It’s been a long week involving significant professional challenges, which I largely overcame, and various other stressors. Plus important things happening otherwise, or notable things. I wanted to describe each in detail, then never found the time. Taking it now, to at least describe briefly, because I am in a messy state and need to focus.
I got hair done again. It matters little in and of itself; I don’t look different from a trimming. It’s really a matter of hoping for my future hair to again be fully long, and to be thick enough that it can compensate for my facial features being too masculine.
More crucially, I went to an endocrinologist, and gave her blood samples. They will test my karyotype (because apparently they don’t do HRT if you are chromosomally intersex, or in a different way? weird), and my baseline hormones, and then when I can confirm having been six months in therapy, which will be in February, then they can perhaps start me on hormones. Apparently in Europe the preferred androgen blocker is one which has depressive side effects in some dose ranges, which has me a little concerned. That would be a later problem though.
Journey involved both correct and incorrect gendering. Restaurant staff madame:d me, police monsieur:d me, train conductor she:d me (causing me to ask my partner to confirm I heard right while smiling stupidly), and cleaning lady in the women’s restroom at the posh department store wanted to throw me out, upon which I said “non, je suis femme – trans femme“ and was allowed to stay. Came out to some more work people, vaguely, and felt generally accepted for my performance with perhaps no actual impact of presenting femme/androgynous.
That all there, I’m today in a dark mood nonetheless. Stress and lack of sleep and lack of blood sugar all might contribute. But there is also a malaise, a rootlessness, a sense of dread, a fear of something dangerous lurking, keeping me on my toes. It seems related to my gender, because it returns me to fear of the future – fear of becoming a freak, a failure, of not being able to find a professional home, of not being able to feel at home with my birth family. Seeing the examples of other trans people failing to blend despite attempts, hearing their accounts, that currently makes it worse. And those fears in turn connect to fearing that my future self would come across as fake, it is fear of not blending (but not about blending to strangers, rather about whether or not my own circles would be able to understand me as being a woman), it is fear of being artificial, of being fake.
Perhaps that is where my emotions are? I fear being fake, worry about it. Not as before so much about whether or not I “really” am trans, whether I truly want these things (though that too is there somewhere) but on whether the womanhood I actually can embody “truly” can be real, which somehow my emotional mind parses through the lens of whether or not others would see me so, whether I myself would see me so. Despair over there being no possibility of having lived as a woman in the eyes of others all along. It seems to broadly be worries concerning the challenge of successful transition, then?
How to tackle that worry? Moving forwards, certainly, but it is all so slow. Doing what I can in the moment. Recognizing that the extent of this worry also depends on unrelated factors which fluctuate in life. Letting it be there, accepting it, letting it pass. Focus on other things and staying effective, until it passes.
I’ll do useful things, and try to let it pass. Wondering if these sorts of doubts and fears and sadnesses can be understood as dysphoria?
lost in transition 