Courage to Transition & Asking for Compliments
Readers ask how people summon the courage to transition and what to do with the desire for external validation.
Dear Lithium,
Transmasc guy here. I've recently become rapidly close friends with cool ass trans people who've linked me up with an extra supply of T, and the availability of it has speedran me into my decision to start hormones. While waiting to schedule my labs, I'm experiencing more instability in my mental state than I ever have, and I guess I just want more persuasion to start becoming the person I would otherwise never get a chance to see.
As I'm doing everything I can not be out to my parents as trans. My mother once tearfully made me convince her I was never going to transition after a "nightmare" she had of me going on testosterone. My question to you more precisely is, not whether or not I should start T, but how to combat the internalized fear I have of hormones "ruining" me, impacting my health, or changing me in a way I won't get back.
How do people summon up the courage to do this? And how do I shut my brain the fuck up and just do it?
Dear Courageous,
Hormones aren’t going to ruin you. Hormones are going to change you, and yes, some of the changes you can never undo. As cute little featherless bipeds running around, not a whole lot can actually ruin us (Yellowstone eruption). We can play in the wide open space of having bodies, and part of that playground is hormones. There’s so much fear mongering taking place right now about HRT.
I got an email the other week from an old teacher of mine, it said “Dear Lithium, yes! I’d love to get together. Is meeting early in the morning okay? Or, if the hormone therapy is making you too fatigued for that we can shoot for the afternoon.” I like this example because it’s something that person would obviously have never said to a cis woman, yet we both have roughly the same hormone profile. She was afraid for me and what I’d done to my body by getting jacked up on E.
Changing your hormone profile is a big deal, but I prefer to think about it like “correcting” your hormone profile. Just how no one would ever expect a cis man to go on estrogen to correct 99.9% of health issues, I wish our society at large treated trans people with the same level of care about how important the right hormones are for our mental health. For health concerns, if you wouldn’t tell a cis man to go on E, then you shouldn’t tell a trans man to stop taking T.
You will feel many of the emotional and physiological changes from T long before your voice drops and you grow ass hair. You have time to figure out if it’s right for you before a lot of the big changes kick in.
As for how people summon up the courage to do it? This is a beautiful question and I don’t have the answer. This is a major gate that all medically transitioning people have to pass through. For me, I took hormones for about 8 months before I actually had the courage to admit to myself and other people what was happening. You don’t need courage. You just need to get started.
Lots of love,
Lithium
Dear Lithium,
I'm at a point in my transition that I'm starting to like my body, but my face still causes me pretty severe dysphoria, that said, a lot of people tell me I'm actually quite pretty and I can't really see it. Like, kinda? When I look at myself in a detached way? But it's still not how I'd want to look even if it's "pretty" by some standard. So, I'm caught feeling guilty when asking for validation (even writing this) that I don't look like a monster, but it's validation I still desperately crave. How do I move forward from this?
Dear Dysphoric Hot Girl,
In “Detransition, Baby” author Torrey Peterson wonders what dysphoria was like before we had access to surgeries:
Reese maintained that foreheads drive trans women insane precisely because there is a surgery to alter it. The surgery created the dysphoria even as the dysphoria created a need for surgery. To know that surgery is out there, but that you can’t yet have it, even as you stare in the mirror and want to die, means that the temptation of want will forever taunt you. Large hands, though? Yes, they suck, but short of lopping off your fingers, no surgeon has yet to devise a procedure to shrink them, so most of the women Reese knew just learned ways to minimize them and get over it, as Reese did herself. The instant that some surgeon invented a hand-shrinking procedure, though, Reese knew she would die rather than have that surgery denied to her
I don’t know how real this is but your question makes me think of it. It’s important for me to question where my dysphoria comes from and why it feels like such a whack-a-mole situation. As soon as I get one surgery I always end up having a problem with a new thing just a month later. I don’t mean to suggest this is your case, just to say that I think it’s important to think about these things.
It sounds like you know some of what you want out of this situation: compliments and validation that you’re hot. So here’s what I’d say about moving forward: seek out what you need to help you feel at peace. I don’t think there’s any shame in seeking compliments, this is like chapter 1 in the trans girl playbook.
In the last 5 or so years in my life I’ve learned to try to set aside what I’m “supposed to want” in favor of what I actually do want. Often, when I feel a divide, what I actually want is something I was raised to to shy away from, I was taught to have a lot of shame. But the reality of the situation is that, just like really freaky kink stuff, there is zero harm in going out to seek compliments. If it makes you feel good then that is the extent of the situation. Not only is it not harmless, but if it’s actually creating good in your life then it’s hard to argue against it.
xoxo,
Lithium
P.S. Hot Girl Summer is almost back, and I know you’re gonna be going hard for it