The Last Night of Phase One

Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?

Tomorrow is my first appointment for hormone therapy. Tomorrow feels a bit like a birthday to me. It’s the day I begin saying goodbye to Heather, the person I’ve been for the first 41 years of my life, and fully embrace Quinn, the person I’ve been growing into for longer than I consciously realized.

It wasn’t until tonight, when I opened my Blogger account, that I realized that I’ve known we were coming to this moment for a minimum of two years. When I look at the words I wrote in 2017, I see the man I am, scared of admitting the truth he needs to face. 

It was never about being non-binary. It wasn’t about being genderqueer. Those were the final two masks I put on in hopes of maintaining my life as I knew it. I was so scared of saying goodbye to the life I’ve created with my husband and my children that I wanted it to be enough to admit I wasn’t a cisgender female. 

So much has happened in the past two years, and I’m looking forward to keeping this space updated as I transition. 

Coming to this point has included nearly a year of therapy. Last week, I found out I didn’t need therapy here in order to transition. Informed consent would have been enough to start hormones. I’m actually happy I was ignorant in this case. If I hadn’t thought it was a vital step, I likely would have skipped it, but talking through my identity has helped me find peace. I’m no longer scared of the future. 

Today is like the night before school starts. I’m excited and nervous. I want everything to go well. I’m worried people won’t like me. The problem is, in this case “people” is my circle of friends and family. So far, everyone who knows has been awesome. 

But my transness is this abstract thing to them. My husband has been supportive yet honest since I came out to him. He loves me and always will but he doesn’t know how he will feel as I go through my changes. Right now, he knows but people walking down the street don’t. He can still be perceived as a straight man.

Some might see his concern as a sign he’s not okay, but I get it. Just as I spent 41 years of my life being viewed as a woman, he has identified as a straight male for 43 years. My change is forcing a change of some sort on him. Either he will be perceived as a gay man by the outside world (because let’s face it, on the surface, people are viewed as straight or gay based on who they are with) or he will be a divorced man whose wife transitioned and is now a man. 

That has to be a lot for him to sort through. The fact he’s willing to be honest and isn’t repulsed by me, the reassurances he gives me that we will cross one bridge at a time, gives me hope that we’ll come through the other side and keep annoying each other for decades to come. I’ve had a lifetime of feeling “off” and years of inching towards self-acceptance. Now, I have to give him the same.

My kids, to their credit, are freaking amazing. Mack gave me the honorific Dre because Madre and Padre both end in Dre. She didn’t want to call me Dad because that’s my husband, and Pops would be confusing because they call my dad Pop Pop. I sort of like the fact she took an active role.

I’ll save my family’s reaction for another time because I’m already rambling and there are things I need to do. For one thing, who goes off to their first day without having the perfect outfit picked out?