Welcome to #TransTuesday! Today’s topic can be described many different ways, but there’s one term I love a lot, because it’s the most inclusive and lets you know just how normal being trans is. So break out the science textbooks, we’re talking: TRANS BODY HACKING.
So what the heck is body hacking? It’s using science and medicine to change our bodies, in ways we need or desire. Pretty simple concept, right? And I bet you’re like HEY WAIT A SEC, CIS PEOPLE DO THAT TOO.
Uh… YEP!
Our bodies are OUR bodies, and until our present cyberpunk dystopia makes the leap to consciousness-transference, we’re stuck in them for life. But we can and SHOULD do what we need to in order to make our stay in these meat sacks as pleasant an experience as possible.
Literally ALL of you reading this have hacked your bodies before. Do you take medication to treat a disease or condition? Body hacking. Had a knee replaced? Body hacking. Taken ibuprofen for a headache? Had a drink to relax? BODY HACKING.
We use the tools at our disposal, via science and medicine, to make our bodies and minds function better or feel better. It’s amazing to think about! We change our bodies (or the way they work) to make ourselves happier and healthier! It saves lives!
It is, to me, immensely cool. And humans have always done it, going back forever to herbal remedies passed down from generation to generation, probably predating written history. It’s part of being human, it’s what all of medicine is founded on. It’s part of us.
All of which is to say the things trans people do to make ourselves at home in our own bodies is the exact same thing. And there are various ways this is done, but the most common and well known is probably HRT (hormone replacement therapy).
If you need more information on that, please see the past thread on HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (spoiler: it’s also about Patience, a key factor in transitioning).
As the super briefest of summations: HRT usually involves lowering or blocking one hormone (estrogen or testosterone), and adding or replacing it with the other. It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it.
And a quick reminder: not all trans people are on HRT, or even want it. And some might not be able to be on it for medical reasons. And not everyone who is on HRT does ALL the HRT someone else might. That makes them no less trans. Okay? Okay.
I mention all of this now so you have something of a base to work from. But today the body hacking I’m talking about is EXERCISE.
“Hold up, Tills!” I hear you yell, “Double-you tee eff?”
Stick with me.
If you’re exercising simply to get in better shape, or for medical, emotional, or mental health reasons? If you’re exercising to feel better, or to change the way your body looks? You’re using science to HACK your BODY.
This is why I like BODY HACKING as a term, because it’s a big umbrella that covers a lot of things. TO BE EXTRA CLEAR: not all trans people need or want to or are able to exercise. And that’s fine! I’m not at all saying that anyone else has to do what I did.
Okay so why the hell am I talking about exercise? I strongly suspected I was transgender in 2015. It was a slow realization, and @susanlbridges was aware of it the entire time. But I was 99.5% sure.
For a reason I won’t get into here (if we’re friends and you really want to know, DM me and I’ll tell you), I knew that even if I WAS trans, I wouldn’t do anything about it until, very specifically, May of 2020. I know, right? What the hell? So weird.
But that meant I could really explore things at my own pace. In high school, I was on the track and cross country teams, talked into it by my best friend at the time who loved to run. WHAT A FOOL I WAS. Oh, the pain. I really hate running.
Around the same time I began to suspect my true identity, my doctor ordered a routine blood test. She looked at the results and was like “You should maybe do something about this, huh?” It wasn’t like I was in the danger zone or anything, but I was trending that way. Noticeably.
I’d done Couch to 5k like three times before, but never stuck with it after. I’d be too busy, it would fall by the wayside, and I’d have to start all over again. And I HATE running! But I didn’t want to actually GET into the danger zone, because Susan and our son need me.
And also I really like being alive. 🤷♀️
So I decided to make a very concerted effort to get back into exercising, and stick with it. But how to motivate myself to keep at it? Well, every week, if I went for all my runs, I allowed myself to go out to lunch and eat like I did in high school.
For all of those lunches, I stuck to places I knew, everything that was familiar. Imagine my surprise how that changed once my dysphoria lessened and dissipated years later, and I was suddenly not just open to entirely new experiences, but was CRAVING them.
For more on that, see the Trans Tuesday on FREEING UP MY BRAIN aka LUNCH WITH TILLY.
Anyway, those lunches helped. I also changed like half my diet, and found a way to do it without ever feeling deprived, but that’s ancillary. The point is that, being so very sure I was trans but knowing I couldn’t do anything about it for years…
I realized that part of my dysphoria at the time was that I had what I’d call the very definition of a dad bod. And if I was the lady I suspected I was (spoiler: I am!), THAT body was going to cause problems for me.
I want to clarify, again, that I do not think every trans person needs to change their body in ANY way. They can change as much or as little as they like or are able. It’s all about whatever is right for YOU. Same goes for every human!
