I’m a Girl
Yes, this is a gender reveal post. No, it is not a gender reveal post for a baby. It’s a gender reveal post for me! So, there you have it. I am a girl. Well, technically I am a woman, but I don’t think that sounds as catchy as a title, and I never really cared for getting caught up in the semantics of girl/boy vs woman/man.
That aside, welcome to my coming out post! So… yeah, this is a thing. I am a woman, my name is Jade and my pronouns are she/her. Many of my friends and family already know this – if I did not come out to you personally, I do apologise. While I find that people take the news better if it is shared with them in private, coming out is also exhausting. I’m ready to rip the band-aid off and let the world know the truth that even I didn’t know for many, many years: I am a girl.
This page is mostly for the people in my life who I haven’t told yet, but I will be leaving it on my website for the years to come, for a few reasons I’ll get to later.
This is quite a lengthy page, so feel free to use the table of contents to skip to the sections that are of most interest to you. However, I would greatly appreciate it if you took the time to read the whole thing. I am baring my soul to you, you know. It’s a long read, but let me tell you, it took much longer to write.
What’s Happening With My Marriage?
Going Forward With a Loudspeaker
The Basics
So, what is this all about? If you couldn’t tell from the intro, I’m coming out as trans. More specifically, I’m coming out as a trans woman. If you’ve come to this page through a link I provided via my social media, the chances are that you know me in real life. The chances are also pretty high that this 1) comes as a shock and, 2) is a little weird for you. That’s okay. I understand that it takes people time to adjust to something like this, and many of you likely do not have much previous experience with trans people. I do not expect everyone I know to immediately name and gender me correctly. All I can ask is that you try. It would mean the world to me if you did.
Being trans can be terrifying, so I want to thank all the people I came out to before posting this for being so incredible. I’ve felt only love and acceptance from you all. It feels incredible to finally be myself, and I can truly say for the first time in my life that I am happy.
If you’re an acquaintance that doesn’t know me that well but is reading this anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to get to know me better. Feel free to reach out in person as well – even if we’ve never actually spoken, I would LOVE to re/connect. I’m shy, but I would literally be best friends with everyone I know if I could.
Okay, so I should cover some etiquette quickly before getting onto the meat of this thing. The most important thing for people in my life to know is that I’m comfortable talking about pretty much any aspect of my transition. Ask me how my hormones are going, ask me what it was like being an undercover boy for 24 years, ask me if I want to get gender-affirming surgery! I love talking about myself and my journey, so don’t be afraid to ask, as long as you have good intentions. However, I need to make it clear that this is not the case for most trans people. Questions about transitioning can be seen as extremely invasive (especially the surgery one), so you should always find out somebody’s boundaries before asking anything like that. Me, though – I’m an open book. You got a question? Fire away, baby. Maybe check my trans FAQs first, though.
One other quick point of etiquette that most people don’t think about is how to refer to trans people in the past. Trans etiquette is that you still use the new name and pronouns, even if you’re quoting the past. Deadnaming (using a trans person’s old name) and misgendering can cause a fair bit of pain for someone trying to move beyond a part of their life filled with dysphoria. Trying to use the right pronouns and name for a trans person 100% of the time signals to others that you support them and prevents unnecessary pain for the trans person.
How Did This Happen?
I suppose the first thing I should explain, for those unaware, is that I have always been a girl. For whatever reason, my brain developed differently in the womb than my body, which has led to dysphoria throughout my life, even if I only identified it as gender dysphoria earlier this year. Hence, I am not transitioning to become a girl or a woman. I am one and always have been. I am transitioning so that my body can finally match the gender identity in my brain, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a woman before.
If you know me in real life, you’ve probably always known me as an incredibly shy and introverted guy who has an undying passion for fantasy stories. The truth is that I am a somewhat shy and introverted girl who has an undying passion for fantasy stories. I’ll go into how I discovered this about myself in the next section, but for now, suffice it to say that I’ve unknowingly suffered from gender dysphoria pretty much my whole life and am now medically and socially transitioning so that I can feel more comfortable simply existing.
You may have noticed the distinction between the descriptions of myself, other than swap in gender language. I am naturally shy and introverted, but I am almost certain that this has been exacerbated by my gender dysphoria. I haven’t been male throughout my life; I have simply been acting male. My gender presentation has always been a performance for me, and an exhausting one at that. Subconsciously, I think I have been extremely paranoid about people seeing through to the real me, the girl, which generally results in me just being quiet and introverted. There have been so many girls and women in my life that I wanted to become good friends with, all throughout school, university (my two-week writing intensive that included 90% female students was particularly interesting – an environment I felt both incredibly comfortable in but also extremely isolated) and work, but because of the performance I have to put on, I instead just try to blend in and not let people think about me. I could go on and on about this, but it might be better suited for a blog post in the future.
