"How Do You Keep Your Transition on the Down Low Early On?"

So, you are transgender. You've made the discovery and you were able to admit it to yourself. You've decided to transition and you are taking the proper steps, but it still seems WAY too early to come out to people. That's okay! Welcome to the "Undercover" period! And an exciting period it is. A time where you, much like a superhero, have a completely different wardrobe and alter ego. Here are a few examples of how I was looking at this time. I thought this was a good balance between boy and girl. What I wanted was a slow ramp up of the feminine over time, so that by the time I actually came out, people would be like, "Yeah, that makes sense".

 

First things first, I made an appointment with a doctor at the LGBT center to get on HRT as soon as humanly possible. Now that I knew what I was, I felt like everyday I didn't get on HRT was robbing my future self of happiness and femininity. It was a pretty panicky feeling, I just felt like time was ticking away and every second I wasn't walking toward it was a failure. This is the closest I've ever felt something like a biological clock ticking.

The waiting room was really sweet (they had TV's Playing Mean Girls and House Hunters), but I was so nervous. I was still at that point where I was afraid everyone would call me a fraud and kick me out, but I also remember that there was a GORGEOUS transgender girl behind the desk who helped me out. She was wearing a dress to work, her hair and nails were perfect, and she even had braces on her teeth which were undeniable really cute. I remember just thinking, "God, how do I get to there? It seems like such a long journey! Why can't I be like her NOW?" But I calmed down and reminded myself that this was the beginning of my journey and it starts with a single step.

My doctor was actually awesome. He was really sweet and helpful. He asked me some questions about it, like if I had always known and if I had told my family yet. I said that I wanted to wait to tell my mother until I was already on HRT for a few months. The reason for this was that I knew my mother still had a strong hold on me, and I didn't want to hear anything she had to say about it until it was too late for her to be able to do anything about it. It's scary to think about how much power she had over me at that time. I believed enough in my decision to keep her completely out of it. The doctor took some blood samples and scheduled a follow up.

Side bar: For about 6-8 months prior to this appointment, I'd passed out a few times. Nothing super scary. Phoebe and I went to Grand Park for the 4th of July that year and I keeled over. This also happened a few other times, where we'd be outside and I'd get super lightheaded. Sometimes it would happen in a hot shower if I was in there too long. I was always able to explain them away in one way or another, so I was only kinda low-level worried about it. Well, it turns our that I was dangerously anemic! It was going in for HRT that found the problem, my doctor personally called me on the phone that night and made me immediate pick up some ferrous sulfate, so transitioning kinda saved my life in more ways than one.

At the next appointment, after squaring away my anemia and getting myself on an iron supplement, I was given my first bottle of Estradol (Estrogen pills) and Spiro (testosterone blockers). I couldn't even wait to take them until I got home. I raced to a drinking fountain and took them right then and there. That was on June 13th, 2016, the date of my first entry in this blog, actually.

So, how does it feel taking HRT? My answer is INCREDIBLE. Some of the first things I noticed what being way less antsy. I was able to sit still and be calm way easier than I had before. I was even able to snuggle with Phoebe for as long as I wanted to, when before my body would begin to twitch and tell me that I was done. I also had suffered from insomnia for pretty much my entire life. Being on HRT made that go away pretty instantly. My doctor said that was because testosterone kept men "on alert" in case any predators came in the night. I just felt SO MUCH better in my own skin. I hadn't even realized how edgy I felt all the time until that went away. It's like growing up with your hand on a hot stove for your whole life and finally realizing that you can take it off. A truly amazing feeling.

What's more, my doctor even had to up my estrogen levels, because my body had a deficit and was actually making too much testosterone. He said that the science on this is still new, but there is something in the bodies of transgender people that are calling out for the hormones that they need. This did a lot to help me be sure of my decision, a decision that is a pretty big deal. This doctor also gave me one of the greatest compliments of my life a few visits later:

Doctor: You do realize you're getting hips, right?

Me: Really? I am?

Doctor: Are you kidding me? Get a load of Brigitte Bardot over here!

Me: (giggles shyly and beet-red for 45 minutes straight)

Going on HRT also means that you become pretty much sterile. There can be exceptions to the rule, I guess, but they suggested that if you still wanted to have a biological kid someday, that you should freeze some sperm before you start the process. This was not-at-all in my price range, so the decision before me was: Live happily as a girl while crushing the possibility of having kids down the line, or continue to live unhappily as a guy in the hopes that I'd be in a financial place to have kids within the next few years. For one of the first times in my life, I put my own happiness first, and a year and a half in I am so happy and confident that was the right decision, but it feels like the end of the world when you deal with huge, unalterable choices like that.