But for ME, it meant getting as far away from dad bod as I could. And suddenly, running (which I still kinda hated) became not as awful. Because I was HACKING MY BODY, and that realization is where I consider my transition to have started… back in 2015.
It’s weird to be so happy to exercise, but to also hate so much of it. But it pushed me. It KEPT me going. I’ve run four 5ks a week for the past eight years. I’ve had to drop to two a week for present schedule reasons, but I crave getting back to four.
Over time I added in push-ups, and I’m doing hundreds of those multiple times a week. Not too far back I added in crunches and bicep curls. I’m more driven than I’ve ever been. And it’s made me kind of buff, and I DIG IT.
And it doesn’t make me feel more masculine at all, because I was never muscular when I pretended to be a man. Does that make sense? In this instance, it’s not about getting away from what society says a man is, but from the man society thought I was.
Besides, I’ve always found buff ladies AMAZING and now I get to BE ONE.
Me in a dress with a print of Superman S-shields (but the S is replaced with hearts) and a matching red hair band with a bow, flexing my left bicep).
Me flexing my left tricep.
My right bicep being flexed and looking the best it ever has, tbh.
A shadow of me cast on the ground, with a red arrow pointing to my left bicep’s shadow looking nice and big.
A shot of me from behind in a tank top with a lace back, which exposes my shoulders. I’m flexing to show my biceps and shoulder/back muscles.
Also a friend found a person selling pins on Etsy that seemed MADE for me and I had to get one. Like… I love my biceps, and it’s PINK and I LOVE pink, and I DO curls and also HAVE curls and I am a girl! 💜
White text that reads “Curls for girls” over a flexing bicep outlined in pink.
I know that I’m incredibly privileged that exercise worked that well for me, and that I was even able to do it. Everyone’s body is different and responds in different ways.
People can exercise as much as I do and not see any visual difference, and that sucks. But all I can do is tell you about my own experience.
Anyway, I then took it a step further. The first women’s clothes I EVER owned were my running clothes. I went to Target early one morning when nobody was there, went to the women’s activewear section, and bought a running hoodie for the winter.
I was SO nervous. I kept looking over my shoulder. There was literally nobody around, not even any employees, but I was sure there were ten thousand eyes and all store cameras pointed at me, wondering what that MAN was doing in the WOMEN’S section. Oh the anxiety.
They had a pink one! But I didn’t have the courage to get it. It felt like if I touched it, the ground would open up and swallow me whole. But there was a powder blue one, and the false dichotomy of our society usually associates that with men…
For more on THE FALSE DICHOTOMY and how it harms all of us, cis and trans alike, see its trans tuesday.
Okay so, listen, you can’t TELL it’s a women’s hoodie. But *I* knew. And when I wore it, I felt like I was FLYING. I couldn’t explain it at all at the time, but I can now. It was gender euphoria, and it was the first time I’d EVER experienced it in my entire life.
There’s a whole Trans Tuesday on GENDER EUPHORIA, if you’d like more information (especially because cis people can experience it too!).
As I’ve said so so many times, my go-to metaphor for GENDER DYSPHORIA is being held underwater and drowning, and nobody can see. It’s constant pain and pressure and agony for your entire life. There’s a whole Trans Tuesday on it.
So when even the tiniest amount of that got better, the pressure decreased and a weight lifted. Like I was rising to the surface, into the sky. FLYING. So much so I started thinking of this hoodie as my CAPE, it let me fly like a superhero and helped me become my true self.
Flying is also used to represent gender euphoria throughout the entire Matrix film franchise. I’m again gonna plug that I wrote twenty-four threads about the intentional trans allegories of those movies, and they got me a book deal. It’s out now! BEGIN TRANSMISSION: THE TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX.
So back in 2015, when spring rolled around I went back to Target and got a pair of women’s running shorts. I went back again the next winter and got a pair of women’s running tights, and then I found women’s running shoes that worked great for my feet and that actually fit me.
I was running in almost all women’s clothing and nobody knew but me (and Susan). And though it would be years before I could medically and socially begin my transition, running and exercise SAVED me.
Because they allowed me to start my transition without anyone in public knowing before I was ready to tell them. I HACKED my BODY, and got it closer to what I wanted it to be… closer to the true me.
All of us humans do it, in many different ways. Trans folks are just like cis folks in that way. We may do different things to hack our bodies, but we’re all still doing the same basic thing for the same basic reason: to feel better, to help ourselves live better lives.
Hack those bodies when you need to, friends.
Do what you need to live.
To be better.
To be YOU.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
Me in my powder blue running hoodie, the first piece of women’s clothing I ever owned, bought back in 2015: my “cape” that let me fly.