You still don’t understand transition.
I’ve seen a lot of stories with a common thread.
It’ll often be a gender non-conforming person sharing their journey of self-acceptance, after a lifetime of not fitting in and even questioning their gender identity as a result…
…eventually to conclude that, no, they were never transgender, and that they wouldn’t (or even didn’t) need transition to feel whole.
I think that’s beautiful.
But there’s a selfish and nervous part of me that needs to speak as well, because I’m worried about such stories implying — intentionally or unintentionally — that nobody really needs to transition.
I want to tell my story, because my story is nothing like those.
When I was a little girl, the only dresses that bothered me were the ones with itchy fabric.
I was never “one of the boys”; in fact, I happily kept my hair well past shoulder length until my mid 20s and probably would have cried if anyone cut it shorter.
I loved playing dolls with my sister.
And I took absolutely no issue with being put into groups with other little girls, for school or summer camp or anything in between.
The “he” in me never had anything to do with external things like that.
It was much, much deeper and more insidious.
Imagine a shy and artsy little lady with hair down to her waist, dreaming up cartoon characters for herself and her siblings to play pretend with.
Without exception, I would make a female character for my sister,
… and a male character for my brother,
…and a male character for me.
Wait…what?
That was just how it happened, from snakes to sea creatures to robots to Lego people. I was ALWAYS a he in the back of my head, despite the fact that I wasn’t remotely tomboyish in real life and didn’t take the slightest issue with being called a her.
That deep, deep, incredibly deep and amorphous instinct was easy to compartmentalize as a child.
But when I learned about what puberty would entail, I was horrified, at every level both conscious and subconscious.
By the time I started high school, I hadn’t even had a first period yet. I held onto a profound relief, a profound, anticipatory grief, and an especially profound hope —
…Maybe it wouldn’t happen.
All the while, I loved the idea of picking out my homecoming dress and went through a myriad of warm and fuzzy and angsty feelings for the boys in band and Latin and calculus.
But there were always strange little quirks and strange little catches that bubbled from within.
I couldn’t wear a bra with cups; it had to be a sports bra to keep me flat. As long as my dress had a high enough neckline to cover me, I was thrilled!
I still hadn’t had a period by age 15, despite being at a healthy weight, and I REVELED in it.
I learned about MRKH syndrome, a genetic disorder causing the absence of various female reproductive organs, and I became obsessed with the hope that, somehow, I had it.
Once again, I could certainly be a she; that was totally fine as far as I was consciously concerned. But the body…
…It was
…was going to
I couldn’t even think about it. I couldn’t even prefix it with “my.”
I curated my visible femininity (the word “my” was fine there) with surgical precision and was grateful that, although the body was foreign around the edges, I could still craft a mystique all my own. And I held onto that.
Without awareness of the reasons why, I developed severe anorexia in the second half of my 10th grade year. It became my full-time job, my hobby, my entire life.
My imagination evaporated.
From that point until around my college graduation, I relapsed three times. Studying and food rituals were the ONLY things I cared about. They were the only things I had any capacity whatsoever to care about.
When I took my first job and moved to Boston in my early 20s, the change of scenery (and, especially, the freedom from academic stress) enabled my mind to quiet down again.
And then my imagination came back, too.
I would dream up the silliest and most wonderful new worlds and, once again, create entire casts of characters. This time, in addition to my siblings, I’d secretly project coworkers and friends and even my partner into them.
Meanwhile, I still adored my carefully-crafted dress collection, and I loved to get fancy for company dinners and symphony nights with said partner — a male partner, of course.
I had matured into some form of body neutrality, and I compromised with myself to maintain a healthy weight.
It was still 24/7 sports bras and, eventually, a hysterectomy at age 24 that I proudly fought tooth-and-nail for as a ‘childfree woman’.
The surgery took a weight off the entire essence of my being, but things were still muddy.
The older I got, the more vivid the characters in my head became.
The men had careers, stories, ordinary lives…
…by their world’s standards, anyway.
To be fair, it was magical.
And the female one just…existed.
Until I dared to allow a happy little accident —
and, suddenly, the floodgates within seemed to open.
This guy has a job.
This guy is tender.
This guy has a story.
This guy is a boyfriend.
This guy’s insane!
No, wait …
…This guy just wants to show up.
She had never been lacking in chutzpah,
but something was wonky. It always had been.
Like a sock seam a bit off-center from the toe, or an eternally stuffy nose.
I was she, but she is…was always…he.
I am he.
Unceremoniously, I started testosterone in secret due to this gut feeling (after half a year of specialized, weekly therapy to pick it apart , of course. The best my software money could buy.)
I wasn’t particularly excited about testosterone’s physical effects, aside from the extra muscle. I was neutral and preemptively annoyed about facial hair.
But something clicked, and some kind of mental fog lifted.
It was sudden, and it was astounding. It happened around 4 days after my first hormone injection.
I realized that I wasn’t thinking about the next meal.
I wasn’t thinking about the latest bug I needed to fix at work.
I wasn’t thinking about the next cleaning product I needed to order or the next time I wanted to sweep the floor (I am, after all, a good Czexan housekeeper).
I was just…
present.
My head was quiet, and I could feel where my arms and legs were.
It was night and day.
I came out publicly shortly afterward; there was no point in waiting around for more physical changes as originally intended.
Congruence has always been important to me, so at first, I kept my clothing entirely non-feminine to minimize ambiguity. I still wasn’t remotely masculine in preference or personality, but I couldn’t face the thought of appearing misaligned.
That’s just me I guess — black and white, rather binary,
an autist and a programmer through and through. (If I think myself so unstereotypically trans, I guess I’ll make up for it with another one.)
I didn’t touch my earrings or bracelets for a couple of years, because passing came first. But it didn’t take long for my usual, real style to happily re-emerge.
Upon this male canvas, I’ve reapplied my earrings, my bracelets, and my skinny jeans whenever I like.
Even my dresses, if only for protests.
Nowadays, I absolutely love doing drag (or at least a fun, amateur version of it) and absolutely revel in doing my femininity my way — layered playfully and haphazardly and joyously atop my own comfortable, baseline.
Because for me, it was never about fitting in.
And there was never a journey of self-acceptance —
— only, perhaps, a journey of accepting that the male self living deep within,
in vicarious, patient parallel,
was the real one all along.
The real shape.
The real, content, quiet form that my thoughts and feelings could be properly contained by.
The instinctual, physical contours and the particular chemical cocktail that, for whatever reason, I was genetically or epigenetically or prenatally meant to have. I don’t know why, and I don’t particularly care, unless it validates me somehow. As I’ve said in the past, I don’t know why I’m left-handed, either.
I had to move myself into another container to exist fully. And that correct container was brought about by my transition.
So, yes — some people still need to do it.
Transition is not what you think, and it’s not at all for the reasons you might think.
It’s so, so much deeper.
(All cute and/or cringe art featured in this story was created by the author in Google Drawings between 2019 and 2025, before, during, and after coming out.
And if anything here resonated with or surprised you, please: SHARE THIS STORY WITH OTHERS.)
