Year 35
Let’s start with a flattering selfie:
Throughout my transition I’ve been benchmarking myself and what’s been happening in my life relative to what I’ve observed from some of my trans sisters who were further along or finished transitioning at the time I started. There’s an argument to be made that you really shouldn’t do this, but I’m an engineer both by temperament and training, and engineers like to get a sanity check on things by comparing what they’re doing to what everyone else is doing. Freeman Dyson’s quip that engineers try to come up with as few new ideas as possible also comes to mind. The reason to do this is obvious: To help figure out what’s possible and what you want to do. The reason not to do this is because no two transitions are alike and you can lose your bananas making comparisons and deriving envy from them in ways that aren’t fair or reasonable.
The best way to do this would be by interacting with and building connections with trans elders in my community. Living in a relatively small college town, I’ve found this to be challenging. Instead I’ve mostly been quietly observing and taking notes on the transition stories I see on the internet, which is doubly fraught but I’m not really sure what else to do. This anonymously-posted guide on reddit has been my favorite in the genre.
The calendar year that closes today marks the period from 15 to 27 months in medical transition for me. It’s very interesting looking back and comparing the path that I’ve been on, not just the path I’m trying to follow. I don’t know how common this experience is, but it feels like this period has been a mushy end to transition, as it was for OP of that series. I’m not done making my body right, and I’m not done repairing the damage that living with dysphoria and denial did to my soul, but I am done with a lot.
The last thing I recall doing while presenting as a man was paying off one the family cars in April 2022. Even that didn’t work out in boymode when Ford ran a credit check and discovered the social security office had already updated my name to Claire. By the start of this year I’d long since stopped introducing myself by my deadname or describing myself as a father, a brother, a husband. In that sense I was fully socially transitioned. Still, my identity hadn’t caught up with the change, even if everyone around me seemed to be onboard.
That’s changed over the course of this year. It’s difficult to pinpoint where it happened because I don’t journal the way I used to, but being myself feels different now. It just feels like being me, in the most pleasantly boring way imaginable. I still get clocked sometimes, particularly in spaces where people are primed to be aware of trans folks, and that’s still just as maddening and dysphoria-inducing for me as it was in the beginning. But I’ve stopped worrying if I pass most of the time. That’s not because I’ve become comfortable with people seeing and scrutinizing the masculine features in me, it’s just because the femininity of my body and the way I carry myself through the world has developed so much this year. I just pass more, and it’s euphoric, and I’m glad that estrogen and voice training seem to have done just enough to make me marginally female instead of marginally male in the eyes of strangers.
I knocked out most of legal transition in 2022, but the name changes never seem to end. I had plenty more to take care of this year. I’m still not done, and I know updating my name in new systems will continue to be a small but present headache for me for a while. The big one I finally got done this year was my birth certificate. Arizona requires you to be “irrevocably committed” to living in your gender before you can change the name and marker on your birth certificate, and this year pushed me over the edge of being comfortable with that irrevocability, at least in the eyes of Phoenix.
The last time I can remember getting misgendered by a stranger was when I was addressed as “sir” in a drive-thru this past summer. I lived so embedded in denial about my gender for so long, it was strange how quickly the sting of getting misgendered developed and how sharply it hurt. Now that the sting is hopefully gone for good, I could not be more thankful to be on this side of all the “sirs” and “ma’ams” getting realigned and re-sorted the proper way.
The big constant looming over me mentally this year was bottom surgery. In March I got a surprise phone call from my surgeon’s office asking if I’d be available for a virtual consult that week instead of flying to Pennsylvania in July as I’d planned. It was a fun and informative conversation, and after another 8 months of hair removal I felt ready to schedule surgery. May 7 next year will be another birthday, like September 30 was a couple of years ago.
It surprised me to find how different everything felt after putting down the deposit money for surgery. Though I’ve been working on electrolysis to prepare for the last 16 months, this felt like the first truly irreversible step toward surgery. The threat of not getting my money back seems petty compared to permanent changes to my body, but brains are petty sometimes. The move from “This will happen some ambiguous future day” to “This will happen on this day and I have specific instructions to follow to get from here to there” changed something in me. I realize now how much of my desire for bottom surgery came from a place of wanting desperately to feel like a woman, and feeling like I was stuck as a different sort of person instead. Apparently this commitment has been enough to make me feel like I’ve crossed that invisible and imaginary line.
The desire in me for surgery feels different now. There’s less desperation, less of a sense of waiting for a miracle to happen, and more of a simple desire to go home. My heart has found a place to rest in womanhood, and I wait in joyful hope for this long-awaited jolt of transformation to get me the last bit there. Maybe I’ll look back in years and think that wasn’t the right way to frame things, but that’s how it feels right now.
2023 was a good year that took me from a place tenuous and uncertain in who I am to a place where I feel confident and insistent. I wish I’d gotten more done. I always wish that, but the feeling is especially acute in this liminal space I’ve found myself in my career. I wish I’d written more, managed my time better, been better to my children and the grown-ups I love. I wish those things, and I try to let go, and simply hope for another good year ahead.
