I’ve written fragments of this story a few times in a few places. I aim for this to be the most complete retelling of how I got to be here today. The threads will be disjoint at first, but I assure you they weave together into a whole person. The myriad of ways the trans people experience the waypoints of transition fascinate me. Some start HRT before coming out, others socially transition first, the order of surgeries, and even which ones. How these variations in process interact with their past, their present, and their aspirations.

Content Warning: Growing up trans isn’t always a pleasant experience, there’s going to be mentions of transphobia, some internal, some external, death, weight loss, blunt descriptions of medical procedures, and infertility ahead reader discretion is advised.

As kid in the 90s my father had a number of manly man friends, Fourth of July BBQs, camping at NASCAR events, hunting, fishing, very manly activities for very manly men. One year at Christmas one the usual crowd was notably absent. I happened to walk in just as my father was explaining “Yeah, he’s calling himself Wendy now, he’s going to get his dick cut off and divorce his wife to go sleep with men”, and that was my introduction to trans people.

In the summer of 1998 I was part of a joint Boy Scout/Girl Scout bicycle tour of the San Juan islands. I had spent the spring going on training rides with my father. At the tender age of 12 I rode just shy of 200 miles in five days. The trip and the training leading up to it were marvels of human fitness. I was still fat and ugly, clearly my body was immutable. The future was on rails, I was just along for the ride, no sense in considering a future I had no control over.

In high school our choir director was an openly gay man, a wonderfully puckish rouge. Truly one of the finest humans I have ever met, but his was the generation decimated by HIV, may the gods keep him. He was the keeper of the queer kids, I had no idea why I was counted among their numbers, but was glad for the sense of belonging. My sophomore year he made me the accompanist for the women’s choir, that lasted all of two weeks before the district noticed and decreed I was obviously unfit for the women’s choir. If I could have any one question in my life answered, I want to know what the old goat knew all those years ago.

My freshman year of college the gays promptly found me again, but this time I was ready to accept that I was bisexual and that’s pretty awesome. I met a non-binary person for the first time in my life. They absolutely didn’t pass as a woman, they weren’t trying to, I was aghast. Internalized transphobia is a hell of a thing. Oh yeah, and I met a nice straight girl and we got married.

2012 my first job out of college added a gym membership as a benefit. So I started going to the gym a couple times a week. Nothing changed, yep my body is in fact still immutable.

By 2014 I was tired of the job I was working at for a number of reasons. As I was looking for a job myself we still had openings and were interviewing candidates, part of the process was having candidates take a tour of the office, part showing off the office, part parading them in front of existing staff for a vibe check. One day we had a trans gal come through interviewing for a position on the support team, she was head and shoulders taller than most of the team, had pink shoulder length hair, overall rocking an iconic amazon look, very stylish. Later in the afternoon the c-suite stopped in the dev office to check in on the vibe check from the developers, we were mostly ambivalent, she was a person, tall, not our department. Our esteemed VP opined “well it doesn’t matter, we’re not hiring the disgusting tranny anyway”. I’m sorry, what!? I caught myself and composed myself enough to not swear or quit on the spot. I did manage to offer a very diplomatic “There may be valid reasons not to hire her, but being trans certainly shouldn’t be one of them”. Management walked back a bit on their reasoning but concluded they still weren’t hiring her, probably for the best for her. After management cleared out the rest of the dev team debriefed on what just happened. The general consensus was that was not cool and they were glad someone stepped up to say something about it. I tried to down play it, I was just doing what was right, “As a bisexual man in a straight passing relationship I have a duty to use my privilege to support the rest of the LGBTQ community, especially trans women” Oh honey listen to the words coming out of your mouth. I quit about a month later.

In 2016 I ran into this music video and said to myself, wow I would love more than anything else to be one of those backup dancers. And then the thought was gone.

Sometime in 2017, I added “They/Them” pronouns to my twitter bio. Totally not a gender thing, one hundred percent, trust me. It was just a privacy thing I told myself, people online don’t need to know what’s in my pants.

