Phorm The Vixdjinn

Once again encountering:

The transfeminine urge for tasty pickles

vs

The transfeminine reality of a loss in grip and muscle strength, preventing opening of the pickle jar.

As of today, I've been taking feminizing hormones for three years to the day.

I suppose my feelings are very similar to what I said last year. I really don't feel like I've changed. I feel stuck in the lurch, the reflection in the mirror is pretty much the same as it was when I started. My voice still sucks, and I can't hide that. I'm not dressing the way I want. My body isn't where I want it to be at all. And I'm still feeling stuck, lost, and wrong. Every attempt at progress is met with failure, and an attitude of "Figure it out on your own".

Honestly, it's a bit hard not to feel hopeless about it. Particularly when I'm seeing HRT transition timelines from other people, showing positively phenomenal progress in their journey after only 11 months or less. Here I am, after nearly three times longer on hormones, and I'm not even near that level of transition.

One thing I keep seeing from folks freshly on HRT is the sentiment that even the first dose brings on a tremendous mental relief. That it gave an emotional change almost immediately. All I can remember was I never had that. When I first got that bottle of estradiol, I remember being happy, but I also remember feeling like I had such an impossible task ahead of me given my age. And when I started taking it I remember feeling something like... "Can this even really fix me at this point in my life?" It was something I was extremely excited to start, but it also just... I don't know. I guess I knew deep down no one would ever see me as a girl, and I was doomed before I started.

Of course, reflecting on this and comparing it to the experience of others makes me wonder - very deeply - Am I even trans?

Maybe it's because I'm not transitioning socially fast enough. Maybe it's because I'm doing everything I can to maintain a job that I need to survive, but really requires me to meet the expectations of others (wearing the clothes they expect, using the pronouns they expect, talking with the voice they expect) if I want to preserve my employment (Because I know I won't be taken seriously the minute I come out, and then it's game over). So the only time I have for "progress" is the fleeting time off I have on the weekends. And that means I don't get consistent practice. How can I improve my voice or learn makeup appropriately when I do it so rarely?

Maybe it's because I know there's just nothing to be done to save me. There's no changing this awful jawline, or these hideous shoulders, or this disgusting body hair. And if there were ever a chance to do so, it was twenty years ago - Twenty years ago when I knew I was trans, but convinced myself "Well, I guess there's nothing I can do about it". So here I am, out of time, without courage, and no future. With hope as small as my tits.

For some of us, it is too late.

Anyhow. Happy HRTaversary to me, I guess.

One thing that continues to catch me off guard: When I came out to my mother (a year ago), and informed her I had secretly been on HRT for two years at the time, she was very worried about cancer*. Her worries, notably, were founded on personal experience: She had been prescribed estradiol for menopause in the past, and the doctor made her quit taking it because of a cancer risk. So she said it was really worrying that I might develop cancer.

Some other cis folks that I have come out to have expressed a similar trepidation with my being on HRT. The idea of "this could give you cancer, or hurt you in some unknown manner".

It all seems to trace back to some relatively dubious studies, in my opinion, that don't do well to isolate estradiol from other risk factors. But that's beside the point. And the point is:

I'm a fucking chemist.

I'm an organic chemist. I handle more carcinogenic materials in a routine day than most people experience in a year. I've been exposed to more dichloromethane than most people will see in a lifetime. Intercolators are standard fare. And this is to say nothing of the unknown/new chemicals I've been exposed to, that no one rightly knows what kind of impact incidental exposure will have. I mean, yes, I wear PPE constantly - But exposures still happen and the risk is there.

At no point in my educational or professional life has anyone ever said, "Are you sure about being a chemist? That sounds risky."

But goddamn do people fall all over themselves to ask, "Are you sure about being a girl?"

* I do want to note that in the moment she was still extremely supportive, and she has continued to be so ever since! She's just legitimately worried, I know, and this is all VERY strange and hard for her. But she's always in my corner, and I love her tremendously.

Exactly two years ago today, on August 14th, 2021, I took my first dose of estadiol and started my journey with HRT. I knew I was trans for a good two decades before that, but it took the threat of my own mortality - and the idea that I would die in the wrong body, recognized as a person I was not - to get me to finally seek the treatment I needed.

And honestly, after two years I look... the same.