It was resolved 5 years ago that I would begin the new year living “full time” as a male, but truth be told I had been operating as a guy for quite some time.
Five years is a good chunk of time. In the 65(!) unpublished posts I have saved in wordpress, one of them is titled “Post Transition?”. I discussed some feelings of being past the transition in many ways, having achieved my main goal of top surgery and after a few years of T having experienced most of the symptoms. Life was getting much bigger than the emotions and feelings of dysphoria, depression, and helpless struggle. I chuckle now that I wrote that post over 2.5 years ago.
I was nervous then that the transition would fade off into distant memory and I would lose connection with the good times on the front end of my transition (and during my transition). I suppose with effort, I could let that happen, but it hasn’t happened organically.
The more comfortable I get with having transitioned and being on this side, the more connected I am to my entire life. It’s multi-faceted, a mixture of slight discomfort with rationalizing my experiences for others, guilt being priviledged to experience a survivable transition, and curiousity for how intertwined all experiences I have are.
Despite having a wonderfully sapphic wife, my queer life is extremely heterosexual and lacks diversity of many kinds. I work for a company in an industry where certain ethnicities generally hold different roles in an office where we have 5 women and 50 men. Being introverted, it has been my choice to withdraw from many social events, including most that link me to the GLBT* community. My transition isn’t a topic of conversation, almost ever. Only at home and on other rare occasions is my pre-transition life included in discussion. I don’t need to talk about my experiences injecting testosterone, but I need to talk about growing up as the oldest of 4 sisters. I don’t need to talk about the strategies I employed for binding, but I need to talk about being a small girl trying to play soccer with mostly boys in grade school. I’m slowly trying to establish more relationships in my day-to-day life where these things can be understood, but it’s a slow road.
Life has gotten to be so grand. The middle-class life I had growing up led me to college, which through hard work and parental support led me to graduate school, which through hard work led me to a few good jobs. My current job is an 8-5 job that lets me have evenings and weekends for enjoying the rest of the fun life has to offer. I’m sure the rest of the things that life has to offer will continue to intertwine with my transition.
Oddball Orbital Transformation: FTM 