Anyway, the thing is, even if I didn’t realise that I am transgender until mid-2021, I’ve also kind of always known. That might not make sense, but I’ll try to explain as best I can. Ever since I was a kid, I would often wonder how amazing it would be to live as a girl. This was not a thought I ever shared with anyone. It was just something that would come into my head every once in a while, and then be forgotten about because 1) as if that would ever happen, and 2) surely all boys secretly wished they were girls.
There have been dozens of signs over the years that something just wasn’t right with how my brain worked, compared to the body I was born with. I’m not going to share them all, but a few of the most interesting/amusing are listed below. Of course, none of these alone necessarily means anything, but when combined with everything else on my own list, I’d say there’s more to suggest that I am a girl than that I am not. This is mostly just to give you an idea of what things have been like for me.
Bugs
I absolutely detest bugs. I get my brave wife to deal with all the spiders and almost die from panic if a moth so much as flies within two metres of me.
Facial hair dysphoria
I’d get quite depressed when I wouldn’t shave my face for a few days out of laziness. Once I shaved, my mental health would suddenly get so much better (for some reason?).
Friendships with women/girls
I have always highly valued my friendships with women. Mind you, I’ve got plenty of guy friends and I love every one of them, but I do feel like I connect with women easier. On the other side of the coin, I never felt I could truly develop my friendships with women because I was paranoid that they would perceive it as me being romantically interested in them which would make things weird.
Roleplaying as women
I’m completely unable to play a confident male character in roleplaying games, but thrive in the spotlight when playing as a woman because, really, when I play female characters, I am playing as my ideal self.
Writing like a girl
As a teenager (and I suppose still to this day) it drove me crazy how slow boys are at responding to messages online. For years, I would wonder why they couldn’t be more like me (supposedly also a boy) and respond as quickly as I did. I never had this problem when talking to girls, though.
Also, girls would often compliment me for my neat handwriting (which isn’t even that neat?) and be surprised that a boy could write by hand so well. I fooled them, didn’t I?
For as long as I can remember, there’s just been this feeling that something was wrong with my life, especially since 2017. I was no longer living with my narcissistic mother, I’ve been married to the woman of my dreams since 2018, and I have been working in pretty much my ideal career as a writer. And yet, I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t unhappy, but I wasn’t happy, and I had no idea why. I wondered if I could ever be happy if I wasn’t happy then.
For a few years before coming out to myself, I was occasionally wearing skirts around the house “just because they’re comfortable”. I would shave my legs in the winter when nobody would see. So, I guess when – in the middle of 2021 – I admitted to myself that I might not be cisgender (gender aligning with sex at birth), it wasn’t too much of a shock.
At first, I actually thought I was genderfluid, and it only took me a week or two to realise that the times where I felt more masculine were caused by waves of shame over presenting feminine at home. One night, I broke down in front of my wife because deep inside I knew the truth. I’m not genderfluid. I’m a woman, which means I am trans, which means life is about to get so much harder. Trans people get beaten and murdered, they kill themselves and they never pass as the gender they are. I was scared to keep exploring my gender identity – I knew it would quickly come to a point of no return.
Dispelling the Myths
It’s true that violence against transgender people is extremely high. There’s not much I can do about that except take precautions to make sure I don’t become a victim. It’s also true that transgender people have a much higher rate of self-harm and suicide. I don’t really have anything to back this up, but I’m reasonably confident that this may have more to do with the rampant transphobia in society (and you know, the violence) than an inherent thing in our minds that gets us to off ourselves. When you bully people just for existing and being themselves, it turns out that they develop some mental health issues. Shocking, I know.
Thankfully, the risk of self-harm and suicide for trans people goes down by a significant amount when family and friends are supportive. Everybody I have come out to so far has been nothing but accepting and loving. I’ve seen just how cared for I am these last few months, and I am so grateful.
As for passing as the gender they are transitioning to, well, the thing is that you (and I) could know plenty of transgender people without realising it because many trans people do just look cisgender. Not everyone passes, but plenty do. If I don’t, that’s something I’ll have to come to terms with, but I’m not going to deny myself happiness in life out of fear.
Coming to Terms With It
After my initial realisation, I started researching. It turns out that I was horribly misinformed about what being transgender even means. I had no idea that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) existed, and certainly, I had no idea about how effective it is. I learned that blocking testosterone and taking estrogen essentially puts one through a second puberty, which takes care of almost everything. All going well, after a few years nobody will even have a clue that the person used to appear as another gender.
