Content Warnings: Adult language, dysphoria, transphobia, transphobic portrayals of trans people in media, 4chan, homophobia, pornography, suicide , talk of sexuality, and anatomy

< The One-Year Post

The Four-Year Post>

The last year since I’ve written about my transition has been a very, very active one, and quite different than the year that preceded it. With COVID not quite so “defeated” but rather, more an unfortunate part of modern life, there has been a return to appearing in public. No longer is my transition something that happens purely in private, rather it has become something that is, that I celebrate each time I step outside or I make the decision to put on makeup or not. I am, and always will be, “trans”, but over the last year I’ve been growing into other labels as well.

Maybe I didn’t expect it to be so quick, you know? I thought “trans” was going to be everything about me for years and years, possibly the rest of my life. At one point it seemed like I had an infinite number of things to say about the experience. Now? It’s feeling mundane.

And I think that’s a good thing?

It’s normal now for me. I just am who I am.

That’s probably why, in a rare act of decent foresight, I decided to do the thing where I doubled the time in between each update on my transition. You won’t be getting another one of these updates from me again until 2024. I sure some of you are thrilled at the prospect.

The last years has brought many changes, most of them personal, some are physical, others social. I still call myself “Nick” from time to time out loud, though I rarely think it, which I find to be rather backwards. But progress is progress and I’m making it!

Full Steam Ahead

When we left off last year, I had been on patches for a while, had started progesterone, and was recovering from the switch from spiro to bica Since then there have been a few changes on the HRT front. Actually, a lot of changes. The last year has seen significant changes to my HRT regimen, but it has all been for the better in my perspective.

Firstly, I’ve switched from patches to an estradiol cream. The patches were not getting me the levels I needed and they were a pain in the ass to apply and keep on. They’re great, I suppose, if you’re a homebody or not very active, but I was active back then and remain so now. The dosage of the cream got bumped a few times during the last year, and while my levels were very promising, we’re waiting for another blood check that will happen a few days after this is posted before making any more changes.

Secondly, another big increase, was upping my progesterone from 100mg a day to 200mg. Progesterone has really been helpful for me, both from a feminization standpoint but also the improvements to mood modulation and just how much better my sleep has been. It’s so weird to be sitting here having gotten a year where most of my sleep was really fucking good. That alone. Fuck. That alone is worth it.

Lastly, on the HRT side, I’ve been taken off bica!

“But Niamh,” you might be asking, “Don’t you need an anti-androgen to combat all the testosterone you make?”

Why yes, reader-being-used-as-a-rhetorical-device, I did have to take an anti-androgen to combat all the testosterone I used to make. Here’s were it gets fun – I don’t make testosterone anymore, so I don’t need to take bica.

“Well doesn’t that mean…?”

Yep! I had my orchiectomy in June! I no longer have testes so it’s not a problem. Funny enough, it took both my surgeon and my GP insisting that I can stop bica for me to finally stop it about a week and a half after my surgery. And even after they both did I still finished up the week. There was a legit fear of backsliding after the disaster of last year.

The surgery itself went super smoothly. The recovery was actually shockingly easy. I have said this to people, but I’ll repeat it here – the recovery from my orchiectomy was significantly easier than the recovery from my vasectomy, which was already pretty easy. Pain was minimal and I only took a small fraction of my prescribed painkillers (just high-doses of otc painkillers, nothing unsavory). I was walking the same evening of the surgery and was even at a DCFC game four days later.

The orchiectomy has done its job as far as I am aware (writing this before my blood test). Despite not taking bica, I am noticing no backsliding at all. In fact, it’s only been progress.

The Changes

The last year has been amazing.

I’ve put on a not insignificant amount (roughly 10lbs) of weight. It’s almost entirely been fat. My breasts have gone from a healthy B to being a prominent (but low-volume) DD. Generally a C or D cup bra works perfectly fine, but the simple bust minus underbust method says I’m a DD. Growth has come in spurts, but the longest lasted from August of last year until like April~May of this year. Since then breast sensitivity has been down and nipple pain nonexistent.

Even if this was the end, and I saw no more growth here on out (and I doubt that, given that like last year, I’m noticing the inklings of the return of growth pains), I’d be extremely happy. I got far more than I was told to expect and so I have not really been considering breast augmentation the way I had even just a year ago.

My bursting bust is probably the most noticeable of the changes but there have been others.

Hair changes have continued. Laser and electrolysis have made it so that after a close shave my face is practically shadow-free and super smooth. I am continuing both of those, though laser is certainly coming to an end (for now, more on that), so there’s more of an emphasis on electrolysis. More than once the results of concentrated electrolysis has left in (good) tears – watching a particularly bad patch of shadow just vanish under the careful eye of my trusted tech.

Staying with my head, I have seen, especially since the orchi, a noticeable filling out of hair on my old hairline. It’s legit amazing to slowly and steadily see more and more. Plus now my hair is super long and luxuriously soft. I love it so much. I have a problem with twirling it in my fingers or running my hand through it throughout the day.

On my body hair has continued to thin and grow lighter. My chest is far from hairless, but it’s a soft, white fuzz like on any woman. Same with my tummy. My thighs are still catching up with that and I’ve even noticed bald patches on my calves, which is legit shocking. My arms are still pretty hairy, but I’ve also never really let it grow out far enough to know what they’re like any more. Overall, though, I shave so, so much less. It’s a euphoria found in not doing something.

My libido had been pretty crazy over the last year. I’m not sure it was the bica… but I’m pretty sure libido on bica is different than libido on spiro and my libido now. My libido is now fully driven by estrogen and progesterone and it’s wild. I absolutely love it. Erections are effectively a thing of the past now. They were possible and happened on bica, but with zero testosterone, I just can’t do it anymore.

I don’t think men truly understand what they’re missing. I don’t think I’ll ever trade back. Testosterone horniess sucked. Testosterone orgasms sucked. Estrogen horniess is everything I could ever want. I love the feeling of butterflies that explodes across my chest when I have naughty thoughts or when a partner is telling me what they’re going to do to me. Thinking about kisses, even, melts me. I love that it’s mental. I love that there’s no shitty erection. I love that I get wet, actually. Is it exactly the same as if I had a vagina? No. But it is waaaay different from a simple erection.

The one constant over the last two years is just how amazing it all is. You rub a cream into your thighs once a day and take a pill at night and BAM your body does the rest. I want to emphasize that before the next section that yes – this has all been my own body so far.

Where to Next?

My next update for this series in the blog is two years away, a lot can change in two years and I do have some plans, though they are not fully concrete yet. Obviously I’ll still be on HRT, that’s never going to end, so if nothing else, there will be plenty of changes with regards to more boobs, more ass, more thighs. But as I alluded to at the end of the previous section, I’m starting to bump against the limits of what HRT can accomplish and what I want done. And that means surgeries.

I mentioned that while laser might be wrapping up for my face, it’s probably not done. Well, that has to do with prep for bottom surgery. I still need to have a consultation with my tech, but the plan would be to begin hair removal down there in prep for the bigger surgery. It takes about a year to clear off all the hair and it would require getting used to shaving places I’ve yet to shave.

In my last update, I emphasized that I did not want bottom surgery, so clearly something has changed. Honestly, I can’t really tell you what. The orchi might’ve helped. One of the first things I did once the pain was gone and the swelling under control was tuck myself into a gaff and throw on some panties. The feeling of having a nearly perfectly flat front was exhilarating. I can’t really describe it. But seeing it made me realized how badly I wanted it.

Over the last few years I’ve been waffling between no surgery at all and vulvaplasty. Vulvaplasty is a form of bottom surgery where the exterior vulva and clitoris are made, but the vagina itself is not. Sometimes this is referred to as a “zero depth” surgery as penetration is not possible.

