Leap of Faith

How to know if transition, HRT, and even surgery is right for you

I’m fifteen. My friend’s bedroom is dingy in the way that late-90’s decor kind of always was—beige walls, cheap Venetian shades with a couple of broken slats, a dated bedspread that he’d thought was cool once, years ago, but which everyone has agreed without saying a word that it’s not worth replacing, since he’ll be gone to college in a couple of years anyway. It’s dirty, but mine is worse, and I absolutely don’t care. I’m squinched up on the floor, my eyes as big as dinner plates, because playing on the little CRT monitor of my friend’s computer is The Matrix, and I’m seeing it for the first time.

He’s a movie geek. Like, a movie geek’s movie geek. He’s got his own movie-making equipment, and is already planning to move to California when he graduates to study directing, and he can’t help but stop the movie again and again to point out all the little effects and camera tricks, from the green tint of the scenes in the matrix to the subtle slowdown of every reflection in it.

I couldn’t care less.

This movie has me drawn tight and vibrating like a violin string. He might as well be a white noise machine.

We watch it again and again and again.

---

It’s twenty years later.

I’m lying in bed with B—, the newness of being trans still burning hot inside my chest. We’ve lived a year this week, both exhausted, and we’ve only come closer together. Hours in bed stretch, as we talk and talk. I’ve known I was a woman for only days, and a thought, an idea, a half-formed dream is knock-knock-knocking on the back of my soul.

“So, therapy’s tomorrow,” I say slowly. This is decidedly not news. We’ve been counting the days in this week-month, because stuff keeps happening, in an unending deluge of revelation, reassessment, and tender experimentation. B— makes a wordless sound of agreement, curled up against my side, and snuggles in more deeply. I take a breath.

“I think I’m going to ask what’d be involved in HRT,” I say. There’s still a part of me that expects B— to react badly to this new step, but it’s small, and it’s been packing it’s bags to leave as the week-month has progressed, having come to understand that it’s really not needed anymore, and probably never was.

“Yeah?” she asks, rousing a little in the darkness. I nod.

“I know you have to wait six months,” I say, and where I know that from I couldn’t say. A therapist has to write a letter certifying that, yes, you’re trans, and yes, HRT is right for you, and it takes six months of sustained gender dysphoria for them to do that. That little nugget of information is totally and completely the sort of thing a cis person just knows offhand. Naturally.

“I guess… I don’t know if I want HRT, but I want to start the timer just in case I want it six months from now, you know?” I say, instead. B— makes her wordless sound of agreement again. There’s a lull, and the velveteen darkness holds us.

“What if she’s willing to backdate it?” B— asks.

“I guess, if that happens, I just go for it,” I say, and I don’t know where the words come from. “It doesn’t matter. She won’t. She has to do her job.”

---

“Sure, I’ve got a letter for you in your file,” M— says casually when I ask her the next day, all sunny cheerfulness.

“…what?” I ask, voice tiny.

“I practice informed consent for HRT. I don’t think it’s my place to tell trans people what they can and can’t do with their own bodies,” she says. I know all the words in that sentence, but the whole of it doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s like… everything I know about transition is wrong, somehow, despite all my desperate research.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of fast?” I ask. “I didn’t even know I was trans a couple of weeks ago.” M— smiles and shrugs.

“Zac,” she says gently. She knows my new name, but I’ve asked her to not use it. I’m not ready for it. Not now. Not yet. “Going on HRT is like starting puberty. It takes years and years, and that’s normal. It’s perfectly fine for you to try it out, and if it’s not for you, you can just stop any time you want to.” Silence, for a long while, as I process the idea. Six months of waiting in the eternity that has been every week, every day, for the last month felt like an eternity away.

“How do I know for sure?” I ask, my voice small. I feel quite a lot like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit-hole.

Hanging by a thread

One of the questions I get very frequently from people who’ve just come out to themselves, or who are finally facing their transness after a lifetime of denial, is what I asked M— that day in August, cicadas droning in the late-summer heat. How do you find your way to being sure of this huge, huge thing that you’re just realizing is going to change your life? That’s going not just going to change the game, it’ll flip the table entirely.

So, uhh… how do you make sure that you’re not making a huge mistake?

It’s a fair question.

Imagine you’re hanging from a rope above a chasm so deep you can’t see the bottom. You’ve been hanging here for as long as you can remember, and you’re really good at it, but the rope is rough, and holding on to it cuts your hands. One day, you get a call on the bluetooth headset you’re wearing. You answer it.

“You can just let go,” the stranger on the phone says. “It’s fine down here. You’ll be safe, and there are a whole bunch of us waiting to help you.” The phone line goes dead.

That’s the decision you’re facing, it feels like. If you fall, there’s no going back. The rope will forever be out of reach. The bottom might be sharp rocks and a painful death. The person on the line is a stranger. They don’t know your life, your reality.

