I missed my turn into Planned Parenthood’s parking lot. There wasn’t a large sign saying “planned parenthood parking here” and perhaps for good reason. I circled back and parked, backing into my spot. I figured making a show of parking well would prove that this didn’t scare me. The building was small, unassuming, that you might mistake it for an apartment building. Every entrance was secured with security cameras and doorbells, like it held some dark secret. We went around to the front entrance, where I told the intercom I was here for an appointment and was let in.

I had made the decision to not bill insurance at all. I was still using my parent’s insurance and will be until I turned 26. I didn’t want to risk someone noticing a Planned Parenthood visit showing up in my claims. I nervously asked the very enthusiastic woman at the front desk if I could pay with cash.

I had carefully considered what I would wear to the appointment the week leading up to it. I wanted to dress masculine, but I didn’t want to feel like I was playing myself up. It felt too disingenuous to pretend I was a an extremely masculine man, but I didn’t want to appear like I was faking being trans by looking overtly feminine. I didn’t want to wear my binder (what if I need to take a deep breath when they take my vitals and I can’t?) but I needed to wear a sports bra that created a flatter, “uniboob” effect. I knew I was overthinking it, and my thoughts were confirmed when I stepped in and were greeted by healthcare workers that were almost cartoonishly friendly and supportive.

I had brought my friend Micky for moral support. They happily accompanied me as far as the waiting room. I found the difference funny, the highly surveilled and guarded brick exterior compared to the colorful waiting room. I played with the pop-it fidget toys they provided in the waiting room until someone called my name.

I left Micky behind and followed the nurse into a room. There was the sound of ocean waves playing over a speaker somewhere. Another fidget toy on the table. I continued playing with it as the nurse began asking me questions. Again, I felt a sense of paranoia, that if I answered wrong, if I didn’t make it sound urgent, she might feel like I didn’t need them, and I would go home empty handed. “When did you first start considering hormone therapy?” I told her since I was 18, but just didn’t get to it until now.

I knew I was trans at 17 but I waited to graduate high school to come out to my friends. I figured I would start hormones soon after I was a legal adult, but once I turned 18, I felt I was in no rush. I enjoyed being who I was in the stage I was in. I did all the things you do as a baby transmasc one at a time. I cut off my hair and nearly gave my mother a heart attack. I started buying cargo shorts from the little boys section of goodwill. I bought a binder from GC2B. I didn’t feel ready to start T then, and I told myself it was because my life wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t know how to explain my transition to my family. I didn’t want to start unless I was sure I was willing to change my entire life around it. But also, it was because I felt like a teenage boy. Being trans for the first time at 18 years old was like being born again, redoing a childhood and adolescence that I got wrong the first time. I made all the mistakes you’re supposed to make as a teenager in discovering myself. I was late to everything, and was happy to be. Being in a pre-T body didn’t feel unnatural.

I became extremely depressed around 19-20. It felt like I suddenly crashed, but had it coming. For two years, I further removed hormone therapy lower in my list of priorities. While my other transmasc friends were making PP appointments for T prescriptions, I was making psych appointments at campus health for antidepressants that ended up giving me heart problems. By the time I finally woke up from that prolonged depressive state, I was about to graduate. I was in a new relationship. Things were finally getting better. I guess I didn’t see a reason to change anything.

I was prepared to have a lot of bloodwork done, but after vitals, all that was taken from me was a little drop of blood from a prick to my finger to check my hemoglobin. The nurse left the room and I was alone to wait for the clinician. Looking around, the office was clearly designed with the assumption that most of the patients would be female. There were posters about empowerment and motivation, diagrams of the uterus and vagina, and flowery decor. The women’s health office I went to months ago for my IUD insertion was sterile and beige in comparison. I didn’t mind, nor feel out of place. I’m not ashamed to be born female.

I know the world largely views me as a girl. Because I’ve not medically transitioned, it never mattered if I had short hair or long hair, nor did it matter if I was wearing a binder or not. I never passed as male, but that was never a distinct goal of mine. To me, my transness colored my inner world. How people interpreted how I presented wasn’t my problem. I would have short hair, wear a binder and a skirt. I found joy in knowing that if I could choose to be a boy, I could be whatever type of guy I wanted. Even when I started growing my hair out again and wearing makeup, I didn’t feel less trans. It feels different doing it now from how I felt trying to be feminine before I knew I was trans. I get she/her’ed wherever I go, it feels more like I’m playing the role of a girl, and I find this fun rather than invalidating. When I realized I was trans, it was not out of disdain for girlhood, but the pleasure I found in viewing my gender as performance, and not a concrete truth meant to be believed.

But I think this, ultimately, has warped my perception of myself. I struggled to know for sure if medical transition was for me. I don’t feel like there was a natural state my body was meant to be in. I could read all the effects of testosterone on Webmd and try to think if it would make me feel more “at home” in my body or not, but I don’t think of my body as a place. My body is just a tool that allows me to move through life.

Of course, playing the girl role made the movement easier. When I started growing my hair again and wearing makeup more, suddenly, people paid more attention to me. People wanted to be my friend. I was asked to be a part of things much more often. My family became nicer to me, started entertaining me and everything I wanted more than they ever used to. It was like an unspoken sigh of relief, that playing boy was just an ugly phase, a growing pain and now my body can exist to fulfill every girl’s only final destination and purpose– being pretty. 

The clinician finally came into the room. She went over the questions again, more in depth. She asked me if I was depressed (I said yes) and if I had thoughts of suicide (she was a mandated reporter– I said no.) She asked me who my support system was– friends, family, partner? I said friends and partner, yes. Family sometimes, but not when it comes to this. She nodded and moved on.

