"an academic all too good at ignoring their own feelings and focusing on something else—anything else—so that they could ignore the plainly obvious truth of their life" <- that describes my years of pointedly NOT looking deeper and trying other things, anything, until I couldn't deny it any longer.
I swear there's something about a trans smile. I want those microexpression experts to study trans people before and after. The luminosity, the totality, and depth is unmistakable.
It all started with that damn comic - browsing Imgur, and stumbling across it, no more than 3-4 weeks ago. It seems like an eternity, at this point. Something maybe 2 weeks ago told me I had missed something on the first run - drove me back to re-read it, like it hadn't fully digested yet.
Finding a pattern match has long been something I've been good at. This pattern stood out like a sore thumb - finding I match this particular pattern has had me in tears, as I read through your account and experience.
The strangest is, I considered myself an introspective person once upon a time, but this seems to be dissociative in hindsight. I could tell - I was thinking/feeling X because Y - trying to code my emotions like a program, tell myself how to feel at a given point. Now, I well and truly *feel* again, for the first time in probably a decade or longer.
I'm going to have to take a lot of time to process this, and I start visits with a therapist in 2 weeks (initially, thinking I was going to go for more general testing). In my early 30s, I feel like I've lost a lot of time I need to get back, but have always been cautious. I've started journaling as of two days ago, trying to put words to the feelings I've pushed down for so long. Engaging the part of my brain that wants to apply logic to this in a constructive fashion.
I'm terrified of what comes next - my immediate family is very conservative and unlikely to understand, other than a sibling I've neglected for a long time - but also relieved. It's a new adventure, the first I've truly had in a long time.
Thank you for sharing your story. This well and truly cracked me wide open.
Congratulations, Alys. I know this is hard and terrifying--you know very, very well that I do--but I can say absolutely unequivocally that it's the best thing I've ever done. It's worth it, I promise.
If you want to talk about any of this, please feel free to reach out, okay?
Thank you. Asking for help, and talking things out, is something of a new skill I have not exercised in a long time. I will keep your offer in mind.
I've always wanted to not have to rely on others, to not show kinks in the mask, so people wouldn't get close and I realize now, it's (at least in part) so I wouldn't have to show what there was behind it.
Yeah... There's a lot of that type of realization that trickles out during this time. It can be really hard to see your behaviors in that kind of new light.
Give yourself a little grace, and let yourself ask for help when you need it. If not now, then when in your whole life have you deserved it? 💜
I can’t overstate how special and meaningful it is that you shared your story. My story is awfully similar and I am currently working through the first few months of allowing myself to be who I have always been. So many little details about your experience stood out to me and mirrored my own and it is soo validating to know I am not alone in these feelings. I just wanted to say thank you and that I’m also immensely happy for you.
My own story differs from yours in many ways - my egg cracked gradually, over a period of at least six *years*, not ten days - but so many parts of this story ring absolutely true to me.
It's been all kinds of joyful and all kinds of hard, but the most amazing thing about my transition has been my partner's response. We married right after college, thirty-one years ago, and she did NOT sign up for this. But when I came out to her, there was no shock, no panic, not even a whole lot of surprise. She knew, maybe not explicitly but deep down, and we were okay.
That night, she told me that many of the things she loved about me were *because* I wasn't a typical masculine dudebro, and how could she not love me for fully embracing that side of myself?
This whole series, just incredible. Cracked me open and poured me out. It's the cause of, guidebook for, and solution to, I guess my whole identity. B is amazing; I'm single but I have a friend like that who has been so much help. Love the pic! Thank you so much for writing this.
Oh my Gosh! This whole series has been so lovely to read, and the way you convey your emotions at the time does a great job of helping the reader empathize with what you were going through. I was just sobbing in bed reading this.
My wife knew before I did, too. She had asked about my gender identity after my D&D characters got more and more genderqueer. I still identified as male for 2 more years after she asked before coming out as bigender (male & female), at which point she knew I was a trans woman.