But a niggling feeling has been creeping up, and that has set me on a new path mentally and physically – I kinda want to get fucked? Like, still by women, but I really need to get bent over a table. Anal isn’t really a thing for me for a couple of reasons, so if I want to get fucked, I need a vagina – that’s just the long and short of it.

Since I’ve had the orchi, though, there’s a little less to do for the vaginoplasty (creation of both the vulva and vagina), but it’s a seriously major surgery, requiring disability time to recover. The whole process is equal parts amazing miracle of science and gruesome testament to surgical wonders. I’ve now had a few friends go through both forms of the surgery at a variety of places so I’m using that to collect data points. I’ll almost certainly stay local for the surgery, though travelling is not unheard of for this surgery.

Waiting times and approval periods are usually measured in months going into years, so hopefully for the two-year post I’ll have an update on that front and hopefully be entirely don with it!

There is one other surgery that I’ve been contemplating and honestly it feels much more optional – facial feminization surgery (FFS). Many trans women seek out FFS to contour the face permanently for a more feminine look. Usually this means reduction of the nose, reduction of the brow, reshaping the jawline, and shaving down the Adam’s apple (among other things).

I’m not fully sold on FFS and if I did, I probably wouldn’t get the whole package, rather just work on specific things. I’d want subtle changes, not radical, and admittedly, I don’t really care for the usual package that seems to be sold to trans women. Firstly, because I think I’m pretty damn hot as-is. Secondly, there’s a certain aspect to my queerness that I’m not really interested in erasing, as weird or self-sacrificing as that might sound.

One’s relationship with their queerness is not a universal thing. We each experience it differently. Part of my experience is as simple as owning the phrase I am queer. And part of that is that I look queer. While I think that I passed through peak trans-ness back in 2021, I’m not sure I’d enjoy going fully stealth. Maybe that will change as things get dicier for trans people, but my goal has and remains being true to me.

All that said, I will admit the idea of getting FFS and passing ever-so-slightly more is tempting. Say nothing of the omnipresent pressure on women to conform to social beauty standards. I spend a non-zero amount of time considering things like the fat on my tummy, or how big my nose is, or how prominent my Adam’s apple might be, and how they make me look to the outside world without considering how they make me feel.

In the end, I am queer. There’s no doubt about it. And it’s not just about being trans, it’s all the letters I’ve collected over the last few years.

The Rainbow Experience

One thing I wanted to focus on in this update was that I am more than trans. Yes, being trans is a massive part of my life, how can it not be, but it is not my life. It is not me in my entirety. I am more than trans. Hell, I am more than queer, but that’s for a different time and blog post.

For folks who fall into multiple boxes within the LGBT+ rainbow, there can be a pressure to adopt one. Like you’re trans first and lesbian second, or aroace first and an enby second. Or do you really need all those labels? You’re just collecting them for attention! You’re just trying to be trendy! And no, absolutely wrong. Apply this to anything outside of the queer community and it falls apart. Oh so you’re a man and you’re white? Come on, dude, pick one. Oh, so you’re Christian too? Wow. Trend surf much?

I have three main labels: I’m trans gendered (the gender I was assigned at birth does not match my gender identity), I’m a lesbian (I am a woman* attracted to other women*). And I am polyamorous (I prefer multiple, open intimate relationships). Each of these labels is a part of me, inseparable. None of them come with increased support or understanding from broader society. In fact, of the three, only one is even value neutral. Two of them carry quite a bit of baggage and can be difficult to unpack, even with queer friends.

* Yes, I will get there.

A phrase I’ll have to define is homonormativity, which is a play on the phrase heteronormativity. “Normativity” is about the assumptions that we make regarding what is default or what is normal. Things that fall outside of normativity are thus not default or not normal. It is not a small leap then when what is default is considered “good” or “right” or “natural” while that which falls outside of the default is “bad” or “wrong” or “unnatural”. Normativity plays into everything, not just topics of queerness. We can consider who is and is not considered “default” or “normal” when we consider how we approach accessibility, for instance.

For example, ADHD is really only an issue because we’ve built a society around a school and work environment that requires long stretches of intense, unbroken focus. ADHD is natural in that it naturally occurs in humans, capitalism is unnatural in that it is a social construct invented by humans. Yet normativity frames capitalism as the natural order and thus ADHD as a disorder.

Homonormativity, then, is an extension of heteronormativity – arguing that monogamous homosexual partnerships are equally valid as monogamous heterosexual partnerships, while doing little to argue for gender identity rights, or rights of polygamous folks. It is a facet of respectability politics, thinking that if you act “normal enough”, you can have rights. Respectability politics in the queer community looks like upper-class, usually white, monogamous couples who think that marriage rights are the final stop and want to move out to the suburbs to get a house with a white picket fence and have two-point-five children.

This will not work in the long run. The cracks are already showing. There exists no number of other queer people that anyone can push under the bus that will guarantee our rights. Heteronormativity never ceded any ground. You aren’t normal just because you’re cis. You have to be cis and hetero. Then you’re normal. But only if you follow all the other rules that our society erects.

Perhaps it doesn’t need to be said, but I am trans gendered. If you hadn’t put that together, then, um… welcome to the finish line, every race has a horse in last. Today that is you. When I tell people I am trans I get a variety of reactions, some positive, some neutral, some negative, some negative but pretending to be positive. Actually, I get a lot of that last sort.

A lot of folks react with “whatever makes you happy” or “I don’t care what two people do in bed”. For the former, there’s a certain dismissiveness, the normativity, that seeps in. “Sure whatever, just do it over there.” The missing second half of the refrain is, “…and doesn’t bother me.” And that happens. My existence can and will eventually bother them, and then their support evaporates. The later is completely missing the point, being trans gender is not about what I do in bed.

It’s who I am.

And so when someone says this, no matter what they mean by it, it’s normativity – “I am normal, you are a subcategory on pornhub.” The implications cannot be heavier. Because when someone sees you as a category on a porn site, they’re already convinced that you’re a problem. Step out of line and they will need to erase you. And the line is thin and constantly moving. Step over it and suddenly even the most progressive liberal is nodding contemplatively as literal fascists call you a pedophile.

We’re a useful wedge that way. Paint us as an easy target to hate, get all the centrists and liberals concerned about midterms, and then watch as they abandon us.

And that sometimes happens within the queer community too. HER – a queer women’s dating app that was made to include trans women receives tremendous hate from transphobes. Tinder too, you learn to pick up on the quiet exclusion. “Females” is usually a giveaway, a favorite dog whistle of lesbian TERFs. “Proud Gryffindor” is another, though just Harry Potter in general is usually a sign.

So no, I don’t think that coming out as trans has helped me be more popular or accepted. It certainly wasn’t chasing a trend. It didn’t even help make me more popular with segments of the LGBT+ community!

One question that pops up time and time in trans spaces is “I’m a trans [gender] but I like [same gender], am I gay?” This question exists because at some level the person asking the question has internalized transphobia. They are articulating the disconnect between their gender and being associated as that gender. But the answer is pretty straightforward – yes, if you’re a trans man who likes men, you’re gay; if you’re a trans woman who likes women, you’re a lesbian.

My sexuality has been in a bit of a crisis lately.

Well, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration. I’m a lesbian, there’s no question about that, but as I hinted with my asterisk a section or two back there’s more going on under the hood. I’ve suggested in previous updates that I leaned somewhat pan, and I’m not going to walk that back entirely, I definitely can feel some sexual attraction to some men, especially a specific slice of feminine men. But my romantic attraction to men is zero. “Pansexual but homoromatic” is the usual refrain.

I actually get a lot of schtick for this. I’m apparently not lesbian enough, which I find rather hysterical. I literally crossed a gulf of gender to be a lesbian, fuck off with the gatekeeping.

