The first day of the rest of your life
Happy birthday to me
So today’s a big day for me.
Today, I started HRT.
This isn’t how it works (unfortunately?) but hey, maybe one day. It’s a long journey, one that I’m sure I’ll find the time and space to sporadically chart here between pointing and yelling about How Good Horror Is or whatever. But as with all journeys, it starts with a single step, and for me that step was buying mysterious drugs off the internet.
The DIY Route
In the UK, there’s basically three routes to getting feminising hormones:
Go via the NHS: This involves being on a waiting list (which I think I still technically am, and have been for 3 years without any change whatsoever). I understand that it also involves clinicians trying to dissuade you from doing the thing you spent a long time waiting to do, so not ideal all in all.
Go private: This involves being either rich or insured; thanks to my line of work, I am the latter, even if very much not the former. I did poke at this one too, but it also entailed a lot of hoop-jumping and proving to people that I am what I say I am; also not ideal. I don’t really love the idea that “there’s something urgently wrong with my body and it needs to change” is an assessment with a pass/fail quality.
Do It Yourself: Which is to say, buy the hormones you need directly from pharmacists, usually abroad. This involves doing a lot of your own research and there’s an innate quality of risk to it: hormones, generally, are not to be fucked with lightly. But when you get desperate, even a stormy port beats the rocks.
I guess there’s a fourth option too, i.e.
Literally Do It Yourself: Break bad and make oestradiol in a bathtub somehow. I’d watch that show. You’d watch that show. Jessie was trans anyway, right?
Anyway, I’ve opted for the DIY route - for now. There’s nothing keeping me on it, and to my mind it actually makes the most sense to get onto the private route once I’m a few months into the process, which would be great cause these hormones are going to cost me a shitload of money on a monthly basis.
I exhausted my patience. There’s not really any other way to put it. You can only see so much of other people living their lives while you crawl day by day over broken glass before it’s time to stand up and put your damn shoes on, so to speak. I couldn’t count the hours I’ve spent lamenting and mourning and tearing myself apart over it, even if I measured them in years. When the chorus of Chappell Roan’s ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ nearly puts you in a coma, it’s time to make a change.
That’s not even to speak of the rest of it. The whole of Against Me!’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues is etched into my fucking eardrums like paleolithic carvings. In my dysphoria’s reflection, I have indeed seen my mother’s son. The point being that it accumulated and accumulated and before I knew it I was knocking at the door of 30, with years of my life wasted puppeteering the world’s idea of who I should be from one breakdown to the next.
Well, from the bottom of my sick little tranny heart, fuck that. Not a single year more.
The Parent Trap
A major roadblock for me - and, doubtless, countless other trans people - was my family. There’s a quote from Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength that recently knocked me flat on my back:
I’m lucky enough to not be dependent (financially or otherwise) on my family, but far from lucky enough to count on their support in this journey. My dad in particular has been unambiguous about his views on the trans community, as much as ‘community’ is doubtless not the word he would choose. I came out to my parents as non-binary around a year ago, as a sort of half-measure to what I actually wanted to tell them, and I’ll never in my life forget what he said: “if you told me you were going to take hormones, I don’t think I could handle that.”
Well, I’d say we’re pretty close to finding out.
This is the looming horror, for me. The opinions of strangers don’t frighten me; the prospect of ostracisation, harassment, or violence at their hands (quite justifiably) does. Conversely, I’ve no concern whatsoever that my family are ever going to visit violence upon me, but their opinion still holds sway. Who can help it? Evidently, I refuse to live a life in service to their preferences - and that is good and right - but that doesn’t mean their shame, revulsion, or general refusal to accept me doesn’t harrow me to the core.
I can already sense the bitterness and discomfort in the atmosphere. It’s so clear it’s like a vision of the future. We sit in silence as I try not to tremble. I fidget restlessly with my skirt. No-one looks at me. I feel the refusal to call me by my name, the denial of the changes that will only be more and more visible as the months and years accumulate, the constant jabs and looks of shame, disappointment. Perhaps even silence wielded against me like a knife - I know they both have it in them, even if I want to pretend they don’t.
So many of us, and especially so many in the queer community, find ourselves detached from our families. Sometimes violently, sometimes quietly, but the outcome remains a sense of rootlessness. I’ve never been much attached to the idea of a bloodline, or heritage, or anything like that - but nothing changes the fact that my family is who and where I come from, whoever I am now. That is not an easy thing to face losing.
I want to repeat that. That is not an easy thing to face losing. The worst wounds are the ones that hurt more to heal, than to leave alone to fester.
A sheep in wolf’s clothing
Then there’s the other side of the coin. The world at large is not so very accommodating of trans people, as you may have noticed. We’re an easy target and an easier scapegoat, so of course we’re trying to get into public bathrooms to do unspeakable things to (cis) women and not, like… just to piss. When you’re a public enemy in that sense, your existence is an act of rebellion, which is very sexy and noble and everything, but it’s fucking tiring too. I’ll be spending the foreseeable in what is sometimes called ‘boymode’ (i.e. masculine presentation), because until I feasibly can pass in public, it’s simply not worth the stress of trying to. I wish I was born into a more enlightened age than this, and it would also be awesome if the planet wasn’t dying, but as a certain fuckable wizard once famously said:
My main comfort is that I am, at the very least, far from alone. None of us are. Our relationships are all we have (there’s a really good Bojack quote I would put here but I just did a Gandalf one), but we do have them, and that’s no meagre thing.
Watch me blossom
The future is uncertain, and scary, but I’m still excited for it. I don’t doubt there are lows (and really low lows at that) still to come - I’m not so naive as to think this is the beginning of a trend that can only go up. As long as it’s trending upwards overall, that’ll do me just fine.
I’ll most assuredly post updates as they come, anyway. For now, this is the first step - this is day one - and I can’t wait for the rest. Your worst day of living life as yourself is better than your best day of living a lie. I don’t just believe that; I know it.
The occasion warrants a sign off, I think - so I am and shall remain:
Yours with love,
Jasmine
