Trans Tuesday 193 – Unexpected Bonuses of Transition (revision of 32)
Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week we’re talking about happy aspects of being trans that I was entirely unprepared for, little delightful side-effects that I never could have expected: UNEXPECTED BONUSES OF TRANSITION.
I suspect there are things like this for every trans person out there, though what they are undoubtedly varies. For people who transition as adults, realizing and accepting that we’re trans requires a lot of introspection and self-examination.
I’ve mentioned many times in these that trans people probably know ourselves better than anyone else on earth, because we HAVE to in order to overcome the gatekeeping, lies, and gaslighting about our own identities that the cis binary matrix of society forces on us.
It’s something that’s maybe never really finished, because life’s a journey of discovery. But those of us who didn’t transition until adulthood, for a variety of reasons, have had to do incredible work to get to where we are.
And you spend so much time focused on that, on trying to figure things out, on trying to accept the truths of who you are, that you don’t always realize every little thing that can come with transitioning. At least I didn’t.
Guy clothes always made my dysphoria worse, and so I couldn’t wait to actually be able to wear women’s clothes. But I didn’t anticipate how much I’d really like wearing skirts and dresses.They make me feel… happy?
See the trans tuesday on HEAVILY GENDERED CLOTHES AND TRANS PEOPLE for more on that.
And like, this somehow surprised me. You’d think, okay sure, you wanted to wear those clothes and now you can, so it stands to reason that achieving that goal would bring you joy. But it’s more than that.
I guess it’s like an exterior sign that says… hey. HEY. The outside matches the inside! HOLY CRAP WHAT IS THIS LIKE. When you go your whole life without that, you don’t realize what a change that is.
And this, my friends, is GENDER EUPHORIA. See the trans tuesday on it (and learn how cis people can and do experience it too).
Maybe that’s something I should have seen coming, but I didn’t. Probably because I had zero frame of reference for what it was like. And what’s wild is that gender euphoria can be one of the best ways of discovering that you’re trans or nonbinary. And people who don’t have gender dysphoria can and do still experience gender euphoria!
But for me, I was so buried by my own dysphoria, my desire to transition was to just LESSEN it, to ease the stress and pressure and pain and burden and loneliness and isolation that it put on me. It somehow never even OCCURRED to me that I could be HAPPY and EXCITED and FEEL GOOD about so many things.
I was actively trying to fix the bad, and hoping that would be good, if that makes sense. Dysphoria got so bad all I could think about was escaping it, rather than focusing on what I might be able to feel and achieve without it.
You can read more about GENDER DYSPHORIA and my personal struggle with it in the trans tuesday on that very topic.
But for a lot of trans and nonbinary people, euphoria leads the way, and they transition to seek out more of it. We all have our own paths. And for me, like… it felt too much to even HOPE I could actually be HAPPY in a dress or a skirt, I thought it just WOULDN’T BE MISERABLE, y’know?
So my own euphoria, every damn day just seeing myself in the mirror, from my clothes, from my voice, from my BODY, totally caught me by surprise.
But there are other much smaller things I’d never considered that also blew my mind.
I really, really like pink. I mean I like most pinks (unless they get too salmon-y), but I LOOOOVE me some neon fuchsia with juuuust the right amount of purple in it. Love it. LOVE. IT!
Four photos of bright, neon purply-pink fuchsia things… flowers, a neon sign that says “to the moon and back,” bright bits of plastic, and a woman whose hair is a mix of purple and neon pink fuchsia
Pretty sure I don’t want my hair that color, but I love it nonetheless. I even got a dress as close to that color as I could for our re-wedding, when my wife Susan and I renewed our vows and had a wedding with the real me! It’s not as purply as I would have preferred, but it was fabulous and so very much me.
A shot of me dancing in my pink wedding dress at our re-wedding. The pink is warmer than the purply fuchsia I love the most, but is still super pretty. 🙂
If you missed the trans tuesday on A TRANS RE-WEDDING, please check it out and bask in the joy and love, won’t you?