By 2018 my wife had been off birth control for over 5 years, statistically speaking we should have been swimming in children, but we weren’t. So knowing how doctors roll she resolved to loose 100lbs before even bothering talking to her doctor. I, being a lovely supportive partner, told her with a smirk “you go ahead, if you find something that works I’ll join in too”. And then kicked back secure in the knowledge I would never have to actually do anything, bodies are immutable. But she found a program that worked for her. I begrudgingly kept my word. Slowly but surely progress was made, I lost 80lbs in 2019, and added 20 more to that total in 2020. Maybe my body isn’t so immutable, maybe change is possible.

In June of 2019 my wife got a sampler pack of hair dyes. After she had had her fill there was some blue dye left over. I decided sure why not I’ve never colored my hair before. I put a dark blue dye directly on brown hair. The results were disappointing, not enough tint, started from too dark of a base to get a noticeable color. Rather than just accept the results, I set out on a quest to “Do it properly”. So we got some bleach and a proper semi-permanent blue dye. The results the second time were so much better. This was a turning point, I set out to change my appearance in a visible way, and I succeeded, my actions mattered, my choices could have consequences, I am not merely a passenger in my body. For the first time in three decades the question “Who do I want to be?” was a coherent question to ask which could have a meaningful answer. But I had long since put such things out of my mind, I honestly had no idea what the answer was.

So I started taking stock of people I looked up to intellectually and aesthetically. And end up with a list:

• Lea Larsson, Drummer, Mom, Metal Head, the paragon of the style I’d love to have, and trans to top it off
• Nate Stephenson, this was before he came out as trans, so just a lesbian at the time
• Megan Ripone, lesbian, and her confidence was everything I wanted as a person
• Vera Wylde, trans and a lesbian, good media commentary
• Erika Iishi, bisexual gender fuck disaster human, and gorgeous body and soul
• Abigail Thorn*, the token “cis” “guy” on the list, yeah so we know how that one turned out.

That’s a lot of queer women dear reader. I am capable of recognizing a pattern when I see one. I have been keenly aware that trans people exist for the vast majority of my life, it’s something people can do and have done in the past, just like people other than me have lost weight in the past. If I can change my weight and change my hair color, can I change the way people see me over all in a more dramatic way? I had the option to choose, I knew what I wanted to choose, how I wanted to see myself, how I wanted others to see me.

I started raiding my wife’s closet to wear her skirts when no one was home.

In late July 2019 my employer had their annual summer get together to bring all the remote employees to town for socializing and the pretense of working. On my team was a plucky young junior dev, it was an open secret she was trans, she was open with folks known to be queer, but was mostly stealth by virtue of being socially awkward in general. On Wednesday afternoon as we were wrapping up a meeting in a conference room I caught her on the way out, “Hey can I ask you about something you’re a subject matter expert in?”, she looked at me with the most incredulous look, “You’ve been here twice as long as me, there’s nothing I know more about than you”, I glanced around to see if anyone was paying attention to this exchange, “No, trust me you’re the expert here, can we just take a walk please?” She agreed and we started walking the perimeter of the building. I explained I wanted to ask her about what dysphoria felt like, I really wanted her to tell me I was wrong. But I laid out my thoughts: a deep burning envy, the resigned fear that I can never be seen by people the way I want to be seen, a sadness at the past that wasn’t. She said yep that all sounds about right, that was not the answer I wanted.

August 28th, 2019, 21:20, egg day. I wandered in to the bathroom, pulled off my shirt, looked in the mirror, and said to myself “I should take some before pictures” so I took a shirtless selfie, and then my brain caught itself: wait, before what exactly? And in that moment I knew.

I spent the fall and into winter flailing about like a fool. I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone. What if I failed, what if people abandoned me, what if I was wrong, what if any number of a million things? I clearly had no idea what I was doing, but learned through blundering. In October the local university was hosting one of their two annual drag shows. I decided to go, it was the first LGBTQ+ event I’d been to since graduating from college.

If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. As luck would have it my wife had her own plans for that day. My wife had a short orange skirt that fit me, and I had more black tee shirts than I knew what to do with. The color scheme there fits for an October event. I made an appointment at my favorite local salon for a full face of makeup. And yes in hindsight I realize that having a favorite salon was very cis behavior.

