Decoder Ring

 

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This is a complex and important subject, so I want to speak as plainly and clearly as I can. I'll start by giving you some basic information.

My name is Claire Atkinson. My pronouns are she/her. This isn’t legally set in stone yet. The name and gender recorded for me at birth are still on all my official documentation, but I assume you have more mental flexibility and working memory than my insurance company, and I request that you honor what I’m asking for here. It will take time for this to become second nature, and old habits are hard to change, I know. I’ll give any mistakes and forces of habit the benefit of the doubt.

If you know me, you know what this information also means about me. I’m transgender. More specifically, I’m a binary trans woman. That means that I’m physically and socially transitioning from male to female. I began taking my first tentative steps toward socially transitioning in August, and I began medically transitioning to female with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) on September 30.

You may be under the impression that trans people know their entire lives that their gender identity is incongruent with their gender assigned at birth. Transfeminine people, the narrative goes, are from youngest childhood feminine, sensitive people who wanted to wear dresses and play with dolls. This is a particular narrative that our culture likes to tell about trans women. For some it’s true. But it doesn’t describe what a significant portion of trans people go through. I’ve been fairly sensitive my whole life, but otherwise my childhood doesn’t really fit this template. I never seriously considered that I might not be a cisgender (not trans) boy or man until earlier this year. This is part of why it took me so long to recognize that I’m trans.

This summer the last of my denial mechanisms that had stopped me from understanding my gender identity for so long finally broke down. I learned more about transgender stories and experiences, and I began to realize how much I had in common with the experiences reflected in these stories. I learned enough to know that I needed to explore this path further, and the further I went the more correct I felt in seeing myself as a woman and as trans. I want to be open now about who I am, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it, so that cisgender people can better understand the variety of trans experiences, and so that there’s another trans voice talking about how this experience of life can work. I wouldn’t have been able to reach where I am now without hearing trans voices telling trans stories. I want to do my part.

The typical medical explanation of transition is that trans people experience gender dysphoria, which then manifests as depression, anxiety, depersonalization, derealization, and a nebula of other mental trauma. The purpose of transition is to alleviate dysphoria. This explanation isn’t wrong, but I’m uncomfortable with how negatively it’s framed. It paints transition as a least-bad option, an escape of last resort, rather than as something elegant and beautiful.

Right now, I see myself and what I’m doing, and it feels just that. Elegant. Beautiful. I feel comfortable, relaxed, joyous in my body for the first time in my adult life. This last week I’ve been nursing a sprained rotator cuff. It’s made me realize that the way I feel about existing in my body now, dealing with near-constant muscle pain, is still better than how I felt existing in my fully masculine body pre-transition on a normal day.

I realize now how much self-hate, how much self-loathing, how much depression and anxiety I was carrying, centered around the ugly itch of living in the wrong flesh. There’s a saying common in trans discourse that fish don’t know they’re swimming in water. Likewise many trans people, myself included, don’t know how dysphoric we are until we’re drowning. All my life I was taught that my masculinity, my maleness, my manhood were some of my most precious gifts. And anyway they were impossible characteristics to change. Being told over and over that I should want this, and (like it or not) had to have it,, was drowning.

But now that I’m transitioning, I don’t feel this process to be a claptrap fix on something broken. I feel the longing that’s been there, at least since the beginning of puberty for me, to become soft, become feminine, to be beautiful and female. And I feel the way every day estrogen is working my body into this, into the right way for me to be. I know, from the philosophy and ideas I appreciate, but much more so from the example of the wonderful women in my life, that femininity, femaleness, womanhood are gifts just as precious as their male counterparts. For me they are the right gifts. I felt able to survive, barely, as a man, but now I feel myself becoming a woman, and I can thrive and sing. I was 30 feet underwater before, sipping air through a broken regulator. Now I’m breathing free at the surface.