The asterisk is that the question “What is a lesbian” has a lot of answers and some of them are complicated because we live in a cisheteronormative patriarchy. The answer “a woman who is sexually involved with other women” is an answer. But it’s not the answer. On the other extreme you have “non-men who love non-men”. That is another answer, but I refuse to say that it is the answer.

Because in the end, the real lesbians were the people we ate out in dive-bar bathrooms along the way.

Okay, but seriously. Strict definitions of any queer label start to sound like cishet bullshit, obsessed with genitals and how they are squished together. Broad strokes, don’t get lost in the details. Focusing on sex erases asexual folks. Focusing on romance erases aromantic folks. Focusing on genitals erases trans folks. Focusing on gender erases non-binary folks. How about, instead, we listen to the people who approach us in good faith?

Why am I a lesbian and not pansexual? Or omnisexual (as was pointed out to me by a friend)? Because in the end those labels don’t matter to me as much, don’t speak to me as deeply, and do not fill me with the sense of community and pride the way that “lesbian” does. That’s what makes me a lesbian.

Honestly, though, if pressed which of my three labels I have the most trouble talking about, and it’s going to be polyamory (quick aside: I fall in the group of folks that uses “polyam” instead of “poly” as the abbreviation, as “poly” is often used by the Polynesian community and that sort of thing matters to me). Firstly, it’s the label that’s the newest to me and thus there’s a certain level of learning I need to go through first. Secondly, it just is the one I feel the least empowered to talk about even within the queer community. There’s a lot of internalized phobia there. It’s definitely not feeling “normal” to me yet, though it definitely feels right.

Polyamory, for the those not in the know, is sometimes referred to as “ethical” or “consensual” non-monogamy. While the general perception is that additional partners are sexual in nature, I will use the term “intimate” as there is more to it than sex, though that can definitely play a part. For me, there is a focus on building multiple intimate partnerships outside my marriage. These partnerships include an emotional aspect, the same as any partner, and have both over-lap and uniqueness to them. The result is not that you “divide” your love, that’s not really possible, but you spread out the pressure you exert as you accept pressure from others.

No longer is one partner responsible for everything. And thus where a partner might not be able to provide, whether because of personal choice or circumstance the others step in. If anything, it has helped me, even in such a short amount of time, improve my relationship, especially my relationship with Brigid, in pretty drastic ways. When you are no longer expecting everything from someone, their limits are no longer “negatives”, they are simply the personal boundaries of a complex human being with their own needs.

The set up looks different for everyone and there’s a lot of cute terminology I’m still getting my head around. As of writing, I have Brigid (wife) and two potential partners, though I don’t think anything is official-official yet, though by the time this is published things might’ve changed. I’ve gone on one date (it was very lovely) and have another one coming up that will be over by the time this posts.

Compersion is the feeling of joy at the happiness your partner(s) get from romance and sex from other people. It is, in a way, the opposite of jealousy and is a feeling that I have been training myself on. At least one of my potential partners has partners of their own, and it’s comforting in a way, to know that I am not alone in supporting this person, and yes – joyous even in the happiness they show from interacting with those other partners.

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not even saying that I’ve mastered it. Just that it intrinsically makes sense to me.

But chatting with other queer folks, there can be a real rift. It’s fractal, the discussion of queerness not being about sex. We spend so much time trying to convince larger society that it isn’t a sex thing, that it isn’t a fetish, whether that’s being gay, or being trans, but now the fight is against a much bigger institution – monogamy – and the discussion is now within the queer community itself. Homonormativity has us worried that if something is a “sex thing”, it’ll harm the movement.

And here’s the problem – it’s okay if it’s a sex thing. We as a society need to be okay with that. Yes, I am trans for more reasons than sex. Yes, I am a lesbian for more reasons than sex. Yes, I am polyam for more reasons than sex.

But I’m also all those things for sex. I’m sick of pretending otherwise.

Like I’m some chaste little nun going through labels and stuff. Sex is better in my body as a trans woman. Sex is better when I approach it from the lens of being a lesbian. Sex is better when I can share my needs and desires with enthusiastic partners and not just string along one poor person.

Being embarrassed about sex and our relationships to it is really fucking hurting our society. Sex is an amazing thing, but folks are so dead-set on being fucking embarrassed by it. Stop it. Seriously. We can’t have conversations about having it. We can’t have conversations about not having it. We can’t have conversations about who we do it with or why we do it at all. Cishet society looks down at having sex then also finds asexuality so foreign as to literally be incomprehensible. Like, folks, sex is great, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. And it doesn’t need to be deeper than that!

If you’re reading this, I want you to consider who you feel comfortable talking to about sex and why. Who do you feel uncomfortable talking to about sex and why. Consider also if people are comfortable coming to you to talk about sex. If they are, why do you think that is; if they aren’t why do you think that is?

More than intimate partners, what about your friends? What about people you share discord servers with? What are your lines and boundaries?

I’m not asking that the world change overnight or even that you, dear reader, change overnight (or at all), but I want you to at least consider that level of comfort and interrogate the why.

Two Years

I suspect that over the next two years I will have plenty to say about being trans, about being a lesbian, and about being polyam. Probably enough to make more posts about it. This last year has been pretty crazy, and I expect that the next two will be even crazier. So much is happening and changing. I can’t possibly not talk about it. I hope that when I post again in 2024 I’ll have a new set of genitals and have had a bunch of crazy sex that I can talk about here.

I also hope to keep having those conversations outside of this blog. In person, on discord, wherever. Please feel free to reach out. I’d love to talk to folks about any of this, especially if you’re questioning if you fit into any of these labels!

The next few years are going to be especially critical for queer people, as it will be for women in general and people of color as well. The precipice of fascism looms over us all. My previous post, as I had suspected, had pulled some folks out of their comfort zone and they confronted me by saying the post-Roe world we live in now wasn’t coming. That I wasn’t being a good enough “pick me”. That their support of me was conditional on my silence and coöperation with fascism and did not extend to queer people in general.

This isn’t that kind of blog and I’m not that kind of trans person.

I end this post once again with a call for us all to consider how we can be accomplices and not just allies. In the struggle against patriarchy. Against white supremacy. Against imperialism and settler states. Against queerphobia. Against fascism and authoritarianism. A better future is possible.

Signing off in solidarity, cheers!

Content Warnings: Adult language, dysphoria, transphobia, transphobic portrayals of trans people in media, 4chan, homophobia, pornography, suicide , talk of sexuality, and anatomy

< The Six-Month Post

The Two-Year Post>

It’s an honest question. I had never considered it before, that might’ve been the privileged of having been assigned male at birth, but changing my name was not something that was ever seriously on the table for me. Even when I considered going through the legal process of having it recognized – the same process I’ve only just finished, it was only going to be to the nickname that literally everyone already called me.

How long does it take to forget your name? The name you had been using for more than thirty years?

It is hard to say, but a year in, I’ve gone from constantly perking up at it, to “only” having a strange semi-conscious bias toward it. I remember having gone by it at some point in my past, but it’s becoming nebulous, tenuous, even. And then, one morning, after spending an hour explaining how to spell your name to a receptionist at a doctor’s office – it pops up.

I hadn’t even used “Nick” in months. It’s always been “Nicholas” because I’m generally dealing with matters that require one’s legal name. And yet, just before the month of August began, I called myself “Nick” when baby-talking with the cat.

Brigid and I both caught it nearly immediately. It felt, weird, admittedly. Wrong. But it came out naturally, so I can promise you, it takes more than a year to forget your own name. Your old name, as it were, because as of August 17th, neither “Nick” nor “Nicholas” is my legal name. It’s a ghost lingering behind me.

It just isn’t me.

Especially the first name. Especially your pronouns. When you think about the countless people (mostly women) who have changed their last names, consider what it means to change your first name. The trepidation to ask someone to use not just a new name, but a new set of pronouns. And not just a new name like when a friend of mine asked for us to stop using the diminutive of his name, but to completely up-end it. I’m not “Nick”, I’m “Niamh”.

