Hey, if you are #trans and began transitioning in the 2016 - 2019 era, can you reply and let me know!
There are apparently way more of us here than I realized, and I would like to be closer friends with those that remember the before times and trans twitter and the discourses and the excitement before we all got burnt the fuck out. π
β
β@FinalGirl
I know a LOT of trans peeps have this defined and set date as to when their "egg cracked" "flower bloomed" or "on this day" beginning of transition.
For me, my slow descent into madness began with questioning in 2014.
From then until June of 2019, before I tripped and fell backwards out of the closet and I extemporaneously came out to my wife, I did the following:
β experimented with clothing, expression, presentation.
β chose a girl name for being online (not my current one)
β thought I might be trans in early 2016.
β participated in the gender wars, debating the minutia of gender, definitions, theory, feminism, queer history, etc.
β started what would become two and half years of extensive research into endocrinology and hormone therapy for transgender people.
β therapy sessions starting in 2017 that would have three different therapists, hoping one would tell me I was anything but trans.
β slowly began to lean toward the idea I might be trans after two years of therapy.
β I tripped backwards out of the closet coincidentally during Pride Weekend 2019
β began laser hair removal on face August 2019
β first pill taken Father's Day 2020.
Sooooo... am I in the club?
@WrenArcher Yeah, I have a lot of problems with egg crack terminology because it doesnβt fit with my path so I have no real way to apply it.
Like was that when I was a kid and told my mom? When I was in college in the 90s and started but didnβt finish? There were 75 moments.
I mean you could maybe say it was when I talked to my doctor about hormones, but I was seeing an endocrinologist about hormones for like a decade before that and he had me on testosterone but I talked to him about how estrogen would feel better.
Like if the criteria is βremembers Trans Twitterβ then that makes sense, but βstarted transitionβ is hard for me because I started transition at least three times.
@FinalGirl @WrenArcher βegg crackingβ definitely doesnβt apply to plenty of folks and peopleβs journeys are all over the place. And Iβm really happy you all are sharing them! Thatβs also why I try to be intentional about including as a possible starting point among others that a person might mark the beginning of their transition or current gender embodiment.
And the way I think of egg cracking is a moment a person can have where all the defenses, rationalizations, and denials break down and it becomes in some sense inevitable to know oneself as trans/nonbinary (which does require access to knowledge and language a lot of times). Itβs the point at which humpty dumpty canβt be put back together again and thereβs no return to believing oneself to be cis.
@JoscelynTransient @WrenArcher
ββ¦humpty dumpty canβt be put back together again and thereβs no return to believing oneself to be cis.β
Does that happen? Like, seriously. This is not a joke. Iβm not even talking about the egg crack, Iβm changing the subject. Does that actually happen for real?
Because I gotta be honest half the time Iβm still not sure. Like I have a vagina and tits and went through facial surgery and Iβm honestly, legitimatelyβthis is not a joke to make a pointβstill sometimes like βbut for real tho?β
@FinalGirl
I've been there too. It hasn't legit happened in probably two or so years but yeah... two and a half years into hormone therapy, growing boobs and getting treated like a woman whenever I go out and there were a LOT of times where I was like, "Am I really trans? I mean these? *grabs my little mosquito bites* Pshhh. These could barely even be called boobs. Still cis though right?"
@FinalGirl @WrenArcher well, I can say for myself that is how it played out for me. I had a night in 2019 when my egg cracked, and I couldnβt go back. And while I can piece together all the signs that were there all along before, I was completely convinced 100% that I was a cishet man and had already considered whether I was trans and answered no in my hubris and ignorance. π
And since then, I know 100% that I am not cis. Even the part of me that still resonates most as βJoshβ does not sit in cisness anymore and canβt back into believing that if I wanted to. Hell, the world has tried to traumatize me back into it a couple times now and failed.
I do still have those occasional moments of βare they right and Iβm just a delusional man playing at thisβ but that makes so little sense to me I see through it as the trauma and hate trying to internalize that it is. Is that the kind of thing you mean? It hits when Iβm most vulnerable and in PTSD moments, but itβs still so flimsy next to having fully been myself for the last 7 years and being unable to deny how different and powerful this has been - and what Iβve had to endure to keep my place in this world.
I donβt know if thatβs getting at what you mean?
