I began to take feminizing hormones in January 2018, after many, many years of delay. The day that I took my first dose of spironolactone, to suppress my testosterone, and estradiol, which supplemented my endocrine system with estrogens, I did not believe that doing so would help me—indeed, I believed that I was ruling something out, and that I would shortly thereafter be able to put aside, if not the drive to transition, then at least the notion that anything might be accomplished in real life that might manifest that drive.
Instead, what I learned was that altering the levels of my estrogen and testosterone profoundly, overwhelmingly, and completely transformed my experience of the world and of myself. The central fact, which my experience has ratified over and again in the years since I began hormone replacement therapy, is that it has been possible for someone who merely wanted to have been a woman, to indeed become one—a metamorphosis from present perfect to present continuous, as utterly fantastical as an Ovidian fabliau.
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