For most of my life, transness wasn’t on my radar as an option for me. I knew people were trans and had known I was queer for a long time; I even knew that I was often very uncomfortable with my gender presentation, and the fact that no matter what I did, everything I did would be interpreted by others as being done by a girl. It just didn’t click for a long time that this was something I could ever change.

In retrospect, after being on T for two years, there are a lot of experiences I look back on now and understand as dysphoria, or indications of transness. I hadn’t met anyone who had taken any medical action towards transition until moving to Wellington in my first year of uni, and although most of my friends were queer in high school, when we did talk about any discomfort with ourselves and how people received us, it was in a way that always felt more related to sexuality than gender. I attributed all my feelings of misalignment to queerness in a more binary way than I do now; because I felt like I couldn’t escape being perceived as a girl I put a lot of work into really embracing stereotypical symbols of femininity and recasting them in a queer light.

For over 4 years I identified really deeply with being a lesbian and everything that I found in the lesbian community. I remember feeling like my friends and I had discovered a secret world that only we could truly understand, and one that we also very much preferred to everybody else's worlds. Before meeting other trans people all I knew about transness was that it was a severe misalignment. I connected my idea of transness to very stereotypical ideas of obvious signs in childhood, but mostly I just thought that if I was transgender I would know. I was under the impression that since I didn’t want to erase my experiences or connections as a girl, and there were things about the concept of transition that I was scared of, I must not be trans.

Moving into student accommodation and witnessing people meeting me and viewing me as a girl was what solidified for me that something had to change. The social shift was a shock to me, because I had gotten used to not feeling boxed in or gendered at all in the company of my queer high school friends; which is something I’m lucky enough to feel again now. I had never felt normal or like I fit in well growing up because of queerness and neurodivergence, but until that time in my life I could always at least find the right words to describe myself—even if they were negative ones.

Looking back, I do think I had a positive and relatively well-rounded understanding of transness; the difference was I had never viewed it as something that could happen to me. When I did have to start considering that, I started engaging a lot more with stereotypical ideas and particularly binary misconceptions of transness, running through lists of things to prove or debunk to assure myself I wasn’t lying.

One of the biggest things that comes up when you start transitioning and telling people you're trans is that everyone starts to get really concerned that you're going to regret it. Which I was scared of, but not because I was wrong or being indoctrinated or brainwashed, just because it is a big decision and change is always scary. It is especially scary to prepare for changes in things that you originally didn't think you’d ever have to consider. It’s a very confronting and alarming thing to be raised as a girl and then do something to your body on purpose that makes you “less attractive” by the standards you’re used to. It can take a while to deconstruct your reaction to your body becoming more masculine; because even though it may be clearly a better symbol of alignment with yourself, it can also bring about feelings of shame and concern about remaining attractive.

It is a distinct and difficult-to-describe feeling, crossing over into another set of criteria to measure yourself against, but having to untrain yourself from policing your body through the guidelines of femininity does not mean you’re not trans. I’ve realised now that I don’t actually have to measure myself against any criteria other than my own experiences of what feels comfortable and good for me. Although I’ve never felt more at home in myself, I think a lot of the hesitance I felt was related to losing the value of my body as a woman if I regretted my decision to start T. I also think this is a large part of the hesitance other people feel, because the image of someone detransitioning in many people's minds is of a person who doesn’t “pass”, which unfortunately and ridiculously, is unattractive, embarrassing, or even threatening to a lot of people. Just the idea of permanently having physical traits that are less conventionally desirable for your assigned gender at birth is often assumed to be negative, both for people witnessing that person’s body, and the person actually living inside it.

Once I decided that the only way to manage how I was feeling was to try T, and simply be prepared to go off of it and deal with the consequences if it wasn’t right for me. There were a lot of things I was still afraid of. I was worried that going on T wouldn’t make me feel better at all, and of what could possibly come next if that was the case. I also felt like I was betraying my girl self and my girl friends by potentially entering a world where I no longer get treated like a woman; I was terrified that I would forget what it was like to be a girl, or that I would become an unsafe space for women. I understand now that it just doesn’t work like this, especially if you're concerned about it and actively don't want it to. The way people sometimes portrayed going on T to me was as if I would become a completely different person and totally forget myself, but the exact opposite is true.

Because of all these worries swimming around my head, I started to really familiarise myself with how I could be “allowed” to continue identifying with lesbianism while also going on T and socially transitioning. The reason I felt okay about transitioning was by calling myself butch and reaching out and around for connection with other butch people. For me, butchness was the hand and bridge I needed to feel like I was allowed to feel how I did, because I wasn’t the only one who felt it. It was also the only thing that eased my concerns about losing my community with women, which I value and rely on so much. I have since learned that my community with women goes hand in hand with my community with queer people, and I no longer feel at risk of losing either of these in any way.