@JoscelynTransient @FinalGirl @WrenArcher kind of chipping in to a thread that is about a different era & definitely not in the club
Like I say I've know since I was a child BUT the whole "you have to live as a woman for some period" etc all seem insurmountable. I experimented a lot with gender presentation in the 90s - wearing skirts & dresses, always wearing makeup (pretty makeup)
then buried it deep
but in my 50's I kind of came to the realisation that I was "allowed"
@JoscelynTransient @FinalGirl @WrenArcher
& kind of slowly revealed myself to A. - _really_ helped by learning terminology from social media and seeing other peoples experiences
been an odd old journey
Now I wish I'd understood better in the 90s that not all trans people were like the medical world said they were.
if only I had heard the term "genderqueer" my life might have been different...
@junklight this story reads a lot like mine. I transitioned at 50 and yet I was effectively out as transgender in the 90s, but didnβt have that terminology and didnβt know hormones existed. I thought it was either man or fly to Scandinavia for βa sex change operation,β which left one not a woman but a Frankenstein monster.
So like it didnβt matter that I knew because in rustbelt Northeast and then in South Carolina the level of epistemological oppression was too high for me to know what that meant.
If someone in the 90s had said βyou can just take a pill,β then I wouldβve transitioned in a hot minute. But all I knew of that path was weird weird prostitutes and Silence of the Lambs.
god yeah - the information in the 90s was so bad. Ironically I actually knew a trans woman (& got off with her a few times - she was gorgeous) but she thought I hated her for some reason (we were all taking a lot of drugs - it was a chaotic time) & I never _actually_ talked to her properly...
but yeah wasn't any better in the uk than you describe.
I'm still like gobsmacked I can just take hormones and things are changing!
but yeah. hard relate!
@junklight @FinalGirl @WrenArcher Iβm younger but feel you both so much on this! I have to explain to trans kids now how different the ability to even *know* or conceive of transness was. If the concept of non-binary had been available to me and I had known open non-binary people earlier in my life, I probably would have done an initial transition (or at least understood something about myself better) in the 90s or early 00s. The cruelty of that epistemological oppression and the harm itβs done is so fucked.
Glad youβre both here now π
@JoscelynTransient @FinalGirl @WrenArcher
Thank you π
Looking back. I realise I am actually pretty lucky to be here. A lot of the time I wasnβt acting in ways conducive to that !!!
@junklight yeahβ¦SOOOO much of my life was passively suicidal or worse.
@junklight It wasn't any better in NZ, and then I moved to London in '95. So much of my life spent pretending to myself I didn't hate LARPing as a man, because the information and vocabulary weren't there.
Then at 51 I fed my brain what it desperately needed, and the tits are (almost) secondary.
@FinalGirl @JoscelynTransient @WrenArcher
@JoscelynTransient I might be a little early for that era, my epiphany day was in 2014, and I think I started hormones sometime in 2015.
(But responding if that's close enough to the cohort for you.)
@eri no, i am talking about when i was in my 30s and a grown ass adult who had already begun her transition. And itβs not actually yearning or nostalgia, more wanting to connect with people that went through similar experiences and have some shared reference points that those transitioning after the pandemic began largely donβt share.
Itβs like how itβs nice to spend time with people your own age as you get older. Thatβs all.
Why the assumption that I was a child? And I think itβs also not a bad thing to have some fondness for a time before my communityβs existence was once more being made illegal and facing active attempts to genocide. Just saying.
@JoscelynTransient It was a long process for me but I started questioning myself in late 2017. (There is a full account, covering 2017-2023, of it here : https://roboctopus.org/post/2023/08/02/my-transition-journey/ )
(I've never been significantly active on Twitter, trans or not, though. Never figured that site out.)
@JoscelynTransient Egg cracked in 2000 (January 2, I think); had a few phone sessions with a therapist over an hour away (the closest available at the time) who didn't seem to take me seriously or else was hella into gatekeeping -- and then in 2001 lost my contract job (for unrelated reasons) and had to stop therapy because $$.
Was finally able to resume in 2016, which is also when I finally got started on HRT, so I guess that puts me inside the window?
I was never connected with trans community IRL, and online only on Mastodon. (I used to say that every other person I ran into there was a trans girl, and half of them were running their own instances.... fedi was smol, then.)
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