Age, Truth, and Authenticity

Coping with a late start.

The witch that came (the withered hag)

To wash the steps with pail and rag

Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.

Too many fall from great and good

For you to doubt the likelihood.

-Robert Frost

Being in community with other trans folks leads to interesting friendships, and interesting interactions. Being trans is a small enough club, percentage-wise, that you sometimes find friendships that transcend age or other interests. Which is how I ended up having a gym-buddy who’s half my age.

Of course, this also brings about an interesting state of affairs; you get a strangely cosmopolitan diversity of viewpoints, and can get exposed to a lot of ideas you might not have otherwise come across. In the case of my gym buddy, she’s an ardent and motivated young socialist, I’m a tired and often grumpy old anarchist, some of the other folks we connect with are fairly apolitical. But being in the same boat, as it were, when that boat is under fire from bigger boats with more firepower, motivates us to hang together despite our differences, and solidarity truly is powerful.

So, we’re about 3 decades apart in age, and our lived experiences are obviously worlds and years apart. But it’s always great and always valuable to get each other’s perspective. I’m not one to dismiss the ideas of youth just because they come from young minds. Young minds are flexible in ways that mine probably no longer is (though I try, I really do). However, my advanced years occasionally put me in a place where I, an Old, can dispense timely and sage advice to the Youth Of Today, and that’s the position I found myself in a few days ago.

So, my friend has a friend who just turned 30. She’s a trans woman, she knows she’s a trans woman, but she thinks that it’s too late for her to transition. What advice do I, as an elder stateswoman of the queer experience, have in a case like this? Plenty, as our subsequent conversation revealed. I feel that I may have been less than entirely eloquent, trying to dispense my sage and aged wisdom while simultaneously getting out of breath on the elliptical trainer, so here I am, sitting down at my keyboard, putting pen to paper as it were, to lay down some ground truths for folks who are transitioning, or wanting to transition, later in life.

FIRSTLY, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY;

It is NEVER, and I mean NEVER, too late to start your transition. As I explained to my friend, I had a lot of those exact same doubts when I started my gender journey. I was 46 years old. I was 6’4” tall, with broad-ish shoulders and a deep voice. I’d lived the better part of a half-century in the role of a man. How could I possibly transition NOW? Surely HRT wasn’t going to have much effect on me. If I transitioned, I would spend the rest of my life looking like an awkward, ungainly, gigantic man in a dress. Well, I was wrong. And so is everyone else who’s ever thought this way. Partly because hormones are fucken magic girl pills as far as I can tell, but also because:

SECONDLY;

It’s not about passing, it’s about living authentically and being true to your own identity, and the magic girl pills, even if they hadn’t given me a feminine face and a new set of tits, fundamentally realigned how my brain worked, so that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t at war with my own body and mind.

Look, I’ve been around the internet block a couple of times, and let me just say, I’ve heard “Am I too late?” questions from middle-aged ladies like me, from the 30’s crowd like my friend’s friend; shit, I’ve seen people who are still in their teens lamenting that the window for transition has passed them by.

Well, bullshit.

Look, hard truth time. Male puberty sucks, even for men. It sucks twice as much for women (ask me how I know). Yes, some of those changes are irreversible, and some are reversible only with time, patience, and pain. (Looking at you, laser hair removal.) But I have met cis women taller than I am. I’ve met cis women with deeper voices, and blockier physiques. I’ve met cis women with flatter asses and smaller tits and more chest hair than I have. Human variation is boundless, and we need to get past the need to fit a patriarchal model that says all women must be perfect little barbie dolls that men like to look at. (I mean, I’m a lesbian, so maybe I get to do this part on easy mode; I couldn’t give two squirts of warm cat piss whether a man thinks I’m hot. My wife thinks I’m hot, and she has excellent taste.)

THIRDLY;

Again, from hard experience; Gender Dysphoria doesn’t go away if you suppress it hard enough. Quite the opposite, actually, it gets way worse the longer it goes on. Closeted trans folks get really really good at suppressing those feelings, but the upshot is usually that you just suppress all of your feelings. I’m given to understand that’s not particularly healthy for you in the long (or the short) run. I lived decades with suppressed dysphoria, and the end result is that I was a mess, but I masked it almost perfectly. If you’re 30 and you’re trans, and you KNOW you’re trans, you’re looking down the barrel of the rest of your life being painfully aware that you are living a lie. That’s the kind of thing that gnaws you open from the inside over time until you wake up one day to discover that every single one of your nerve endings is a raw exposed conduit for unending pain. Zero stars, do not recommend.

So here’s my conclusion, and I know everyone’s mileage will vary, but whatever age you are, it’s not too late, and it never will be too late. I know of women in their 80s who started on HRT. And here’s what it gets you: a brain that actually works in alignment with your deepest sense of self, a body that gets more comfortable to live in every day, and the knowledge that you’re authentically living your truth.

To be clear, it also gets you a never-ending stream of bullshit from bigots on the internet, funny looks in the checkout line at the supermarket, and a chance to be the target of this decade’s biggest and least convincing moral panic. And all those things suck rancid donkey scrotum, but none of them are bad enough to outweigh that inner sense of serenity that comes from just being yourself.

Now get off my lawn, ya little whippersnappers!