“And how long have you been on hormones?”

I’m in a consult appointment for top surgery — a double mastectomy — and the surgeon is scribbling away at my paperwork, taking brisk and efficient notes in a shorthand legible only to himself. He has, perhaps, glanced up at me once or twice after the perfunctory greeting at his office door — the effect is not so much one of curt rudeness as it is one of mechanical smoothness: He has done so many of these consultations that he can more or less run on autopilot now, with the practiced assurance of an unflappable master.

“Oh, about three and a half years at this point”, i say, which is true, and which also does not actually give him the information he thinks it does.

“Three and a half years on testosterone,”, he says as he writes, before asking, still without looking up, “Gel or inject—”

“Ah, sorry!” I cut him off. “I’m on estrogen, not testosterone.”

This, at last, makes him stop and look at me.

The Trans 101 Story goes something like this:

On the one hand, you’ve got trans women and people who follow a somewhat similar gender trajectory (people who are often described, for better or for worse, as transfeminine people). These are people who were assumed to be male when they were born (or when they had their first ultrasound or whenever) but were subsequently like “nah” and found a less masculine place in the gender landscape. Such people may (altho they also may not) wind up taking estrogen, changing their names and wardrobes, and potentially pursuing surgeries like breast augmentation and vaginoplasty.

On the other hand, you’ve got trans men and people who follow a somewhat similar gender trajectory (people who are often described, for better or for worse, as transmasculine people). These are people who were assumed to be female when they were born (or when they had their first ultrasound or whenever) but were subsequently like “nah” and found a less feminine place in the gender landscape. Such people may (altho they also may not) wind up taking testosterone, changing their names and wardrobes, and potentially pursuing surgeries like breast reduction and phalloplasty.

Transfeminine people, in other words, are not supposed to want to lop off their breasts.

I got my first prescription for hormones at New York University in the spring of 2017. They had switched over to an informed consent model at that point, so it was a fairly painless process, tho it still involved seeing, in a quick, pro-forma way, rather more Gender Specialists than was really necessary. Everyone i met with was sure to mention — and to elicit from me explicit confirmation that i understood — that going on estrogen would, among other things, make me grow tits, and that this would be irreversible. Irreversible! Tits forever!

My attitude at the time was, more or less, “sure, whatever, fine i guess”. This did not exactly endear me to the member of the Gender Team that i saw, but the thing about informed consent is that, done properly, it does actually leave room for the patient to be like “I understand that this treatment may have some effects that I’m not 100% over the moon about but, nevertheless, I want the other effects of this treatment enough that I am absolutely willing to accept those less than ideal effects because I understand that we do not live in a perfect world with ideal super custom treatments for everything, and this is currently the best we’ve got, so yeah, I know what I’m getting into, go ahead and give it to me.”. And lo and behold, the other effects of hormones were pretty great! And growing tits was . . . meh. It was like, fine, i guess. I was whatever about it.

And then i started hooking up with trans guys, and realized that no, actually, i didn’t really want tits after all. I wanted my body to be like theirs instead.

In the Trans 101 Story, this isn’t supposed to happen. A person’s gender journey is supposed to be an internal affair: Your gender is something you discover inside of yourself, and then you bring it out into the world (slowly or quickly, partially or fully, to a greater or lesser degree). Your gender might be validated, affirmed, re-enforced by your interactions with other people, but it’s not supposed to be created or altered by it, the “is-ness” of your gender isn’t supposed to change depending on who you fuck.

Oops?

But then again, is it so surprising that i would learn about my body thru its interactions with other bodies? I decided i wanted to start estrogen in the first place after hooking up with a trans girl already taking hormones. My body could be like that, i thought. Wow! My body, in all its physicality, learns thru physicality, not intellectual introspection. And what more physical way of learning, of knowing, is there than knowing another body intimately, in the biblical sense?

With estrogen, i didn’t think a lot about this, because taking estrogen was a default next step for me according to the Trans 101 Story. Change your pronouns and name: check. Change your wardrobe: check. Change your hormones: guess it’s time! And then i grew tits and mostly slept with other transfeminine people (and the occasional cis guy because of . . . reasons) and i flirted with calling myself a lesbian but decided not to (also because of . . . reasons) and then i crashed into this devastatingly handsome trans guy and was like oh right, i’m helplessly bisexual and then i slept with him and then my body was like oh.

