"Fade Into You" or 1000 Days of HRT
A celebration of joy, change, love, passion, and the miracles of estrogen
One thousand days of change, growth, and most importantly: JOY!
A lot of ignorant people have so many things to say about trans people and it’s disgusting, but today I’m only focusing on that to say that they have ZERO clue what being trans is like. Think of the body horror scenes in The Matrix, and the abject terror that Neo felt when he was having his mouth seal shut. The visceral feeling of your body doing things against your will, that lack of control petrifying you.
When I think back about where I was anytime before 1000 days ago, that’s similar to what that brain-body disconnect feels like. Yes, I’m not broken, or ignorant of the fact that my body is externally male. But the brain, the conscious trapped in this meat popsicle is so viscerally female and the disconnect from seeing the external figure my chromosomes is disgusting and dysphoria inducing even to this day. But I’ve learned how to live with that a bit easier. But that doesn’t mean it goes away. In fact, I had quite a dysphoric week last week with all the negative rhetoric I was subjected to trying to hear what these idiots were saying about trans people without ever knowing a trans person. But that dysphoria is a lot fewer and farther between spikes now.
I owe so much of that to exposure therapy to being around bigoted people who don’t see the true version of me. But HRT was the big linchpin in the arsenal. It helped me find my true self and root her into my conscious as well as beginning to change my body to look more like what I felt internally. Projecting outward into society that I want to be treated as a woman, and my body looking mostly female has been the biggest gift from HRT. The best gift from HRT isn’t boobs, soft skin, or less body hair. The biggest worry I had was that I had come to the wrong conclusion. That somewhere in my cocktail of cocked-up trauma lied the key to why I thought I was trans and to get rid of that would be crushing if being trans wasn’t my truth. However, around day 30-45 of HRT, I was driving home from work, and I was feeling kind of manic but like in a surreal fashion. All the colors were brighter, the music was sweeter, and SO LOUD. I turned off the radio in the work van, and it was still too loud in the van. So I put the windows up and rolled home, but it was still loud. But something was missing. The voice that usually screams at me at Metallica levels was nowhere to be found. The eternal screaming of dysphoria was vacant that day, and in its place was a joy unlike any I had ever felt. I cried the rest of the way home because as I told my wife when I first got home: “Holy shit, I’m fucking trans!” To which she responded “Well, duh” not knowing what had just transpired on the drive, so I explained it to her.
What has been the most amazing part which seems so simple to people who don’t experience this disconnect is that I have so much joy in just moving through the world as a woman. My documents all say female, my chest sure as fuck does too. My brain is pretty much deprogrammed from all the testosterone steeping over the years, as well as learning how women’s interactions are so innately different and the beauty in that lesson and now exercising it in conversations is so joy inducing. I no longer feel the horror of like “this body and these mannerisms are so disjointed from who I know I am.” Instead, I have far more joy. A thought I had on the drive home tonight was this: Transphobes simply can’t see joy outside of their little worldview. Trans people are so drained of joy in most cases before HRT or even social transition that we have no clue what we’re looking for.
What I’ve found in my life is that just moving through every day, feeling very girl, and the joys of being perceived as such is what gives me the greatest bliss. Seeing my friends, my community members, my kids, all of that being done through the lens of womanhood brings such clear joy to my world. The joy of my life isn’t in just that though, it’s in finally feeling the passions towards all of my hobbies, having fun with friends, playing music, laying with my cat, the joy of being with my girls and having movie nights with terrible B movies and laughing over pizza and female joy!
They don’t want to see any of those joys, they want to dehumanize us as miserable mental cases that need to be saved so that they can also win by saving women and girls (from fucking what, asshole? Getting gassed up in the women’s room? Because that’s what I’m doing in there). It’s just another hateful way to erase trans people from public life by denying the modified birth certificates and even in some cases gender affirming care. They want to have their white knight fantasy of being the big bad man that saved women from the ‘man posing as a woman.’ What they don’t see is the sheer amount of love from the people I care about because I’m not battling something uncontrollable without medical intervention for me. That disgusting myopic view of trans people isn’t helpful to cis women even, it’s not even helpful to cut rape statistics because it’s not treating the real issues.
So after 1000 days, I can wholeheartedly say I’m so trans I could never go back again. Nor would I want to. Your executive orders, your laws, your bullshit hatred has no bearing on how I feel deep in my soul, but I’ll still fight to be able to express that in the world. For all the trans siblings that came before, that are here now, and that will come in the future. Trans joy is beauty, resistance, and everything!
Love, Lily
To all my beautiful trans siblings out there. Please don’t let the bastards get you down. You are more beautiful, more powerful, stronger than you’ll ever know. Find your support structure and cherish all of them. This world is so much better with trans people in it, and you are so deserving of love and kindness. I love you all from the bottom of my heart and I hope you find a reason to keep going even if only for another 24 hours.