Okay so at first I thought my love of fuchsia was maybe some weird overcorrection on my part. I was denied female-coded things my whole life, it’s only natural I’d dive into them as far as I could.
And then maybe pull back a bit as I discover what I really like. It’s a common thing that happens for a lot of trans folks because again, it’s all a process. But for me, that’s not what this is.
Because I can remember being a very little kid and LOVING this color, and loving the way it mixed with purple (like in the hair photo) even more.
And I remember telling my mom this during one of those times you ask a kid their favorite color, because you don’t have a lot to talk about when they’re that age (or you have passive-aggressive midwestern parents who don’t want to talk about REAL things at any point ever, ahem ahem ahem).
And I was told, unequivocally, NO. That was NOT my favorite color. And could not be. Because it was for GIRLS and girls ONLY.
I was not allowed to like a god damned COLOR.
The gendering of our society is so horribly damaging. ESPECIALLY to kids. And if you don’t know just how insidious it is, see the trans tuesday on GENDERED CHILDHOODS and let it open your eyes to just how compulsory being cisgender and heterosexual is in our society.
In any case, little Tilly was told she COULD like purple… as long as it wasn’t too pink. And then little Tilly did some overcorrection of her own and threw herself into purple everything.
It even carried over to candy, where I claimed every grape variety as my favorite. And I mean that’s some delusion, because “grape” candy and drinks are… anything but. They’re so weird! How does anyone like that? It doesn’t taste like grapes! What even IS it?!
And yet I still kinda love it, probably because I formed some association with it being safe in my childhood, and that carries over still today. See, when I told you trans people do so much damned introspection, I wasn’t kidding. 😶
So realizing that now I “could” like this color was revelatory. I mean I certainly could have at any time, even when presenting as a man, because nobody can stop you from liking a color (except your parents when you are *ver smol*, apparently).
But again, our society programs these things into us without us even realizing, and it took me breaking out of those societal “norms” to declare my true gender before I realized I could even declare my true favorite color. Which is pretty fucked up.
For so much more on the ways society worms thoughts into us without our knowledge in MUCH more damaging ways, see the trans tuesdays on IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA…
And on INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA.
You know what else I wasn’t allowed to like? Matching. Like, in terms of clothes. If I got too matchy my mom would always make some comment and tell me I couldn’t dress like that. I guess matching colors on different pieces of clothing is… somehow… also gendered?!
Beau Brummel fucked us up so bad, friends. I went into more about that in the trans tuesday on gendered clothes linked above, so check it out if you want to hate Beau too.
Anyway! This manifested itself one night when I used a hair tie to put my hair up into a pineapple for bed (if you follow my socials, you’ve no doubt seen my pineapple selfies). I have a big bag of satin scrunchies in all different colors, because I’ve always always loved brightly colored anything.
But there’s so many varieties I could stand there for ten minutes and still not know which one I wanted to use (every decision is potentially life-altering, I guess? Welcome to my brain.) So I generally just grab one without looking.
And as soon as I put my hair up, I noticed that the hair tie I picked just happened to exactly match the color of my pajamas. And… I squealed with glee. What? WHAT?
I was so baffled. WHY DID SOMETHING SO MEANINGLESS BRING ME SO MUCH JOY??? Because it’s another thing that had been kept from me my whole life, and now here it is, for me. Mine. Anytime I want. I can match any hair accessory to my clothes anytime I want!?
FREEEEEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOM! (insert your favorite gif of someone cool yelling this, but not the famous one from that movie with the cis straight white man who’s a sexist racist).
In fact, I also love love love matching my glasses to my outfit (and sometimes even my lipstick), and people are always complimenting me on it! Which is, frankly, very cool and the correct thing that you should all be doing more of. 😌
And sometimes I even get all matchy WITH FUCHSIA and good golly dang it makes me so happy.
Me in an off the shoulder long-sleeved black top, with bright pink fuchsia bra straps showing… that match the color of my heart-shaped cat eye glasses and my lipstick.