My connection to lesbianism as a label and community has always been very strong, and I will always feel connected to it and feel it in myself and how I function, even though it is no longer the most practical label for me, my deepest sense of community is with lesbians and other trans people. In saying that, I also have beautiful and strong connections with gay men, and all queer people, so really my deepest connections are simply the ones I made through shared experiences, which may or may not happen to align with labels. I don’t call myself a lesbian anymore, but I am proud to have been one and am really proud of who I was when I was a girl.

Another thing that I realised in this process is that if you change labels or your identity shifts, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were ever wrong about who you were, or lying, or that you weren’t truthfully exactly as you said you were at that time. Sexuality and gender are fluid and overlapping; creating boundaries between kinds of queerness does not serve us as a community. Even if it can feel protective and validating, telling each other who we are and who we are allowed to be is exactly what we should be advocating against.

I don't feel the need to strongly label myself or even strongly assert myself as masculine. I think for me, transitioning has been a process of enjoying disrupting others’ assumptions of me because of my feminine or masculine traits. Having a more confusing and ambiguous gender presentation allows me to step outside of other people’s assumptions about me, because a lot of the time they don’t know which signals and symbols to base their assumptions on.

I don’t feel like I would ever only call myself one thing. There are things about me that are still traditionally feminine, but transitioning has essentially allowed me to neutralise these symbols by adding masculine ones alongside them, so I can exist comfortably in-between and outside-of. The way I like to use labels now is to identify the communities I feel safe and accepted in, rather than to box myself into a set of criteria. In many ways, accepting my transness has made the logic of sexuality categories fall away a fair amount; most traditionally masculine or feminine traits I can easily and joyfully imagine in any number of contexts concerning different people and bodies and words. I prefer to use broader language to describe myself now, to factually indicate my queerness and transness, without offering people the opportunity to make assumptions about my interests, preferences, aesthetics etc based on their ideas of a certain label.

I absolutely was a lesbian for a long time, because of that fact that I was also a girl. The comfort and beauty I found in the lesbian experience was about the ability to create and then live within a kind of neutrality that came from being with someone who was the same as me. “The same” at that time, was other girls, and now that sameness looks less narrow and definitely a bit different, but my understanding of myself and how I love and what I want in a relationship remains the same. Lesbianism for me was never so much about being repulsed or repelled by men, or anything to do with men. I had still found people who weren’t girls attractive, but could never properly imagine myself with them in a relationship. The key part was that I was uncomfortable being in a pair where I am the counterpart to a man: where his being a man makes me feel like a woman, which I never felt I was any good at being.

This is hard to remedy, but important to take notice of.

In the place I am now, as myself and nothing, or better said, everything, anything - I seek relationships that nurture my need for neutrality: people who understand how I am, so I can exist in relation to them comfortably. I seek connections where our coupling is not creating new meanings of our bodies, because there is no gap to bridge. It is more than not wanting to embody gender roles, because I have happily embodied these roles many times. The crucial part is that it has been in the context of a relationship where we both know that we are acting the part for the fun of it, for the joy of the symbol, something after subversion - because it moves past the fun of being a girl and taking on a boyish role or act or look, it’s more like being an alien and enjoying human customs. I feel less like I belong within the lesbian community in the present tense, considering how I usually carry and discuss myself, which is not a criticism on lesbians/lesbianism - but an observation that no matter what label I try on, there is always some space at the top of it that I feel unable to fill. For me, it feels as though anything I call myself becomes subjecting myself to the experience of failing at the task of being me - and I see no reason to do this. Even the labels that seek escape from labels don't feel right to me.

I am just myself: human, alien, body, person, girl and boy, both and neither, fluid-hybrid-nothing. I do not want to contribute to people’s checklists for learning where they can find out what I am, and flick through their noncomprehensive rolodex of what I must then find acceptable, affirming, interesting, and moral. This will of course happen no matter what I do, will always be sorted into whatever works best to comfort someone else - but I find it important to reject, even if only out of stubbornness. I do not want to be viewed through any lens.

I have changed a lot in two years being on T. There are things that felt like they were going to be the end of my world a year ago that I hardly remember now. I am less worried about how to define myself to others, because I am finally happy with my own understanding of myself. I always had thought that, to be trans I should want to be referred to entirely differently and destroy evidence of my girl self, but I absolutely adore her, and the work she did to help me exist. I am happy to still be considered my parents’ daughter and am happy to also get to be their son. There is simply no right or wrong way to do it. I think a lot of the time when cisgender people try to make trans people feel comfortable or accepted in their gender, they try to ignore their transness altogether. For me at least, I don’t need people to pretend I am cisgender - I need them to treat me like it's normal that I’m not.