The day came, I got dressed, headed to the car, and just as I was getting in the car, my wife was unexpectedly getting home early. I hoped she hadn’t seen me, and continued on my way.

I got to the show itself about half an hour before the doors even opened. I was too nervous for proper time management. So ended up milling about outside. A lesbian couple spotted me and immediately glommed onto me. Not sure if it was because I was obviously alone, obviously nervous, or both. They introduced themselves, and asked what my name was. I gave them the name I was using at the time. That name didn’t stick but it was the first time I introduced myself by a name other than my birth name.

When the doors opened we went inside, and milled about more, but it was better milling because there were more people, a smaller area, oh and most importantly the building was heated. Another trans woman approached our group and struck up conversation. I was aghast, she was in her 50s, silver stringy hair, a bit of face stubble, and the worst breast forms I have ever seen. They swayed unnaturally, oddly, and obviously. All I could think of was please no one associate this cross dresser with me, a real trans(tm). Not my finest moment. Turns out it was also her first night out, and she was just happy to see another trans person. In the years since we’ve become good friends in spite my initial reaction.

It was a strange tension, I felt both like a faker, I was clearly a man in a skirt, I wasn’t achieving my goals, I wasn’t the person I wanted people to see, but everyone was so welcoming. I wasn’t there yet, but people recognized and affirmed my efforts, progress was possible.

The next day my wife told me she had seen me going out in a skirt and we needed to have a talk. I explained I was questioning my gender, that’s why I went to the drag show at all, she knew I was going to the show, but not about my plans for attire. She was relieved to find out I was having an existential crisis, rather than an affair. But she still wanted couples therapy because she was very straight and this was a lot.

We started looking for a couples therapist. Most had months long wait lists, except for one. That probably should have been a red flag, but we were just happy with the prospect of figuring out what we were going to do as a couple going forward. At the appointment we quickly notice that the counselor was old enough to be both of our grandmothers. She asked what brought us here today. I spoke first “Well I’m a trans woman and -“ the counselor immediately turned to my wife “I am so sorry honey, don’t worry we’ll get you through this with as little pain as possible. My ex-husband was gay, I know what it’s like.” And it was all down hill from there. But! There were two big positives that came out of that night. It was the first time I said I was a trans woman out loud. And over all it was such a disaster that it turned into a bonding experience for my wife and I, we still laugh about the crazy old lady to this day. We got on a wait list and found a proper therapist.

That fall I set out to buy clothes for myself. Things with my wife were still pretty touch and go. So I set out shopping in secret, I told myself I was an adult and didn’t need anyone’s permission buy clothes. (If I could give one bit of advice to partnered folks questioning their gender it would be: be completely up front and transparent with your partner; it was a lesson I learned the hard way). I headed downtown and made two stops: a second hand store popular with the college kids, and the boutique lingerie shop. I got a couple of tops at the second hand store, but couldn’t find anything for my lower half that fit that I liked, but that’s ok I knew which pieces in my wife’s wardrobe fit my body and style by this point. At the lingerie shop I explained bashfully that I was trans but I had no idea how to size a bra. The clerk was an absolute gem, treated me completely normally, we went back to a fitting room and got me measured, 36B not a bad starting point. She then went and pulled a few selections that helped accentuate what I had, and a few practical sports bras. I bought two padded sports bras. I asked if I could duck back into the changing room and put one of my new bras on before heading out, the clerk said go for it, so I did.

When I got home I quietly slipped the bra I wasn’t wearing into my dresser, and hung the new tops in my closet. I hadn’t planned this far ahead really. That evening as my wife and I were getting ready to turn in for the evening I realized another thing I hadn’t planned for, how to get undressed because I was now wearing a bra. Feeling trapped by the situation, I told my wife that I had gone out shopping and bought myself a couple bras, and was wearing one now. Things got heated, she was mostly upset that I hadn’t discussed it with her before hand, but also she’d noticed the straps hours ago, I was not a sneaky as I thought I was.