And the thing about all of this was she still thought she was straight at the time. I was terrified I was a trans woman and was going to lose her. I told her my gender didn't determine her sexuality, but she did her own work (goddess bless her), and kept coming back to "I'm her person, no matter what." Now I'm a girl and she's super bi, and enthusiastic about my changes, and I feel like I've won the lotto. Glad you did too!
Right? A full 8 years before I finally arrived, I played a character who everyone thought was a boy, until she CAME OUT AS A GIRL. You know a perfectly normal cis story to want to tell. 🤣
I actually chose her name as my middle name, Elia, to honor the girl that always was but never got to be. Well until now.
That is amazing. I say this every time, but thank you for sharing your story. I can't imagine the emotion you must have felt reliving it to put it down for others to see. Hugs and love and best wishes to you, Zoe!
As an emotionally repressed person, reading through this blew my mind. Having the courage to just flat out say you're not cis even when you expect the worse is incredible.
Thank you Zoe for sharing your story. I read this a few weeks ago just two days after I had accepted I was trans and I was ugly crying from about part two. I see so much of myself in the things you experienced and I can't stress enough how impactful it is to read someone else going through it all. I guess maybe more than that to have read the rest of this wonderful substack and know that it all turned out ok for you. That gives me so much hope for my own future.
Thank you so much! I still find it hard to believe this is real. I can just choose to be a girl rather than stuffing that longing down deep inside me forever? It's unbelievable. I am so thrilled and excited to be trans. My depression has ended literally overnight. I just... find myself happy now. For no reason! I've been wandering in the fog for so long. Just marking time until eventually I die. But now I want to live and there's so much to do and see and BE.
One of those things I want to do is to finally have an online presence rather than just being the lurker I've been for the last 25 years since my first exposure to forums on dial up connections. So here I am. Trying new things.
Anyway I'm rambling. Thank you Zoe - you have helped me immensely in realizing who I am. Love Isabelle
How it started for me was long ago, around 9-8 years, i was in my drama program (kind of like theater classes i think where we need to create and perform drama works, and appreciating others), and one of the drama work we had to perform was based on a soap opera called Sins of Loves (in Quebec it's called Le coeur à ses raisons and it's a parody of american soap operas) and one of the actress in it had ballons under her dress to simulate having bigger boobs, and someone needed to do it because we had only 2 girls in our class, so i decided to do it. After doing the work, i went to the bathroom close to the local and i had a panic attack, i can't remember the rest of it but it did affect myself i think, and after that i started to watch for female halloween costumes, then female realistic latex mask and transexual fiction mtf that i watched, weared once or twice my mother's clothes when she wasn't there and removed them after that, picking paper toilet to make like a ball and putting it under my t-shirt to simulate boobs. I started to crack like 2 weeks ago, when i came to watch on an old webcomic i watched (Bodysuit 23) when i found out about the creator that came out as trans and read the message they posted on the website, i still felt disturbed, then while playing with some friends in Starbound, one of them called me by the character name i chose (Maria, human female) and the panic came in but i didn't showed that something was off, and after that, i had a hard time sleeping, then the next day, it was like i wasn't hungry, only eating half of a Bagelwich (a kind of toast which is like a bagel but rectangular and without a center hole) and going to my job. After i arrived, i went into the bathroom to calm myself and i finally came up to the conclusion that yeah, im trans. Only told my parents like 1 day ago that i was trans. I also asked a question about a trans friend about how do they know they where trans, got the answer 2 day after i posted it, and i got some answers. Only after telling it to a cousin when i was in vacation in the North of Quebec that the pression stopped growing. And now i'm just waiting to get a prescription to start HRT. The only thing i regret is that it took so long for me to finally accept myself.
(P.S. i also did saw that page of RealLife comic, but it didn't resonated that much with me since i wasn't an adult, i think bodysuit 23 resonated more since it was like a big wake up call for me because of how i was thinking that it was a kink. Almost at 22 years old btw) As for my new name, it's the one i used for naming this account (normally i go w esralierdo which i can't remember how i came up with it.) and as for my old name, it's not a shame for me.
