Member-only story
Living in a trans body
Often when cis people ask what is it like being trans they seem to think that trans folk are going to give them exhaustive details of hormones, surgeries, and other treatments for gender dysphoria. The reality is that being trans is both completely normal and in some respects exceptional. None of the treatments trans folk undergo are unique to trans healthcare, they were all devised for cis folk, so the reality is that trans people who transition have bodies which overlap in many ways with cis folk. That would be a short article. The lived reality is that living as a medicalised trans person comes with some interesting caveats, the primary one being that as you age you are entering into lesser trod paths that even medical professionals have not seen before outside of gender clinics. All of which means that sharing stories about trans bodies makes for interesting tales for outsiders.
I transitioned at a time when the number of out trans women in the UK was reasonably small, enough for me to have to actively hunt for other trans folk to talk to and associate with. My body did not stop going through puberty until I was in my mid-twenties because I stated on HRT, meaning that my figure has feminine curves and wider hips, giving lie to the notion that trans women cannot have either. Indeed, this is one of the central issues with trans bodies, in that people make a whole range of assumptions about what our…
