My 1st year as a girl

I'm not sure how seriously you can call a 33-year-old a "girl", but I guess that's just what people say.

Anyway, I've been on HRT for a year at this stage and it's really changed a few things I never thought would change. Like, I knew I was going to get boobs, I knew I would get erectile dysfunction, but that's all. I mean, the doctor told me a lot about the effects of feminising HRT as part of my affirmative-consent counselling, but I only heard the words; I couldn't truly understand any of it until it happened.

First, I should start off by saying that I was absolutely convinced that I could never become a woman in any meaningful manner; I cried about this like you couldn't believe. Pretty much from January 2020-June 2023 solid-state, I thought about how lucky women were to simply exist, while I was just a boring man with no distinguishing features apart from being bisexual. The best I could hope for was a typical relationship with a man or a woman—if I got with a woman, it would just be a boring old advertiser-friendly cishet relationship; if I got with a man, it would be a slightly more exciting but still fairly commonplace homosexual relationship. I felt like I didn't deserve to force my uninteresting self onto anyone, that they would be infinitely better off with someone conventionally attractive who made more money and had a more exciting personality; all the while feeling extreme, unadulterated jealousy toward women for being able to be women. On the bus back home from work one day, I let my imagination wander back to preschool in the '90s, at a facility that no longer exists, on a playground the likes of which are not built anymore; and I was playing in the sandbox when someone called out "Tina?", and I turned to look. For whatever reason, I responded to "Tina" in my daydream as surely as it was the name I'd been using for the past 29 years and it felt... right somehow. It's not like my mind just selected that name from a hat; I'd been a fan of Bob's Burgers since I'd started watching it on Hulu in 2016, and I was so drawn to Tina Belcher. Here was an awkward tween girl who wasn't conventionally attractive in any sense of the term, who was able to confidently function in the hell that is American junior high... and whose voice is played by a guy named Dan. An awkward, overweight girl who is simultaneously confident and strong, and she has a deep voice. I didn't realise how much that resonated with me until I started applying the word "transgender" to myself. Certainly the fact that several other female characters on Bob's Burgers are played by male voice actors helped matters, but Tina was everything I wished I could have been when I was 12 and 13. Of course, back then, I was more interested in being the stoic, academic, "Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes" type; being observant and playing the violin. I don't want to talk about that too much, it'll bring up a whole lot of other shit that would be best kept in the past. The point is, rewatching 1ASA05-"Sheesh! Cab, Bob?" was my trans awakening. I would like to personally thank whoever storyboarded that episode for this shot...

Copyright © 2011 20th Century Fox

This is the picture I used when I came out to my mum last year. This is a still-frame of the shot where Tina expresses her appreciation for everything Bob has done to bring her to this point in her life, saying that she didn't appreciate it "as a girl", but she does "as a woman". She sees herself as a woman now, therefore her life is now a blank canvas to paint on again. Even after the jokey dénouement, that bit stuck out more than anything else. I realised I could do the same thing, but I needed help. I felt the first step was to come out to my mum. She was a little taken aback at first, as you would be. I mean, I was going along for 30 years as a man and now I come with the admission that I want to be a woman now; I can understand how that would be a little thought-provoking. But, after she got over the initial shock, she was very supportive of my decision.

The first hurdle was asking the doctor about HRT. The only general practitioner my Medicaid would pay for is a teaching facility, sort of like student-teaching but for doctors. They're about 2 years away from graduation and know enough to make diagnoses and see their own patients. I used this to my advantage when I asked for my referral, because they would need to come into the situation with firmly-held biases, but they haven't been practising long enough to have any. Now, understand one thing—this is where my story is likely to diverge from other transwomen's stories, because I met zero adversity. This is NOT the norm. I'd heard stories about obstinate doctors, evangelism in the exam room, years-long psychoanalysis, gatekeepers from here 'til doomsday from other transgender people on Tumblr; men and women. So, naturally, I expected to meet adversity from the very first time the words, "I want to speak to you about transgender hormone replacement", came out of my mouth, and it just never materialised. Everything was working to my advantage here, to the point I will admit that I was lucky. I only wish other transgirls' experiences were so easy. I got my referral, my consultation, and my first dose of oestradiol and bicalutamide within a month. Like I said, a lot of transgirls trip over that first hurdle, but I was lucky. Plus, with the way science is progressing, transwomen may even be able to have their own stem-cells grow them a functional uterus and permit vaginal birth within the next 10 years; there's already stuff we can take to stimulate milk production, so that's pretty cool for all of us who want to have kids. In the interim though, I read a post on tumblr where a cisgender woman who had a double mastectomy got pregnant and her trans gf took meds to boost her prolactin so she could breastfeed their child instead!

