What triggered my transition

It took so much for me to start to really explore my gender identity. Years of questioning my orientation. Years of trans fascination that did not seem attainable to me (I had trouble perceiving trans as something within me). And then in faster succession - A mild car accident, the pandemic and the sudden passing of a close childhood friend.Only after all of this did momentum accumulate for me enough to relentlessly explore gender and sex in whole new ways that have dramatically changed my life, my sense of inner balance and capacity to bring an honest self to the world.

At times I’ve felt combinations of deep shame and regret for not understanding sooner. I lament the fact I couldn’t be one of those brave souls who shows their truth much earlier in life. It can make me feel like a weak person or phoney. I can feel a tremendous amount of guilt for ever towing for masculinity/patriarchy, just by fitting that mold.

On the other hand I recognize just how much pressure is on us to live a heteronormative lifestyle and make our parents and friends proud. There’s nothing so crazy about a kid just wanting to fit in with their peers and do whatever society seems to be rewarding them for. Gender identity and orientation is also a spectrum. Being curious, yet not strongly enough to defy norms and be labelled, is reasonable as well.

Having journeyed so far over the last 4 years I think it’s just easy to take for granted how effortless being myself has become, but it took a tremendous amount of deprogramming that I sometimes forget about.

I know that for me this necessity I have now to deprogram and go through a ‘second puberty’, having found this later in life, makes my advocacy for the rights of trans kids so strong and personal. If these kids feel as they do and can avoid going through being a gender they don’t identify with first before having to deprogram/have a second puberty later, we should let them have that.