I came out as a trans woman around oct 2021 but my experience was dumb and relatively destructive. I started borrowing my moms clothes from about when I was 11 and cross dressing at every opportunity, but at the same time I played football and being the mid 00s homophobia/transphobia was pretty rampant so all I knew was nobody could ever find out. I did tell 2 people when I was in grade 9 that I wanted to be a girl, but one of them was a cis woman that told me that I would never menstruate so I would never be a girl? And thus i was initiated on my lifelong journey of recreational drug use trying to numb that transphobic nonsense. I never told anyone after that, but I never stopped cross dressing, or hoping I would wake up as a girl. This was all pre-2013(when trans people entered the modern media cycle in Canada), and regardless of me always being attracted to trans women this was when they were only referred to by slurs like transvestite and shemale, so in my dumb teenage brain I didn't understand that they were women, I thought they got surgeries to become a sex objects and also ended up in the forced fem/sissy world because anyone but myself doing it was alright I guess? Combined with finding out cross dressing resulted in gender euphoria/arousal made things really confusing for a long time.
Then for valentine's day 2015 I got told by my supervisor that I needed to "wear something red or fancy" for that day, and I didn't own anything red so I asked my friend if she had a dress I could use and if she would do my makeup the next day. and she agreed. That next day was absolutely incredible and I've cherished that day in the years after, but unfortunately was too afraid of anyone getting the pictures and making fun of me at the time so I made sure there weren't any left.
My sister ended up coming out as transgender a month or two after that day and I remember asking her at least once how she knew, but her dysphoria was way more prominent than mine was and she didn't have any answers for me at the time. But I guess my mom realized I was trans way sooner than I did(maybe it was her clothes missing or something xD) because she literally asked me that summer if I needed to transition too, but I got hilariously scared in that moment and denied everything and got myself back in the closet.
Fast forward to August 2021(and skip over a few cross dressing purge cycles because those sucked) and I was going through what would be my last cross dressing cycle, but I was absolutely distraught this time around due to my dysphoria only seeming to increase with age and I didn't know what else to do but drink. I've always avoided alcohol after being 18 and those initial phases of discovery because I realized how little control I had over my mouth and absolutely would've told someone I was cross dressing or something so I never did. While getting drunk for like 2 months, it turns out that I did out myself super quick, but for the first time it wasn't a mistake that I didn't immediately regret once I woke up, and came out to like 4-5 more people decided I should get my shit vaguely back together and I stopped drinking and decided I needed to figure out how to get a doctor referral in BC, and after a 34 I started hrt on Jan.14/22. :3
and sorry, apparently this brought back some feelings and i needed to write this.
Thank you so much for sharing your story, it was the right tool needed to break my egg after questioning for so many months. My tears started to fall around halfway through part one and continued 17 hours after I finished part seven. I still have a lot to work through and only have the support of a good therapist as my nearest and dearest need to be handled with kid gloves at the best of times but my life is slowly moving forwards after being in stasis for far too may decades.
I will always be grateful to you for sharing your beautifully written account. From the bottom of my heart thank you.
"an academic all too good at ignoring their own feelings and focusing on something else—anything else—so that they could ignore the plainly obvious truth of their life" <- that describes my years of pointedly NOT looking deeper and trying other things, anything, until I couldn't deny it any longer.
I swear there's something about a trans smile. I want those microexpression experts to study trans people before and after. The luminosity, the totality, and depth is unmistakable.
We all find out ways of holding out until we're ready, don't we?
I've had friends say I smile more since my egg broke. And that it's more natural now.
It all started with that damn comic - browsing Imgur, and stumbling across it, no more than 3-4 weeks ago. It seems like an eternity, at this point. Something maybe 2 weeks ago told me I had missed something on the first run - drove me back to re-read it, like it hadn't fully digested yet.
Finding a pattern match has long been something I've been good at. This pattern stood out like a sore thumb - finding I match this particular pattern has had me in tears, as I read through your account and experience.
The strangest is, I considered myself an introspective person once upon a time, but this seems to be dissociative in hindsight. I could tell - I was thinking/feeling X because Y - trying to code my emotions like a program, tell myself how to feel at a given point. Now, I well and truly *feel* again, for the first time in probably a decade or longer.
