some thoughts on the impact of transitioning
I do wonder if I would be as happy with my transition if I had transitioned younger. Obviously that's the cry of all trans women, I wish I transitioned younger, it would have done so much for me, etc etc. But it's strange, I don't know if it would have helped me all that much. I'm very pretty and aside from my truly monstrous height I would be very content with my appearance. I guess physically I didn't changed very much from when I was 17 except in the obvious ways. I certainly didn't grow any taller. And sure, it's very nice to say that I could have transitioned then and saved myself a couple of years of frustration, but then I also could have transitioned when I was 14 and saved myself even more years of frustration and I even could have been born a cis girl. None of these things are true and I guess I don't despair over them very much. But then I think about what I was like when I was 17, and when I was 14, and so on, and what I'm not like now.
I'm a happier person now. And I have friends who I love and activities I enjoy. I learned how to get these things before I transitioned, and only decided to transition when I realized that these things did not make me happy. I did not believe that my friends could love me or that I could love them, I did not believe that the things I enjoyed were things that were worthy of joy, but I loved my friends and enjoyed hobbies the most when I was catching those fleeting glimpses of girlhood that were so few and far between. I talked with a friend and told her that there was happiness in my life (a lie) and so what if I wasn't really trans? Every girl feels like that, she told me. We were sitting together on a river bank and she was close to 4 years on estrogen, and I never thought I had ever seen a girl as beautiful as she was.
Beauty is not everything. I am beautiful now and it makes my life easier, but it doesn't make me more a girl than any of the ugly girls that I know. Beauty is not something that most people can judge outwardly for themselves. I know I am beautiful because people, friends and strangers, will tell me so; I know I am beautiful because I possess the things that people so often ascribe to beauty; I know I am beautiful because I see a picture of myself and judge, for myself, that I am beautiful. Estrogen has done approximately 90% of the work to make me outwardly beautiful and the remaining 10% is jealousy over other beautiful people.
I try to be beautiful inwardly, too. But to be inwardly beautiful is much more difficult than to be outwardly beautiful. No one can truly know the insides of another person. We all have our internal worlds, but every other person exists only as an externality. So we cannot judge other peoples’ inward operations because they are wholly outward to us. In order for me to be an inwardly beautiful person I must understand my own beauty, without relying on others to understand it for me. I try to do this, and I fail often, but once I had understood what is ugly in others I forced myself to understand what is ugly in myself. I was unpleasant in many mundane ways, and I decided that it was more worth it to make myself pleasant to myself and to others. In this process of self refinement I realized that I was trans, but my ability to truly acknowledge myself as needing to transition only came after acknowledging that my current mode of personhood was untenable.
If I had realized I was trans before realizing I needed to be a different person, would transitioning truly have helped me? I don’t know if it would have. Maybe I would have saved myself from a couple of years of fighting internally about my selfhood, but I don’t think that it would have made me a better person. I think I just would have transitioned to become an unpleasant girl, who would probably still be dissatisfied with her life but not understand why. Transitioning has definitely made me a better and happier person but that is not by the simple virtue of estrogen itself. Estrogen is grease on the wheels, it is not the axle that they turn around.
I saw a video of myself from a couple years ago. That poor girl, she had just started to understand that she needed to change and how hard that was going to be. In it, she was trying to voice train because maybe that would help her be slightly more trans and she couldn’t even imagine a world where she could be on hormones. At the end of the video, she looks into the camera and says, Let’s see what my voice sounds like in a couple of years. That poor girl. There was so much pain in her eyes, more pain than I have ever seen in mine.
In What Is to Be Done?, the novel by Chernyshevsky (I have not read the book by Lenin), Vera has a dream. She dreams that she lives in a cellar, but then escapes. How could I have survived in that cellar? she wonders, It was only because I had never seen life outside of it. The sheer sadness in the girl’s eyes, that girl that grew up to be me, I can’t imagine that sadness anymore. Even now, when I am thinking about my transness every single day and wondering how I will live for another 40, 50, 60 years when it’s so difficult to be trans every single week, I can’t imagine the horror of going back into the body and the life of that teenage girl who tried to voice train in her messy childhood bedroom. What an absolute mockery of life she was living, and what a miracle she managed to escape it.