When did I stop being transgender?

The day I became a woman

One upon a time I was deemed a boy at birth.  The bits were in the right place—at least from what we could see.  But the narrative of my life shows that something was off.  The bits just might not have been in the right place in the ways that matter.

Perhaps science will one day explain that “transgenderism” is more than a feeling, but a physiological reality.  And there are hallway murmurs to this effect already.  I do not stand amongst the crowd which needs these things, but would of course welcome what science has to offer by way of explanation for what is the lived reality of the minority group to which I belong…I repeat the statistic of 0.5% of the global population as transgender and 1.5% as intersex as repetition spreads knowledge.  Nothing that 0.5% of any population can do could be described as a threat to the majority.  We are inconsequential.  But no less real.

Somewhere along my journey, long after I realised that I wouldn’t be able to live any longer if I stayed in a male body I had an epiphany.  My conversion on the road to Damascus was simple and elegant.  “If I am to be a woman, then I must do, act, think, decide as she would do.”

And from that moment, I have endeavoured to live by that principle.  And it helped me immeasurably to do so.

I don’t wish to turn my back on the WPATH, the global body which most closely resembles a regulatory consensus and treatment path for transgender people.  After all, every major psychiatric and medical trade body are counted amongst its membership and governance structure.  What they do not do is decide how society treats us, but they do establish the rules by which we are to access care.  They are gatekeepers.  As such, they draw criticism both from the trans community and from society at large, and while there are issues, they are beyond the scope of this post [perhaps another day], and broadly, the consensus they have made possible is the path I and so many other trans people trod to alleviate my gender dysphoria.

In other words, a gatekeeper still stands before a gate.

For the sake of simplicity, I repeat the common definition of transgender.  It is a person whose gender deviates from their sex.  In a world where nature offers a plethora of examples where the binary of sex breaks down, so too does humanity, not just in the stark reality of the intersex, where their physiology, genetics, and biology are incongruent, we also have such a rich tapestry within the cis world.  I can be a cis woman and be butch, manly, or delicate, feminine.  Same with cis men.

We have entered silly season when it comes to the gender wars, where one side’s “biological reality” is confounded by reality, where trans and intersex people simply don’t exist because we don’t fit.

The key factor in transgenderism is the presence of gender dysphoria.  It is the presence of this disconnect between gender and sex which the person in question feels, perceives, experiences.  You cannot be transgender without gender dysphoria, and vice versa.  That is what the word “transgender” means.  “Cis”, on the other hand, simply means “the same as”.  In other words sex is the same as gender.  How anyone could have ever decided that being labelled cis is an insult.  I suspect most trans people out there would want to be cis.

The WPATH guidelines are important in establishing a consensus, but they also signpost the path to how a transgender person treats gender dysphoria.  Do we call it an illness, an ailment, a disease?  I don’t know.  But we don’t call it a mental illness—we used to, but that stopped in the 1970’s as it was inaccurate, misleading, and ultimately harmful.  Today, legally, gender dysphoria is a medical condition.  Let’s not dwell on the problems of a medical society.  To medical problems there are medical solutions.

Drugs.  In our case it is hormones.  There are the usual suspects, HRT (hormone replacement therapy) which is more commonly called GAHT in the trans community (Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy).  Cis women and men have been taking this for years.  There are also blockers, which stop the body from producing the hormones that the body’s natal sex organs produce.  For male-to-female transition, drugs like spironolactone and finasteride were developed for other things and have a long history of being administered to both women and men for other ailments.  They have also been given to cis children to stop precocious puberty.  The ethical debate around whether the under-18’s should be given access to blockers is a critically important discussion I have touched on elsewhere, but merits its own post.

And there is surgery.

In other words, these medical solutions, along with psychotherapy, and lifestyle changes such as living in the sex you are transitioning towards, have been laid out by WPATH not definitively as a cure for Gender Dysphoria, but as the most effective treatment plan.  For some, it is a cure.

Why is this so important?  Well, when you let a medical issue fester, there are adverse outcomes.  The gallows humour in the trans community is that the life expectancy of a trans person is to reach the average life expectancy of all people.  It is sad but true.  Many trans people choose to unalive themselves, or suffer violence from their communities, or even loved ones.

If it wasn’t so grim, it might be amusing that the UK Supreme Court has ruled that the UK governments own “Gender Recognition Certificates” are worthless.  Obtaining a GRC, however, is no easy task, and requires a person to jump through all kinds of bureaucratic and medical hoops.  But now that a trans person can only be their sex assigned at birth according to the Supreme Court, why bother even having a GRC?  If you can’t use your ID to justify why you might pee in the same facilities as what your ID says you are, what was the point.

Passing, is the name of the game.  Many cis women don’t pass as women.  Many cis men don’t either.  Never mind the rest of us.  Surely it would be better to trust the ID’s obtained at great effort, and independently corroborated than it is to contemplate genital inspections by the police?

It all seems very reductive.

As for me, my body has changed.  Hormones have given me breasts, have given me the ability to lactate and breast feed. Surgery has given me a gorgeous vulva, a porn-star pussy.  The weight on my body has moved around, my skin has changed.  I look different, feel different both inside and out, I am different.  I am definitely not a man anymore—if I ever was.

There was a period of transition.  Yes.  I came out socially and began to wear the clothes of my destination sex.  I did not use the bathrooms or changing rooms of women until after two things happened: my legal papers changed, and my sex change happened.  But they do call it a sex change for a reason.

I was confronted with the very personal reality of needing to change at the gym recently.  I had never changed in a women’s changing room before.  I won’t lie.  I was scared.  To the point of almost crying.  Thankfully it was fine.  Natural, fine, not weird, as it should be.

But I know that my physical size sends a message which is mixed.  But my body sends a different one.  I can’t help but think that often my choice of clothing reflects the desire to show off my body, to signal what I am.  It doesn’t always work.  Especially in Britain.  Men and women could be looking at my tits and still call me sir.  I could always tell the difference between falsies and the real thing, a perky nipple.  I even said to a woman at British Airways the other day, “why are you calling me sir when you’re staring at my tits?”

The response?  Priceless.  “Sorry sir.”

You can bet I didn’t leave it there.

But I’m not trans anymore.  I don’t have gender dysphoria anymore.  I am a woman.  That’s it.  I don’t have a uterus.  I couldn’t be bothered to get a transplant, which is now possible.  I’m too old to have babies.  No point.  Science and medicine can work wonders.  Genetics are a set of instructions.  They are not always obeyed, as in the case of intersex people.  But once a trans person takes hormones, the instructions are overridden.  Hormones control the expression of every cell in our bodies.  Every single one.

At a cellular level, I am female.  I am an ovulating female.  That explains a lot.  Just ask my kids.

But the point of all this is that I don’t feel trans anymore.  And why would I want to?  I have common cause with my trans brothers and sisters.  That will never go away.  But my dysphoria is gone.  I am happy in my skin for the first time in my life.

The words which helped me come out, “what would a woman do in this situation?” has been replaced with “I am a woman, so whatever I do, by definition, is what a woman would do.”

And that just feels right.  My stock response to being misgendered has become “do you always call women ‘sir’?”  The amazing thing is that 99% of people don’t hear me the first time.   I guess, just like all women, I need to raise my voice.