I wrote this for a plastic surgery support group, to make the transgender experience more familiar to them. It was well received, so I am sharing it more broadly.

These two photos, ten years apart, tell a story.

Ten years ago, I had only the faintest hints of where my life was heading. I was getting a degree that hadn’t yet finished burning me out on my entire field, the most dramatic shouting matches between me and my parents had not yet happened…and I didn’t look at all like I do today. Back then, I didn’t know I was a woman yet.

It would take a few more years for some of those shoes to drop, a few more dominoes to fall, a few more metaphors to mix, before that poor kid’s sad, sad eyes had any life in them. The time before that realization (“hatching,” in transgender slang) is a haze, fogged with the wrongness that every moment feels like when one’s identity is so mismatched. To be transgender and not know it yet is to wrestle with an opponent one can’t name or see or touch but whose every waking moment is spent tearing one down and daring one to look up and see the truth, all at once. It is exhausting, and it makes every other problem and challenge in one’s life into a fuzzed-out blur against that endless pummeling. There was so much I could not see until I could name that opponent.

Medical science worked miracles on me, once I knew what to ask of it. The established, accepted, medically recommended response to being transgender is to make one’s life and, if desired, one’s body line up with that reality. For most of us, me included, that meant a new name, a new wardrobe, and a regimen of estrogen to replace the testosterone that was ruining my body.

It was a transformative experience in every sense of the word. The stories about us that cis (that is, non-trans) people tell each other focus on the lurid outside: the obligatory putting-on-makeup scene, the genitals, the awkward dressing room moments. Transition is so much more than that for those of us who need it. The best thing that replacing my hormones did for me wasn’t these curvaceous hips, this soft skin, or finally defeating my persistent adult acne. It was the moment when the change in my brain chemistry meant that, for the first time in decades, I looked in the mirror and the person looking back at me wasn’t a stranger. Depersonalization is a frequent symptom of being trans, the mind protecting itself from the sheer visceral body horror of such a mismatched shape by refusing to recognize it as one’s own, and one day, before my eyes, long before the hormones had done much of anything for my curves or skin or libido, it wasn’t like that anymore. I looked in the mirror and I saw ME.

There were more steps to claiming myself. There still are. There’s legal rigmarole ahead of me due to my two-country existence, I’m still purging unwanted androgenic hair with lasers and electric needles, things with my family are vastly improved but still tense. But some big ones are done, including the ones that brought me to you lovelies.

Tragically, hormones can’t fix everything. A few years ago, I had the privilege of receiving vaginoplasty, correcting perhaps the most obvious of the frustrations testosterone inflicted upon me in the womb. A few years after that, roughly one year ago, I made a few more corrections in one fell swoop: four facial surgeries and my breast augmentation. Today, at last, I can look at this body and see no dramatic errors, no horror at my own shape, no disappointment, no pain that isn’t my chronic migraines and TMD. It’s mine. I did it. From that most inauspicious start, I’ve claimed beauty and femininity and all those other things that sad-eyed green-shirted young adult didn’t yet believe were possible. That 23-year-old could scarcely imagine the woman she would become by 33, or the life that that woman would lead, thanks to all the medical science she would take into that body to finally make it hers.

Maybe it’s not that intense for most of you. Maybe it doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming to see one’s old shape reappear after a post-weight-loss tummy tuck, or square the circle of an intense fitness regimen and a bust that feels appropriately hefty, or reclaim the proportions one had before birthing children, or just having some bigger breasts installed without any grander narrative. But I like to think that all these experiences have some of this feeling in common, this sense of finally coming home to oneself after a long journey one might not have even known one was on, of finally looking in the mirror and at long last getting to say,

yeah,

that’s me.

I’m here.

I made it.

It’s a thought I find beautiful, that something about me that would seem to set me thoroughly apart from the 99+% of humans who aren’t trans, could also be something that all of us here understand in our own way.

So here’s to the wonders of modern medicine, and all the glorious ways it lets us make our bodies truly, inescapably our own, even when so, so many people don’t understand why we’d want to.

And here’s to us, for coming home to ourselves, no matter how long it took.

And here’s to some nice hecking tits.