So, I’m a girl. I know it with every feeling of my fiber, and that’s something I can’t explain, I know that is so, but, there are no supporting arguments I can give you to explain how that works. I can’t really, in any meaningful way, explain to you that my internal experience of how my brain operates makes “I’m a girl” an obvious statement. I can point to anecdotes, but the anecdotes aren’t my gender. The bigger question is “Now what?”. I’m a girl, sure, but, how does one be a girl? Or, to be more precise, how does one communicate to her surrounding “I am a girl”?

We’re now late fall of 2018, dysphoria starts to become a bigger issue than it had been before. The more I learned about myself, the more I discovered, the more I could point to things and go “this, this is what makes me feel bad”. Libido was a huge issue. It kept popping into my brain like intrusive thoughts, and didn’t go away until I had “dealt” with it. I knew it would probably get better once I started on HRT, but I hadn’t even gotten my first meeting at the trans clinic. Heck I haven’t even gotten a referral sent! I go to my doctor and ask for a referral to the gender clinic. Wait time until first meeting, approximately 6 months. Welp.

Another friend of mine I’d have gotten to know through this trans community was switching to injections. She offered to send me her surplus of pill based HRT, and, after much hesitation, I accepted. I was VERY VERY skeptical to the prospect of taking substances without prescriptions. I had… done drugs before, and it was what kicked off my depression. Being an egg might be why I didn’t get out of it, but the drugs and psychosis that followed was definitely what sent me down into my lowest point in the first place. I was NOT feeling too well about even getting close to “doing drugs” again. But I accepted, figured that, since I want to live now, but still have “issues”, I’d use them in the right way and not for recreational use. I was gonna do it as properly I could if at all, and not until I actually needed it. If there was another way, I would choose another way.

So I got the hormones, but had decided not to use them. I still had no job, no income, debt was still an issue. My life was pretty much in ruin, and I had just started crawling out of it. I wasn’t sure I’d make it. I had a little bit of hope, but that hope was fragile. I was still in a really really really bad spot in many many ways. Mentally, financially, medically.

I also realize… With this newfound gender identity, that, I’m not the person I thought I was, and that I’m suddenly a lot less certain about my engagement and relationship with Eve. Do I love her? Yes, of course I do, but… is that enough? Is this going to work in the long run? Is it really… a good idea to commit to this? Drag her across the world into a relationship I don’t know if it’s going to last? I also start to question my sexuality. I had been pretty squarely identifying as pansexual. Now I was thinking “You know … I think I’m straight”. I love her, but… I don’t feel the relationship anymore. So I have to do the thing and break up, and … it kinda hurt us both pretty bad. We’re still friends and maybe even something like a QPP, but not really on the level “let’s get married and move in together”.

2019 comes around. I’m now exclusively dressing feminine. I may know the answer, 42, I mean “I’m a girl and always has been”, but… now what? How does one “be girl”? It’s not that easy. Gender expression is a real thing, but it’s also socially constructed. It’s like a language, words are technically just vibrations in the air, but they still convey meaning. I could put on a dress and makeup, but, I was very much just appropriating stereotypes, and I was aware of the fact. But I didn’t know where else to start. I was just starting to learn the new social rules, the new language, and you start with the most basics and work your way from there, the most basics, sadly, happen to be rather stereotypical in nature.

Around this time I start chatting with someone, they’re someone who’s been in a mutual Discord for a while, we’ve chatted a couple of times in there, let’s call them… DirtyStraight. Hi baby, yes I’m a dork, love you too, MUAH!. Our first chat is pretty recently after my breakup, I think I’m straight, they’re presenting rather exclusively feminine at this point in time. I shut them down with “Oh sorry I’m straight”.

This whole “figuring out your own gender thing” tends to pull down a lot of walls, like dominoes. They fall rapidly after one another, but there’s still a gap of time between one and another. This whole “straight” thing for instance. I wasn’t straight. I was a bottom, a sub and a kinky bastard. I won’t go into too much details, but after a night of drinking I hit them up again, and … that’s the beginning of “the modern era”.