Find out who you are and do it on purpose. 

DOLLY PARTON

I.
If you are my friend on Goodreads, you may have seen my reading interests shift. Somewhere in the past year, the LGBTQ tag began to appear more frequently. I read memoirs, academic tomes about queer theology, and histories. I searched my library’s catalog and realized most of the LGBT fiction was to be found in the young adult section, so off to the teen corner I went. I read romance novels that were sexy and sometimes cheesy but not heteronormative. And finally I read book after book with transgender in the title. And I cried while I read those, and then I reached for more, because here were my experiences laid out across the page. I sobbed because it turns out there were words for what I felt, there was a whole system of language that could articulate and explain what I’ve known as long as I can remember but never knew how to express. I cried because there was the proof that there were other people like me, that I wasn’t alone, and that I wasn’t broken. I was just transgender.

II.
Transitioning is a very odd thing, because it is something intensely personal and private, but it happens in public. I have half a dozen versions of this post sitting in my drafts folder, because I didn’t know what I wanted to tell you. I’ve written about very personal things on this blog, but always in a measured and curated way, with a narrative I shaped myself, generally after a lot of processing. I believe in speaking truth, telling stories, and breaking silences. But when it came to this post, I didn’t know what that would look like.

I could write about how I was still in elementary school the first time I realized I was different, and just how quickly different was internalized as deviant and shameful. How I always felt like I was on the outside looking in, that there was always something separating me from other people. Or how hellish puberty is when your body changes in ways you desperately don’t want it to but can’t control–and for that matter, how pregnancy was even worse. I could write about just how much energy I spent on policing myself and trying to perform femininity in socially acceptable ways, and how I never could make that feel like anything other than pretend. I could write about the studies that estimate that 41% of trans people try to kill themselves—that’s at a rate nine times higher than cis people—and how I fit in those statistics. Or what it’s like to look in the mirror and not recognize yourself, what it’s like to be so disassociated from your physical self because the alternative is just too much to bear. Or maybe I could write about how lonely I have been and how often I prayed to be normal, to somehow be not-me, and how that wish was never granted. Because all of that is true, and I have so many stories of heartbreak, pain, and self-loathing I could tell you. There is a reason most of the trans narratives you know are narratives of trauma.

I hesitate, though, because it’s not the whole story, and not even the most important part. I’d much rather write about how realizing I was trans took away so much of the anguish that was a daily and normalized part of my life, and gave me so much peace. How it made me finally believe I am perfectly and wonderfully made just as I am, to use the psalmist’s words. And how my husband told me I was glowing when he picked me up after my first masculine haircut, and just how indescribably amazing gender euphoria is when all you’ve known is dysphoria. I’d rather write about how I am still me, that if anything, I am more me than I used to be. How friends have told me they can see what this is doing for me and how much more comfortable with myself and happy I seem. And how I know transitioning isn’t exactly an easy process, particularly in this political climate, but compared to living the rest of my life in the body I had, it’s absolutely the easier option. I’d rather write about how for the first time in my life, I make sense to myself. To appropriate Yeats’ poem, the center can hold. For the first time in my life, things are not falling apart, the center holds. I’d much rather write about that.

III. 
The observant reader may have noticed a name change in the header of this blog. I’m slowly switching names and pronouns; though I don’t dislike my birth name, it also no longer feels like me, and I have chosen a new one, Mees. There’s a story behind that too–one of many new stories I have to share. Ask me and maybe I’ll tell you sometime.

IV. 
In April, I found myself in an exam room at a hospital clinic in San Francisco, learning to inject myself with testosterone. I walked out of that clinic in a daze, with a new hormone in my body and a prescription in my hand so I could give myself weekly shots going forward. I don’t remember much of the drive home, honestly, my head spinning with the reality of what I had just done. This was happening; I was transitioning.

That night, as I was brushing my teeth, tired and not thinking of anything much in particular, an unfamiliar feeling crept up on me. It took me a while to figure out, but I finally realized that what I was feeling was happiness, an equilibrium, a tiny bit of feeling at home in myself. I cried then, too, because I didn’t know I could feel that way. That, I think, is what I want you to know, and the story I want to leave you with. I’m 32 years old and I finally feel like a whole person, in a way I couldn’t even have imagined when I was 7 or 15 or 28 years old. I finally feel like me.