In December the Christmas season was upon us, and I went out shopping. I picked up what I needed and headed for the register. As I got to the front there was a bit of a shuffle at the register with clerks coming and going, but we ended up with myself and another woman in line, and a new clerk at the register. The new clerk addressed the other woman in line first, and she without missing a beat said “I think she was here first”, meaning me, and took a step back. It was electric, someone else I’ve never seen before or since, saw me, understood me, respected me, and supported the person I want to be. This wasn’t the expected affirmation you get in queer spaces, this was an unknown unprompted person seeing and understanding. Progress wasn’t just possible, it was happening.

I hadn’t, knowingly, seen another trans person at all since being sure that that was who I was and wanted to be. I live in a college town, it’s pretty darn gay here, so I looked around to see what the options for community were. There was a trans support group that met a few times a month in the evenings. So I got dressed up, and timidly went to see what the group was like. There were around a dozen people that night, all different phases of transition and styles of presentation. There was a guy in the group that looked vaguely familiar but I wasn’t quite sure why, months later I realized we had both volunteered at the same church camp years ago, small world that. I met people that night and got contact information. A gal and her partner offered to give me lessons in make up and how to girl 101, I was excited for the future. Things were really starting to pick up the pace.

And then Covid happened.

By the spring of 2020 my marriage had stabilized. We were going to make this work. But I still hadn’t said anything about a name to my wife. I had one picked out, but there was always something more pressing to talk about. I finally broached the subject with her, I’d like to be called Oliva going forward. She absolutely was not having it, we had talked potential kids names years ago, and Oliva was the second pick name for a daughter, I absolutely could not have it. We were both hurt by this in different ways. Once we had a chance to regroup we decided we’ll find a new name for me together. I told her what I was looking for: unquestionably feminine, good vowel sounds, good single syllable nick name, didn’t overlap with anyone in my life. For a few weeks we’d burst in on the other person like the Kool-Aid man and toss name suggestions at each other. Nothing stuck. Then a week before my birthday my wife suggested Isabel, it hit all the marks. I had spent 33 years living under my birth name, but no more, I had a name now, it was mine, it was me.

Despite the fact that my mother in law lives with us, and had seen me about the house in dresses and skirts for the last six months, I hadn’t actually said anything specific to her. So one night after dinner, I sat down with her and tried to explain what was going on, that I was a woman and would like to be called Isabel, she was receptive as the aging hippie that she was. And then the next day it was like nothing happened, right back to the old name, masculine pronouns. I was hurt, she seemed so receptive. I mentioned it to my wife who said she’d talk to her mom about it. My wife reported back that her mother didn’t think I was actually serious about wanting to be called by my new name or she/her pronouns, but was completely supportive after it was cleared up no I really was serious about being trans.

Next up was coming out to my sister, we live several hours apart, so I delivered the news via text message. “Hey, I’m trans and going by Isabel these days”, about half an hour later she replied “Yeah, I know, I follow you on Twitter, remember?” No, no I did not remember, we had a good chat and she was happy to have a big sister, so yeah that was easy.

It was time to actually start making permanent changes to be the person that I was. Given Covid my options were limited, but the local dermatology clinic was still offering laser hair removal, so I started doing sessions of laser every 5 weeks. After a few sessions I was starting to see good results for my cheeks, but my neck was proving to be an intractable problem.

I had kept the whole existential crisis about gender under wraps at work, but our plucky junior dev knew to be on the look out, she knew what she was seeing. I asked her about how she navigated the name change process at work, she said she got her name legally changed and then quit her previous job. I guess that’s one way to do it, but not very helpful to me. So I reached out to our HR rep and let her know I had something important I needed to talk to her about when she had time. She had time available Thursday morning later that week, ok so I was set.

