Welcome to #TransTuesday! Today we’re talking about something that’s unique to me and a small subset of other trans people: the PANDEMIC TRANSITION. As always, while there may be commonalities, these are my experiences only.
I don’t speak for others, and if you interpret what I’m saying that way you are wrong and bad and you should feel bad. So don’t do that. 🙂 I’ve mentioned before in multiple threads how I had to wait until a certain date to begin my transition for reasons.
Not going to link you to those, as it’s come up a lot of times and you get the point so let’s all move on. But the time I could begin transitioning was around two months after all us socially conscious people went into strict lockdown.
I knew the earliest I’d be able to start transitioning would be May 2020, and the panini threw that all into the air. But I’d been waiting so long, it felt like waiting until if/when covid was past us was unbearable. I couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to be me.
When I came out publicly last July, my transition was well underway (at least socially, HRT finally started in August). But I didn’t realize at the time how much more difficult the panorama was going to make things.
I never thought it would all be easy, but it’s definitely held me back in a lot of ways that I have struggled with. One of the biggest of these was the way it’s prevented me from getting electrolysis/laser hair removal, especially on my face.
Which may not seem like a big deal to you, but body hair and ESPECIALLY facial hair are one of the things that a whole mess of my gender dysphoria comes along with. I talked specifically about my facial hair in the trans tuesday on GENDER DYSPHORIA.
And my BODY HAIR dysphoria got an entire thread of its own.
So what the pan-fried salmon has done is kept me locked into a holding pattern for a solid year. I still have to shave my face, ALL THE TIME. I’ve found a different shaving cream that helps, and a slightly different way of doing it.
I don’t know how to explain it other than I changed some hand motions and the order of the areas I shave and it allowed my brain to (SLIGHTLY) interpret it differently so it doesn’t bother me quite as much because it’s different than when I shaved before. But I still hate it!
On a scale of hate from 0 to 100, my previous hate for it was a solid 100. Now it’s, like… 95. Which doesn’t seem like much, and it’s not, but when I’m battling my dysphoria I will take absolutely anything I can get. Every little bit honestly helps.
There’s nothing I’ve been able to change about shaving/epilating my body hair. It’s the same now as it always has been. I despise it, it eats up a ton of my time, and it makes me absolutely miserable.
And though some laser/electrolysis places have been open for a while, I couldn’t go. Susan is immune compromised and there’s NO WAY IN HELL I would put her at risk just to make myself feel better.
Especially since, y’know, you kinda have to be maskless in order to get your facial hair zapped off. And it’s not like it’s a one and done appointment. You have to go a lot. It’s a process and it takes time.
And it’s caused other problems. I run, and I do it pretty often. For exercise and my mental health, but also other reasons I call BODY HACKING.
The problem is I have asthma, and running with a mask on has been miserable agony. But once my second vaccine shot reaches full effectiveness, I should be able to run alone outside unmasked, right? Except if I do that, you’re gonna see beard shadow.
Even if I shave RIGHT before I run, it won’t matter. Immediately after shaving you can still see the bluish tint of the hair under the skin. Only makeup covers it up, and I can’t run in makeup. So what’s the problem? Well I am now on HRT, and… I have boobs. Noticeable boobs.
You can tell they’re there even under my sports bra (which I need because now they jiggle! Which is amazing and also OH SO PAINFUL). And if I go running as a mildly-bearded lady, I’m unsure how safe that will be.
There’s this wiry old man who always waved at me on my runs, from his stoop where he sat with his morning coffee. He disappeared for most of the last year, but I was happy to see he reappeared this week and seems fine.
Only when he waved this time, his hand just stopped in mid-air, and he just STARED at me. Super great feeling, let me tell you. There was another time some guy driving by in his car slowed down to talk to me (guys: why?).
He stuck his arm out with a raised fist and was like “YEAH WOO!” (guys: WHY?!?) and then also just stopped, arm mid-air, I guess when he saw I had boobs? And then he also just STARED. And that’s with a mask ON. So fun!
So I’m going to have to KEEP running with a mask on, just to hide the beard shadow, until the laser/electrolysis progresses enough that you can’t see it anymore. And that is awful, but I don’t feel like I really have any other choice. It’d be even worse without it.
But I’m going to set up my first appointment to zap said facial hair later today, and I’m just… I don’t even know how to feel. I’m elated and scared and overwhelmed, though the latter is because there’s more than just that.