But then again, they might be telling you the truth. You might be suffering, hands bleeding and living in a state of constant fear, for no reason.

Understanding and misunderstanding

A lot of people tell newly-out folks “just transition,” as if it’s that easy. We forget the impossibility of holding on to that rope, of choosing between forever-pain and a chance at either death or salvation at the end. Some of us—more than a few of us, really—held on to that rope until our hands failed, and it really did become transition or die. They look back at the people still hanging on, and all they see is inevitability, of a regret for having waited. I think, in many ways, Amanda Roman—who, to be clear, has since transitioned—really nailed the sentiment best, when she was facing the same reality, dangling from her own rope:

It doesn’t get better. These feelings will increase over time. Someday you will break. We thought we were strong too, but we ended up transitioning. Delaying only makes it worse. It was this or suicide. We thought we could keep our transition private, but the need to present publicly became unbearable. It will happen to you too.

I call it the Transition or Die response, and it terrifies me.

Those cannot be the only options. There must be at least one example of someone with gender dysphoria who transcended it. A Buddhist monk, perhaps. But wherever that person is, I can’t find them. All I can find are non-transitioners who are coping and helping others cope.

I think one of the hardest parts of this all is that nobody’s actually wrong, here.

Amanda, and all the people who are or were trying to figure out whether transition, HRT, or even surgery is right for them? They’re acting rationally. Absolutely, completely rationally—they’re staring a seismic change in their life straight in the face, and want to understand it before they commit to something, no matter what that something might be.

Meanwhile, those of us who’ve been around for a while? Especially those of us who held on as long as we could, until the decision was taken from us by our fundamental need to live an authentic life as themselves? All they see is someone hurting themselves needlessly, holding on to something that they cannot hold on to forever.

It’s a survivorship bias. And I don’t think that that’s recognized or respected enough.

The famous WW2 diagram of where a plane would return to base, damaged but operational.

The Matrix

You’ve probably heard by now that The Matrix movies are, to quote the fourth movie, “about trans politics.” But… what on Earth does that actually mean? I mean, aside from being a movie written and directed by two closeted trans women about waking up from a world where an order is forcefully imposed on you that constantly hurts and represses you, and against which you can’t help but struggle. “What you know you can't explain, but you feel it,” to quote Morpheus directly, “You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” Where you can wake up from that reality by taking a red pill that’s definitely, totally, and completely not filled with estrogen.

You know. Small potatoes stuff.

One of the reasons that The Matrix holds up so brilliantly, even after two and a half decades, is that it talks about what it means to be trans in ways that also resonates with the rest of the world. Everyone’s had to face those impossible choices, where they finally had to turn and face the grim oppression or fear they’d been running from. It’s a universal human experience.

What makes The Matrix different from some random action movie about rebelling against The Man, though, is the matrix itself—an omnipresent system of control that’s built to restrain you. It’s a stand-in for the cisheteropatriarchy, and in that respect, the matrix is an absolutely perfect metaphor, right down to the binary nature of the root of its control. After all, we know that no part of human existence is binary, and least of all gender.

But when we look at that, at that system of control that tints our every moment in it in a sickly digital green, we need to remember the hook built right into the movie:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

The system that builds our fear of transition, of HRT, of surgery—that system is also the system that we all rely on for our survival. I mean that literally, because in many ways, capitalism is the economic version of patriarchy. It’s what Morpheus means when he talks about seeing the matrix when you go to work, when you pay your taxes, and it’s why people who’re unsure about transition are rational, are right, in their fears.

The matrix has them. Has us all, if we’re being honest.

You take the red pill…

It will never stop being funny to me that far right sexists took the Wachowski’s red pill—a symbol of transgender identity—and turned it into a symbol of sexism.

But that symbol has power. Our power. Trans power. And the moment in the film—and so many that come after—are, ultimately, the answer to the question you’re here for.

Neo sits in a strange room with a strange man he knows only by reputation. He’s discombobulated, has “the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.” And then, this stranger—this purported terrorist—leans forward and offers him a choice: he can take one mystery pill, which could be anything, and leave this incessant questioning behind. He can move on with his life. Or he can take this other mystery pill, which again could be anything, and see the truth for himself.

Imagine you were in that chair instead. Really try and picture it.

What would it take for you to trust that stranger with either choice? To do anything other than run, screaming, from a room full of dangerous people with guns offering you strange mystery substances that could very easily kill you?

How could you be sure in any choice you made?

Whether you’re thinking about transition, about starting HRT, whether you’re weighing one of any number of possible gender-affirming surgeries, that’s exactly where you are, right now, if you’re reading this and wrestling with that question. Like Neo, you’ve spent months, maybe years, thinking, researching, digging. You know everything about these things a person can know. You’ve heard the stories, you’ve read the statistics.

