Why is it now? Why is it not yesterday?
On time, and the choices I didn't make
Ok, this is normally a newsletter about pop culture, and it will be again in the future. But that’s not what I want to write today. And I can’t really just spill my guts on the football newsletter that I actually make money from, so you’re getting it here. And yes, this is all a pretty privileged whine about transition feelings, but I had to get it out on the page somewhere.
I cried a lot as a child until I didn’t. I would cry about anything and everything. If I thought we’d be having something different for dinner, I’d cry. If I couldn’t find my pencil sharpener, I’d cry. If I couldn’t watch something on TV… ok that one happened a lot. Adults were telling me that I needed to stop crying so easily and toughen up. When I was ten years old, I remember crying in front of everyone I knew at school, mostly because people kept picking on me for being a little weird (wonder what was up with that), and it got embarrassing. It got so embarrassing that I decided, there and then, that I would stop crying. I would “man up” and deal with it.
And so I did. A little too well. I pretty much never cried once I hit my teenage years. I successfully shut all those feelings down. This seems to be pretty common among trans women, whether that’s because of dysphoria numbing your emotions, or the chemical effects of testosterone, or whatever. I’m not here to diagnose a medical cause here. I’m just observing what happened.
That didn’t make people stop thinking I was weird, far from it. People have thought that my entire life. Being kind of emotionless at times was no better on that front. I remember my grandma died when I was 12 years old. I loved my grandma, and missed her dearly in my teenage years. But I was sat there when I was told she was about to pass, and I was sat there at her funeral, and I just couldn’t feel anything. I wanted to be very sad about it, but I just couldn’t feel those feelings, and it wasn’t because I didn’t care.
This happened over and over again. I couldn’t feel, and I couldn’t cry. The only thing I did consistently feel was anxiety, and that tended to bubble into meltdowns and freakouts. In my adult life, I only once had a serious, proper cry over something once when I was very drunk, and I can’t even remember what that was about. Until the night when I’m writing this paragraph, and I just bawled my eyes out.
I knew it was coming at some point. Every post I’ve read, and I’ve read them all, said that being on hormones will make you cry. And I was growing frustrated that it hadn’t happened in just over a year on HRT. My testosterone levels were a touch higher than they needed to be until around late March (though still far, far lower than before), and maybe that stopped me getting there. I don’t know. But it finally happened. I finally had the ugly cry I’d been waiting for. And I cried about that waiting.
A lot of trans women talk about kind of thresholds of revelation. There is so much writing online about realising you’re trans, starting to transition, taking the hormones, and being able to reevaluate your entire life in a different context. All of that has happened to me. But it was split over two completely different periods. The experience is so bifurcated for me that I find it hard to totally relate to the way most trans women talk about it.
I realised I was trans over a decade ago now. I fully accepted my gender along time ago. I understood what was happening in my head. I recognised exactly who I was. I saw all of my own past behaviours reflected back through a lens of gender dysphoria and it all made sense. I had aced the theory portion of the exam without ever taking the practice portion. I was an astronomer, able to see the constellations clearly without ever going into space.
The best “window” for transitioning in my life was probably when I was 21. I was at university, I could’ve started doing it pretty quietly without anyone in my family finding out until I was ready. I could’ve been anyone there, and I ended up being no one. I just… never quite managed to do it. I graduated and, shockingly, a degree in film studies did not exactly lead to a string of employment opportunities. So I flitted between living with each of my parents (they’re not together), ultimately failing to hold down a part time minimum wage retail job. I really didn’t know how to progress in those years. I felt completely paralysed with what felt like almost no hope of transitioning.
I was visibly trans online. It was pretty much my only escape. But I’m not sure how much it helped. The contrast between being Grace on Twitter, and being a hollowed out shell of a human being known by another name in real life, felt worse and worse as time went on. Even if brain fog dysphoria meant that I usually didn’t believe them, plenty of people did genuinely like me on there. I didn’t like me much, but hey, dysphoria and all. There were a few times when people wanted to be friends beyond twitter, whether they lived nearby, were visiting, or just wanted to chat over video or something. And the answer I could never quite give was: “I don’t know how to be this person outside of a text-based medium”.
So I sat inside alone. I read a lot of posts. A lot of trans people end up building comfortable but ultimately unfulfilling lives for themselves. They end up with careers they feel totally detached from, with partners and/or children they can’t be entirely there for. I already knew I was trans in my 20s, so I didn’t do that. I didn’t want to create even more barriers for when I did eventually transition, oh, any day now. So I made my life as small as possible. I had no friends, no relationships, nothing of any connection to in real life outside my family. I didn’t exist.
I did exist online, so inevitably that was how I broke out of the rut. I got popular enough writing about football that I, somehow, was able to build enough of an audience to make a living out of it. That’s right, kids, if you want to make (some) money, start writing on the internet. It took me time to do it, and the economic privilege of not having to pay much in rent at the time, but I was able to get to a financial position where I could move into my own place, with some money in the bank, and be Grace Robertson for real, not just on the computer.
That was last year. In all that time, I don’t know how many friends of mine on the internet themselves turned out to be trans. Some of them told me that I helped them figure out who they were. And many of them started transitioning pretty quickly after that. All of them were doing better for it, all of them living better and more valuable lives as their true selves. And I wasn’t. I’m not proud of this at all, but in some of my worst moments, I couldn’t help but think “I’m delighted for you, I truly am, but I cannot process another of my friends getting better while I’m still here wanting to kill myself”. It felt like it was never my turn. I know all of this is ridiculous and petty and selfish, and I can now say I truly am happy for every single one of my friends. But it was hard.
It was harder still because I couldn’t actually process any of those emotions properly. I just felt anxiety and dread over it all. A lot of what I’ve written here is pretty basic early trans girl stuff of the sort many of my friends moved past a long time ago. And I should have moved past it. There’s a version of me in some alternate universe who transitioned when she was 21, and she moved past all of this years ago. I have no idea what she’s doing now, but she got to live a decade of her life as a real person. I’ll never get that.
And then, tonight, all of those feelings just kind of came pouring out of me. I can’t turn the clock back. I can’t get all those years of my life back that I’ve lost forever. I can’t change that I’m having extremely basic trans feelings at age 32 when it could’ve happened such a long time ago. I know that I’m here now, and that’s what matters. God knows how many trans people are driven to suicide in that pit of dysphoria in a world that hates us. I made it out alive, and that has to count for something, even if it took me a lot longer to get out than I thought.
I have no idea how long I’ll live for. I lost a decade, but I should have plenty more. It hurts. I’ll probably cry about it some more. But at least that’s proof that I’m alive right now, that these things really are happening to a real, tangible version of me. At least that’s something.