In the six months since my last update, I’ve mostly settled on the pronunciation “NEEV”, one syllable, easier to get across, and I’m more consistent with it. Perhaps it was my Dungeons and Dragons group, a group of folks from the UK who did in the two-syllable pronunciation. “Niamh” (with one syllable) is a recognized name there, and so there was no explanation needed. It just was. It’s comforting to log in and hear the lads all going “Hello, Niamh!”

I’m tearing up just thinking about it.

The last six months have been marked by periods of comfort and periods of excruciating pain, almost in equal measure. So maybe I’ll give a brief overview of those months.

Two Months of Hell

I last updated you all in February. Around then, I had just gotten done with a bloodwork exam and my injection dose had been increased from .5ml every other week to .6ml, despite me asking to go to .75ml. I had been doing laser hair removal since September, and that was going well. I had been presenting as female since November and it was becoming more and more usual. I was putting off starting my name change.

But I was finding the injections too much to handle. After each one I would black out, most likely because I was tensing up so hard to get through and even thinking about the injections now makes me sick. I’ve since called around and there are no pharmacies around here that offer injection services, which is ridiculous. I was legitimately told to hire a nurse to come by once every other week and inject me for god knows how much. It has just crossed my mind, though, I never thought to call the urgent cares in the area. (I just did – the answer remains “no”.)

I cannot imagine how much that hurts other people’s ability to take their drugs as prescribed.

I got both my vaccines and eventually I went and had another round of bloodwork done in early May, arriving with a laundry list of things I wanted changed. First – I wanted off injections. Second – I wanted on progesterone. Third – I wanted off spironolactone and onto bicalutamide. Forth – I wanted an orchiectomy. Let’s break that down.

Item 1 – Off injections. This was easy enough. I explained my predicament, my doctor agreed, we switched to patches – .05mg/d transdermal patches. Marvelous.

Item 2 – My doctor waffled on this, and suggested we wait for the 1 year mark. I laughed and said that I assumed that’d be the answer, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t come out of no where at the 1 year mark and get kicked to “the next bloodwork”. He said that wouldn’t be the case, that he’s a big proponent of progesterone as part of HRT, but obviously doesn’t want to prescribe expensive drugs if they aren’t desired or needed.

Item 3 – My side effects with spironolactone were getting pretty bad. First, I constantly had to pee, and it was starting to effect my sleep quality as I was constantly fighting the feeling of urgency when laying down even though I was taking it in the morning. It got so bad, I was taking a UTI medication every night for relief and that was getting both expensive and also just needlessly taxing my liver. The alternative was bica. I got prescribed 50mg/d of bica and was told to start the bica one month later in June, that way if there was a reaction to the patches, we would know the source – and similarly if there was a reaction to the bica, we would know the source – because I hadn’t started both at once. I asked if we should overlap the spiro and the bica and was told “no”.

Item 4 – I was told that I needed to wait to the 1 year mark as the cis gatekeepers of trans healthcare looked for that when deciding if I was “mentally sound enough” to have the procedure done. For the confused, an orchiectomy is the removal of the testicles. It would allow me to quit anti-androgens like spiro and bica all together. It would also mean that if I suddenly ran out of estrogen, I wouldn’t begin to detransition – an issue I was about to become very acquainted with.

Something felt wrong almost immediately. I had joked with some folks that on injections there was this weird feeling of not doing enough to be trans. Like on the pills each day you took a pill and you felt medicated, but the injections? They were once every now and then. In my head I felt like I could order more. Inject more. The patch, though, was there, all week, and I could touch it, see it, and feel like it was working.

But it didn’t feel like it was working.

All the things I associated with transitioning – the sore breasts, the thinning body hair, the dead libido, the complete inability to get an erection, hell just the way I saw myself, started to slowly slip away. My body hair was getting thicker. I was waking up to painful morning wood. My libido was quickly reëstablishing itself. I emailed my doctor and shared my concerns. They were noted but otherwise we kept moving forward.

In June, I switched from spiro to bica, right on schedule, and everything got worse. So, so much worse.

My mood completely collapsed. If you ever ran into me during June or July, understand that I was completely falling apart behind the scenes. I couldn’t even cry, the estrogen well had so thoroughly dried up. Hair was growing again up my chest, across my breasts, and onto my shoulders again. I was shaving my legs like weekly again, after only needing to do it monthly. I hadn’t felt breast growth pain in months. So I reached out to my doctor again and insisted things were going south quickly and it was agreed that we’d pull up my August bloodwork to later that week.

The one good thing was that I was prescribed progesterone immediately, but we’d wait on the other results before making any other changes.

And those results were stunningly bad. I was basically at cis male levels of E and T. I had been detransitioning for two months and it was torture, literally killing me mind, body, and soul. We upped my patch dose from .05mg/d to .1mg/d, added the 100mg/d of progesterone, and kept the bica the same.

The .05mg/d patch was far too little it seemed and the bica had lagged. By the end of July I had actually noticed that I was way more tired during rec soccer than I had been in May or June, which leads me to believe that the blocker had taken a month and a half to start having a noticeable effect.

Since changing, things have felt better and that gets into a while new discussion: how do you know? Well that’s hard to answer, right? It’s internal. You can never be totally certain of how I feel. You have to trust me. And if you already don’t trust me or already have ideas on what trans people are and why we transition, I can’t convince you otherwise. It’ll always be a lie. An excuse.

What I do know is the two months I was effectively detransitioning were two of the worst months of my life, stressful and constantly filled with dread. I absolutely hated it, and seeing hair growing on my chest again and having to shave my legs every week again was killing me. It was horrific and I felt awful, I could hardly look at myself in the mirror and I can actually see it in my google photos timeline.

For the first time since starting my transition, I took fewer photos in July. A lot fewer. Because I wasn’t taking selfies and I wasn’t taking selfies because I absolutely hated looking at myself again. All that self esteem had been sapped and I felt lost without it. Anyone who says “HRT isn’t life-saving” has never seen a trans person panic when they’ve thought they’ve lost or misplaced it, or gotten the call from the pharmacy that it’s been delayed, again. Never seen me in the midst of despair as I feel it all slip away.

The Changes

That whole episode of detransitioning led to some awkward conversations, both with lay folks around me and my doctor. When you live in your body, you become accustomed to the ins and outs of it, and you can tell you feel off, I think most people understand this, but what one might not understand is what that feels like when you’re undergoing hormone replacement therapy. The number one thing that comes up when discussing it with cis people is “Wait, that changes?”

And yeah, the list of changes is pretty long and sometimes weird to talk about. Some of them are just awkward in the abstract, because it’s weird to be 32 going on 33 and talking about your second puberty with people, but at least this time it’s a puberty I like and I am at least mature enough and aware enough to understand the consequences.

I’ll get it out of the way quickly – the biggest change was obviously that I got glasses! This was something I should’ve been up front about earlier, but it’s important to note.

Actually, no joke, I had been wearing protective “anti-bluelight” glasses for a while before this, but Brigid and I finally got to the eye doctor and were diagnosed with various sight issues. Even though mine are rather slight, I’ve actually noticed some pretty big improvements to my quality of life and a reduction in issues such as auras and silent migraines.

All joking aside it’s hard to take stock at the one-year mark when significant portions of that year were spent with bad levels or even effectively detransitioning. However, they are numerous and they have been very fulfilling and affirming. A lot of it is just internal, even, the way I feel about my self and about my body. I’ve talked at length about the mental changes, having self-esteem for a change or better control of my libido. Even with progesterone added to the mix, I still have better control over my libido than I did on testosterone, which is crazy. I’m interested to see how the combination of orchi and progesterone will go, once all the T is flushed out and any off side-effects are gone.

