I have always struggled with my identity – my inner sense of who I am in this world, and what I want from it. So with that in mind, it’s unsurprising that I was drawn to experimenting with gender, finding various labels to try on and discard. Non-binary, genderqueer, demiboy, transmasc, trans man, and the list goes on. I was fresh out of high school when the exploration begun, and the rabbit hole took me deeper and deeper until I had absolutely no true sense of self. I was lost in labels, thrilled to try yet another new identity on and escape myself for a while longer.
That’s all it ever really was for me – escapism. I struggle with a concoction of mental illnesses and have dealt with intense body image issues for as long as I can remember. I have always been desperate to escape the mess in my head, and I believe that transitioning was one such attempt to do so. I was so full of self loathing, and it’s human nature to get as far away as you can from the person you hate.
So I ran, leaving behind a vulnerable young woman in the dust. I was in my early twenties when I started testosterone, and a year after that I had a double mastectomy. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing. I was settling into my new identity as a man, and felt I was solving my issues with these decisions. That feeling of contentedness lasted a while, but the doubts eventually crept in. Little niggling moments of discomfort, of longing for a self I had erased. Those moments only grew in intensisty and duration, and before long I couldn’t ignore what my heart was telling me. I couldn’t even recognise myself in the mirror- it’s beyond unsettling to see a stranger staring back at you in the place where your reflection should be. The once validating sounds of “he” and “him”, “sir” and “mister”, became jabs to my gut, signs of a facade which had become far too convincing. My body, my voice, my face, my role in people’s lives – all of it had begun to feel overwhelmingly foreign and unsettling.
Accepting that I was wrong about myself was difficult, admitting that I was wrong to others was even harder. I know now that I am a woman – I was very lost for a long while, but I found my way back home. I was on hormones for just over 4 years in total, and I cannot undo a lot of what they did – nor can I magically return my chest to its former state. But none of that makes me any less of a woman. I am so happy that I can now embrace myself and heal – the same self that I once wanted to eradicate.
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