"I'm a trans woman and this is what I've learnt so far": Lessons about transitioning and self-acceptance

In two days, I will be taking the Eurostar to Brussels where, on arrival, I’ll hop across to Platform 19 and board a 35-minute train to Antwerp. But this isn’t your average European city break. I am Antwerp-bound because it is the home of 2Pass, a specialist clinic offering gender affirming care to the trans community. From facial and body feminisation surgeries to various aesthetic treatments, 2Pass does it all. Think of it as the trans destination of Europe.

This will be my 14th trip to 2Pass as a trans woman. There, I will submit myself to a session of electrolysis, a form of permanent hair removal that involves eight hours of my face being injected with lidocaine, before each individual hair follicle is electrocuted with a fine metal probe. And yes, the experience is as delightful as it sounds. I will emerge swollen—so cartoonishly swollen, in fact, that the clinic will provide me with a letter to present to the passport control officers at Brussels station, in order to explain the visual discrepancy between my passport photo and the person before them, who will look more like Shrek than me. It makes for a fairly traumatising experience—but it’s my only option after two-and-a-half years of limited success with laser hair removal on my fair hair. It turns out that blondes don’t have more fun, they just have more electrolysis. For me, the results are just about worth it so that I can move forward in my transition, which can otherwise feel painfully slow at times. When I first started transitioning years ago, I would never have predicted hair removal would come to dominate my days. I wish someone had told me about the many challenges I’d face—and the many incredible realisations I’d have about myself along the way. Really, hair removal is just the tip of the iceberg. There are some lessons I would love to have learned earlier—and the following are probably the most crucial.

Progress isn’t linear: When I first started transitioning, I drew up a roadmap of important milestones I expected to achieve by certain dates. It covered things like switching pronouns, starting hormone replacement therapy, coming out to my employer and going ‘full-time’ (in other words, presenting as a woman day-to-day). Committing this information to writing felt empowering; it gave me a sense of direction and a way to track my progress. Somewhere, at some point along the journey, I thought there would be an ‘Aha!’ moment when everything would just suddenly click into place: womanhood achieved, transition complete. This was admittedly slightly harder to schedule, but I was certain the moment would come, provided I worked hard and hit every target on the roadmap. Well, guess what? So far, nothing has gone to plan and, on reflection I see how naïve I was to think it could. Transitioning isn’t a paint-by-numbers exercise. My roadmap didn’t account for the possibility of coming up against challenges, setbacks, the occasional need for off-piste travel, or even the simple fact that I might not want to take certain steps at the time I’d previously decreed I would. The reality is that my transition has felt much more like a game of snakes and ladders—three steps forward, two steps back. Some of the procedures I have undertaken to address my gender dysphoria have, frustratingly, only made it worse—at least in the short term. Even the moments when I felt invincible and brimming with self-confidence could quickly collapse into insecurity if I so much as detected a funny look from a stranger. Nothing has felt guaranteed, and I’ve learnt to just roll with the punches.

Self-discovery can be awkward: Remember the makeover montage scenes in early Noughties films, where just removing a pair of glasses or swapping paint overalls for a slip dress would somehow catapult the heroine into social acceptance? There’d be a rock’n’roll soundtrack, maybe a round of high fives. Transitioning isn’t like that: it’s weird and gawky and painfully slow, and mostly just trial-and-error. For me, there were the mullet months, when, in waiting for the sides of my hair to catch up with the back, I unintentionally looked like an extra from Footloose; there was the whole year it took my non-existent right breast to catch up with my fairly developed left; there was that strange period of androgyny, when I neither resembled a girl nor a boy, and so was misgendered by strangers as frequently as I was gendered correctly. And then there was the irrational dread of travelling under my old passport, and coming face-to-face with a pre-transition me like some unwelcome run-in with an ex. “Transitioning isn’t a paint-by-numbers exercise—I’ve learnt to just roll with the punches”

The thing is, even with the best will in the world, you still can’t leapfrog the awkward parts of transitioning and skip to the finish line. To be honest, I’m not even sure that finish line even exists, at least not for me—I’ve embraced fridge magnet wisdom, particularly the phrase: “The journey is the destination”. And while it’s so easy and extremely tempting to focus on the before and after, I’ve found that it’s all the in-between stuff that really matters and has formed the bedrock of my own personal metamorphosis. Those awkward and sometimes ugly bits of self-discovery have empowered me to find a home in my own skin. So, if you can, remember to celebrate all of your gradual changes: month to month you are ushering in a new iteration of yourself, and there’s something quietly magical about that. Don’t miss out. Don’t yearn to skip ahead. All of you is a working title and it’s a privilege to watch yourself grow.

Your community is everything: The desire to ‘pass’ is problematic, but don’t hate yourself for wanting to. The concept of passing is screwed up, and for so many reasons. It’s screwed up because it turns the lived realities of trans people into performance, some elaborate game of deception. It’s screwed up because it reinforces restrictive and damaging cultural attitudes to gender presentation. It’s screwed up because its empowerment of trans people is built on their very disempowerment—and their complicity in that disempowerment by willingly gatekeeping their own bodies. It’s screwed up because, despite all of these reasons, for so many the allure of passing simply cannot be helped—not when it promises apparent safety and the ability to walk the street without the expectation of discrimination, harassment or even violence along the way. To my trans siblings: I get it. The will to ‘pass’. It’s almost unavoidable and, for many of us, it is a suffocating obsession. It can take a lot of work to appreciate that, in fact, there’s beauty in your transness—even when it doesn’t align with conventional aesthetics of cis-gender beauty—that offers its own unique affirmation.

To the blissfully unaware ‘passing’ describes someone who is invisibly trans. So, for example, a trans man is said to ‘pass’ if a stranger assumes he is a cisgender man without so much as a second glance. Passing is not about beauty: it’s about camouflage, blending into the fabric of everyday society without raising an eyebrow or arousing the ‘wrong’ attention. For a minority of trans people, passing is irrelevant. For the vast majority, the desire to pass can at times feel all-consuming and the only metric for judging the success of their transition.

I cannot overstate the importance of queer friendships and connections. They have been a vital and meaningful reminder of my own humanity, that I am valid, that I belong and that I am heard, particularly at a time when it so often feels like I am still working out who I am. London is buzzing with queer-friendly spaces and I would encourage anyone who is in the infancy of their transition to explore queer culture at its grassroots, if you’re lucky enough to live in the city (or near any city that offers something similar). This could be a queer bar, or club night or even a support group.

Whilst there’s obviously no blueprint for transitioning, social media can be another great resource: a place to feel connected, to gather useful and trustworthy information and to create your own personal support hub. I have loved following Dani St James, Shon Faye and Charlie Craggs. I have found all their accounts informative and genuine; seeing these trans women talk about their experiences in such real and often exposing ways has been an inexpressible source of comfort to me. They’re also hilarious, encouraging and very strong on the meme front.