People like me have existed throughout the time and space of human experience. In history this is usually seen most clearly in the people who lived in third genders between masculine and feminine (for example the Hijra of south Asia). In the last hundred years the discovery of steroid sex hormones allowed the development of therapy that, over time, replaces many of the characteristics of the body developed during puberty with those of the opposite sex. I’m grateful that I live in a time when this therapy is readily available, because I’m experiencing how life-saving and life-affirming HRT is.

Already my skin has softened into a woman’s skin. My little breasts are growing. My face is growing rounder, becoming a woman’s face. These changes will continue for at least another two years, possibly several years more. As I’ve seen each change begin to surface on my body I’ve wanted to cry in delight. Sometimes I literally have. I imagined so often in my most private fantasies how wonderful it would be for my mind to exist in harmony with the body of a woman. Now I’m learning what it’s truly like. There’s a special sweetness in the answering of a prayer so private that I never dared utter it to anyone, even myself.

The process isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it’s hard work. I’ve had four sessions so far for laser hair removal of my beard, and I have at least that many ahead of me. Each zap of coherent light hurts like a hot needle. I’m working on retraining my voice so that I can recognize it to be a woman’s voice. It’s tough, and often emotionally draining. But I’m beginning to see the results, and I know this is what I need.

I’m not saying that relative quantities of testosterone and estrogen in the blood determine who's a man and who's a woman. But for me, this realignment is a huge chunk of what I needed to see myself as a woman. Womanhood as part of my identity is something I need to grow into, the same way cisgender girls grow into it in their teen years. I’m opening my arms to it, feeling a little more like a woman every day, and I give thanks for this wonderful body that’s taking me on this journey.

It's really beyond the scope of this post, but I'll take a moment to talk about how my wife and my children are doing in reaction to this. It's an adjustment, but we're adjusting. Life is getting better, I'm reasonably sure, for all of us. I was failing to be the husband and father I wanted to be, because these are not roles I was made to fill. I have a lot of learning ahead of me on how to be a wife and mother. But now I know these are things I was born to be. My wife and I are communicating better than we have ever before in our marriage, stating clearly what we need, and giving that grace to each other. My children are thriving with two parents who are both showing up with all that they are every day. I'm happy, and the connections in my family are such that we're all happier than we've been in a long time.

Please spare a thought for how tough this road is for many trans people. My journey so far has been much easier than it is for many. You should also know how precarious trans rights are at this time. There’s an ongoing push to prevent teens from accessing puberty blockers, which are reversible in their effects and can massively improve the lives of children who recognize they're trans while young enough to make use of this therapy. Discrimination against trans people is openly acceptable and applauded in many parts of this country and around the world. Trans people face unemployment and violence at a rate far higher than cis people. Spare a thought, and if you’re moved to do something to help, please do so.

If I can make one other small request, it’s that you listen to trans people tell their own stories. Until very recently cis people have controlled what discourse about trans people is allowable, and it’s silenced the voices of this community. It's created a fog of ignorance that’s blocked people like me from understanding who they are for decades, sometimes whole lifetimes. Read the writing of people like Amanda Roman, Cassie LaBelle, and Jocelyn Badgley if you want to understand more about what people like me go through. Watch the content that people like Abigail Thorn, Natalie Wynn, and Jami Higginbotham create. I don’t want to tell you what to think. I just want you to hear what I, and people like me, have to say.

In this excellent video Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube made pre-transition, she talks about what it’s like to discover that you’re queer. In this case, she’s talking about finding out that she’s bisexual, though I imagine she went through a similar process discovering that she’s trans:

 

So much here resonated with me and my experience, but one bit was missing. The missing piece was how much, after I realized that I’m trans, it felt like I understood who I was in a way I couldn't have imagined before. It’s as though when the idea of me was first conceived some late spring day in 1988, the forces that made me wrote the script of my life to be a puzzle. I was powerless to solve the puzzle until I whittled my way down to the bedrock of what makes me who I am. There, at the heart of the equation, was the decoder ring that made it all make sense. I realized that I’m trans, and realized that I’m me for the first time.

I will thank God for the rest of my life I’ve been blessed with this enlightenment.