I'm very out on facebook but have kept it pretty surface level and light. Today I thought I would change that and be a little deeper and more honest. I've gotten a very positive reaction and thought someone else might here appreciate it or connect or something!

Today – the Transgender Day of Visibility – is a very important day to me. One year ago I considered coming out to everyone, even though I was pre hormones and even still pre total-self-acceptance. I didn’t feel comfortable yet sharing my real self with the world and regretted having to stay invisible on the day of visibility. Well, this year I’m doing the opposite – if my visibility can help make the world easier for all my trans siblings who can not be visible, then I want to be as loud and as visible as possible.

I felt it important to share more than just a smiling picture of me today – probably the best picture of myself I’ve ever seen. I post a lot about the milestones and big things that make me happy. I don’t often post about the little things that thrill me, like when I look in the mirror and finally am able to see myself as more woman than not-woman, the simple joy of being able to wake up and not have to shave (some days), the tacit (and sometimes spoken) acceptance of new friends and coworkers and random people I get to know as myself. The thrills I’ve had when I’ve cleared out non-female body hair and the look and the feel fills me with a warm contentedness. The freedom and joy of feeling like I can finally dress and express myself however I want – and the amazing relief of no longer having to wear a damn tux jacket in orchestra concerts while staring in jealousy at all the women who get to dress however they want. The fact that I can cry watching The Big Short, of all movies (our country is so messed up, yo), is both hilarious and wonderfully validating in how emotionally responsive running on estrogen makes me. The amazing happiness that comes from honing in my (still not very publicly debuted) voice work… when I hear myself speaking indistinguishably from any other woman it almost sends tingles of happiness down my spine. I just had my fourth session of laser today and the cathartic pain as my oppressive beard gets burned off is starting to feel amazing.

There is much to be happy about, but I post even less about the realities of dealing with gender dysphoria – it fucking sucks. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s analogous to cancer – maybe it starts un-noticeable, and eventually tumors pop up but you’re told they’re benign and will pass and not to worry about it, until it starts to drain all your energy as it slowly kills you from the inside, permanently damaging your body the longer you take to figure it out. Only, society teaches us it’s wrong to have this disease, it’s wrong to not want to be poisoned by improper genitals dripping an incorrect sex hormone into your body, and that it’s shameful to even think you might be rotting to death on the inside even though you know it to be true. You either hide and let it slowly kill you and hope and pray it goes away through magic or divine intervention, or you repress it so deeply you find other excuses for the deterioration and the pain and the misery and aren’t even aware it’s there. Or, perhaps, you’re fortunate to realize what it is that’s the problem and you begin treatment and slowly reverse the course of it and start to heal the damage it’s done, both physically and mentally. Like cancer, the earlier you start treatment, the better your chances to go on and live a happy, healthy life are – but there’s a reason trans people have one of, if not the, highest suicide rates per person and absurdly disgusting murder rates. Dysphoria is, quite literally, deadly.

There are still days I’m crippled by the fact that my body just simply isn’t right yet. Some days the labor of having to perform such a male ritual as shaving my face pins me to bed for hours on time before I can muster the strength to face it, even if it’s only a 5-10 minute task. There are times I’m reminded of the childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood that I didn’t have and were stripped from me, and I can do nothing but cry and mourn for its loss. I still frequently feel an intense jealousy of cis women, and the relative ease of their life – who don’t require expensive, non-insurance covered surgeries for their faces to not have indisputably male browbones, or actual lips, or whatever else. Who don’t have to train their voice to sound naturally female, who’ve had a lifetime of female socialization (both good and bad) and don’t know the pain of being excluded from women’s spaces because their body appears male, who (sometimes) get to menstruate and (sometimes) have kids – who, often, are born with the proper genitalia. I watched the movie Carol last night, which was so intensely beautiful, and cried through most of it – especially the sex scenes, which filled me with such jealousy of both who the characters are and of how I’ve never had such an experience and maybe never will, that I literally had to look away to make it through it. Dysphoria has stunted my ability to form relationships in the past – both romantically and platonically. It is hard to properly connect to others when you’re internally so disconnected from yourself. It is truly a curse whose weight is difficult to bare.