Physically, I’m definitely more curvy. Most of the changes have been slow, subtle, as one would expect for hormonal changes, but my thighs have definitely grown some, waist has pinched in ever-so-slightly. Butt has grown a bit as well, and the fat on my belly is more femme as well, not quite the beer-gut shape any more, but certainly still there.

I have tits too, those have been pretty nice, I’ve even gotten pretty good at how to puff them up a bit for the camera. Are they massive, earth-shattering knockers? No. But they’re mine and they’re doing their best. Actually one of the signs I got that my levels were bad is the pain that had been plaguing my breasts and nipples almost constantly since December/January dried up. That has since returned.

Most of my muscle mass that was lost was lost pretty early. My arms still have a bit of tone to them, but even then it was nothing like before. I’ve also lost a lot of fat and muscle over my shoulders and neck, so I look much thinner now and there’s more of a boney look now.

My face has changed a bit. Seeing fat buildups on my cheeks and away from my chin and jowls. Despite not picking up my father’s genes when it came to hair, my hairline has seen improvement. Not sure if I’d call it a “drastic” improvement, but especially up over the temples it’s been slowly creeping forward again. I wasn’t really expecting any changes with that, but it’s welcomed regardless.

Hair is over-all one of those bigger problems with transitioning, getting it where you want it and removing it from where you don’t. My body hair is obviously recovering from the two months of bad levels, where that was some of the first stuff to reverse. Luckily it’s already thinning out again and growth is slowing down. Hair on my thighs has thinned a bit, as has the hair on my legs and arms. I can go pretty long before the need to be shaved and I’ve even started noticing that when I decide the hair is “long enough” to be cut is changing as well, with my tolerance getting shorter and shorter. But still the time between shaves increases.

I’ve been doing laser hair removal on my face for about eleven months now, and my chest for about two. Seen pretty big improvements there, as you can tell by the pictures, my shadow is mostly gone. Cleaning up the last of my my stubborn chest hair is one of my higher priorities along with the last of the shadow. Laser (and soon electrolysis) remain the only procedures related to transitioning I’ve had done, if you don’t count coloring and cutting my hair (which would be extreme if you did). I’m set on the orchi, but that’s probably a ways off. The consultation is at the end of September and I’ll almost certainly need to jump through some gatekeepy hoops before I can actually get it done. Even that isn’t particularly massive. But other than maybe considering breast augmentation in three years or so, I have no real drive for surgeries.

Yes. Including that one.

I’m sort of in the air about that one. I don’t really care one way or the other. The orchi is a pragmatic decision about getting off anti-androgens, preventing future detransitioning, and improving the quality of my tuck. Plus a lot of folks have said they get a little boost to their estrogen effects since there’s no testosterone getting in the way at all.

Lastly there’s a grab-bag of effects that HRT brings. Progesterone has given me some of the best night’s sleep I’ve had in literal decades. After years of sleep problems, progesterone knocks me out cold and I love it. I specifically take it at night because it was actually putting me to sleep during work! My genitals actually smell different… actually all of me smells different, but this is the most notable and was another one of those changes that losing it tipped me off to there being an issue with my levels.

Another one of those effects folks are surprised to hear about is your libido changes and that can be hard to describe without playing into stereotypes of binary sexuality. I can say that it is different, there’s more desire to be held? Cared for? I don’t want to go as far as say the desire has switched from fucking to being fucked, but I’m not turned on just by like raw pictures of nudity, I want and even need some sort of emotion or rationale behind it. I want to feel invested in it and it’s more mental than physical.

Briefly, I’d like to touch on the actual drugs and methods, because I think that sort of transparency is important for trans folks and I’m sure a number of folks reading this are going to want feedback to bring to their own transitions or to add to the growing pile of anecdotal accounts that passes for trans research in the early 2020s.

Estrogen methods: I am current on patches. I’ve done pills, injections, and patches. Pills and my liver didn’t play together nicely, so that’s completely off the table. I did injections for six months. First 10mg as .5ml 20mg/ml EV per injection every two weeks. Then it was 12mg as .6ml 20mg/ml EV per injection every two weeks. If this is confusing to you, welcome to being trans, where you get to be a lawyer, doctor, endocrinologist, pharmacist, and nurse all rolled into one little dysphoric package! But I personally couldn’t handle injecting myself. So I moved to patches. First a single .05mg/d patch per week, then later a single .1mg/d patch per week.

When it comes to preference, the problem is the act of injecting myself. I asked around the local pharmacies to see what the cost was to have them do the injection and they just don’t, suggesting I hire a nurse instead. If I could’ve had that done, I would’ve stayed on injections no problem. When the pros do it, there’s no worries! I prefer the injections, tbh, I just can’t do them. They last for two week, gave good results and good changes, are easier to change dosages, and they can’t fall off under your shorts. That said, patches have been working admirably and am happy to continue with them

Anti-Androgens: Spiro. fucking. sucks. The side effects were horrendous. Between the brain fog, the constantly needing to pee, the fucking with my sleep, the only good that seemed to come out of it was it completely nuked my masculine libido. All that said, I am way happier with bica, even if there’s like a zone of protection around my junk that seems to still be under the immediate influence of testosterone. I’d rather the occasional boner than constantly feeling like I need to pee and being perpetually tired from bad sleep. Preference is 125% bica all the way.

As for the actual methods: I went from 100mg/d of spiro (taken in the morning) to 50mg/d of bica (taken in the morning).

Where does that leave progesterone? Progesterone is useful both as an anti-androgen and a hormone for transitioning. For all I know my E2 levels are still shit, but the progesterone is over-riding it all. The big downside is constantly being horny again, I’m interested to see how that plays out when I’m post orchi and my testosterone is dead forever. But that’s really the only downside! I am currently on 100mg/d (taken orally about two hours before bed) of progesterone and I love it. Helps improve so much about both my transition and my quality of life. Seriously, the sleep is worth it alone.

A Reflection on Adulthood

For the longest time, I’ve dealt with intrusive and often extremely negative thoughts and memories. HRT has not fixed that, unfortunately. That is an important lesson, though, transitioning has done so much to make me feel better, make me be better – but it is not a panacea. It doesn’t make everything work instantly.

I wish it would, honestly.

My general health and well-being is better now because I care. Because I want to be around for years and years and years to enjoy this new lease on life, but depression and anxiety don’t just disappear. And in a way, I have gained new fears and anxieties, mostly related to the way I interface with a cis world. As I write this, I am dealing with a clinic stonewalling me from trans-related care. Something that should’ve taken minutes has taken weeks, and I’ve given up. I’m not dealing with their bullshit.

But there is one intrusive thought that doesn’t cross my mind any more – that I should transition.

In the last update, I talked at length about what it was like discovering trans people, something I had to do myself and a lot of the information I got was, perhaps obviously, from transphobic people. But I mentioned that when I was nineteen, I actually conceptualized myself transitioning in the post-knowing world. So to sort of wrap up this update, I wanted to expand on that a bit.

One summer, when I was nineteen, I was back home between freshmen and sophomore years of uni. I worked at a local store selling shoes, slept in what before my going off to school was my sister’s bedroom, and I flirted with a really cute redhead at a couple of things I went to.

Before my senior year of school, I didn’t really do much that was co-ed. Especially outside of school. I almost entirely hung out with (at the time) other boys my age. We played lots of D&D, lots of Warhammer, lots of video games, and all that. But there weren’t really girls involved, as stereotypical as that sounds now. I had a lot of trouble dealing with women in general. Partially because of this lack of exposure, and it was something that plagued me for decades. Which is weird, considering my first best friend was a girl.