And so, I considered going on HRT. I started seeing a psychologist through Headspace and a therapist through Betterhelp. I didn’t want to rush into anything, even though I was eager to finally be able to live as my true self. Many of the pathways toward trans healthcare were closed due to Melbourne’s mid-2021 lockdown, which left me stressed and miserable. Thankfully, I had my incredible wife to support me throughout all of this.
What’s Happening With My Marriage?
Speaking of my wife, I should probably talk about her now. To keep her anonymous, I’m going to call her Neraya.
Neraya and I are staying together, and we are happier than we have ever been. Why is that? Well, that’s because we are both lesbians. I know how crazy that sounds, but it’s true. Neraya is pretty dang gay. Kind of like me, though, she was in denial about it for 24 years. Earlier this year, she started exploring her sexuality by learning more about asexuality. She started to think of herself as demi-sexual (only being able to experience sexual attraction to those one forms a deep connection with first) and possibly bi/polysexual. She never had crushes as a teenager and was definitely never into boys. It was actually Neraya exploring her identity that gave me the courage to do the same.
So what happened with me, if we both believed I was male when we got together at 15/16 and still believed that when we got married at 20/21? When she found out that I had a crush on her, we’d already become best friends, and I guess she sort of saw through me without realising it. I’d shown enough of my feminine side to her (without myself even knowing it) that something was there. The thing is, she was never into me, physically. I never really felt wanted or desired.
Oh, boy, did that change when I started presenting feminine at home. Suddenly she was thinking, “Oh, is this what attraction is supposed to feel like?” So yeah, we’re staying married, but now we’re a proud lesbian couple, which makes us stronger than ever.
Faith vs Being True
I was raised going to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (you know, the Mormons). My dad served a two-year mission for the Church when he was a young adult, as did my younger brother. I was baptised as a member of the Church when I was eight. I received the Aaronic Priesthood at twelve and the Melchizedek Priesthood at 18, although I decided not to serve a mission. I was a pretty spiritual kid. Someone even once remarked that they thought I’d be a bishop one day (unless the Church makes some major changes in my lifetime, I kind of doubt that). I have always considered myself pretty faithful, and I don’t think I’d be the person I am today without the Church in my life.
As you can imagine, that caused some pretty significant distress for me once I realised that I am transgender. Even though the Church teaches that LGBT+ people deserve unconditional love and support, ultimately the major belief, even (and sometimes especially) by Church leaders, is still queer = bad. It was extremely painful to feel trapped between my faith and my desire to transition and be true to myself.
I still love many aspects of the Church, even if I’m not attending at the moment. People like my dad and brothers, who have shown me nothing but love since I came out to them, are the reason I think spirituality has done more good than harm in my life. My brother who went on a mission was the first person I came out to (other than Neraya) because I knew he would still love me. I told my dad next and the result was the same. When many trans people with religious families are getting completely cut off, I was met with only acceptance. When I told them, a few months later, that I wanted to switch to Jade and she/her, there was no hesitation.
My brother and dad embody the Christ-like love that everybody who claims to be a Christian should have. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most times it isn’t. That said, I’ve come out to two other church friends and they’ve both been cool with it, as have the active members of my extended family, so maybe I’m not giving people enough credit.
Suffice it to say that navigating these conflicting aspects of my life was exceedingly difficult. A few productive conversations with my dad – as well as one of the members of my writing group who also happens to be religious – helped me through it. I think that first and foremost, my Heavenly Father wants me to be happy. I also think that I have much more love to give as a woman than I ever did as a man. If I just lived with my gender dysphoria and went along with it because some old white guys said I couldn’t transition, I’d just end up bitter and depressed or, quite possibly, suicidal. The Church actually has very little on its website regarding transitioning, and ultimately that just wasn’t enough for me. I couldn’t base my happiness on one paragraph that said not to do it because reasons.
I am at peace with where I’m at regarding faith and transitioning. Although I don’t feel comfortable being a social outcast at church, the lifestyle I’ve been brought up with works for me. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it does for me. I have a few church friends who will possibly be finding out about my transition via this post, especially the group I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons with over the last few years. If you’re reading this, I want you to know that I love you all, and I hope you still love me back.
Some queer people might take this as me supporting an institution that has harmed countless LGBT+ people over the years, and I want to make it completely clear that I think the Church needs to do better. Regardless of what the leaders of the Church believe about LGBT+ people, it is simply unacceptable that people like me can be treated so poorly for something we have no control over. On the other hand, I recognise that the leaders of the Church are old and likely just afraid of something they don’t understand. I have hope that things can change for the better in the future.
A big part of me wanted to just disappear and not come out to people at church. However, I think it’s important that they know. Transgender is just a strange concept until you actually know somebody who is trans. I hope that by coming out, they can be more accepting of others like me and make the world a better place for the LGBT+ community.
