Transition Guilt

My gender and sexuality has lined up almost toe to toe with national LGBTQ tragedies. You can almost set your watch to it. Two weeks after I came out as bisexual, the Pulse shooting happened. Trump’s trans ban in 2017 led me to realize I was trans. And now I’m starting my medical transition during a time when trans rights and body autonomy rights in general are under attack. In fact, I’m so in-step with queer attacks that I literally started Testosterone on the same day Alabama made gender-affirming care a felony. When I injected myself with hormones for the first time, I cried with my friends because I was finally going to live as myself. Then I opened up Twitter and cried again because so many people are being denied that experience and hope I felt.

While visiting me in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, one of my best friends heard news that their home state, Missouri, was trying to ban gender-affirming care for anyone 25 and under. I watched their face change, and we shared an unannounced moment of silence for what this meant to trans children and young adults in the state, some of whom their girlfriend knew personally. Whenever I excitedly message my friend about my transition, when xe sang to me as I injected testosterone into my body the first time, that’s where my mind goes. I’m finally starting my life while my siblings and best friends watch theirs get legislated away.

While I was waiting for my hormone appointment at Planned Parenthood, I wondered if this is how people felt when they got IUDs before the 2016 election. Being scared of someone taking away your rights to your body while you do what you can to protect what rights you do have for now. It feels like a particular “fuck you” to the lawmakers to begin hormone therapy while they try to make the possibility of it go away. Fuck you for trying to keep me and my trans siblings in lives and bodies that don’t fit and only harm us. As Colby Gordon prolifically tweeted “listen, spite is a perfectly good reason to transition”.

A small part of me does wonder if I’m only doing hormones now because I’m afraid I won’t always have the option to. Then my mind moves to a worse question and scenario: Is my transitioning during the recent onslaught of legislative attacks rubbing it in the face of people who can’t transition? Is transitioning more important now than ever? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions.

Talking about beginning transition on open platforms feels like I’m bragging. “Look at me and how great my transition is! My life is opening up! I’m sorry, what about Alabama? I can’t hear you over my NEW HORMONES!” But to keep this monumental moment in my life to myself feels like I’m hiding. Or worse, helping these egregious lawmakers by furthering trans erasure since I’m keeping silent about my own trans experience.

Beginning my medical transition during this legislative massacre on our rights has been bittersweet. I’m transitioning and coming into myself and loving myself in ways I didn’t know were possible. But every time I look around or pick up my phone, it’s time to snap back to reality and help my siblings who are currently fighting for their lives to attain that same happiness.

And I feel confident that I’m not alone in my feelings about transitioning right now. The Hormone Freshman class of 2022 has to balance their own joy and rebirth in one hand while holding space for others’ pain and trauma in the other. Not that every other trans person hasn’t had a similar balancing act, but when we read a new horrific news story each time we go to a doctor for a gender-affirming consultation or rub the tops of our HRT vials with an alcohol pad, another state has taken rights away from trans people. It’s endless.

When I initially booked the Planned Parenthood appointment, I wanted my transition to be private, something meant for me and I don’t have to advertise or share it with anyone I didn’t want to. But the game has changed, and so has my perspective. I am a part of a community under attack. I can show up monetarily and protest locally; I can share stories and funds and news about what’s going on. And I can also be myself and relish in my transition as I do everyone else’s.

The fact that I can and am transitioning gives me hope that maybe we can preserve the right for those of us who still have it and get it back for those of us who don’t. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t fill me with 25 ml of guilt once a week that I’m flagrantly rubbing my transition in the face of some of my trans siblings. Either way, it’s reason to keep fighting until every last one of us has full body autonomy.