Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week we’re gonna talk about something every trans person deals with, though we wish we didn’t have to. So let’s examine TRANSITION SETBACKS.
Because for a while… I almost lost myself.
This is something I subconsciously knew going in, and probably even consciously knew on some level. Few things in life happen in straight lines, with uninterrupted forward progress. So why would transition be any different?
Honestly though, that’s how my transition HAD been going up until the start of this year. And it was elating. I was constantly moving toward being the most ME I’ve ever been. And while it was slow, because transition is a process, it was gradual, constant improvement.
But two things happened around the start of this year that dramatically impacted my transition, and it was really tough for me to deal with. So my hope is by talking about them, I can help some other trans folks out there realize these things are normal.
They SUCK, don’t get me wrong, but they’re also to be expected. Stuff happens, that’s life. And I think if I had been MORE consciously aware of that, they might not have hit me quite as hard as they did.
I felt a bit blindsided, which is my own fault for thinking things would just continually get better forever without interruption. But things had been going SO well and I was feeling SO good the more I became the true me, I guess I stopped thinking about anything going wrong.
I’ve mentioned many times how changing my body pre-transition, away from the “dad bod” I had, was still a very real part of my transition. It allowed me to get closer to ME before I began my social/medical transition. See the trans tuesday on BODY HACKING.
But I want you to understand it has been a very real part of transitioning for me. Not as much as hormone replacement therapy, or my hair, or my clothes, but still really important. Even now, years into my transition, I consider it vital.
Because if I stop, it means my body will (in some ways) transition back toward where it was pre-transition. And that’s an awful and frightening thing for me, because I do not want to be associated with that body at all.
Around the start of the new year, I was doing bicep curls after my push-ups. Normal exercising for me, part of the routine I did often. But for some reason, something went wrong in my left bicep.
I don’t know exactly what because I didn’t go to a doctor to get it checked out. It didn’t seem to be anything super serious, it was maybe just a pulled muscle or the like. BUT it meant I had to rest it. For weeks.
I think it took almost a month before it felt basically back to normal, and I could get back to using it to exercise. And guess what? In that time I had lost SO MUCH of my arm and upper body strength. Like SO MUCH.
Because again, I’m fighting HRT at every step. I love love love being on estrogen, but it is not kind to muscle definition. And nearly a month with no activity had seriously depleted my strength. I could barely manage a hundred push-ups in sets of 20.
Now I know some of you are gonna be like “that’s still a lot!” and for some people it certainly is. But it’s a third of what I’d been able to do before (in sets of 30). It was a drastic reduction. And I was EXHAUSTED and totally wiped out from doing those hundred.
And it kinda crushed me. Because although it didn’t change my physical appearance much (my biceps def got smaller, but I dunno if anyone could tell but me), I knew the truth of it was that I’d backslid and thus moved closer to where I was pre-transition.
And it terrified me. It was so hard to deal with, because if there’s a timeline with a slider, with pre-transition me on one end and the 100% true me on the other, I had clearly moved toward the wrong end, however slightly.
It felt like the walls were closing in on me. It felt like the unending sea of dysphoria was there, just behind those walls, and cracks were forming. It was threatening to come in and drown me again.
And you can’t rush muscle healing or strength training. I’m only just NOW getting back to where I was before I got hurt. And it’s been tough to not push myself too hard to try and get back faster, because doing so would likely result in me getting hurt again.
There was literally no way to make it go any faster, which meant I had to just sit inside those cracking walls, feeling the trickle of water begin, and do my best to slowly and methodically patch the cracks before I drowned.
And then, in the middle of dealing with all of that, a MUCH larger setback happened. I mentioned in the trans tuesday on ANECDOTAL TRANS HEALTHCARE that I didn’t know there were two kinds of progesterone, and I’d recently switched.
What I didn’t tell you in that trans tuesday is that while the micronized progesterone has absolutely helped with breast growth and developing small but very real hips for me… apparently medroxyprogesterone suppressed testosterone a lot more.