A dress is, more or less, a complete outfit in one single article of clothing. As such, a wardrobe made of dresses is one of the lowest-effort wardrobes to wear: Make one decision about what to put on your body in the morning and you’re done. Conveniently, a dress is a dress is just about as far from masculine attire as you can get in the fashion landscape of the contemporary United States as well. So if you don’t really want to think too much about clothes, but you also want to emphasize that you are completely, 100%, really not at all anything like a man, a closet full of dresses is a good way to go.

I don’t have a lot of energy to spend thinking about clothes, and I am completely, 100% really not at all anything like a man, and so for years, i wore dresses exclusively, day in and day out.

This made it fairly easy for me to park myself under the transfeminine umbrella. After all, i was trans, i was feminine, 2+2=4, done and done.

I wasn’t a woman, tho. This much i knew, this much i was quite clear on. At the time, i think i would have said that i was more emphatically not-a-man than i was not-a-woman, but these days, it feels like the negations are of different kinds, rather than different degrees. Manhood is a place i did in habit, or tried to, for years, and i did not have a very good time of it. I don’t think it’s inherently toxic, or anything, just not the right environment for me, any more than the salt flats flamingos thrive in are a good fit for freshwater snails. The arrow away from it is one born from experience. The arrow away from womanhood, on the other hand, is one born of strangeness. I know many women, i love many women, i have tried walking the streets of womanhood (and i have, certainly, more than once been read and treated as a woman), but trying on womanhood feels like trying to intuit my way around a city in which i am a recently arrived tourist: Surely these roadways have a logic to them, a logic i could even learn if i spent more time here, but this place is not my home; for whatever reason, it does not resonate with the music that is in my heart. I live elsewhere. These arrows (the one pointing away from maleness and the one pointing away from femaleness) don’t point towards each other, and they may not point in the same coordinate system, even, but i think, at the end of the day, however they point, they point with equal intensity.

This is one of the reasons i mention the low-effortness of dresses. Wearing dresses was not so much an embrace of femininity as an abdication of spending any energy at all figuring out clothes, while also, simultaneously, acceding to the arrow away from maleness. If that meant being (or at least coming across as) a tourist in womanhood for a while, well, so be it. Being a tourist is fun!

And then i started hooking up with trans guys, and it was time to go home.

Home for me isn’t masculinity, of course. I’m not detransitioning, not trying to return to a starting point as tho the previous journey never happened. I’m just continuing on with my transition, winging ever deeper into an interstellar void.

In high school physics, my teacher drilled into us the distinction between speed and velocity. Speed is motion without knowledge of direction: how fast an object is moving without any specificity about where it’s going. Velocity is motion in a specific direction: it’s going this fast towards this destination. Speed is scalar, velocity is a vector.

I have given up trying to vectorize my transition. I am moving — sometimes slowly and sometimes with alacrity — but not in any particular direction. I have localized goals — i would like this surgery, or that outfit; these pronouns, that orthography for my name — but no destination. I am moving the way a bird moves, on the lazy currents of the air. I am moving as a small boat in a shallow lagoon, carefully, curiously, ever turning this way and that. The destination is the journey. The direction is towards myself. The goal is to live a life.

Some people make a distinction between dysphoria — not wanting your body to be a certain way — and euphoria — wanting your body to be a certain other way — but in truth, they’re two sides of the same coin. To want to be somewhere else is to not want to be where you currently are, just in different words. There is no wanting X more than you want Y without not wanting Y as much as you want X.

Some people try to rank dysphoria, too, trying to assess whether one person feels more distress about their body than another.

I do not know about other people. Here is what i know about myself.

I did not feel a state of constant wild distress about having breasts. I was, again, mostly “eh, whatever” about it. I didn’t love them, they felt kind of weird, but mostly, i could ignore them. I wanted to have a flat chest. I didn’t know exactly where this desire came from. Was it “real” dysphoria coming from somewhere inside of me? Was it a pure reaction to sleeping with a trans guy that would be undone the next time i slept with a trans woman? I decided that it ultimately didn’t matter: Feelings exist only inside your head; there is no difference between thinking you feel a thing and actually feeling it. Wherever this feeling came from, i was feeling it now, and that was the important thing. I wanted this, and that was the end of the matter.

