On being trans – post egg-cracking

Have you ever felt like you started seeing a pattern where there used to be none? It used to happen to me when I was a kid – I was once obsessed with a very specific car model and suddenly I started seeing it everywhere. It also happened recently to my partner that the specific model and color of the car we want to buy started showing up everywhere we go. I find this pattern-matching in our brain kind of interesting.

Once I realized I wasn’t a boy, this kind of pattern seemed to follow me everywhere. People I followed were suddenly coming out of the closet. I remember that, back in 2020, Abigail Thorn and James Stephanie Sterling both came out as trans and Abigail released the most beautiful, awesome video about it. I was astonished. And as I transitioned further, I started seeing transgender people everywhere, making friends, creating my own trans bubble.

I remember a friend of mine told me about the late Lynn Conway, after I complained that the corporate world lacked trans people. There’s an interesting article about her [1] called “Through the Gender Labyrinth”, which is amazing. She was a computer scientist who invented VLSI (a way to design integrated circuits) and some techniques for out-of-order execution on supercomputers. She’s an inspiration to me.

To make sense of everything I said previously, I feel like I started getting more and more into a bubble of trans, queer and autistic people. It feels like more people are transitioning and that there’s more transgender people out there, making great stuff or just going on with their lives. As hard as the world can be upon us, we’re being normalized, or at least that’s what the pattern matching, biased brain is telling me. At the same time, more autistic people seem to come out of nowhere, being transgender as well mostly [2].

Talking about my own transition, post-transition has been nice.

The thing about transition is that you just keep going forward. There are many things I regret not doing earier, but I have no regret at all for the changes I’ve made. It’s my body, and I get to decide what I can do with it.

I’ve been taking hormones for 2 years now and everyday I wake up and peek at myself in the mirror. My body looks nice, and it keeps on getting nicer. I feel sexier, I feel empowered, I feel confident. I don’t hate myself anymore (sometimes I do, but not because of how I look/feel).

And I learned to love myself being a weird, autistic person. I don’t want to be like other people, but to be myself!

I take more pictures, I smile more, I don’t feel as shy and socially anxious as I used to be. My sense of fashion has changed a lot as well.

I feel gorgeous.

If you’re transitioning like me, if you ever feel lost about it, think about those things I said. Read this and the other two posts about transitioning. Understand that you’re an awesome human being trying to navigate something so complex such as this.

Don’t shy away from being yourself.

Dear reader, please listen to this song by Nina Simone, I felt like it would fit the narrative somehow.

[1] Through the Gender Labyrinth

[2] Largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender diversity