Anyway, going back to the first paragraph, like I said there, HRT did some stuff to me that I never expected, and it really broadened my understanding of what teenage girls go through. First of all, to every girl I ever accused of "PMS'ing" back in high school, I would like to sincerely apologise. I didn't say it as much as some of my peers, but the fact is that the hormones really do play with your mood. I knew what the term "mood swing" meant in English, but I never understood what that was until I experienced one for myself. It's not so much a wild shift in mood from one minute to the next as it is a complete reboot of mood across days. One day, you're angry and irritable, the next day you're depressed and crying all the time, the next you're laughing and joking around, the next you're totally neutral and almost incapable of emoting, the next you're worried about nothing... oh, it's all very taxing. Certainly, occasionally more than one of these can happen in a single day, but my mood's been swinging A LOT since I got my oestradiol increased. You might have read a post from earlier this month called "On Yesterday..." that I wrote in the middle of a mood swing. It really took me by surprise how depressed I got. That intense, burning jealousy towards women I mentioned a few paragraphs ago? Well, the oestradiol increase made that worse! There's all type of chosts I've made in the middle of those kind of mood swings, and they're pretty easy to spot. Oestrogen really plays with your emotions in ways that cis men cannot comprehend.

The other thing (and the reason for the age verification) is its effect on my libido. For the first month or so that I was taking the HRT, sex stopped being such a priority. I was almost never in the mood, but I kind of had to compel myself into at the very least getting an erection. One of the things that your affirmative-consent counselling talks about is penile atrophy. Basically, HRT (specifically the antiandrogens you have to take; i.e. finasteride, bicalutamide/spironolactone) casts Small Your Dick but the spell will only work if you let it. You're gonna stop getting random wood pretty soon after you start the meds, so you have to intentionally give yourself an erection every 2 days or so in order to prevent your penis shrivelling. I'm deadly serious about this. Fortunately, I keep a fairly extensive spank-bank on my computer that never fails to do the job; and even if I wasn't going to actually masturbate, at the very least I could get hard.
...However...
When my libido rebounded, it rebounded. Without even being on progesterone, I became really horny in a bad way. The loudest, wettest, most satisfying orgasm I ever had was after Small Your Dick lifted and all of my sexual desire rushed back in like someone had turned the faucet on and walked away. I was horny for about 3 days straight before it finally levelled off back to a pre-e level. It was like I was 13 and discovering how to masturbate all over again!

What does progesterone have to do with it? Well, one of the best-known side effects of progesterone is a libido enhancement. While it doesn't happen to everyone, it's happened to enough transwomen for it to be statistically significant. I'm not taking that yet, but I still got really, really horny. Also, occasionally, I still experience random horniness throughout the day. The other month, I remember being so horny one day that I started swivel-frotting my desk leg, stimming with my nipples, and making needy little noises... but the interesting thing in that particular case was that, I had to finish a commission that day, so I had to finish working before I could leap into bed and jill. Once I was finally able to, I just... didn't. I ended up scrolling through my Tumblr dash and watching a Rayman longplay on Newpipe before getting up and making coffee like nothing had happened 5 hours before.

Relative to the expected physical effects. I did anticipate growing boobs, but I thought that I was gonna need surgery to get them as large as they've gotten so far! I'm at DDD already, and I'm still growing! And I'm 33, right? Remember that, because I've heard pre-HRT transgirls in their early 20s lamenting how it's too late for them to do HRT, that it's not going to do anything. I want to take everyone who's ever said this gently by the shoulders, look them squarely in the eyes, and say, "Honey, that's gatekeeper propaganda." It's not their fault they believed in that—they probably made the mistake of including Wikipedia in their initial research phase and read the science-y, clinic-y bit of the article that said "effects of feminisation were observed to diminish the further away from puberty subjects were when they began the regimen". I mean, yeah, taking these hormones at puberty would certainly enhance the effects, but I've heard of people transitioning in their 60s and 70s and still seeing results. Plus, we live in an exciting time for gender science! Despite the fact that legislatures all across the world are attempting (often fruitlessly) to limit the availability of gender-affirming care to transgender people, millennials and gen-z's are becoming doctors and scientists, and they're studying things that the older generations refused to study. I'm confident when I say that, in 20 years, scientists will crack the code and figure out how to give transwomen a second puberty and basically start from scratch. I don't have any evidence to back that up, but I know that stem-cells are finally being studied, and it's turning out that they have a hell of a lot to do with how we look and what we have inside us.

