Starting testosterone was a lot like switching my mouse buttons.
Let me explain.
I am left-handed, but for most of my 20+ years of computer-using life, I had the buttons on my mouse configured in the default way. The left side button was of course the ‘left click’ for standard selections, and the right side button was the ‘right click’ — you know, to open little auxiliary menus or change the desktop background or the like.
It didn’t feel particularly wonky, despite my dominant hand sitting in a shifted position halfway off the mouse to enable my index finger to still rest on the left button. I just assumed that ‘right click’ was supposed to involve a little reach, and I didn’t tend to watch anyone else’s hands or think much of it. After all, computing tends to be a rather solitary activity, and reaching your finger another inch over isn’t acutely painful for a non-arthritic young person.
That said, it was probably age 23 or 24 when someone finally did look at my hand. My partner was introducing me to World of Warcraft, and he was patiently walking me through how to re-bind the keys and default mouse buttons to better suit my handedness and the game in general.
There was something like, ‘wait, why do you hold the mouse like that?’ and eventually, ‘oh, you know you can switch the buttons, right?’ Wait…what?
As silly as it sounds, I had no idea that this was even an option. Good enough was good enough — or it seemed to have been, until I changed the setting. It felt so natural that it was stupidly mind-blowing.
There wasn’t even a learning curve after I slid my hand over and let my fingers do the jobs the device had meant for them to do the entire time. No wonkiness, no discomfort, and, to my great surprise, no misclicks. Design is a beautiful thing when you’re designed for it, or perhaps when it’s designed for you. Either way, I felt like a happy idiot. Better late than never.
So, what on earth does this have to do with testosterone?
Well, about a week into that first dose, my state of consciousness felt — in a moment that I still remember, pondering away on a chilly Saturday walk and about three blocks from my house at the time — like it somehow switched over to the correct mouse buttons.
The passing moments (and my mind’s taken-for-granted movement through them) went from very deliberate, heavy things — like little reaches, from one thought or task to the next — to calm, airy, somehow weightless things.
Wait…what?
As with the mouse, it felt so natural that it was stupidly mind-blowing.
A biochemical weight seemed to evaporate when I was treated with the correct sex hormone for my body and brain, one that had been there for so long that I didn’t know how burdensome it was (or even that it existed, and that life wasn’t supposed to feel like a relatively monochrome hike from one thing to the next) until it was gone. For this happy idiot — passively happy, even! — it was better late than never. I couldn’t and cannot imagine going back, almost a year later at this point.
Ridiculously overdone metaphors aside, I like to think that the broader public simply isn’t aware that transition can work this way.
I sincerely hope so, anyway.
In lieu of going on with impatience and fear and frustration, I will say this: Sure, I’m quite interested in the day that science figures out exactly what makes some of us transgender (although it hasn’t exactly figured out what makes some of us left-handed, either).
But what I’d really like for science to figure out is a way to simulate the mental before and after, and to let a non-transgender person feel that for themself.
Until then, a little empathy and trust goes a long way.