In senior year of highschool, I got a girlfriend and began going to more social ‘parties’ for lack of a better word. It was different, but if you knew me at the time, you could attest that I was extremely awkward. Purdue, in some ways, was a step back, but only because I didn’t push myself out of my comfort zone. I got broken up with, and alone, scared, and once again surrounded by men, I had a very toxic idea of relationships and people in general. I went to Purdue thinking I would rebuild myself, and as much as I did that first year, there was a lot of progress still to be had.

When I came back home for summer, there were a lot of reunion get-togethers. And my social circle back home had shifted over the year. The people I was hanging out with were not the same I had hung out with before. But it was an easy-going group, and there were a lot more women involved. I’m sitting here thinking about how I interacted with them, and how I interact with women now, and there’s a weird parallel.

As a trans lesbian, or trans panlesbian, it can be hard to distinguish whether what you feel around women is gender envy, sexual attraction, camaraderie, or all of the above. Part of your social transition is breaking these things down and realizing that they can coexist. And today I can look back and see the first sparks of that camaraderie here in this summer. I wanted to belong, not as part of ‘the group’, but as part of ‘the girls’ in particular. I spoke in a way as to disarm myself. Not talking down, per se, rather, as not a man.

The thought that I wanted to transition literally haunted me for over a decade.

My entire adult life has been defined by these thoughts. I had thoughts of transitioning for this redhead, who (to be clear) was not a lesbian or bi as far as I am aware, because it didn’t work out – it remained a whatif in my life, even after I met and began dating my would-be wife and partner just months later. I had dreams and thoughts that I could’ve started sooner, that it had been there all that time and I just didn’t know it and I hadn’t known I wanted to.

During quiet times, when I was forced to be alone with myself for long stretches of waking time, like long drives, or flights, I thought about transitioning. Over and over and over. For years. I was plagued with doubt. Doubt about the results. Doubt about the effect on my life, my work, my relationships. Doubt about myself.

All my life I had envisioned a life for myself and later a life for me and Brigid, but increasingly it felt like I had missed such a major piece in my own life.

One night in 2017 or 2018, after Brigid and I had spent too much time out and on the town, driving back from Ferndale, she came out to me as bi, and feeling the momentum, I came out to her being extremely gender confused. I had effectively told her, and would repeat, that I was trans but not going to transition because of my apprehensions around transitioning.

It was around this time that I had switched my pronouns to he/they and eventually to they/them to little fanfare on my twitter profile (but never enforced any sort of adherence). I was never non-binary, but the increasing detachment from what it meant to be “a man” made he/him more and more painful.

And though the thoughts of transitioning ebbed and flowed over the next two years, they never stopped. Over those two years I met and formed a number of relationships with trans women and today, with the help of hindsight, it makes it feel inevitable.

But I’m hesitant to say it was. In the end, what really gave me the chance to become myself was the pandemic and the permanent work-from-home. I was offered a chance to get this first, awkward year out of the way in privacy, and I took it. I know I am not alone there. I think we’ve all had a chance over the last year, year and a half, to get reflective and strive to build our lives anew.

And so, the end for now…

So it’s been a year. One whole year of medical transitioning and roughly ten months of “full-timing” it. I will admit, I go into my second year slightly apprehensive. The lockdowns won’t last forever; the masks will eventually get put away, but the head start I have should serve me well. In September I return to the doctor for an early follow up to the changes in my HRT regimen that I spoke of a couple thousand words ago.

My next “official” update for you will be next year for my second anniversary! If you hadn’t noticed, the idea what that they doubled in length each time: 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 4 years, 8 years.

Of course, there will be social media and my micro updates there, but these updates have proven a nice way for me to process my transition for myself. I can assure you, if you think it’s drastic from the outside, it’s quite a bit more on the inside.

But here we must end it for now! Remember to continue to support the LGBT+ people of all walks in your life. “Accomplices not allies” and all that! I hope this update was informative for everyone!

Cheers!

As I’m starting to write this, it’s become known that Rush Limbaugh has passed away, and let me take a moment to say good riddance to bad trash, and if you have a problem with me saying that, you can stop reading and go on and do something else. Save us both a lot of time.

Content Warnings: Adult language, dysphoria, transphobia, transphobic portrayals of trans people in media, 4chan, homophobia, pornography, suicide , talk of sexuality, and anatomy

> Beginning <

The One-Year Post >

Back in August I made quite a big announcement about a part of myself that had always been there, at least as far back as I can piece together from the fragmented shards of my memories. On facebook and twitter I came out as a trans woman, beginning a new era in my life that has brought with it drastic changes. Changes I am sure that some, if not most of you are interested in at least hearing a bit more about.

Hi! I’m Niamh. I’m a trans woman who lives outside of Detroit, Michigan.

This is going to be a very frank discussion, so if that bothers you, you might want to move on. I will discuss, among other things, my anatomy, my sexuality and libido, and pornography. There’s a lot of LGBT terminology throughout, including “cis”, which I wanted to define for all you cis folk out there. Subtracted from nuance, if you’re not trans, you’re cis. Cis- and trans- come from Latin and are opposites meaning “this side of [X]” and “that side of [X]” respectively.

I plan to make this a growing series, with updates at six months (this one), one year, two years, four years, and eight years, if I can even remember that long. After that I’ll put it to bed. This post has to set the scene, and thus is very long. There’s more than thirty years to cover to get where I am now.

For those of you who might be catching up, or new, and I have picked up a large number of followers since coming out, becoming, unwittingly, the first generation of people who know me only as a woman, only as Niamh – Hi! I’m Niamh. I’m a trans woman who lives outside of Detroit, Michigan. I work in the automotive industry, and I am a huge soccer person. I watch soccer. Support soccer. I even run a small co-ed team, which shares this website with me.

Come with me, on a journey.

Setting a scene…

On August 28th of 2020, I publicly came out as a trans woman after it being a known secret to those closest to me for about two months before that. Four days before, though, was my rebirth – my first dosage of HRT, where I, personally, mark the beginning of of my transition. It is on that day that my personal calendar first uses “Niamh” and not “Nick”. And thus, the 24th of February marks six months.

But six months of what?

Being a woman? Being trans? Being out?

If nothing, the heart of the trans experience for me is existential, reflective, and deeply, deeply personal. This might not be very profound or new to print, but it is to me. A lot of things taken for granted, institutions and whole constructs once assumed monolithic and immutable, crumble away, revealing the sawdust and glue concoction that it was the whole time.

It is easy, and almost necessary, to then scour your life for the little breadcrumbs of trans-ness. As if that would be enough to make it okay under the immense pressure of cis-heteronormative expectations. We are almost expected by cis folks to say “I always knew,” when, at least in my case, is it’s more “it makes sense in retrospect” and that’s half true.

I think I really came to understand I was trans when I was nineteen. I remember one summer getting involved in what could’ve been a fling, if I wasn’t such a fuck head, and someone remarked that they thought the target of my crush was either bi and only interested in women at the time, or a lesbian. And I distinctly, even twelve years later, remember the pang of thinking “I’d transition for her.” After that it was a rough twelve years, internally. I thought about transitioning a lot.

And when you live in a cis-heteronormative society, getting information, real, honest information can be extremely difficult. Even just learning that trans people were a thing, was a long, arduous journey. Movies like Dressed to Kill or Silence of the Lambs painted a picture of the never-passing psychopathic trans woman, while Ace Ventura: Pet Detective only really gets transphobic in the end, but at least the psychopathic trans woman passed, so progress? A movie that I’ve not seen, only read about and heard jokes and comments about is The Crying Game, which at least from the synopsis seems to be more sympathetic to trans women. I mean she only gets smacked and the protagonist pukes, but they make up and become close? Woo?

The list for trans men is significantly shorter, and if I could venture a guess it’s because trans women are considered significantly more dangerous to society by the cis majority. If you are interested, a more complete list of such films can be found here, but those mentioned above where, for a long time, the “truth” about trans people to me.