Here is what else i know: I was coldly determined to get top surgery, and to get insurance to pay for it, and i was entirely willing to change my gender marker, lie about the kind of dysphoria i had, pretend to be transmasculine on insurance paperwork, and do any other steps necessary to get the brutal, inhumane monstrosity that is the US healthcare system to do what i wanted. By the measure of psychological distress, some might want to suggest that i was barely dysphoric at all. By this measure, i submit to you that i was, in fact, extremely dysphoric, and that it manifested as an almost feral rage instead of as the more traditional psychic distress. But in the end it doesn’t matter: Even if i wasn’t dysphoric at all, the wanting is enough. My body is mine, and i demand the right to have autonomy over it as my own home. The wanting is enough.

In the end, tho, i had to do very little. My insurance — state Medicaid — picked up the entire bill, my doctor and therapist wrote form letters with no complaint, and my surgeon — after an initial moment of “wow, you don’t see that every day!” — was totally on board and treated me like any other patient. Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — the fight you’re gearing up for never comes at all.

There is, of course, a social component to gender, and it isn’t lost on me that i’ve done all this during the pandemic, when i’ve been spending most of my days locked away in my not particularly spacious Manhattan apartment with, at best, my singular roommate for in-person company. When i think about trying to explain where i’m “at” with my gender these days, even to other very sympathetic and ideologically on-the-same-page trans people, what comes out is closer to an inchoate snarl than any kind of sensible string of words. This inchoate snarl is not, ultimately, separable from the inchoate snarl of grief and rage i feel towards the entire political establishment that’s let more than 600,000 people die in a plague in this country alone, that cares more about profit than life, that’s happy to continue enriching the obscenely wealthy even as the whole world burns.

There’s a lot going on here, in other words.

Is it possible, then, that this current gender eddy is less a stable state and more a result of some strained self-decomposition due to the stresses of pandemic isolation? Is it possible that, once we all start hanging out in person again, i’ll snap back together, look down at my chest, and be like, “Oh shit, i wish i still had tits :(“? Might i not regret this, after all?

I mean sure, yeah, i guess.

I might regret anything, eventually. I might regret going to grad school, i might regret getting the tattoos i have, i might regret spending as long as i’ve spent in New York, i might regret not having children yet, i might regret spending money to rent an upright piano, i might regret spending less time looking at the moon. I can’t hold my present happiness hostage to the hypothetical veto of a future me whose desires are impossible for me to ascertain. The only way to live without regret is to never live at all. And after all, tomorrow i might trip ignominiously and die falling down a flight of stairs, so why not seize a chance at present happiness when it comes my way?

If i change, then i change, and i will deal with that when and if it happens, as i have dealt with all the other changes i have been thru. I don’t regret going on hormones. I changed. I dealt with it. Speed without direction. The destination is the journey.

The Trans 101 Story, as it gets told to trans people, often tells us that we have to be certain we won’t ever change again before we take the first step. It tells us we should only transition for the right reasons, for good reasons, for lofty, serious, last-resort reasons, not for trivial, flippant, bad ones. And, you know, sure, whatever, you only have one life, it’s important to think about what you want from it, if you know that you have fleeting whims that make you unhappy if you follow every one of them, maybe don’t follow every fleeting whim you have. But here, ultimately, is a list of reasons i got top surgery, and i stand by every one of them:

I did it so i’d be shaped more like a bird. I did it because underboob sweat is the worst. I did it so i’d be hotter. I did it to assert that this body is fucking mine. I did it to short-circuit the brains of TERFs. I did it so i could keep wearing some old dresses that i’d grown out of. I did it because binders are hella obnoxious, especially in the summer. I did it because it would make an incredible story. I did it because scars are hot. I did it because gender makes me want to scream and sometimes the closest a body can come to screaming is shedding a few pounds. I did it to remove the gender from the me. I did it to prove that i could. I did it because i wanted to, and the wanting is enough.

You only have one life. You don’t have to follow the paths that others have laid down if you don’t want to. You can be a terrible little gremlin on your own terms, finding terrible little gremlin joys along the way.

There aren’t a lot of case studies of people who were assumed to be male at birth, who then started taking estrogen, grew breasts, had surgery to remove those breasts, and kept right on taking estrogen. I know thru the trans rumor mill that at least one other person has done it before me, and i know a couple other people who want to, but it’s not a large cohort. So i don’t know a ton about what’s going to happen next. The thing i’m scared of most is that they’re going to grow back, and i’ll have to go thru this entire process again, the way sharks grow new teeth perpetually when their old ones fall out. Rationally, i don’t think that’s likely to happen, but if it does, i hope i grow a new pair of nipples every time as well.