An eleven-year retrospective, written in advance.
[cw for an experience with a wildly incompetent gender therapist; relatedly, transmisogny. sexuality/genitalia mentioned briefly!]
I've talked about my impending Testosterone Adventure before, of course.
But I kind of just wanna sit and look back in the direction of me, 23 years old, and feel the part where I'm meeting back up with that iteration of myself. Holding my hand, crossing the threshold we dithered on for so many years.
The part where I started considering testosterone came at a bad time, or maybe came because of a bad time. 2015. The Trans Tipping Point itself - the beginning of discussions of 'social contagion', the endless newspaper headlines. Tumblr wasn't much better, what with the truscum/tucute wars and the freshly introduced neopronouns creating a perpetual tug-of-war between those declaring me so heckin' valid and those declaring people like me a 'trender'.
Looking back, I'm really not sure what tripped me over from being a gleeful little imp into an anxious perseverating wreck. I know the point where it started! I know the part where I sat in the bathtub thinking, 'I wish anyone would see me how I see myself, but I don't think many people will.'
It sort of snowballed out from there?
There was a lot of muddiness, at 23, about who the allure of testosterone would be serving. Did I actually want it, or did I just want to be immunised against the Discourse? Did I just want to force observers closer to seeing me as something other than An Girl? Why did I want that, anyway?
I'm really glad I didn't attempt to pursue anything back then, because pretty much every choice I was making was about trying to avoid shame. I was so ashamed of everything I wanted and everything I didn't want - bounced back and forth between trying to be Properly Trans and trying to be Properly A Girl. Shame is a bad substrate for growth, funnily enough.
(I'd also not figured out the kinda-sorta-plurality situation yet. There were lots of tortured blog posts about feeling like I was in a tug-of-war between alternate versions of me over what to do with the host body. A recurring refrain was that I felt like I needed two bodies or more, so then I could just have my cake and eat it. Which could mean nothing!)
There was also this idea, lodged firmly in me, that I needed to figure out the Truth of myself. If I was going to make a permanent choice (because of course, the choice is permanent), I needed to be Sure. I was obsessed with avoiding a scenario where anyone could think it meant something. ('It' would alternate between wanting it or not wanting it.)
...anyway, that continued for [checks watch] six or so years?? I alternated the whole time between fascination and repulsion at the idea of altering myself hormonally. The repulsion was largely made of fear of regret - again, it was the 2010s and early 2020s. Detransition narratives were eeeeeverywhere. I looked at all those bitter, angry, self-hating articles and tweets and blog posts and went, 'oh god, I don't want that to be me', as if it could ever have been me!
But what if it was, right? What if, what if, what if.
What if I took testosterone and it ruuuiiinneedd my liiiifeee. What if everyone saw the badge of shame that was me having started and then stopped? That I changed my mind? Everyone would know.
Even if I wasn't some bitter TERFY bastard crowing about my butch regret, I'd be a Failed Trans, somehow. I really did believe this. It felt like fact - that anything short of being able to make a full commitment to Transitioning(TM) must mean I never really felt any of it.
I kept on furtively applying Wyrm's mascara to my peach fuzz when she was at work, making photo-edits of myself, fixating and ruminating on how it made me feel. I read detransitioners' blogs as a sort of compulsive mental self-injury. I got skinny again, alternated between delight that I was achieving functional androgyny and a sort of sickly discomfort with how much effort it required and how it felt like a costume.
You know, there was a point where I did sincerely consider starting low-dose T back then! Brought it up, tentatively and wretchedly, to Wyrm, and everything. I didn't go through with it, though.
See, I started gender therapy and the first person I talked to, uh. Was not. Great.
When I brought the thought up, all her questions focused on the idea of what if I still wanted to present femininely? She very much implied - stated, even - that if I did want that, the effects of T wouldn't be things I wanted to combine with it. I still remember her saying that I wouldn't want to wear a dress with 'hairy gorilla arms', which, first of all, holy fucking transmisogyny????
Second of all, excuse you, what if I did want to be femme and fuzzy? Why in the world should hairy arms preclude me from wearing dresses?
However; I simply did not have a developed enough sense of self to give the 'excuse me, what on earth do you mean by that???' that present-day me would. Instead, I just kind of shrunk. I was being told that I had incompatible desires within myself. It confirmed what I felt and feared: I only got to be one thing. My options were Girl and Man. I was once again failing out of the transmasculinity I was supposed to presumably exhibit.
While I quit that therapist and complained about her immediately, and my second one was far more supportive and reasonable (also not cis, so that helped), the damage had already been done. And unfortunately my second gender therapist didn't quite hone in on the right stuff - before we talked about hormones, we should've been unpicking the shame. I sort of just spun in circles with her for a year or two, but in retrospect I would've got on with her really well if I were seeing her now. She was very open about having not changed her legal name because she didn't hate it, was always reminding me that I Could Just Try Things. It was just, I guess, too soon for me to be getting encouraged.
Unexpectedly, in 2017...D&D helped. A lot?? First by getting to fully escape the baggage of my body to inhabit an underdeveloped teenage tiefling, and then Julian who became a comfy pair of slippers and dressing gown to my soul. I thought less about me and more about them. Every week or two, I fully got to leave my body behind and put theirs on, and get to feel at home in various shapes. I guess it also helped gender become a playground again. I could be a girl for the evening, and a man for the evening, and come home to being whatever I was but still thinking about them and thinking about them and thinking about them.
Besides, being a transmutation wizard felt good. Wish fulfillment.