Thursday came, the call started pleasantly enough, the usual way video meeting start, how are you doing, how’s the cat, etc. Finally the tension broke, and I just blurted out “I’m a trans woman, I want to go by Isabel going forward”, there was a brief pause and then a look of palpable relief washed over her face. “Oh thank god! I was afraid you had cancer or your wife died from Covid, or something like actually bad”. She was supper supportive but let me know there weren’t really any policies in place for employee name changes outside of legal name changes. She said for telling folks I worked with we could move at what ever pace was comfortable for me. I didn’t know what that was and said I was going to play it by ear. Next Tuesday was the monthly close meeting with the entire accounting group. I hadn’t planned on moving that quickly but realized that was my best chance to tell everybody all at once. As the meeting was coming to a close I let everybody know “Hey I’m trans and I’m going to be going by Isabel going forward” They were vaguely positive in that we’re cis het and have no idea what to say here way. The ball was now in motion, I had a team meeting with the engineering side of the house later in the morning. That was met with much more ruckus approval, owing to the fact that half the team was some flavor of queer themselves. After that I updated my slack name, and that was that, other teams were left to their own devices to figure it out, or not.

The wheels of bureaucracy were slow to turn for email address and more “corporate” places my name showed up. I really just cared about email, but it was all tied together. About a week later one of the senior managers from the IT group popped up in my DMs to apologize the process was going so slow, and she felt bad every time she saw my old name and could only imagine how I felt about it. Uh mostly ambivalent, but I figured it was more diplomatic not to say that and just let her crusade. A few days later she got back to me again, they had permission now to change all my account names over, we just needed to coordinate when that would happen. I heard later that she and the head of payroll had a beef that made it all the way to the CEO, who declared the whole thing a waste of time, and to “just change her damn name, it’s not that hard”. And thus new policy was made.

Time marched on until December of 2020 when my wife and I got all dolled up to take holiday pictures since we had both gotten new dresses for the occasion. It was after my wife had posted the pictures that it dawned on me, I hadn’t changed my name on Facebook yet, or really said anything publicly about being trans. A few people knew what was going on, some more had some pretty solid guesses at this point. So I wrote a post about my process of questioning and eventually realizing who I wanted to be, leading up to choosing a new name in the spring. Most of the text of that original post is contained somewhere in this page, but with lots more commentary and anecdotes sprinkled in. By and large people were supportive, to my great surprise no one raged or abandoned me. I guess I picked up good people in my life, horary for minor miracles. My favorite response was from one of my best friends from high school, “Yeah I saw your Christmas pictures, was wondering when you were going to get around to telling us your new name.” Ah thanks buddy, that supportive gruffness is why we have been friends for years.

Two years ago the pieces started coming together because of my wife’s quest to loose weight for fertility reasons. Still no baby, and she had been given a clean bill of health, so now it was my turn to get put through the battery of tests. We started with the easy but expensive test, specifically a semen analysis and genetic screening. Gave blood and got it shipped off for screening. As part of that process they ran a karyotyping, came back 46XY and let me tell you I’ve never been so disappointed to be “healthy” in my life. I really did want there to be a genetic component here, something I could point to and say see there’s a reason I’m trans, it’s right there in the genome, but that wasn’t to be. Since I was good at the genetic level, the next order of business was testing how well I delivered that DNA with a semen analysis. They ran me through three rounds of semen analysis they all came back low and inconclusive. From there they moved on to increasingly invasive methods of analyzing my physical anatomy finally culminating in a testicular biopsy. And that’s where things get interesting, turns out half my testes are missing, whoops. Unfortunately for me it was the cells responsible for gamete production and not hormone production that had gone missing in action. All the testosterone, none of the fertility, thanks little traitor spheres.

With it now firmly established that I was no longer going to be directly involved in the baby making process, there wasn’t any reason to delay HRT any further. So in April of 2021 I started on Spironolactone and estrogen patches. I wanted to see clearly which changes were from the hormones, so I stopped laser hair removal temporarily to see what changes estrogen would provide to my facial hair. Life happened and I never resumed laser hair removal.

Now on HRT I met the legal requirements in the state of Oregon to change my gender marker, so in May I started the paperwork to get my name and gender marker changed. By June I was legally Isabel and embarked on the journey of updating all the darn documents.

In October after 6 months of lackluster E levels I switched to injections instead of patches, and that got hormones up to where they should have been finally.