And now I can also get “girly” gifts! Susan got me a little charm necklace with my name on it (which you can see in almost every single selfie I take). It’s very cute and I adore it.
A circular silver charm pendant hanging on a necklace. Engraved into it is “Tilly”
A lovely friend, after reading a past trans tuesday where I mentioned never getting to be a little girl, or a teen girl, etc. sent me a few gifts.
My Little Ponies! One of them is on my dresser, and there’s a big stuffed Rainbow Dash that sits right next to the bed and it’s the first thing I see every morning when I get up and it makes me smile. Every day.
A purple My Little Pony with a sticker of the pone on it that says her name is Tickle
A large stuffed Rainbow Dash My Little Pony
I don’t know if you can anticipate stuff like that, but it changes everything. Little tiny moments over and over, throughout your life, reminding you of how much better things are now.
Even just hearing someone call me Tilly sends me soaring to the clouds. Susan and I have had some calls and meetings where people start off by saying “hello, ladies” and it makes me want to scream every time (in extreme joy, I assure you), even now four years in to my transition. I hope it never stops.
If you’ve ever done this, by the way, and I continued talking to you like an adult, please realize it took all my self control to not scream OH MY GOD THANK YOU at you over and over again.
And I was even more surprised to discover… my handwriting changed. Not randomly or subconsciously, but because I decided I could change it.
As a kid, I loved the way some girls wrote, where the letters were rounded and flowy and pretty to look at. So I tried to write like that too, and you know exactly where this is going. Someone… my parents, my teachers, my friends, probably all of the above… said NO.
BOYS CAN’T WRITE PRETTY. It’s just so, so tiring, y’all.
So little me overcorrected there too. Fine, if I can’t write pretty, I’m not going to care how I write at all. My printing became rough, and scratchy, small and constrained. And I never gave it another thought my entire life. Until a couple years ago.
I keep a physical planner on my desk to write down all the shit I have to do, because for some reason my brain LOVES analog written lists with dates, but if I try to use a calendar app it’s just another computer program to ignore and it doesn’t work for me. At all.
And because the only real writing I do by hand is in my planners and I was paying attention, I can tell you exactly when this happened and what I was writing/thinking about.
February 3, 2021. I wrote down to email Susan’s and my manager about a new series pitch we’ve been working on, and it looked different from EVERYTHING ELSE up to that point. The letters were more spaced out. Open. Rounded.
It’s probably no surprise that it happened with a note about something creative we were doing, my brain was probably more open to experimenting and, well, being creative with my handwriting because it was already in creative mode.
February 4, 2021, most of everything written down was still the tightly constrained scratch… except for another note about this series pitch and our manager. By Friday February 5, 80% of what I’d written there was in the new open, rounded style.
The following week? ALL of it was in the new style. The messy scratch that looked like it’s waiting to explode is… gone. I could even see how I was experimenting with letters and words day to day, trying to see what I liked.
This was a conscious decision I made because I was looking at the horrible, tightly-wound, edgy, scratchy, messy print and it made me feel… bad.
Maybe because I associate it with the world telling me I was a gender I’m not, maybe because subconsciously I was remembering wanting to print differently and being told I couldn’t, or maybe because you should read my description of it again:
“Horrible, tightly-wound, edgy, scratchy, messy.” “Waiting to explode.” If that’s not a metaphor for how it felt living in the wrong body, thinking I was the wrong gender, for most of my life, I don’t know what is. It’s a very visual representation of the dysphoria I was feeling (again see the trans tuesday on it, linked above, for more).
I was writing like that because that’s how I FELT.
All. The. Time.
But I don’t feel that way anymore! I finally feel OPEN and RELAXED and at PEACE with myself.
All of which is to say that looking at every aspect of your own life, no matter what your gender is, can lead you to important revelations. Even if small, they could change your entire life for the better.
Look inward, examine yourself and your choices and your desires and the things you like and dislike, and discover why, and do what you need to make yourself happier.
I’m worth it, and so are you.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com