I spent years of my life asking myself if I was trans enough to transition and if I was trans enough to count. I learned the word “genderqueer” when I was in college and it unlocked something enormous in me, but I had no idea what to do with that feeling. From 20 to 25 years old I would watch every YouTube video I could find from trans and nonbinary people talking about going on hormones and having surgery. I would lurk in countless message boards and online communities searching for answers. For a while I convinced myself I was just fascinated by these people’s stories, but eventually it became too hard to maintain a plausible deniability and I knew I wanted someone to tell me if I should transition or not. I wanted to know if it would work out for me and if I would live. It felt life or death, and I know that was not an exaggeration. It was life or death. Everything hinged on whether I was able to figure this out.
I looked for stories that were as close to my own as possible, searching for more and more similarities until I realized I was searching the internet for a video of myself in the future speaking back to my younger and more confused self. I wanted someone to reach through my computer screen and say, “This is who you are, and this is what you need to do.” I never found one. Then, in an attempt to keep a balanced perspective and not get my hopes up, I would look up videos of people who had stopped hormones or detransitioned. It seemed to make sense. Maybe I was just pinning all of my hopes on this one thing and I wasn’t actually trans. Maybe I just wanted to be trans because at least then I would have a path forward, even if it felt like a horrifying one.
I would think about starting testosterone and would list the few changes that felt exciting and then I would list the much longer list of changes that felt unpleasant and overwhelming. I knew I wanted a deeper voice and more muscle mass, but I was terrified of growing body hair or losing the hair on my head. Looking at the men in my family did not soothe any of those anxieties, and the fears I had seemed to lurk in my genetic makeup, waiting to be unlocked by testosterone. I knew it was impossible to pick and choose which results I would get from hormones, so I would convince myself that there were far more cons than pros and try to put it aside again. This never actually felt like putting it aside so much as trying to stuff the entire contents of my hopes, dreams, and fears into a tiny, dark closet in the back of my brain and hoping the closet door would not explode open from overcrowding. The stretches of time where I felt okay became shorter and shorter, and the occurrence of what I started to call “gender panic attacks” got closer and closer together. The gender panic attacks were when that closet burst open unexpectedly because I had gently brushed past some miniscule gender trigger. The triggers got smaller and the panic got larger. Eventually I could not stop thinking about hormones. I knew I had reached the limits of where my imagination could take me and I would have to try testosterone in order to find out how I would feel on it. I couldn’t imagine what it would do to my body physically and I certainly couldn’t imagine how it would make me feel mentally or emotionally.
Making that decision felt like jumping off a cliff. I was afraid of having to live life as a trans person and I was afraid of finding out that transition wouldn’t save me. I had been white-knuckling life knowing that it was unsustainable and that something drastic had to change in order for me to make it to old age. I wasn’t actively suicidal in the same ways I had heard people discuss suicide, but I had made detailed plans that always started with “If things don’t get better by the time I’m thirty, then I can’t keep doing this…”
At that time, I lived in Los Angeles and sought out an informed consent clinic to start the process of getting on hormones. I knew I wouldn’t be able to convince a doctor or therapist that I was trans because I didn’t know if I was. I just knew I had to try. I did the blood test, I signed the packet of forms that notified me of what to expect and what sorts of side effects might exist, and eventually I got my prescription. I received my supplies and testosterone in the mail in about a week.
Five minutes after my first testosterone injection was the first time in my entire life I truly thought, What if this works for me? What if this is actually what I need? What if this does change my life for the better? Needless to say, nothing physically had happened to me after five minutes on testosterone. My voice hadn’t gotten deeper and I was far from seeing increased muscle mass. But I think there was something about the testosterone being in my body (and it being unremovable) that allowed me to stop focusing on all my fears and allowed me to focus on my hopes for the first time. As much as I thought I had been doing that consciously for the past five years, really I had been so terrified of being wrong that I had not truly known what optimism even felt like. I had not been balancing hope and fear, idealism and discretion; I had been feeding my fears and suffocating my hope. I had been so careful to “balance” the positive stories with the negative stories that I hadn’t noticed that throughout my whole life I had been fed negative stories about transition and that the whole scale was wildly unbalanced from the start. It turned out that my worst fears about physical changes were because of the limitations of my imagination. I could not imagine the fullness of my experience as an embodied and happy adult. The only way for me to know what that felt like was to experience it for myself.
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From Am I Trans Enough? How to Overcome Your Doubts and Find Your Authentic Self by Alo Johnston, available from Amazon and Bookshop.