The next big milestone came in December of 2021, my employer was throwing a holiday party again since there was a lull in Covid and people were all to happy to think the worst was over. This was going to be my first time seeing my coworkers in person since coming out. It was going to be my first time going through airport security with my new ID. In preparation for the trip I bought a green lace gown since it was going to be a fancy event. Being a totally “we swear it’s not just Christmas” Christmas party I would need a splash of red to go with my green dress. So I got my hair professionally colored for the first time, in a beautiful radiant red. I chose the red partially as a Christmas gimmick, and partially because I was partial to the warmer end of the color spectrum. Since then the red hair has become an element of my identity, the fiery red hair is who I am, passion and warmth.

The party itself was lovely, the food was lovely and I got to see so many people I hadn’t seen in years. I got to deliver my favorite joke many times. “Hi! I’m Isabel! It’s so nice to meet you again for the first time my old friend”, the list of people I can use that joke on is getting rather short, it’s a shame it’s got a finite shelf life. The after party was an unexpected moment of validation as a woman. It was my first time in a bar since coming out, my first time in a bar in general in many many years. But I really was a woman in a bar that night, I had a woman I’d worked with in passing but hadn’t met in person before stop to chat with me, she capped off the conversation with, “oh yeah, and keep an eye on the sales bro at the bar with the cowboy hat, he’s a bit of a creep”, I was enough of a woman in her eyes to warrant the sisterly heads up. Strange thing to find joy in but I did.

February of 2022 my kid was born, I was a mother. Me, a mother. This also led to a hormonal disaster, since I now had to be a responsible parent, I figured I should finally get around to having a regular GP. There was a local GP accepting patients who was a lesbian and was comfortable with prescribing patients HRT. This was an improvement over driving an hour to a specialty clinic. As part of the intake with her she wanted me to do a full blood panel, just to see where I was as a person. I did the blood draw for this when my kid was 4 days old, after 4 days of intense after birth close contact with an infant. The hormonal impacts of postpartum on birthing parents is well studied, for non-birthing cis men the effects have been studied enough to conclude further study isn’t warranted. What about trans women who’s partner’s give birth? Well there’s a noticeable lack of literature there. None the wiser I went in and gave the vampires their tribute. The next day a nurse called me, with a bit of persistence bordering on professional panic in her voice, “Hey you need to come in today to talk to your GP about your lab results”. That’s a fun phone call to get. So I came in a few hours later. Turns out my E levels had jumped up to 1200 pg/mL, usual target range is 240-300, that just means more boobs faster, right? No turns out my doctor was worried about cancer being at play, so we cut my E dosage by two thirds and referred me to the local cancer center for a screening. As noted above there’s no medical literature on trans partners postpartum. However there is a known spike in estrogen in birthing parents that corresponds to the start of milk production brought on by skin contact with newborns and exposure to crying. Is that what happened to me? Maybe. Since then my E levels have been stable at the lower dosage, so whatever changed seems to have stuck.

After a month of arguing back and forth between my GP, the cancer center, and insurance I finally got in for the screening. Unsurprisingly it came back clean. Yay the abysmal state of knowledge on trans medicine. The high point of the trip was the radio technician for my mammogram note that I had “excellent, well formed symmetrical” breasts, I asked her if she could make sure that got included in my results verbatim, she obliged, so it is now an official part of my medical records that I have excellent breasts, how about that for a point of pride?

To celebrate both my birth and rebirth days in May of 2022 and got a phoenix in the trans pride colors tattooed on my left bicep. I want to be visibly trans, I want queer people to look at me and know she’s one of us. I want the next generation of trans people to have access to role models living their best lives inviting them to do the same. I don’t want to hide, I want people to be confronted by my queerness. If people have no choice but to accept me, they can accept anyone.

The remainder of 2022 was mostly momming and letting the estrogen do it’s thing. We’ll see what 2023 has in store, there’s still a bit more work to do to become my ideal self.

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Filed under: Auto-biographical - @ 2023-01-06 13:22

Tags: FridayNightStoryTime, Trans