Back to my boobs, though :p
I said I have DDD cups, and that's mostly to do with my weight. Let's say it like it is: I'm a thick girl. I can expect to see at least 3 more cup sizes out of this deal, to say nothing of the fat re-arrangement that my body is actively doing as I type this. By the time I hit 40, I'm gonna look HOT. And that's because of my weight. I've seen transgirls on tumblr (pre-Matt, of course) complaining about their boobs not growing like they expected, while they only weighed 57 kg at their last physical. Okay? I weigh 135 kg; my body has actual fat to rearrange. If you want to see an increase in your bra size and you only weigh 60 kg, you'll need to gain some weight. If you want thick thighs, ride your bike. Now, maybe you're actually trying to lose weight. If you do this whilst on E, the first place you're going to see weight loss is... sorry about this, but, it's in your bra. Don't ask me why this happens, but women just naturally lose inches in their bra before inches on their belt. Also, I should point out, being fat is not a bad thing. Every doctor from here to Medicine Hat is taught that a fat patient is a goldmine, to the point where nearly every disease in the book can be caused by "obesity". As long as your heart is healthy and you don't have diabetes, you can weigh as much as you want and you'll be fine. Personally, I like to take long walks at the park. It's such a beautiful place and I get to exercise my heart at the same time I'm listening to Oingo Boingo. I'm still thick, and I'm still gonna get thicker.

I sort of went off on a tangent near the end there. I guess I got fed up at long last with being told I can't participate in something because I'm fat. Well, hey! It turns out being fat wasn't the death sentence everyone said it was! I'm not diabetic, I do not have heart disease, and I have mommy milkers now, so fuck my high school PE teacher.

Anyway, one more thing I want to talk about before I close up here. Remember how I said that HRT casts Small Your Dick? It also reduces your sperm count. It's not foolproof, certainly—the doctor I saw at my referral opened with that, but said several times: "HRT is not birth control"—so I don't know about this myself, because I'm not in a serious relationship right now and, even if I were, the likelihood of wanting to have kids is pretty low; but while you're on HRT, you're probably not going to be fertile enough to get anyone pregnant. The doctor asked me if I wanted to bank my sperm, but, like I said on a different website, this is a really shitty time in my life to have kids, and a sperm bank is just another subscription service I'd need to pay for. I already have my insurance, my rent, the VPN, and several other places I have to put money every month; planning for having kids I may not ever want doesn't need to be one of them. Also, I should point out also that HRT does not necessarily sterilise you. As with all things scientific, there's a slim margin of cases where that will happen, but all you need to do is tell your gender care specialist that you want to have a baby, and they'll tell you what you need to do with your HRT. Now... carrying a foetus yourself? That's a little more complicated. Okay, a lot more complicated. Be prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars of your own money to do this, because there's absolutely no insurance plan in the entire country that will cover a uterine transplant. Until stem-cells can be programmed to say "grow me a uterus, please," that's the only way to do it. But, it's like I said earlier: if you can get a prolactin releaser medication, like domperidone, your uterus-haver partner can carry the baby, and you can nurse them. Whatever makes you feel like you're contributing.

Why did I say any of that? Because that's another unexpected effect of my HRT—a profound, chronic case of baby fever. I've felt more domestic and maternal over the past 2 months than I have in the past 33 years, and I suspect the oestradiol has something to do with that.

Anyway, for one more parting thought. Despite all the weird emotional stuff it's done over the past year, and all the weird emotional stuff it's going to do over the next X0 years I take it, HRT was easily the best thing I've ever done. Gatekeepers like to say, "oh you'll hate yourself forever and ever if you do this", well, no. What happened was, I hated myself for years, thinking I was made wrong or a statistical anomaly or something. But then, once I realised I wasn't depressed or suicidal, just transgender, the whole world seemed to fix itself. My world pre-transition was like an MCU film; desaturated and mostly artificial. Since accepting myself for who I am, I'm finally able to see the world in colour. And it was such a relief to realise that I wasn't bad, just different.

"There. I said it. Now get outta here."
--Garfield (final line from "A Garfield Christmas ", 1987)