Welcome to #TransTuesday! Milestones abound! I’ve just passed two big dates that are pretty close together, and that means it’s time to take stock of where we’re at. So here’s my THREE YEARS OUT AND ON HRT CHECK-IN!
For reference, you may want to first read my ONE YEAR OUT AND ON HRT CHECK-IN thread first to better understand the progression.
And here’s the TWO YEARS OUT AND ON HRT CHECK-IN, if you want to better chart my progress over time.
And if you’re super brand-new to these, please see the Trans Tuesday on HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY.
And the Trans Tuesday on GENDER DYSPHORIA.
Last year I had monumental gains. This year… well things were good through the back half of 2022, but then I had two things happen that both caused TRANSITION SETBACKS, which I talked about in the trans tuesday on that very topic.
Thankfully things seem to be settled now, hopefully at a good equilibrium. My arm is healed, my exercise is back where it was, and my head feels like me. And I never actually lost sight of myself in photos or mirrors like I was afraid of in that thread on setbacks.
But it still sucks that I had such a backslide. And yeah it’s normal, and happens through all parts of life, transition or otherwise. But that doesn’t just make it easy to accept. Because of course then all I do is wonder where I’d be now if I HADN’T backslid.
But then I also remember that the backslide came with gains I couldn’t get any other way, in breast and hip growth, so maybe it was worth it? I dunno. We shouldn’t have to lose some gains to get others, but life never said it was fair.
Shaving my face doesn’t give me dysphoria, I figured out how to fix that last year. But I still resent having to do it every single day. And the 20-25 minutes it eats up every single morning.
If you look back at my two year check-in from last year, you’ll see I’d finally hit the arbitrary level of testosterone I needed to be below before our health insurance would cover laser hair removal and electrolysis for my face.
Except now, per the thread on setbacks, my T level is no longer below that arbitrary barrier some cis doctors somewhere thought every trans woman needed to be at before she’d earned the right to not ever have facial hair again. Yeah I’m still salty about it.
Know what else I’m still salty about? Covid! Which is NOT over! Especially when you live with an immunocompromised person. I STILL CANNOT SIT INDOORS FOR DOZENS OF HOURS WITH A MASK OFF while my facial hair is zapped away.
THREE YEARS I’ve been waiting, and I’m no closer to being able to do that than when I started. I’m getting really fed up with how our society has just decided to move on and left so many people behind, as if they don’t deserve to exist in public too.
Here’s the trans tuesday on the unique problems a PANDEMIC TRANSITION has brought.
Now that the two big setbacks I experienced this year are (mostly) behind me, facial hair removal continues to be the biggest part of my transition I NEED to get taken care of.
But I’ve seen some other trans ladies talking about at home laser hair removal that seems to actually work. Not as well as getting it professionally done, but it works. And I’m SO SO sick of waiting. So I think I’m gonna give it a go and hope it helps.
My body hair growth, which got much faster during my HRT setback, has slowed back down a little. But it’s not as slow as it was before that setback, and I’m not sure I can get it back there again anytime soon.
This might be my new normal. At least for a while. Again, hormones are weird, so I don’t really know. If this IS the new normal, I’m not happy about it, BUT it’s something I think I can live with. As long as I’m getting the other benefits I want from the micronized progesterone.
Here’s the trans tuesday on my issues with BODY HAIR, if you’re curious.
PHOTOS AND REFLECTIONS check-in.
And its follow-up, a long time later when something suddenly changed for reasons unknown, see PHOTOS 2: THE SELFIE APOCALYPSE.
Thankfully this has remained constant for me, even through my HRT setback. I still see ME, she’s still there, and I’m still only chucking out photos because they’re bad photos and not because they give me dysphoria. I really lucked out there, and I’ll never take it for granted.
One thing I’ve noticed, though, in doing all of the promotional interviews for my book this year, is that most of them were being done via videoconferencing like Zoom. And I still apparently still have a LOT of dysphoria revolving around video. I had to do them with my camera off.
I can handle it if it’s just friends, and can maybe struggle through if the video won’t be posted anywhere, though that’s still really difficult. But it is not easy and not okay. Something about photos combined with motion and voice just sets it off. Hope that goes away eventually.
If you want to see ways in which that’s already caused other problems for me (or rather, the ways in which cis people refusing to accommodate my dysphoria has caused problems for me), see the trans tuesday on PERFORMATIVE ALLYSHIP.
BODY HACKING check-in.
I’m still only getting in a couple 5ks a week, rather than the four I want to be at, but I’ve been so busy with book promotion and writing and then the WGA strike on top of it, I just can’t work any more of them into my schedule right now.
I’m at least walking a lot when I’m out on the WGA picket lines, so that’s good. But running more often would also pose a problem with my hair, which takes a long time to do and the hair product I use is expensive.
It’s not feasible for me to wash/style it every day. Twice a week is about right. But when I run I get sweaty, and so… what do I do? I don’t know. I’m not sure if actually running four days a week will be possible now, given all that. It’s vexing.
But my HAIR is super important to me, it’s STILL the part of my body I love the most. You can see its growing importance to me in the original trans tuesday on it.
And the follow-up, HAIR 2, when I got my first real haircut and how much it made me feel like ME.
When I CAN run, my 5k times STILL continue to rise. Not as dramatically as they did last year, but I’m STILL. GETTING. SLOWER. I hate it! But there’s nothing I can do about it. HRT has totally sacked my running speed.
A reminder that this is just some of the evidence why the whole TRANS SPORTS thing is a complete non-issue that’s really only about punishing trans women and upholding sexist patriarchal gender roles.
I’ve had my tattoo for a while now (it was still relatively new at the two year check-in), and you can read about the entire process of deciding to get it and why it took so long. It’s all wrapped up in BODILY AUTONOMY.