I’ve never done anything with my hair. NEVER. I didn’t even know I had curls, my head was buzzed to a quarter inch long for most of my life. HAIR got its own trans tuesday.
I LOVE my hair. I had no idea this is what I had, and I feel so lucky that it’s something I like so much. But I don’t even know what’s POSSIBLE to do in terms of styling it. And I’m terrified of hating it after, because it’s the only part of my body I love without reservation.
I’ve never had a real haircut as ME. And I already have an appointment, with a lovely and highly recommended trans-friendly stylist. It’s in a couple weeks! AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
And guess what else ya girl has an appointment for? STARTING MY OFFICIAL NAME AND GENDER MARKER CHANGE! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! It’s with a legal expert who helps trans people with these things.
Quick aside if you missed it above, but please notice/remember that we trans people have to worry if something as basic as a hair stylist is safe for us to go see, so we don’t risk being treated as subhuman by a fermented sack of poop.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable just going to any well-reviewed stylist without knowing ahead of time if they were going to treat me like shit or even refuse to cut my hair altogether. It’s something I didn’t at all plan for before I started transitioning.
And I’m only now noticing it because I’m fully vaccinated and can finally start going places again, and it’s a cold wake up call to always be reminded how hostile so much of American society is to us. It’s just a damned haircut! Good times.
So this “pause button” that the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster put on a lot of my transition affected me in another way that I only discovered a couple weeks ago, after we’d had our first vaccine shot and I realized there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
This entire time, since before I came out, since I began my transition… I never painted my nails. Who the hell cares, Tilly? Literally nobody. Ladies can paint or not paint their nails as they choose. So can guys and non-binary people. Do or don’t, whatever!
Except that I wanted to. I’ve always wanted to. But I didn’t. I held off for ALL of the pandemic, and honestly I didn’t know why until I turned it over and over in my head for a few days, eventually asking Susan to show me how because I had no idea.
(I didn’t get to go to little girl school, we have to learn these things somewhere). After all the things I’ve tried and done, and still do, painting my nails was really the last thing I had that I could do at home as part of my transition.
And again, it’s not a part of transitioning for every trans lady, nor should it be, but for me it was. I wanted to see what it would look like, discover how it would make me feel. Maybe I would feel nothing and not even care, you know? I was really curious.
What I discovered is that I don’t like it, I LOVE IT. And for a reason I didn’t expect. It doesn’t seem to make me FEEL more like a woman, though. It’s so difficult to explain this stuff sometimes. I guess it never felt like an overly-gendered thing to do for some reason.
I think my nails look nice. Susan had me start with a light color since I was bound to make mistakes, and hey, good call actually. I wanted to dive right into some super bright color because of course I did. I talked about colors and how even those ended up gendered and kept from me in UNEXPECTED BONUSES OF TRANSITION.
But what it does is make my hands look less like “man hands” in my mind. Is it just because they have polish on them? Is it drawing my eye to them in a new way that makes my brain interpret them differently? Hell if I know.
I have pretty large hands and my fingers are quite long. I didn’t think they bothered me, but maybe they do because seeing the polish on my nails somehow made me feel a little less dysphoria. And I didn’t expect that.
I don’t know what I expected, which is why I wanted to try it, and look at the good that came of it! It makes me feel better somehow, and that’s amazing! So why the hell did I wait so long? I could have done it a year ago.
And that puzzled me. What I’ve been able to figure out was that the pancreas took so much away from me in terms of freedom to explore my own transition that I was incredibly resentful of it.
And boo hoo, cry some tears Tilly, a lot of people had it a whole lot worse. I know. But that didn’t make it less difficult for me to wait my entire life to be myself and then have forces outside my control say “Uh uh, no. You can only go so far.”
So though I WANTED to try putting nail polish on, I held off, because it was the ONE TRANSITION THING left that I felt I still had control over. Yeah I wanted it, but I’d do it on MY terms.
Somehow it was comforting to know there was still something else I COULD do as part of my transition, that even the panhandle couldn’t stop. And weirdly holding on to that knowledge made things feel just slightly more in control.
But once we got the first shot, I could let that go. I didn’t need to hold onto it anymore, because now there was something else I was doing to get the situation under control.
I have my hair/name appointments. I’m gonna laser my face. And my nails will look FAB while doing it. This color’s called LEIA (I am one with the general, the general is with me).
Let go of what you need to. Embrace the unknown. Full speed ahead.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com