I'm going to have to take a lot of time to process this, and I start visits with a therapist in 2 weeks (initially, thinking I was going to go for more general testing). In my early 30s, I feel like I've lost a lot of time I need to get back, but have always been cautious. I've started journaling as of two days ago, trying to put words to the feelings I've pushed down for so long. Engaging the part of my brain that wants to apply logic to this in a constructive fashion.
I'm terrified of what comes next - my immediate family is very conservative and unlikely to understand, other than a sibling I've neglected for a long time - but also relieved. It's a new adventure, the first I've truly had in a long time.
Thank you for sharing your story. This well and truly cracked me wide open.
Congratulations, Alys. I know this is hard and terrifying--you know very, very well that I do--but I can say absolutely unequivocally that it's the best thing I've ever done. It's worth it, I promise.
If you want to talk about any of this, please feel free to reach out, okay?
Thank you. Asking for help, and talking things out, is something of a new skill I have not exercised in a long time. I will keep your offer in mind.
I've always wanted to not have to rely on others, to not show kinks in the mask, so people wouldn't get close and I realize now, it's (at least in part) so I wouldn't have to show what there was behind it.
Yeah... There's a lot of that type of realization that trickles out during this time. It can be really hard to see your behaviors in that kind of new light.
Give yourself a little grace, and let yourself ask for help when you need it. If not now, then when in your whole life have you deserved it? 💜
This had me bawling 😭
I’m so lucky that my wife had a similar reaction to B’s
So you’re a girl, that’s fine we’ll deal with it.
That's was just... I have no words for what it meant to me.
🙏💕
Are you on IG?
Is it ok if I share?
I'm not on IG, but it's absolutely fine for anyone to share this wherever they like.
I can’t overstate how special and meaningful it is that you shared your story. My story is awfully similar and I am currently working through the first few months of allowing myself to be who I have always been. So many little details about your experience stood out to me and mirrored my own and it is soo validating to know I am not alone in these feelings. I just wanted to say thank you and that I’m also immensely happy for you.
That's wonderful to hear, Meadow!
Tears in my eyes. For hours.
My own story differs from yours in many ways - my egg cracked gradually, over a period of at least six *years*, not ten days - but so many parts of this story ring absolutely true to me.
It's been all kinds of joyful and all kinds of hard, but the most amazing thing about my transition has been my partner's response. We married right after college, thirty-one years ago, and she did NOT sign up for this. But when I came out to her, there was no shock, no panic, not even a whole lot of surprise. She knew, maybe not explicitly but deep down, and we were okay.
That night, she told me that many of the things she loved about me were *because* I wasn't a typical masculine dudebro, and how could she not love me for fully embracing that side of myself?
Awww, that's so beautiful! 💙💗🤍💗💙
You and B both sound like amazing people. You're lucky to have each other.
We really, really are. Really, really are.
This whole series, just incredible. Cracked me open and poured me out. It's the cause of, guidebook for, and solution to, I guess my whole identity. B is amazing; I'm single but I have a friend like that who has been so much help. Love the pic! Thank you so much for writing this.
Awwwww, I'm so happy for you! Welcome to the family! 💙💗🤍💗💙
And if you need or want someone to talk to about this who's been there, I'd consider it a privilege to listen. ☺️
I mean this quite literally - this might be one of the most romantic passages I've ever read, even if (because?) it came from a place of such fear.
It was a day almost beyond description.
Oh my Gosh! This whole series has been so lovely to read, and the way you convey your emotions at the time does a great job of helping the reader empathize with what you were going through. I was just sobbing in bed reading this.
My wife knew before I did, too. She had asked about my gender identity after my D&D characters got more and more genderqueer. I still identified as male for 2 more years after she asked before coming out as bigender (male & female), at which point she knew I was a trans woman.
And the thing about all of this was she still thought she was straight at the time. I was terrified I was a trans woman and was going to lose her. I told her my gender didn't determine her sexuality, but she did her own work (goddess bless her), and kept coming back to "I'm her person, no matter what." Now I'm a girl and she's super bi, and enthusiastic about my changes, and I feel like I've won the lotto. Glad you did too!