And you’re not sure yet. Because everything you read tells you that there’s a chance it’s the wrong choice. That you’ll regret it. A small chance, but a chance.

Neo reaches for the red pill. He chooses to know, understanding there’s a real chance he’s about to end up very, very dead. And in that moment, that split second of time, frozen in his mirrorshades, Morpheus says one final thing:

“Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.”

Truth

You know this information, but I’m going to repeat it anyway. According to the largest survey of trans people ever completed:

• Only 3% of people who transition are less satisfied overall with their lives in transition than they were before

• Less than 1% of people who start HRT are less satisfied than they were before

• Only a little more than 1% of all people who have gender-affirming surgery are less satisfied than they were before

And remember, these are total, overall life satisfaction rates inclusive of any reason. Say someone got hit by a bus that paralyzed them after they started their transition—a terrible accident, but having nothing to do with them being trans—that’s part of that 3%.

The chances that you’ll transition, begin HRT, or get a surgery and be worse off than when you started are indescribably small.

But you knew that already. You’ve known it for ages. That’s not why you’re here. You’re here because you’re scared of that three percent, that one-and-a-bit percent, that less-than-one percent. So, here’s a truth:

People, from experts to folks like you, are terrible at weighing the probability and impact of whether unlikely things are going to happen. Absolutely garbage at it. If we were any good at all, casinos would all immediately go bankrupt and lotteries would collapse, because nobody would ever play.

But that tiny chance, that maybe-might-possibly? That’s your life. You live with it. So… yeah. It makes sense that it weighs really heavily in your mind.

No matter how incredibly unlikely it actually is.

Taking the leap

Neo takes the red pill. Later, he and Trinity take the impossible chance of rescuing Morpheus. Later, Neo turns to fight Agent Smith instead of running, a fight nobody anywhere has ever won. At no point in any of those decisions does Neo know things will work out. Every piece of evidence in existence is screaming at him that they won’t.

And, each of these times, he takes a breath, and then takes the leap of faith.

But he doesn’t take the leap every time.

At the beginning of the movie, Neo is running from the Agents at his work, as Morpheus guides him out of the building. To escape, he needs to shimmy around the outside of that skyscraper, get into a scaffold, and ride it to the top of the building.

He needs to take a leap of faith.

And, as Morpheus tells him in that moment, “you take a chance either way. I leave it to you.” In that moment, Neo backs down, surrenders to the police, and is taken away… and then ends up exactly where he was before, dissatisfied and desperate.

ND Stevenson runs a Substack I absolutely love, where he makes tender little comics about transition and gender and his love of his wife. And in one of those comics—one of my very favorites—he faces this very reality. Go have a read, if you haven’t seen it already. I’ll wait.

Every single piece of transition is a leap of faith.

Every.

Last.

One.

You will never know whether it’s the right decision until you’re hanging, weightless, in the air. But there’s a hidden piece, a truth we don’t acknowledge often enough, and one I think you should think about carefully: not making a decision is also making a decision. Delaying is also making a decision.

If Neo took the blue pill, or if you shied away from these parts of yourself, these drumbeat, thrumming truths inside that are calling you so intensely you’re listening right now to the advice of a stranger on the internet who you’ve never met and probably never will meet, what happens? Well, Neo goes home. You go home. You try to forget about all of this. You probably fail.

And days, weeks, months fall off of the calendar. Time you can never have back.

I got real close and personal with death when my dad was wasting away from pancreatic cancer. There are a lot of critical-care nurses in my family. And the real truth? The truth of ND’s comic, that advancing cliff, crumbling away under his feet?

None of us are going to get off this ride alive. All of us are going to die sooner or later.

Every.

Last.

One.

That’s the hard part, the terrifying truth, the real reason you’re here: it’s a leap of faith either way. Transition, or don’t. Start HRT, or don’t. Go in for surgery, or don’t. One way, you’re trusting that a big change will make it all worth it. Another, you’re trusting that the way things are will meet your needs. That these desires, these needs, these hurts, will all just somehow go away.

There are no safe choices. It never gets easier. You just get more ready to jump.

That’s why Neo took the red pill. That’s why Morpheus’ last words—that all he was offering was the truth—didn’t stop Neo. That’s why ND jumped off his cliff. That’s why I went in for, frankly, huge boobs, when I was terrified people would react badly. (They didn’t).

Only you can know your life. Only you can know your truth. Only you can know whether it’s physically safe for you to be yourself.

But you're here, now. You know the truth of your heart, if you’re being honest. You’re just scared of it.

In a situation where you take a chance either way, where every choice and no choice is a leap of faith, there’s only one good way to know which leap to take, whether you take the leap today or next week or a year from now:

Imagine the ideal future for you.

And jump for it.