You’re not broken. You can’t be trans.

A second wind of “truth” came with my access to the internet and through that, access to pornography. And thus, truly, I start to take an active role in my own journey. Where before I absorbed through osmosis, now I could seek out, explore, and consume on my own.

Pornography is a place fraught with the male gaze. A cis hetero male gaze to be exact, and in 2003 the portrayal of trans women rarely worth exploring. At best she is an oddity, a strange woman-shaped object with a penis who exists to fuck as a man would. At the worst, a projection of a failure of masculinity. A man reduced to a woman. To be fucked, taken, as a woman should.

The exception, of course, is Japanese futanari, which for those of you so uncultured to not consider hentai art, are anime(?) women with penises. And while I shall spare the normies the debate on whether she must have testicles, or must have a vagina, the critical understanding is futanari are almost universally attractive women who have a little bit more. And isn’t that weird? Attractive women with penises? Isn’t it, for lack of a better word, transgressive? Isn’t it disgusting that these women with penises feel attractive? Are taken as attractive? Are sexual and enjoy themselves?

Well, that was the opinion of sites like 4chan, and it was clear that there were two sorts of folks who enjoyed trans pornography – trans people (and eggs) and people who openly hated trans people and mocked the eggs relentlessly.

(Aside: A egg, for the unaware, is someone who is questioning their gender, or is otherwise a trans person who hasn’t come out to themselves.)

Once there was an active thread at the top of which was an image of two trans people: a trans woman and a trans man. Both were shining examples of their chosen expression – the woman curvy and beautiful, with long flowing hair and a large bosom; the man stout and strong, hairy with a thick beard and biker tattoos. The “catch” was that neither had undergone GRS, that is colloquially “bottom” surgery. The image urged users to pick which one you’d have sex with and then defend why it wasn’t gay.

You’re already dealing with internalized misogyny.

Here, I’ll even pause so the trans folks can vent for a second and you cis-hets will probably take a moment to consider the question yourself.

Obviously for OP in a place like 4chan, there was no right answer. You were broken regardless. Whether you were a faggot defending having sex with a dude with tits and a dick, or a faggot defending having sex with a dude with a hairy chest and a beard – you were broken. And you should kill yourself.

The suggestion or the push to kill one’s self is one that pops up a lot, when you are trans. If you have ever seen 41% mentioned around trans folk, especially aggressively, that is the percentage of trans people who attempt suicide when not in the presence of a supporting family. Being tortured literally to death is a statistic that is thrown into our faces as a joke. A snide comment that perhaps we should just end it all. It’d be so much easier. And… it’s not like you’ll ever pass, right?

When I was nineteen, going on twenty, and staring up into the ceiling of my sister’s old room, repurposed to be a guest room while I had been away at Purdue, I really thought about it. The idea of transitioning was tempting, and with it brought great worry and doubt. But also excitement? But no. You’re not broken. You can’t be trans. And yet these thoughts persisted. I mean, something so innocent put it in there. The idea of being a woman and being thought of as attractive by other women was exhilarating. If only I could reach out and pluck it.

“If only” is a phrase trans people say to themselves a lot, I fear. If only I had known sooner. If only I had started sooner. If only I had supportive friends and family. If only I had more money. If only I had better insurance. If only I had known what it was. If only I had known it was even possible.

I was on my journey.

It took a long time to draw the line between knowing what trans people were, and what I was feeling. The first problem, of course, is that being trans is an deeply personal and subjective journey. While some thought patterns are shared or more common than others, there’s really no way to just say “yes, you’re trans” after a brief discussion or a night of reading. It takes a certain level of internalization. And I’m sure, even as I write this, that this is where a divide begins. A divide between those who grew up before the 2010s and those who grew up afterwards.

The difference is that younger folk have grown up not just with the internet, but a mature internet – that is “mature” as in a fully-realized and developed tool. Queer spaces have not just been carved out, but they flourish, and in them you can quickly find many others sharing the same strange feelings of incongruity as you. Even if they don’t match 100%, after reading ten, twenty, a hundred stories, the sum total of overlap begins to build a picture of a new you.

Of a happy you.

And so after over a decade of toying with it, of thinking and hemming and hawing I was really running out of room and increasingly I felt like I was running out of time.

My egg finally and utterly shattered one night while reading a comic on a subreddit for eggs, a place where people coming to terms with being trans would share silly memes, trying to bring a bit of light to a rather stressful and confusing part of our shared struggle. The comic said something along the lines of “If you’re putting off transitioning because you’re afraid of not being a pretty girl – you’ve already accepted that you’re a girl. You’re already dealing with internalized misogyny.”

It was almost instant. Reading the words and it just clicked.

And I realized there was no going back. The boulder was rolling down the hill. I had been pushing it up and over the hump for twelve years. I stood from atop that awful hill and watched as it got away from me, and then after a few seconds, realized that I was expected to follow it and so clumsily at first began running down the hill after it, struggling to catch up.

COVID and the resulting stay-at-home orders have brought discord and pain to so, so many but I sat there, watching the She-Ra on netflix with Brigid, and I could feel it welling up. This amazing chance had dropped onto my lap. I could have like four or five months to transition completely in private while maintaining my job and income. And it kept getting pushed back! Further and further! I might even have a whole year.

It took me multiple weeks to come out to Brigid.

I had told Brigid multiple times of my feelings of genderqueerness, my concerns with transitioning, but I told her that I had thought about it and did not want to do it. She’s always been supportive of my decisions and made nothing of it, though once she did ask if I was interested in dressing more femme and at the time I was screaming “yes!” in my head, but declined, citing what now I recognize as gender dysphoria as why I couldn’t.

But there were multiple times, as we were sitting in bed before going to sleep, that I could feel the urge and drive building to just tell her, and then… I couldn’t.

And it happened over and over.

Then, finally, one morning in late June we were making coffee before catching a few episodes of She-Ra and I barely managed to squeak out the words “I want to transition.”

I honestly don’t remember much from the rest of that conversation, other than Brigid saying “Okay.” After that it’s really all just a blur.

On facebook and twitter I came out as a trans woman, beginning a new era in my life that has brought with it drastic changes.

Not even just that day, rather the next few months went by very quickly as I prepared to come out, start HRT, and at least try speaking with a therapist. After so long of just thinking about it meant that when the time came, I was running, sprinting through whatever popped up. After meeting with a GP and some bloodwork, and some day-of mix-ups at the pharmacy, on August 24th at roughly five o’ clock on a Monday evening, I had my first dosage of HRT. 4mg of Estradiol and 100mg of Spironolactone. I took all three pills at once and regretted that by the end of the night, as it was a bit much for my stomach to process.

The next morning I took one of the estrogen pills and the spironolactone. Nausea came and went through the day and again at night, it spiked, but it was fading. Whether it was the pills or anxiety, I will never really know. It doesn’t even really matter at this point. I was on my journey. And four days later I came out to the world.

Six Months Later…

Niamh. That’s my name. Sometimes I need to remind myself. You refer to yourself as one thing for so long it’s not easy to get over. Same with pronouns. I’ve exclusively used she/her/hers since coming out, but still in my head, my ego, uses the wrong name, the wrong designations because it had for thirty-one years. I correct myself every time. I owe myself that much.

When I first came out to Brigid, one of her first questions was what did I want to do about my name and my initial reaction was to keep at least “Nick”, arguing at the time that it was unisexual for both Nicholas and Nichole.

But the more I thought about it the more that rang as false. I already desperately wanted to change my middle name, which I had grown over the years to loathe, despite using it in a professional sense for quite a while. This is, after all, N H Kendall dot com. There is another Nick Kendall, a professional violinist, who hogs all that precious, precious SEO.

