transcription: trans people: hormones have made me finally feel good about and at home in my body for the first time in my life. cis people: but arent you worried that might be irreversible?
transcription: trans people: hormones have made me finally feel good about and at home in my body for the first time in my life. cis people: but arent you worried that might be irreversible?
Occasionally I’ll see someone say something along the lines of:
“I just wonder if they’ll feel the same about it in ten years. I think we’ll start seeing a lot of regret from all these young folks rushing into it.”
Yet here I am, ten years plus transition, continuing to exist.
Gender affirming care continues to have one of the lowest patient regret rates in healthcare.
Funny, that.
I think a huge factor in this is that outsiders never see all the inner thoughts and ruminating on it. I can’t tell you how many of my close friends/family say “This came out of nowhere/we saw no signs”, despite there being fairly obvious signs as young as 4, but also an insane amount of repression and masking of those feelings because I saw the attitude my parents had towards queer people, and literally calling my friends slurs behind their back for expressing even the slightest amount of femininity/queerness. Gee, I wonder why you never saw any signs?
They expect over the top displays of “transness” and when they don’t see it, they only see the “sudden” change, which usually isn’t even that sudden. I grew my hair out for years beforehand, had experimented with women’s clothes/fashion for a decade at least, and even had some friends who were very “in the know” on trans people who were not shocked in the slightest when I came out, because I was already not particularly masc presenting by the time I came out. The other friends just couldn’t see past the masc persona I had put on, so when that act finally dropped, it was some shocking and sudden revelation to them.
I feel that hard. It didn’t come out of nowhere, it came out of me exhausting every alternative I grasped for despite knowing full well that it would always end here. And of course the signs were all easy to brush off like me hating being photographed, I saw how people who violated gender expectations were treated. And especially I saw how trans women were treated in society. Why the fuck would I have been open about having these thoughts until I was damn sure? I spent a lot of my teen years trying to stay safe and wantable while also trying to push those boundaries and see what I could get away with
My parents and siblings were sorta the opposite; we generally agreed gender norms are BS, so none of us saw things that would sometimes be considered signs of being queer in some way to actually be signs, so only things like clear expressions of bottom dysphoria would count. And I had kept that stuff to myself.
Started at 20, got hormones in under a year after coming out. Been over 10 years, and have had surgery. My regrets are all about not getting to start sooner, that I should have gotten more modern approaches to hrt (reduced spiro and increased estrogen with injections sooner), and how I should’ve learned to be more feminine earlier.
I’m alive now, truly and fully. I was just barely surviving before
But what about the regret you could have had for not transitioning you didn’t even consider that did you so reckless