You know that you are a transgender guy when…

…Friends who are moving or arranging a party kindly wait for you to arrive to let you carry the really heavy stuff – in the pure purpose to help cultivate both your male ego, your back and biceps.

…You find yourself discussing different ways to do a mastectomy (breast removal) with no less than four different transgenderd people on a week flat, considering loss of sensitivity, re-positioning of the nipple and the risk for visible scars. (Amount of pain experienced or expected was never mentioned.)

…Tired cis-genderd guys follow you blindly into the changing room at the gym, looking at you rather than the sign on the door and therefore ending up in the ladies locker room. Embarrassment.

…Tired cis-genderd girls stop and blink in a mix of confusion and awkvardness when you meet them in the door to the ladies changing room at the gym, seemingly questioning which one of you who are not supposed to be there. Embarrassment.

…You feel awkward and embarrassed about NOT having a rolled up sock tucked down in your trousers, because you forgot to do your packing routine when dressing in the morning.

Everyday things I do to transition

Sometimes you hear frustrated trans people who are pre-diagnose, pre-surgery or pre-hormone treatment saying that they are “pre-everything”. Some say that they are “early in their transitioning” or that they haven’t even started transitioning yet. I don’t feel like that. Even if I’m currently pre-everything mentioned above, I’m not pre-everything. I like to think that I’m in charge of my transitioning, not any team of doctors and psychiatrists I might meet in the future.

Sure, I’m waiting to get in contact with the special trans care-team, but it is more empowering to think of the things I can do for myself every day. I feel that my transitioning is an active process that started long before I was even aware of it, years ago. I’m now post decision, post name-choosing, post coming out. Everyday I actively do lots and lots of things related to trans. Almost every aspect of daily life is somehow influenced of my transitioning and in this post I will go in to a few of them.

Meeting my reflection in the mirror is a transitioning experience every time as it has to do with my self image, how I build gender. I can also see many of the little things I do to make myself more androgynous.

Is today a boxer, binder and packer day or not?

I transition when I get dressed in the morning. What I’ll wear is based on two questions; how comfortable verses how representative for myself do I want to be today? That settles if I’ll wear my binder or a sports bra or neither. Then; am I going to change clothes in the girls locker room at the gym later that day? In that case, no boxers and no packing, that’d be to embarrassing.

Every shirt I buy, I have to alter a bit before I can wear it. Nowadays men’s shirts fit just fine over my shoulders but the sleeves always needs shortening. I also have to shorten the bottom hem or else the shirt will be to long and to narrow over my hips. It took me a while, but now I feel that I’ve really gotten the hang of how to adjust men’s clothing to my size without making them look feminine.

After dressing I’ll have breakfast. Back when I was a “she”, I’d have spent >20 minutes in the bathroom first, doing all sorts of stuff to tidy myself up, like braiding my hair, picking eyebrows, going through a serous skin care routine and putting on make up. Now, I just wash off and go for a less tidy look. 😉

When it comes to food, I try to stuff in as much as I can manage in order to get good result out of my intense training routine. I want to gain muscle weight, but I have trouble eating enough to make that happen. Therefore I drink full milk instead of the less fat one I used to prefer. I have extra meals when I can and always gainer after training. For breakfast I try to eat a large portion of porridge rather than a few sandwiches as before. The texture of the porridge is absolutely disgusting and I really, really hate it. But because of the texture I can spoon in more of it before I feel full.

That brings me to health issues. Being trans affects how I feel about myself and how much energy I have (there is a lot of work with the transitioning stuff, that is what this post is about). I eat a few health supplements for supporting my training and I’m cutting down on some medications in order to gain weight and grow. I do what I do with my doctors support but every time I talk to him or anyone in the health care system, there is a huge gender confusion from their side. They simply can’t get it straight.