What’s really interesting is now, photos of myself (even ones I really like, post-transition) without my tattoo feel wrong. They feel like they’re not really me. I mean they ARE, and it’s not gender dysphoria per se, but it’s definitely… something.
I mean I guess that confirms I was right to get it and it was absolutely what I wanted, but I’m still trying to parse why photos of me without it feel “wrong.” If I’m ever able to figure it out, there will likely be a trans tuesday about it.
Okay, CONFIDENCE check-in!
And the unexpected, surprising follow-up CONFIDENCE 2: INTO THE UNKNOWN aka WHAT IS HAPPENING aka A WHOLE NEW WORLD as my confidence grew.
Happy to say this has held steady from last year. I’m still super happy to talk to new people in ways I never was pre-transition. In fact just a little while back I spent an entire shift on the WGA picket lines talking to someone I’d never met before.
Like… we spent FOUR HOURS talking. And now we’re friends! We just hit it off and it was never uncomfortable. Even when the conversation would hit a lull for a bit, the silence was never awkward. It was comfortable. And then we’d pick up talking about something else.
It was really great, and let me tell you I could have NEVER done something like that pre-transition. Ever. Even if the other person took the lead. I’d clam up and shut down at the first opportunity. Very glad to see this seems permanent!
Okay, TRANS VOICES check in. This one’s actually been big, and I might not have realized without writing this out! Here’s my original thread on starting voice therapy and how my old voice made my dysphoric.
I’m getting pretty consistent with hitting all the techniques I’ve learned, and my voice usually makes me really happy. I’ve gotten to a point now where I launched these trans tuesdays as a podcast, which I’m sure you’ve noticed.
And I couldn’t have done that before! The few podcasts I was already doing were difficult for me, but I could have never taken HEARING myself on a weekly basis, and didn’t have the stamina to maintain all the techniques that long anyway.
But my stamina for it has grown by leaps and bounds. It still falters sometimes, and occasionally I will hear my voice slipping when I’m forgetting one of the things I need to be doing. But on the whole I’m very happy with it and I know it’ll keep getting better.
It’s to the point where now I believe I can actually record the audiobook for my book! Before I never thought I’d have been able to. It’ll be slow going, and I’ll have to do portions at a time, but it seems completely doable now and it never did before. That’s amazing.
Oh right, and I figure you know since I never shut up about it, but the trans tuesday threads on the trans allegory of the Matrix films got me a book deal and that book is out now! Audiobook coming as soon as I can get it all recorded. 🙂
Regarding my HRT, as I talked a bit about in the previously linked threads on setbacks, my breast growth has continued and I have tiny hips now. Still nothing in my butt though, there is barely one to speak of.
As I mentioned last year, my style in terms of clothing is STILL evolving (I guess it’s probably always evolving somewhat for most of us), but I think I’m finally maybe honing in on it. Last year I said it might be a future thread. Now it definitely will. Probably soonish.
Before we get to my timeline photo, I do want to mention one thing I’ve never talked about in these retrospectives before. And that’s how I wish I’d started them earlier.
I think it’s so important to chronicle these things, both the good and the bad, to help people (trans and cis) see what it’s really like. And there were so many years of transition where I wasn’t doing this, and I’d have loved to remember better how it was going.
My personal transition started in 2015, and up until I came out publicly in 2020, I wasn’t writing about my transition or anything trans-related. I felt I didn’t have the right to, since the world still saw me as a cisgender man.
But I’d love to be able to look back and see what I was going through then in better detail than my memory allows. What struggles and triumphs did I find? I think it’d be fascinating to see. But the past is the past and I can’t change that, so.
I’m gonna wonder, though. Because I’m SURE, especially before any hormones or social changes, I was also experiencing highs and lows, and setbacks and advancements. Which might provide some reassurance now.
In any case, we march on, ever forward (even if the path gets winding and seems to double back sometimes), ever closer to the truest me I’ve ever been.
So here’s the timeline photo again, with bonus pre-transition photo added so you can truly see more of the changes. And I still see it in my eyes, thank goodness. That’s Tilly. That’s ME. And no matter what, I’m not going anywhere. And remember, if I can do it so can you.
A timeline showing my transition progress from pre-transition, 2020 (when I came out and started HRT), 2021 (one year in), 2022 (two years in), 2023 (three years in). You can see my face changing drastically through them, becoming rounder and softer over time. Also the life in my eyes goes from dead, to huh, to yay, to hooray, to OH MY GOD.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
PS – this is my trans tuesday and I’m mad with power, so here’s all the (barely slightly different) versions of the photo I took for this year because I love them all! A lot!
Me with my long brown curly hair up in a pineapple that has fallen to the back, with curly bangs, iridescent white cat eye glasses, dark eyeliner, sparkly dark pink lipstick, wearing a black tank top with white piping.
…a barely slightly different angle of me with my long brown curly hair up in a pineapple that has fallen to the back, with curly bangs, iridescent white cat eye glasses, dark eyeliner, sparkly dark pink lipstick, wearing a black tank top with white piping.
Me with my long brown curly hair up in a pineapple that has fallen to my right, with curly bangs, iridescent white cat eye glasses, dark eyeliner, sparkly dark pink lipstick, wearing a black tank top with white piping.
…a barely different angle of me with my long brown curly hair up in a pineapple that has fallen to the back, with curly bangs, iridescent white cat eye glasses, dark eyeliner, sparkly dark pink lipstick, wearing a black tank top with white piping.
And here’s the one I used in the timeline all by itself, and look, yes, it’s the same as the others, but I don’t care I DON’T CARE. This is ME!!!