I also started to cry. A lot. When I'm sad. When I'm happy. I love it. When I used to get depressed, I would have NO IDEA why I was sad. I was so repressed that it would just come as a general feeling of sadness with seemingly no cause. Now, when I'm sad, I cry about it and I know exactly the reason why. It's SO MUCH BETTER than the alternative.  My dad died when I was like 7 years old, and I remember distinctly not crying. Everyone told me that I was the "man of the house" and my Mom was crying all the time, so I just learned how to turn that part of myself off, and I had never been able to turn it back on. Not until HRT anyway.

So, now that my medication was taken care of, I just had to go on living my life. I didn't want anyone at work to know yet, nor did I want any of my family or friends to know until I was ready. And that's okay. That is what this period is for. It's getting to be okay with yourself before the opinions of others (and they will have opinions) were thrown at me. So, I stopped uploading pictures of myself onto social media. This was a big deal to me, because I'm pretty active online. I love posting pics to Facebook and Instagram and all that, so this was a big adjustment. Not only not taking pictures of me at cool events and hanging with friends, but like actively making sure that I wasn't in the pictures my friends were taking. I don't know if you've ever done this, but it is MUCH harder than it sounds. I just knew if even so much as ONE picture of me with even just my nails polished or something would have meant big trouble with mom. I became a social media ghost.

This is one of the few photos (Me with my amazing actor friend, Esteban) that made it through, and even this I was a bit uncomfortable with. I'm wearing my hair longer, my necklace, my nails, my girl's clothes and my pink-laced shoes are all in full view. This was for a show I was in at Sacred Fools theater in Hollywood and there was really nothing I could do about it without drawing even more attention to myself. I handled it in my head by saying if anyone asked, I could just say it was a part of my costume (even though this picture was from a plain clothes rehearsal).

No one ended up saying anything. It was a way bigger deal to me than anyone else.

The phone conversations I had with my mother during this time became very difficult, (well, more difficult than normal) as she had not changed a bit since my childhood, and I was feeling like a drastically more and more different person every second. One day, she told me that one of my little brother's friends had just come out to her as gay, and she was kinda making fun of him to me. This kid, thinking he could trust her, confided in her rather than tell his own parents, and she responded by teasing him behind his back and telling everyone that she wanted to gossip with about it. I called her out on this and told her that she shouldn't be telling anyone about this behind his back, let alone teasing him. That was for him to disclose to people as he saw fit, and she couldn't wait to tell everyone she knew. As someone who was hiding out at that very moment, this bugged me a lot and we got into a fight about it. I feared what was coming when I had to tell her.

So, the low-key life was pretty nice, actually. I got used to myself. On the weekends, I'd get to go into full girl-mode, and Phoebe and I would choose a place I wasn't likely to run into anyone I knew, and we'd go spend the day out in public as two girls. These days were absolute magic. The more I got of this, but more dissatisfied I became with living in boy-mode. A necessary evil for the time being, I supposed.

I continued to wear nail polish to work and increasingly more and more feminine clothing. I never really got called out on this, except for once as an office meeting my boss kinda stopped mid-sentence to address me: 

My Boss: So, this season we gotta focus on selling- HEY! WHY ARE YOU WEARING NAIL POLISH!?

Me: Um... because I like it.

My Boss: No, like, I'm just asking because my brother wears it and it's only because he needed to stop chewing his nails. I thought it might be for something like that.

Me: Nope. I just like it.

My Boss: But, you never wore it before, right?

Me: Right.

My Boss: So you just started painting them?

Me: Yup. Just cuz I like it...

And then we awkwardly continued the meeting. That moment was kind of a nightmare.

I did come out to a few of my girlfriends at work though. Mostly, because we wanted to hang out on breaks and that is usually when me and Phoebe would go dress shopping, so I'd be like, "Hey! Not to like overwhelm you, but I'm transgender and we are going dress shopping, cool?" And they'd blink a few times, smile and go "Cool!" And that was it. These girls are still my really close friends. Sarah, a girl that used to sit right by me, actually came up to me a day or two later and asked if I had any ideas for what I wanted my name to be. I told her and a week later, she gave me this keychain. I could seriously cry just thinking about this.

The other main thing about this time was dread. I knew I was nearing crossing the point of no return. I was constantly arguing with Mom in my head. Ways it could go good, neutral, or bad. Mostly bad. It is hard to articulate this, but so much of my mental real estate was devoted to running scenarios and making arguments and fighting for my right to be myself and still have her love me. That was really rough and would cause me to be heightened and easily flustered when it came to other things. Combine this with being on HRT, and there was a period where I was kind of a mess. A necessary mess. All of these tears and hardships were me working things out and exorcising them from my body. I just needed to tell my family no matter how it would go. The thought of having them know slowly became preferable to how I'd been torturing myself preparing for it.

It was time to tell my family.

More next time.