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Prism & Pen

Amplifying LGBTQ voices through the art of storytelling

This Trans Woman Drowns in a Pool Of Social Testosterone Every Summer

How I keep my transgender head above water.

3 min readSep 12, 2025

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Transitioning is always hard. Sometimes, doing it with the existing people and things in our lives makes it even harder.

If you are transitioning late in life, your transition drags your whole lifetime along with it.

Transitioning can be dominated by marriage, children, family, friends, jobs, geography, politics, religion, and finances. They all weigh in on top of the incredible internal turmoil of transgender emotions crashing around inside our heads. We then try to reconcile our gender reality against the other realities that surround us.

I am a Baby Boomer, and I have been on estradiol (female hormones) for eight years. My gender realities are intertwined. I have chosen to live my life by straddling my natural gender with the socialized gender that was forced on me at birth.

It is not perfect, nothing ever is, but it is how I have chosen to live my life, one with as much joy and happiness as I can get.

But compromising does have its pitfalls.

There are times that I feel like I am drowning in the socialized testosterone that dominates my life. The vast majority of the time, I present as male to protect…

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Prism & Pen
Prism & Pen

Published in Prism & Pen

Amplifying LGBTQ voices through the art of storytelling

Emma Holiday
Emma Holiday

Written by Emma Holiday

After decades of denial I finally answered the question “What’s wrong with me?” The answer is “Nothing”. I am transgender and I am OK.

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