I also made my goblinsona around this time - finally stopped bothering trying to depict myself in a way that looks at all like I do, and started doing it in a way that I *feel*. Little by little, I allowed myself room to depict myself in the kind of androgyny that would be my dream: still shaped much like myself (although I do, and will, continue to omit my chest) but Fuzzy, but Hairy, and with noteworthily more substantial junk.
Which could mean nothing, of course.
I'm really glad I suddenly realised shame was the whole problem circa 2021. Things picked up rapidly, but I also kind of went, 'ah, that whole thing was me being ashamed to Exist without Permission'. I wrote off hormones, because obviously Gender Hell Socket had just been desperate for legitimacy which had been within them the whole time. After all, I like my body! After all, I definitely figured out I don't want top surgery because I will not willingly relinquish nipple sensation. All I needed was to unapologetically exist.
So I did that! I changed my name, at long last after bouncing between failed attempts for five or so years. I finally kicked she/her out of my accepted pronouns and felt intensely relieved. I stopped attempting to affect masculinity and just accepted that the pool of people who'd see beyond my tiny, chubby, thick-thighed body was a small one. Misgendering started to hurt less the less I did it to myself. I shamelessly appropriated traditionally-boylike honorifics and styles of address.
I accepted that in a perfect world, I'd be able to shapeshift - but I've got what I've got.
And yet, and yet. Especially as I spent more time in queer, kinky circles, I found myself noticing the traits I made grabby hands in my heart at. As I reclaimed my long-banished sexuality circa 2023, I followed a lot of queer and trans nsft blogs. I saw bodies I wished mine looked like. Deltas of soft-looking chest hair, happy trails, well-furred thighs.
Any time I got ill, I felt what can only be described as euphoria over that day-one-sickness huskiness. I'd be at home just talking to myself to hear the expansion of my lower range, and once it left me, I'd miss it so badly. I've always loved it, whenever it happened I'd be talking, singing, making sound just to enjoy the resonance my lightly yucky vocal cords could suddenly produce. (Anecdote: one time at youth club aged 16, a friend of mine heard me with Oncoming Cold voice and asked me - in earnestness that belied that she had herself forgotten this was not a possibility - if my voice was dropping. Sheer glee.)
I guess at some point I realised that it didn't even have to be about gender. My whole problem, for so long, was the idea that I needed special clearance to be able to justify fucking about with the ol' endocrine system. I had to really, Really want it. I had to be capital-D dysphoric. And I wasn't. So I couldn't.
All I was, was curious. Fascinated. Compelled.
Genuinely, I'm not sure when the switch flipped into, 'this could be for me'. So many components have led me here.
Part of it, I think, was getting on antidepressants. It's been a rough couple of years - but a surprising side-effect of turning the volume down on the Call of the Void is the other thing it turned down: the heat of the Gender Thoughts Oven. Granted the ability to touch the contents bare-handed, without descending into sickly anxiety and self-consciousness...
...turns out, I wanted to think about it. Liked thinking about it, even.
Honestly, one of the things I noticed that really settled the decision for me was how I approached the matter in my dreams. Top surgery dreams were always fraught and weird and sick with push-pull and doubt, focused firmly on the Bad Ending, of losing more than I gained. By comparison, there was a throughcurrent to the T dreams. And that throughcurrent was that the way those dreams worked was that I’d have a friend willing to share, or I’d find some long-lost in the cupboard from a time when I never went through with it. I’d be talking to a therapist who told me then and there she could prescribe for me.
In those dreams, what I always felt was excitement. It was like being handed a little treat. ‘Can I really?’ was the reaction. ‘Ooh, if you’re offering,’ was the reaction. ‘Oh wow, I forgot I had this - that’s fun!’ was the reaction.
It's also helped now having friends who've walked this path and back again, and who are glad to have made the journey. It's spending more time around transfeminine folk who have made it so much harder to spin myself a What If I Regret It narrative with their existence. It's being reminded that I can, in fact, just give it a go if I'm curious! It's realising that the mistake I was making the whole time was trying to figure out what a theoretical future me would want 'in the end', and not paying any attention to present me.
Present me wants to try it. Present me knows it probably won't be long-term! But if future me decides to keep going, that's future me's prerogative.
Looking back, yes, shame was the issue. But it was also the specific shame-behaviour of looking to everyone else to tell me what I 'should' do. Both in reality and in theory - be that the reddit posts warning that you don't get to pick and choose, or constantly looking for approving or disapproving reactions to my every action or wondering.
It's really, really nice to arrive here, take the hands of myself-eleven-years-ago, and say, 'the only thing that ever mattered is what you wanted. We can do what we want, if people like it or not'. We're allowed to just try things. We don't have to know everything in advance.
Did you know that when you're not trying to do everything Right, you can just be excited to be trying?
I'm so, so excited to try this. I like that it doesn't have to mean anything other than what it means to me.
What it means to me is a gift to the 15-year-old whose mother told them that 'shaving makes your hair grow back darker' and who immediately shaved their tummy.
What it means to me is the compromise I was looking for the whole time with the 'un-boy in the mirror' I used to write about.
It means that I know I've always wanted bottom growth and I'll feel hotter and more Like I Ought To Be if I pursue it.
It doesn't mean 'masculinity'. Hell, I don't know if I even consider this to be transition the way 23-year-old Socket was fixated on whether or not they wanted to transition. It's just an exploration. It's staking a claim on my own body, it's the closest to shape-shifting I'm going to get, and it's nothing to do with how anyone else sees me.
It's just that I've been putting a little goatee on my Mii for like, fifteen years. I draw traits onto myself that I don't have, because they make it look like I feel. And I don't know if T will give me those things.
But I'm finally in a place to go, 'Let's find out....' :3c
So let’s go find out!!!!!
