one year of popping hormones and anxiety about having my skull broke

It was my birthday last week — one whole year in this body. In late August of 2016, I wrested a script for Cyproterone, a testosterone blocker, from the doctor I was seeing. The process was actually really simple for me — I know that this is not always the case, especially south of the border or outside Toronto in less metropolitan areas. I was lucky in a lot of ways. I walked into a clinic, made an appointment and came back the following week to listen to the doc mumble about breast growth and impotence, stuff I had already read about online. A week after that I came back and was given the script, walked to a pharmacy and filled it, and popped a pill in the grungy bathroom of a hot dog restaurant. And that was that.
I was frightened at how easy it had been, thinking that there was supposed to be something more substantive involved in the process, like they were supposed to ask me about the kinds of toys I played with when I was a kid or what I fantasized about when I jerked off. For the first couple months I feared that they (the government, my doctor, the military, idk) where going to realize that I wasn’t actually trans or wasn’t actually deserving of my little pills and vials of viscous liquid, and would retract my scripts and reclaim all my drugs. Obviously that didn’t happen.
What did happen, over time, was a gradual embitterment against the world. This isn’t mentioned in any of the uplifting stories of liberating yourself from the confines of your assigned gender and embodying your true and whole self despite what the world might think. Cuz it turns out that what the world might think does actually matter, no matter how much you tell yourself that you don’t give a fuck, that only god can judge you, that you’re a rebel who doesn’t need society’s approval, whatever. Turns out human beings are social animals and you, the individual, are socially placed and socially defined and that like, literally every facet of your identity and every way you navigate the world is influenced by and immersed in the social. Heavy shit.
It kinda blows, but there’s no altering it, I mean, you can’t do the ascetic hermit thing and go all Jack Kerouac on the mountain all your life unless you have a bunch of money, but it would be really unhealthy and eventually you’d get bored or psychotic and need to get back to somewhere with people around. I don’t have any money and need near-constant attention and validation, so I go to school and go to work and go to brunch and post excessively on social media. Every day of my life, I interact with a whole bunch of people, and I’m guessing it’s the same for you. All of these people you pass by every day, from your barista handing you a cup of bean water to the instructor talking to you about Kant’s ethical theories, they all have these like opinions and constructions and preconceived notions of you. They interact with you in certain ways according to how they’ve judged you. And turns out these ways are, who could’ve guessed it, influenced by how gender is socially constructed and what the popular discourses on trans women are. Which generally suck.
A year ago, I was innocent as to how most people thought about gender and how they thought about “divergently gendered” people. I put a wig over my shaved head, threw some lipstick and eyeliner and a skirt on, and went out thinking that people would know that I was a girl. I had face stubble and chest hair and muscular arms from drumming, but based on how I was presenting I figured that people would understand what gender I was aiming for and know how to interact with me. In a way I was right, and god I do wish things could be that simple.
I did quickly learn that being read as your gender isn’t so much contingent on how you present as it is on the things that are really difficult to change, like the curve of your body and the pitch of your voice. This is a difficult realization. I didn’t start popping hormones so that people would look at how wide my hips were and realize I was a girl, I started them because I wanted boobs to play with and was tired of having so little ass that it hurt when I sat for too long. I thought that it was obvious that I was a girl because I said I was.
Having this biological location of gender slammed into you day after day makes you really skittish. Like, sure I don’t really care what Raymond the customer service representation at Tim Hortons thinks of me and my aberrant gender presentation, but it gets really frustrating when Raymond is 90% of the people you meet. It’s like water-drip torture or whatever.
And this skittishness and frustration over time develops into an obsessive need to morph your body to as close to the body of “ideal cisgendered girl” as you can get. None of us will ever get there, and most of us won’t even “pass” for cis girls unless it’s dark out and they don’t hear your voice. I probably won’t. But I want to start moving my energy into a direction of being okay with being read as trans, instead of putting it towards trying as hard as possible to not be read as trans. I want to be okay with others knowing that I’m a genderqueer person, but I’m not sure that I can get there. As Imogen Binnie muses in her novel Nevada, “is genderqueer a privileged identity that’s mostly available to female-assigned people with punk rock haircuts in college?” For most of us AMAB people, being read as genderfucks instead of cis girls frequently results in our getting thrust into dangerous situations. A few days after I started transition a man in an alleyway called me a f*ggot and then ran over to me telling me that he was going to break my skull for being a f*ggot. Like, I wouldn’t mind being a f*ggot but I’m not so keen on it when it involves having a broken skull.
So it’s an awful catch-22 where if you become comfortable with not passing you’ll probably feel a lot better about yourself and stop staring in the mirror for an hour every day wondering what’s wrong with your body. But then you might die or like, get your skull broke.
I’m hopeful that with the recent popularity of genderfuck AMAB people like Vivek Shraya and Alok Vaid-Menon people will begin to understand that we can be women without getting laser hair removal all over our bodies or needing to save up 40k for facial feminization surgery, because I’m not sure I’ll ever even have 40k. I want to be more comfortable straying from a perfect womanhood that I’ll never embody. I didn’t liberate myself from my assigned gender to be stuck in a different kind of gender rigidity. But I mean, I also don’t really want to have my skull broke by some insecure white boy.
Being a trans girl sucks, happy birthday.