Wow. This section kind of turned into its own essay. I guess I have some strong feelings about this stuff.
Where Am I at Now?
This is a coming out post, so you should be able to work out on your own that I landed on transitioning.
I started HRT on 17 November 2021. After months of itching to begin my medical transition, it was actually a pretty quiet event. In stark contrast, a few weeks earlier, when I managed to get an appointment with a GP offering trans healthcare, I was literally jumping with joy. I had never been more excited or happy in my life.
Starting hormones was completely different. I think I was just at peace with my decision, and I was ready. I knew this would be a long journey and that changes would take time, so I wasn’t bursting with emotion. I simply took my anti-androgen tablet and put my estrogen patches on, then hosted my brother for dinner and mentioned it offhand. I only told a couple of friends. There was no big announcement on my new Facebook account, on which I had only added people I was out to. I didn’t even announce it to my family (although little bro passed that message along). I didn’t feel the need to make a big deal out of it. I think I just wanted this to be my own little journey for a while.
Because now it’s not my own little journey anymore. Now everybody knows, and I can never take that back.
First Two Months of HRT
My psychologist explained transitioning to me like watching a glacier. If you stand and stare at it, you’re not going to notice any changes. But if you come back a year later, you’ll notice that a lot has changed. He was mostly talking about physical changes; however, I think this applies well to mental changes, too. At least, that has been my experience.
Many people describe sudden mental changes when starting HRT, or at least major changes after a few days. That has not been my experience. That said, I think many of those major mental changes come from the relief of simply starting hormones. I’m quite cynical when it comes to this sort of stuff, so I set my expectations low, which basically guaranteed I wasn’t going to get any placebo miracle cure for my dysphoria.
Day to day, I guess I don’t feel too different. But if I look back on several weeks ago, I’m definitely happier now. I’m starting to feel actual emotions for the first time in my life. A few weeks after starting hormones, Neraya and I were driving into the country when I spotted a train depot across the freeway, and I absolutely burst with excitement. I’ve always had a bit of a thing for trains and cool train stations, and seeing so many trains together was just the coolest thing ever. It was like a little discovery, and I could not contain my excitement. Before starting HRT, there’s no chance I would have had emotions of any kind bursting out of me like that. It was actually kind of incredible.
Previously, I would describe my default state as empty. Now, if I’m not feeling any particularly strong emotions, I am content. I feel peaceful. When I’m happy, I’m happier than I even realised was possible. Before hormones, I’d only cried – really cried – a handful of times, mostly at funerals. Since starting HRT, I’ve been doing it much more often. For years, there would be times where I felt like I needed to cry but just couldn’t. Finally, I can, and it’s a huge relief. It’s nice to feel emotions for the first time in years, if ever.
In terms of physical changes, I’ve had a few so far. I definitely feel better about myself in photos, although part of that is probably thanks to my makeup skills improving. Even without makeup, though, I feel like my face is just a little more feminine than before, even if I can’t work out exactly why. I’ve had some breast growth, which is unusual but not unheard of so early (most trans girls start having breast growth after about three months), and for the first time, I’m starting to feel at home in my body thanks to it. Things also definitely feel softer now. My hair feels like silk – I can’t stop touching it. It’s early days and changes can take years when transitioning, so I’m just trying to let myself sit back and enjoy the ride.
Going Forward With a Loudspeaker
I will not transition quietly. Many people do, and that is completely valid. On a day-to-day basis, I would like to pass and not have random people know I am transgender. However, I intend to use this website to document my transition. On my blog, I am going to be very open about the changes I am going through.
The tragic thing about being transgender is that there really isn’t that much representation. This is because when you transition, you kind of just want to get on with your best life. It’s bad enough that we have missed our entire childhoods as our true selves, and for some trans people, they’ve missed the majority of their lives as their true selves.
When I have books published, I want my fans to know about my journey. I want them to know who I really am. I want my friends and family to know what being trans is really like. As a result, I might get death threats from transphobes on the internet. I’ll deal with it because I think I’m strong enough to do so. If I can help one person discover themselves, or help one person be more understanding toward trans people, this all will have been worth it.
To my friends and family reading this, my inbox is always open. I am happy to discuss anything about transitioning, as long as it is well-intended. As touched on earlier, I don’t really find anything invasive, so if you have questions, fire away. I actually enjoy discussing this stuff, so please don’t be shy. I’m here to educate.
I’d love to have you join me on this journey if you’re willing to come along. Make sure to check out my trans FAQs if you’d like to learn more, or get started with my blog posts. And make sure to subscribe to my newsletter below so that you never miss a new post.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for taking the time to get to know me better. I love you all, whether you’re a family member, friend or someone I’ve never even met. Even if you hate me, I love you, and you’ve just gotta deal with it.
—Jade