And so when I switched, while I got those great benefits I’ve been wanting for years… my T levels rose. A LOT. And I want to take a second to let you know what that did to me.
My body hair was growing a LOT faster again, and that makes me really dysphoric. There’s a whole trans tuesday about it.
My facial hair ALSO was growing faster, to the point where all of my time-intensive shaving against the grain every morning was no longer leaving my face smooth for an entire day.
But do you want to know the worst part? IT. MESSED. UP. MY. HEAD.
So many people on HRT will tell you how being on the right hormones made their heads feel right, emotionally and physically and in basically any other way you can think of.
And… I could feel it slipping away. I could feel ME slipping away.
My dysphoria was going back up, I was starting to feel angry and confused and trapped and isolated and lonely and broken all over again. It literally felt like the core of who I am, the ME, was being stripped away to be stuffed back inside that box I always kept her in before.
And do you want to know the wildest part? Just from my head and my emotions feeling wrong like they did before, I fell back into some things I always did back when I felt like that all the time WITHOUT EVEN REALIZING IT.
Such as what, Tilly? I’m glad you asked. On multiple occasions, I almost accidentally misgendered myself in my head. THREE YEARS INTO MY SOCIAL TRANSITION! That stopped a few months after I came out when I got used to being the real me.
And now here it was happening again, because I felt like I did back then! And you know what else? I was surprised to discover when I went to the bathroom I WAS PEEING STANDING UP. I have not done that in years, even since before my social transition started!
I didn’t INTEND to do it, it just happened. And I realized midway through what was going on. I didn’t think anything of it at first BECAUSE THAT’S JUST WHAT I ALWAYS DID WHEN I FELT THIS HORRIBLE BEFORE. It was definitely not helping my already wounded state!
And then with all of those changes happening, I began to worry that the fat redistribution under the skin would also start changing back, and my face would morph back to that stranger I never recognized in the mirror for my entire life.
The largest part of my gender dysphoria always came from my face. I mean lots of other parts of my body, too, but that was the worst. And so the thought of no longer even being able to SEE MYSELF was terrifying.
It was absolutely DEVASTATING. It WRECKED me entirely. I was an emotional mess for weeks. And I was so, SO mad that in order to get more of the body changes I want (breast growth and hips) I had to sacrifice all the other things I also want.
WHY does it have to be like this? It’s SO UNFAIR. I didn’t ask for this. Why can’t I just BE ME and not have to deal with this? Can you even imagine what it’s like to feel your identity is being stripped from you? Ripped out of your mind and heart, leaving a cold shell behind?
That’s where I was. And my body was getting more dysphoric IN TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WAYS at THE EXACT SAME TIME.
But HRT is always about finding the right balance, adjusting as you go, trying to get more of what you need and less of what you don’t. And so I adjusted, and now… I think I’ve found an okay balance. Maybe.
My body hair’s still growing faster than I like, BUT not as bad as before. My facial hair is back to staying gone for a day as long as I keep shaving it really close against the grain, over and over again, every morning.
I’m still seeing the gains I want from the micronized progesterone. I think. I mean hormones are slow but my boobs hurt so I’m pretty sure they’re still growing and I can still see my actual little hips that make me totally euphoric.
But above all, the hormones have adjusted enough that my brain, my thoughts, my personality, my ME is back. I feel like myself again, and I’m so glad because those dark days where I felt almost like I was entirely cut off from the world again were so tough to deal with.
All of which is to remind you again that few things in life are nothing but a straight path of progress. There are going to be twists and turns, ups and downs, and sometimes it’s going to feel like you’re going backward. That’s just the way life works. It’s normal.
But when that happens, PLEASE do not give up. There is still a way forward, even if you can’t see it at the time. It’s hard work, but you can find the path back to where you want to be.
And when it happens, remember you’re not the first person it’s happened to, and you don’t have to go through it alone. If Susan wasn’t there to help me through it, the despair might have eaten me alive.
Reach out to those who care about you when you need it.
We can find that path forward together.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com