, shedding the things I don’t want in order for the world to look at me differently?

Again, with the heteronormative bullshit.

None of that matters. It isn’t the opinions of others that define if I’ve “changed” or not. Because the truth is it will never be enough for some people. I will never be enough for them… And neither will you.

That truth? I don’t need to be enough for them.

I just need to be enough for me.

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This is why I say, “I’m not changing”. These last four years have been act of discovery, an act of rendering myself into existence, of chipping away at the block of pale marble to reveal the form within. I’m not the one who’s changing… You are. I’ve always been this, regardless of if I knew it consciously or not, regardless of if I told anyone or not. This is the truth of me from the moment I was born.

You are the one who has to change, not me.

You are the one who has to say that despite your eyes the earth is not flat, that a woman can look how I look, sound how I sound, live how I live. Despite what you’ve be told, what falsehoods you’ve been raised on, you can change.

Because I can’t change this. My god, don’t you think I tried?

I spent forty years wishing this wasn’t so. Decades spent pretending, mercilessly bullying this body into being something it wasn’t, supplicating myself to the heteronormative bullshit. These last four years have been punctuated with heartbreak and pain, with shame and fear, but they haven’t been harder than the combined weight of the decades before.

So, happy four years HRT-iversay to me.

This date is more important to me than my birthday. It’s the day I stopped denying that which already existed. It’s the day I stopped pretending. It’s the day I started asking the world to change around me and I am grateful for how much it has.

–S