But it’s not impossible to overcome. I’m so lucky I get to deal with it in this modern era of medicine, where I am likely able to repair my body to the point where I will, someday, be outwardly indistinguishable from a ciswoman. Maybe I’ll be taller than average, my hips will remain a little narrow, maybe my shoulders will remain a little broad, my feet a little big. But there’s no shortage of ciswomen with those features. I might remain infertile, but there’s no shortage of women in the world who are either. There is a light at the end of this tunnel, and I will emerge better, stronger, and more beautiful for it.

Accepting myself as trans has allowed me to truly love myself in a way I’ve never felt before. There are so many things in my life I used to beat myself up for as being a failure of a person that I can now look at and see: Oh wow, that was dysphoria. Was literally everything negative in my life a direct result? Probably not, but it’s so all-encompassing it affected everything from a minor to a very major degree – kind of like corporate money in politics wink emoticon. And the amount of things I’ve gone through that it does directly explain is staggering. The only way the story of my life makes any sense is to understand I was suffering from a destructive mismatch of brain and body that I wasn’t always cognizantly aware of, and when my mind did recognize it, I would explain it away or think it must be some other issue. It is so amazingly liberating and wonderful to be able to acknowledge this and work to fix it. Life seems crystal clear and totally worth living now.

One issue I’ve struggled with solving for my entire life has been my weight. In my slightly overcompensating weight-lifting days (2008-2009ish), I got down below 200 pounds and was well on my way to losing more… until I injured my knee and had to take a break. While that year had one of the highlights of my life – my month in Korea – it also lead to the worst living situation of my life (which was, incidentally, with a drag queen) and I went through some turbulent emotional stuff, much of which was dysphoria related. By the end of that year I had lost my good diet and my habits of exercise. Minus the stupid juice fast which was a totally unsustainable thing under the stress and lack of mobility at grad school, I never gained that back until I started keto in 2014 as a test to see if what I thought was probably dysphoria was actually just body image issues. After a year losing a good amount of weight I concluded that was not the case and started really transitioning. Between hormones, woodwind camp wrecking my diet, and all sorts of other things I’ve gained most of what I lost back and I’m so fucking done with it.

I love myself, I love my body, and I am done not treating it right. I’m done eating shitty food. I’m done not exercising. I’ve been eating perfectly clean this week and been doing daily cardio and I have a set, focused plan for myself to lose 2 pounds a week for the next year or so. I have extra incentives to do this – it’ll remove most, if not all, the fat on my body that is still distributed in a male pattern, it’ll put me at a weight where I can get gender confirmation surgery, and it will enable me to become the smoking hot woman that I know I am (not that fat can’t be beautiful). I’m making a public promise here to hold myself accountable to follow through – not that my own personal fire and drive isn’t enough – and I welcome and encourage you, my friends and family, to help keep me accountable if you see me wavering at all. It will, undoubtedly, be the most work and effort of anything yet in my transition. But the end result, will be so, so worth it.

I encourage everyone who reads this to truly love yourself despite whatever may be harming you, and if you desire a change in your life – especially if you can slay your biggest demon – to go after it, full heartedly. The resulting happiness of even just being on the journey makes it easier to weather the ups and downs of life. Even at my saddest, darkest place these days, I’m still able to return to my baseline level of happiness that is so much higher than perhaps it’s ever been, after properly allowing time and space to process the emotions.

Dysphoria is hard as hell sometimes and frequently leaves me in tears. It requires a tenacious struggle to overcome that sometimes consumes my entire life. But in fighting it, and healing myself, I’ve come to a deeper level of core happiness than I feel I’ve ever had in my entire life and a greater honesty and knowledge about who I am as a person. And I hope this post has shed more light on what my transition really means to me. Anything less just wouldn’t be as visible as I could be.

Happy trans day of visibility everyone. I love you all.

Time to go hit the treadmill.