Are you comfortable with questions about your journey to HRT?

Like, mentally how you took the leap of faith from femboy to needing something more / different. Asking for, uh, *a friend*, yeah 👀

Holy shit, this got long. This springboarded me into a massive writing about how my life influenced my personal gender philosophy, and is probably more than you bargained for. But I hope it's helpful in some way! I actually had a similar conversation recently with an NB, not on HRT friend of mine. What's the jump that makes you want to do HRT?

I don't think my experience parallels that of a lot of people's - everyone's is unique. But I do think there are good takeaways from my thoughts on this. Now that I have an Adderall prescription and my quarter is about to end, I've started writing some kind of more cited and developed essay or video essay, but that's random future stuff. This post itself is gonna be a little rambling, and a little personal. Sorry!

Vaguely, I think that the *push* to start HRT was a distinct force from tearing down the internal barriers associated with HRT, if that makes any sense. For many people, I think they have some sense of a mild preference of the gender they would "want" to be, but it doesn't bother them enough to actually break down the barriers to transition. For me, breaking those barriers, both internal and external, was as important as the motivations to transition themselves.

One of the major barriers in people's heads, often without them realizing it, is some kind of inherent belief in the "sanctity" of their body. For many people, "permanent changes" are terrifying, "unnatural", and even if they don't have medical risks, intrinsically *feel* like a medical risk they're taking on some level. It's an offshoot of purity culture in a weird way- it's the same root as a fear of psychiatric medicine making you "not you". Much of this is intrinsically religious, but a lot is actually not. I had a little bit of this growing up. Being raised atheist certainly helped in this regard, even though it was still a queerphobic slavic atheism.

The tiny bit of this I did have was sanctity of my mind, which internally, I still viewed as a separate entity from my body. This was 100% incited by crushing academic pressure, which influenced how I think and my own morality in a lot of unexpected ways. I grew up in a kind of infamously high pressure education area. It sounds unrelated, but it's really not. My mind, academics, and thinking kind of got put on a pedestal on my mind. My personal image of myself was basically a detached orb of thoughts and public speaking. I had 0 connection to my body. But since my mind was everything, both psychiatric medication and HRT were these vile things that could alter how I think and my mood! Gasp!

The final, crushing blow to both of these mentalities was studying biology. And WOW there's so much I could say about how studying biology has influenced how I think about this idea, which I want to talk about a lot more outside of the scope of just a tumblr post. But to summarize- it's not even about finding a biological "reason" for transness. It's about how I saw a living thing as a detailed, dynamic, intricate, constantly changing system that is as much a function of its environment as it is any intrinsic factors. And this includes the mind. So since I'm a shambling mass of chemicals anyways..... Why not be a shambling mass of slightly different chemicals?

The "detached orb" image isn't entirely accurate, though. Because, from an early age, I did have a self image that made me happy. And it was a female one. I shoved this deeply out of my mind in shame, leaving behind the "orb". This was my "push", as I called it before. In addition to a weird separation between my mind and my body, an additional factor contributed to my detachment- a growing distress around developing male traits during puberty, which coincided in the worst ways with academic pressure during teen and preteen years. Looking back, I now recognize this as dysphoria. I don't think my dysphoria was ever as extreme as many other people. But this is why I'm emphasizing taking down barriers as much as the weight of dysphoria itself. It has always been easy to distract from my dysphoria, but it's always been my "resting state" without realizing it.

Linked a bit to the second point is also how I felt shame about exploring any aspect of my life other than academic and professional achievement. Being raised in a high pressure environment means that any exploration of my queer identity felt like a distraction from the "real" things I should be focusing on. The final thing that tore this down, which I don't recommend for ANYONE, was an almost traumatic set of events during the pandemic/my masters degree that made me have a wake up call. I wasn't structuring anything in my life for my own happiness. Going through that made me realize I was going to continue being miserable unless I changed that. So... I started taking the idea of transitioning to actually work on my happiness very seriously.

Being a femboy was actually how I tried to reconcile these things in my head. It was my attempt to "compartmentalize"- allow myself to gently indulge in gender nonconformity and the happiness associated with it, while still not making the "commitment" to fully transition. It helps that most of my existence as a femboy was crossdressing during the height of the pandemic- spending hours on analysis and writing while living alone during my MS, wearing femme outfits while I did it. And of course, taking pics to kick off this whole online persona. I also kind of liked the idea of cis gender nonconformity as a concept, and still do. I love how femboys fuck with gender, and I wanted a slice of that for myself. It wasn't enough long term, and my new commitment to happiness overcame my desire to compartmentalize.

The final barriers were practical. By the end of my masters in 2022, I knew I wanted to transition, I just needed to get my social and financial shit together. Cue moving to my PhD university, becoming active in the queer community here, having an accepting professional environment... and yeah. Here I am. Still gotta socially transition outside of my queer circles, but now, I even have a plan for that. I still got a long way to go, but for the first time, I feel like I'm going in the right direction. And I'm very, very happy.

A lot of this is not applicable to everyone. It's mostly my personal experience. But if there is one thing that I think should apply to everyone here, it's this: kill bioessentialism in your mind. Kill the concept of complete sanctity of your mind and body. Break the barriers and then let yourself move freely across the new landscape you've opened up. At the very least, you'll come out with a more healthy relationship with your cis identity. And at best, you'll find a new part of you that needed to be found.

The other thing I think is broadly applicable is this: when initially figuring things out, stop thinking about what you "are", and start thinking about what you want. Would it make you happy to grow breasts, curves, have a femme face, estrogen regulated emotions, and other transfemme HRT changes? Because those are the actual, physical effects of HRT. If the answer is yes, start it. There's no reason not to. Your identity can come later. You deserve to be happy *for the explicit purpose of being happy*. You don't need to validate that desire through some other random factor.

This got WAAAYYYY too long, but if you have any questions, please, please ask!!!!