I'm so glad! I worked hard on these, so I'm glad that they connected emotionally.
Aaaaand yeah, I played a lot of women D&D characters too. I was... Actually playing a trans character when I hatched. 😅
There Were No Signs.
Right? A full 8 years before I finally arrived, I played a character who everyone thought was a boy, until she CAME OUT AS A GIRL. You know a perfectly normal cis story to want to tell. 🤣
I actually chose her name as my middle name, Elia, to honor the girl that always was but never got to be. Well until now.
That's beautiful!
Every single video game and RPG character I have ever played has been female.
Every single one.
Was "still Cis through". *laughs at myself"
That is amazing. I say this every time, but thank you for sharing your story. I can't imagine the emotion you must have felt reliving it to put it down for others to see. Hugs and love and best wishes to you, Zoe!
As an emotionally repressed person, reading through this blew my mind. Having the courage to just flat out say you're not cis even when you expect the worse is incredible.
It was a leap of faith.
All transition is.
I don't know if I'll ever get the courage for such a feat. I'll keep holding out hope though.
It's so, so worth it.
And eventually, you get tired of running.
Thank you Zoe for sharing your story. I read this a few weeks ago just two days after I had accepted I was trans and I was ugly crying from about part two. I see so much of myself in the things you experienced and I can't stress enough how impactful it is to read someone else going through it all. I guess maybe more than that to have read the rest of this wonderful substack and know that it all turned out ok for you. That gives me so much hope for my own future.
Thank you so much! I still find it hard to believe this is real. I can just choose to be a girl rather than stuffing that longing down deep inside me forever? It's unbelievable. I am so thrilled and excited to be trans. My depression has ended literally overnight. I just... find myself happy now. For no reason! I've been wandering in the fog for so long. Just marking time until eventually I die. But now I want to live and there's so much to do and see and BE.
One of those things I want to do is to finally have an online presence rather than just being the lurker I've been for the last 25 years since my first exposure to forums on dial up connections. So here I am. Trying new things.
Anyway I'm rambling. Thank you Zoe - you have helped me immensely in realizing who I am. Love Isabelle
I'm so, so glad that my story could help you. 💜
The percentage of this that resonates so hard I could have written it myself is very, very high. I'm so happy for you.
And I'm so mad they took your stuffed animals away like that. That's just cruel.
Thank you. And I have a whole new collection of stuffies now. 🥰
How it started for me was long ago, around 9-8 years, i was in my drama program (kind of like theater classes i think where we need to create and perform drama works, and appreciating others), and one of the drama work we had to perform was based on a soap opera called Sins of Loves (in Quebec it's called Le coeur à ses raisons and it's a parody of american soap operas) and one of the actress in it had ballons under her dress to simulate having bigger boobs, and someone needed to do it because we had only 2 girls in our class, so i decided to do it. After doing the work, i went to the bathroom close to the local and i had a panic attack, i can't remember the rest of it but it did affect myself i think, and after that i started to watch for female halloween costumes, then female realistic latex mask and transexual fiction mtf that i watched, weared once or twice my mother's clothes when she wasn't there and removed them after that, picking paper toilet to make like a ball and putting it under my t-shirt to simulate boobs. I started to crack like 2 weeks ago, when i came to watch on an old webcomic i watched (Bodysuit 23) when i found out about the creator that came out as trans and read the message they posted on the website, i still felt disturbed, then while playing with some friends in Starbound, one of them called me by the character name i chose (Maria, human female) and the panic came in but i didn't showed that something was off, and after that, i had a hard time sleeping, then the next day, it was like i wasn't hungry, only eating half of a Bagelwich (a kind of toast which is like a bagel but rectangular and without a center hole) and going to my job. After i arrived, i went into the bathroom to calm myself and i finally came up to the conclusion that yeah, im trans. Only told my parents like 1 day ago that i was trans. I also asked a question about a trans friend about how do they know they where trans, got the answer 2 day after i posted it, and i got some answers. Only after telling it to a cousin when i was in vacation in the North of Quebec that the pression stopped growing. And now i'm just waiting to get a prescription to start HRT. The only thing i regret is that it took so long for me to finally accept myself.