It didn’t take long, but I quickly came to the conclusion I really did want to change my name. I wanted to keep my initials, I knew that much. I wanted to have feminine names. I wanted to celebrate my Irish and German heritages if I could. Niamh is a very traditional Irish name meaning “brilliant” or “radiant”, pronounced like NEE-uhv or NEEV; I prefer the first. Golden-haired Niamh was also one of the Queens of Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Young, a name for the Celtic otherworld. For my middle name I chose another older, more traditional name Henriette, and as of writing, have chosen to pronounce it in French. Is it a shout out to my home – Detroit? Is it a stab at the H I carry, marking bound to my father and his fathers and fathers back to the 1800s? To leave it unpronounced? You tell me. It’s a little and a lot of both. It’s also just pretty.

Briefly I considered ditching my last name, a name that I’ve actually used as a first name for quite a while as it is, a woman’s name. That, however, was a step too far in the end.

The sudden shift is a common feeling now, as my transition progresses. Nothing is sacred anymore. Any feeling or nudge, any deeply held conviction is up for reconsideration. And really, isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Aren’t we supposed to be reflective on ourselves? Reimagine and rebuild ourselves from time to time?

For me, one thing I was immediately interested in confronting was my sexuality. For a lot of trans people there is a period of “Am I sexually attracted to this person? Or do I want to be them?” And once you start on the road to being the gender of your choosing, what really were you feeling? It’s complex and difficult, but I think in a way it’s both necessary and inevitable.

Coming to terms with being a woman also involved unloading a lot of toxic masculinity, which had been smothering me for so long. Simultaneously, coming to terms with being a trans woman who as of writing is still interested in keeping and maintaining the functionality of her penis forced myself to ask some pretty critical questions and confront my internalized transphobia. The process would go like:

If I consider myself a woman, why don’t I necessarily consider other trans women women?

I do! And there’s a lot of hot trans women out there! I’d totally hook up with one (marriage aside)!

Even if she had a penis?

Well yeah.

Then what about men?

Well… I’m not sexually attracted to men.

What if they were non-binary?

I guess that depends?

Depends on what?

The “catch” was that neither had undergone GRS, that is colloquially “bottom” surgery. The image urged users to pick which one you’d have sex with and then defend why it wasn’t gay.

I began to appreciate that my sexuality was not a monolith. It wasn’t a single facet of who I found attractive or even who I was. And once I was able to understand that, I was better able to relate to the people around me and understand my own feelings much better. The way I came to think of it was what I had been assuming was “sexuality” was actually three scales that I could use independently of each other, sort of like a character stat diagram. The three arms were: aesthetic attraction, romantic attraction, and sexual attraction.

Aesthetics are how people look. Who do I find “pretty” to look at? Who do I aesthetically appreciate. Luckily we were watching Bridgerton at the time, and what I discovered was that I found men, women, and non-binary folks as potentially aesthetically pleasing. Thus, at least on this one axis, I was pan.

Romantic attraction, though, is a bit harder to define. For me, it’s who would I stay up with all night discussion life while nude and drinking wine. Who would I, in the absence of sexual intimacy, be willing to hang my arms around and get kisses and fervent glances from. And it’s as wishy-washy as it sounds. There’s a lot of “depends”, but in the end it’s more of a femme thing – women, and femme-presenting non-binary. I’d be willing to call this “pan with preferences” or “pan lesbian”.

Sexual attraction is who do I want to do the dirty with. I think this is the one that most folks will get immediately and it is here that I remain the most steadfast. I’m solely attracted to women and femme-presenting non-binary folks at a purely sexual level. Over-all, I think this puts me in the “pan lesbian” category, but generally I just use the label “lesbian” because if I’m honest, most of the gents falling into that first category are like celebrities at their peaks. I am almost certainly going to continue to reëvaluate this over the next six months.

Finally, I think I’m ready to reach the part that I’m sure brought you all here. The T&A. My six months on HRT. I hope if nothing else, what my cis readers take away is there is so much more to transness and transitioning than the medical side of things. It is a deeply emotional beast. And while it is easiest to measure the time I have been taking some pills and now the injections, my timeline is more about the firsts that come with wearing dresses, presenting feminine in public, being ma’amd, my ever growing, ever changing relationship to the LGBT community, the trans community in specific, and my growing confidence in myself.

HRT is prescribed as a cure to gender dysphoria. That’s what the paperwork says. So let’s start there.

The idea of being a woman and being thought of as attractive by other women was exhilarating. If only I could reach out and pluck it.

Gender dysphoria is a vicious monster. For some trans people it’s extremely visceral, a sort of gender-based panic attack that can leave them unable to function. For me it was very different, almost more insidious, I felt nothing.

And the problem with feeling nothing is that it’s harder to realize that you’ve been carrying it around for years and then decades. When it did actually manifest, it was often in the small things. Like being uncomfortable when my wife ran her hands through my chest hair. It was hard to pin down, easy to ignore, and thus it was more successful in evading treatment.

Explaining gender dysphoria to cis people is difficult, to say the least. More than feeling ugly, or mismatched, more than the awkwardness and the emptiness. It is much worse than the sum of its parts. Draining you physically and spiritually. And at the emptiness, you flail powerless to beat it back. You try to grow buff. You wear a beard for seventeen years. You hope and you pray that you’ll get better, that one day you’ll feel right.

And pray I did. One of the only times I prayed to a higher power ever was in early puberty when I effectively grew very small, but clearly unmasculine breasts. I prayed for puberty to carry me to the other side, or at least take them away. But no dice. I was forced to undergo a very awkward puberty, left without words or definitions to express my horror to those charged with caring for me.

Since starting HRT and presenting female, though, I have felt a strange and intoxicating rush that I can only assume is self-esteem and body confidence. I have found it so much easier to be happy. And I love standing in front of the mirror.

I love the physical changes to my body. Losing the beard and lasering it off bit by bit. I love my little titties and I love that HRT has sucked all the fat from my neck and collar and stuffed it all into my ass and thighs. I’ve lost about 12# or so, mostly to muscle loss in my arms, which are slimming. My fingers too are slimming down, as my jewelry held in place with little plastic forms make me aware. I love makeup. I love getting dressed up and putting together outfits. I love presenting a more honest me. I would even risk saying that I love my voice.

The confidence that has come with embracing my femininity has been utterly infectious. I revel in every cry, every glance of my curves, knowing that all the hair on my back and chest is thinning away. And the hair on my head is so much longer, I can twirl it in my fingers and Brigid can comb it for me at night. The confidence is so powerful, in fact that even with spironolactone essentially completely suppressing my libido, I feel much more sexual in a way. I also feel so much more in control.

For decades I suffered from a libido that was completely out of control, to the point of negatively effecting my life and my ability to even just interact with people. I’ve described the problem as fueling your Ford Fusion with nitro-methane for thirty years before someone finally comes up to you and says, “You can just fill the tank with unleaded gas.”

And there’s the crux.

Testosterone was clearly, clearly not the fuel I was meant to be running on. Physically and mentally, it was killing me. Estrogen is right, though. Everything just works better.

For the first time in over thirty years I feel good.

And so, the end for now…

There is a chance this was not an easy read for you. And that’s how it should be, honestly. It was not necessarily easy to write, but it was, all things told, cathartic. Transitioning has also been very hard and also very easy, and very cathartic all the same. I don’t think there are words I could ever string together to completely convey how right all of this has felt.

I can only keep insisting that you listen. That you read. That you internalize in yourself the words that trans people put out for you. And that you, more than anything, believe us.

In six months I shall return to this and perhaps go deeper into the physical and mental changes I’ve been seeing as well as comment on my experiences as a trans person out and about, if being out and about is something we can do by August. But I felt it necessary to set the stage, to dig to the root of my own transness which even still might be enigmatic to you all.

Hopefully you continue with me on this journey. I look forward to sharing my HRT-versary with you all. If we are diligent, it could even be in person!