In school or among other people I watch my voice so that I keep the pitch down as much as I can. After all, I’m studying to be a speech and language pathologist – voice matters to us! I also try to monitor my way of speaking and behaving so that I make sure not to take to much or to little place in conversation. I’ve noticed that people tend to give more room to me now. They ask for my opinions and listen in a different way to me when I use a more masculine model of speech. That is a male privilege, if you ever saw one. I don’t want to take advantage of that on someone’s expense if I can help it. Also, to some extent I try to monitor how others speak to or about me. Sometimes people who don’t know me to well need to be informed on what’d be the right pronoun.

My phone makes me uneasy.

Suddenly, sometime during the day, my cell phone rings. I always freeze for a second when it happens. Every time. I’m not comfortable speaking in the phone any more. I have a male name and a distinctive female voice. When my only mean of communicating, (my voice, language or way of speech) is deceiving me in how I want to be gendered, I feel uncertain and uneasy.

Is it a relative calling, someone that I haven’t come out to yet in person, someone that’s worried about talking to me or unsure of how to adress me? How am I to make this person feel more at ease? Is it a stranger calling? Is it some bureaucratic issue regarding my gender where I’ll be held responsible for a missunderstanding or for being “missleading” in some way? Am I going to have to come out as trans or do some awkward explaining about my name or voice or pronoun now? Is a conflict or insult coming up when I take the call? Usually, everything is fine. But this panic reaction just keep coming.

I work out at the least four times a weak. That is eight visits to the locker room were I feel unwelcome and frowned upon .

After school I either meet up with friends, go to work or to the gym. The two later activity’s usually means confronting issues of taking or not taking conflict abut my gender identity. When having to choose gender/locker room, that is a conflict to me, I don’t feel welcome in neither.

And on work, well, I work with mentally disabled grown ups that have no idea about non normative gender expressions and identity issues. I started to work there before I came out as transgender and I have only outed myself to my boss. That went well but later she seemed to sort of accidentally have happened to slip information about it to my co workers. I feel that it is to much for me to educate both clients and co workers on the matter and because of that also to much to ask for to have them using the right name and pronoun. That is somewhat depressing to say the least and I consider changing workplace so that I don’t have to waste energy on constantly holding myself back.

But I’m very lucky when it comes to how my family, friends and close relations have handled my coming out as transgender. I’m so proud of my parents! They have been more supportive and understanding than I ever had hoped for, even if much of what I’m going through is new to them. My friends have also turned out to be genuine super allys and I feel truly blessed to have such a strong network. ❤ Thank you all.

Sometimes, I seem to pass

Yesterday I was out with a friend at a pub we use to visit when he is in town. I had my doubts about going there. The last time we where there, the owner placed us in a cosy corner with the motivation that “the ladies use to like it there” only to be given the ungrateful evil eye of an insulted FtX, (namely me.) He didn’t repeat his mistake this time, but we were treated as regulars and the pub owner seemed to recognize us.

I had a good packer and binder-day and even took my shirt of when we sat down, not so secretly enjoying how my upper body look when I’m only wearing the binder. For those who want to know; I’ve got a 998 binder from Underworks. From the outside it looks just like an ordinary black cotton tank top and it works excellent, but I suppose that my petite A-cup hardly can be challenging to compress.

Tank tops in general is nowadays a huge boost for my self confidence since my strict training regime is giving awesome results. My shoulders, arms, back- and chest muscles are literally swelling from all the time spent on the gym and there is something clearly masculine about the way I put on weight. (No wonder, I work very strategically for just that purpose, thank you Kian for good advice! :-)) I feel a bit embarrassed about my sudden change of look and slightly surprised every time I see myself in a mirror. I’ts a strange new take on body dysphoria. But I’m also immensely proud of the result and effort I put in to it.

I noticed how the crew who served us gave me confused looks over their shoulders when they thought I wouldn’t see. Was I a guy or girl? How was I to be adressed? I never know if I’m to be happy or not about that ordeal. I sure put in a lot of work to be seen as more masculine and because of that I get a bit offended when I’m genderd female by strangers. But still, I don’t want gender to be an issue at all and prefer it when it doesn’t matter to people.

When we left, we were greeted with a “Welcome back, you guys!” that warmed my heart. Yes, I think we will return.

Picture: Elin Nordlinder.