(P.S. i also did saw that page of RealLife comic, but it didn't resonated that much with me since i wasn't an adult, i think bodysuit 23 resonated more since it was like a big wake up call for me because of how i was thinking that it was a kink. Almost at 22 years old btw) As for my new name, it's the one i used for naming this account (normally i go w esralierdo which i can't remember how i came up with it.) and as for my old name, it's not a shame for me.
Congratulations!
This is such beautiful work. Thank you so so so much for sharing. I cried my eyes out at every part of this piece.
You are gorgeous in so many ways and I hope for you all the beauty and love you could want in this life. All the best, Zoe.
Curious, if you hadn't mentioned the name Zoe to your wife, how did she know to use it?
Thank you.
And she just... guessed it. It seemed like the right name to her.
I'm a very, very lucky woman.
Thank you for this, it was beautiful..
I came out as a trans woman around oct 2021 but my experience was dumb and relatively destructive. I started borrowing my moms clothes from about when I was 11 and cross dressing at every opportunity, but at the same time I played football and being the mid 00s homophobia/transphobia was pretty rampant so all I knew was nobody could ever find out. I did tell 2 people when I was in grade 9 that I wanted to be a girl, but one of them was a cis woman that told me that I would never menstruate so I would never be a girl? And thus i was initiated on my lifelong journey of recreational drug use trying to numb that transphobic nonsense. I never told anyone after that, but I never stopped cross dressing, or hoping I would wake up as a girl. This was all pre-2013(when trans people entered the modern media cycle in Canada), and regardless of me always being attracted to trans women this was when they were only referred to by slurs like transvestite and shemale, so in my dumb teenage brain I didn't understand that they were women, I thought they got surgeries to become a sex objects and also ended up in the forced fem/sissy world because anyone but myself doing it was alright I guess? Combined with finding out cross dressing resulted in gender euphoria/arousal made things really confusing for a long time.
Then for valentine's day 2015 I got told by my supervisor that I needed to "wear something red or fancy" for that day, and I didn't own anything red so I asked my friend if she had a dress I could use and if she would do my makeup the next day. and she agreed. That next day was absolutely incredible and I've cherished that day in the years after, but unfortunately was too afraid of anyone getting the pictures and making fun of me at the time so I made sure there weren't any left.
My sister ended up coming out as transgender a month or two after that day and I remember asking her at least once how she knew, but her dysphoria was way more prominent than mine was and she didn't have any answers for me at the time. But I guess my mom realized I was trans way sooner than I did(maybe it was her clothes missing or something xD) because she literally asked me that summer if I needed to transition too, but I got hilariously scared in that moment and denied everything and got myself back in the closet.
Fast forward to August 2021(and skip over a few cross dressing purge cycles because those sucked) and I was going through what would be my last cross dressing cycle, but I was absolutely distraught this time around due to my dysphoria only seeming to increase with age and I didn't know what else to do but drink. I've always avoided alcohol after being 18 and those initial phases of discovery because I realized how little control I had over my mouth and absolutely would've told someone I was cross dressing or something so I never did. While getting drunk for like 2 months, it turns out that I did out myself super quick, but for the first time it wasn't a mistake that I didn't immediately regret once I woke up, and came out to like 4-5 more people decided I should get my shit vaguely back together and I stopped drinking and decided I needed to figure out how to get a doctor referral in BC, and after a 34 I started hrt on Jan.14/22. :3
and sorry, apparently this brought back some feelings and i needed to write this.
Thank you so much for sharing your story, it was the right tool needed to break my egg after questioning for so many months. My tears started to fall around halfway through part one and continued 17 hours after I finished part seven. I still have a lot to work through and only have the support of a good therapist as my nearest and dearest need to be handled with kid gloves at the best of times but my life is slowly moving forwards after being in stasis for far too may decades.
I will always be grateful to you for sharing your beautifully written account. From the bottom of my heart thank you.
Oh, Jessica, I'm so glad my story helped you. It's a long and hard journey, but it's *so* worth it!