It’s a bit annoying and played out that so much trans media is about familial acceptance but it’s more annoying that family is genuinely a big part of transitioning. When I first started making myself look different, I could tell my family tried hard to understand what I was doing, so that they could stop it. When I had short hair, I had an aunt who said she’d pay me $300 to grow out my hair. I had another aunt who said she’d give me $100 for the hair but another $100 if I brought home a boyfriend (they don’t really know the difference between being trans and being a lesbian.) I was a pretty girl, they thought. They don’t know why I would do this to myself.

She asked me if I knew what effects of T I should expect. I said yes. Ever since I was fifteen, I had consumed every piece of transmasculine internet media there was about transition. She went down the list and told me if it was a side effect I wanted. I nodded as she rattled them off. Fat redistribution, yes. Increased muscle, yes. Facial and body hair, yes. Voice change, yes. Enlarged clitoris, yes. She asked me if there were any effects I didn’t want. I told her I heard that T could affect your mod, make you angrier and more aggressive. She nodded and told me it’s possible, but it’s just something to monitor. “There are other effects. Hairloss, increased acne.” It’s her job to warn me that T might make me uglier.

I had finally gotten to a point in my life where people unilaterally liked the way I looked (more or less) and didn’t give me shit for it. I knew I knew I had to make peace with the possibility that T might make me ugly to people again.

Being pretty has advantages that you only understand if you’ve made a conscious decision to try at both at different points in your life. While I have opinions about the increasing expectation to look a certain way and the current success of the beauty industry, I am not above it. Being pretty makes life easier, frictionless, and painless. You can be charitable, smart, funny, successful. You could have won a Nobel prize for discovering the cure to something incurable. Or you could be a huge cunt. No one will care about it if you look like you’ve gained a few pounds and didn’t blend your concealer properly.

I was ashamed that I was afraid of transitioning for such a vain reason, but my life has orbited around acceptance based upon how I looked. If I was tall or if I gained or lost weight. If I had done my eyebrows weird, or if I dressed well. We moralize beauty, we moralize the body. I knew I was making a big faux pas by purposefully uglifying myself, at least in the eyes of others. You can only justify what you do with yourself if you make it nice to look at.

T basically makes you go through puberty, again, but this time the boy puberty. All that hard fought effort I made to clear my acne and tame body hair I would have to experience again. I’ll smell different, sound different, and look different.

I asked for an extra low dose, 0.1 ml injected subcutaneously every week. She explained that the effects would be the same, but they’d come slower. I said it was better that way. I wasn’t out to my family, and I’d rather the changes go unnoticed for a while longer. Really, I wanted more control, to start and stop whenever I wanted, as the effects developed and as my life changed.

I paid around $200 and left the clinic, feeling strange that it was so easy. Something that I had built up for so long, something that I had to convince even myself to believe, was believed by the nurses so readily. I left feeling like I had made transitioning so hard fought in my head, so much that I was the only one fighting it.

My prescription was ready that same evening, and I did my first ever T-shot in our living room. My loving boyfriend read over the informational pamphlet I brought home. Heart pounding, I carefully inserted the needle at a 45 degree angle into my lower abdomen like I was told. There was only a momentary prick of pain and discomfort and no bleeding. Calvin put a band-aid over the spot anyway.

It’s not too important to me that other people understand why I’m doing this. I was asked a few weeks later by a friend if I was going on hormones for health reasons or something, and I just said, “Nah, it’s recreational.” Half joke, two-thirds earnest– I’m transitioning because I like it. Because I want to. Being trans makes my experience of life colorful, interesting, new, and sexy. As I sit in a cafe writing this, in a lace shirt and pink plaid shorts, I feel like a boy. I feel like a girl. And while the world has a right to look at me and see whatever it wants, I have the right to look out into the world and back at myself and I see and experience something that’s rare and special.

So much of the conversation around medical transition centers need. And for the sake of trans issues at large, yes, transgender people need access to gender affirming care, period.

But I don't like to talk about my personal decision to go on T in terms of need. That isn't to say I think of me medically transition as a frivolous past time, something I'm doing just because I'm bored. I just don't like the idea of having to quantify or justify my need for transition to cis people who don't know what it feels like. How should we define need? How much self hatred do I have to prove in order for my transition to be justified in the eyes of cis people who cannot fathom the idea of being trans for any other reason than self-loathing?

I said earlier that I saw my body as just a tool that allows me to move through life, but nowadays, I find that perception reductive, inaccurate, and enabled me to have a distanced and detached relationship with my own life and how I felt about it. Our bodies are not tools. I am my body. I cannot experience life without my body. Every life experience I've ever had, important or mundane, was felt through my body. How my body feels, how it takes up space, how it exists, what I do with it– that IS the culmination of what my life is. When I kiss my boyfriend and feel his stubble on my chin, when I get dressed in the morning and pull a t-shirt over my head, when I get so angry my voice shakes, when I dance for hour and feel the sweat wick off of me outside of the club, when I eat something delicious, when I slip into warm, freshly dried blankets, when I cry so hard my throat burns, when I see a rabbit run into a bush, when I turn my head to back out of a parking spot, when I hug my friends, when I subconsciously start bobbing my head to a song blaring from a passing car, when I wake up from a nightmare with my heart pounding, when I feel a breeze brush against the hair on my legs, when I feel the radiating pain of hitting my shin against a chair, when I feel embarrassed when my voice cracks as I try to say, "good morning," when I

transition,

I am simply giving myself more life to experience. More pleasure to experience. More heartache to experience. More joy to experience. More me to experience.