Cracking the Egg

I'm not being furtive. Totally straightforward: just put the bra in the cart, go to self-checkout, ring myself up like normal. Nothing weird about it.

It is Friday evening, February 25, 2022. I am in Fred Meyer, a sort of overgrown general store, which sells groceries and hardware and clothing and sporting goods and electronics. I happen to notice that they have a big Clearance rack in the back of the women's clothing section. I happen to further notice that they have sports bras, and that they're about $17, which is an approachable enough price. I select a likely-looking grey one with fancy criss-crossing straps and thick-feeling pads in the cups. Perfect? Perfect enough.

I've been wearing skirts, off and on, since 2011 or so. I started wearing homemade fleece dresses ("No one makes dresses to fit my body, which is shaped all weird," I asserted to myself, thinking of my wide shoulders and narrow hips) as the weather got colder last year. But I wasn't trans. Probably. I mean, it seemed unlikely, right? Trans people know from an early age. I just thought you should be able to wear any old clothing without having to freak out about your gender.

I take my not-at-all-furtively-selected sports bra, in the cart with my usual pandemic load of groceries, up to the front, and check out. No one pays me the least attention. I put the bra in the laundry after trying it on, under the very reasonable assumption that the dye and stuff needs to be washed out before I'm going to spend any time with it touching my skin. Definitely not a delaying tactic.

In late December, I'd started looking for a therapist, a first for me as an adult. I'd formulated the question I needed help to answer: Am I trans? I finally found one in late January, and we set up our first session in mid February. The first session, I basically gave a quick summary of who I was, and what my question was. The second session, I utterly chickened out, and talked about a weird sort of nascent relationship that went kablooey due to some pretty profound misunderstandings. I didn't need to talk about that, it was something to do in order to avoid the real question: Am I trans?

A few months back, I'd been talking to a friend on a zoom call. "Well, if I'm trans," I said, as a lead into some new topic. It was on my mind. With an uncomfortable laugh, he'd asked if he could see my boobs, if I was trans. I said sure, why not. It wasn't true, after all, so what did it matter what I answered?

Before that, around the start of 2021, I'd started seriously pondering my gender. What was gender? What did it mean to me, related to me? I read a lot. A lot. Tons of Reddit threads, and stuff on Twitter, and the Gender Dysphoria Bible. I knew what gender dysphoria was, and it was clear I didn't have it.

I'd always been male, clearly. There was no mistaking it. I didn't have that feeling of being in the wrong body that all the trans writers described. I wasn't a girl trapped in a boy's body. I mean, sure, I'd kept my distance from "men" as a class -- so crude, so cruel, so aggressive. So likely to sneer at me. I mostly associated with women, but that's just logical, obviously any heterosexual man would want to associate with women more than men. They're so awesome, so attractive.

Of course, at the theater, I also associated with a lot of queer folks. It was a natural fit: an art-form where underdogs in society can punch up, poke at the systems of power that hold them down. Naturally there are a lot of queer kids in theater. A few of them were trans, and I was so proud of myself for treating them just like anyone else. So open-minded, I was.

Way back, in early 2000, my then-girlfriend had a friend who was a trans woman. I met her a couple times, once to watch the Kingdome be imploded from her Georgetown apartment building. She lived in pretty poor conditions. Not exactly squalor, but everything was definitely rundown, and it was clear she wasn't thriving. This trans woman kind of horrified me. I was trying to be open-minded about it, but she joked about how she became a woman to spite her ex-wife. The thing is, I thought she was serious. I doubted her grasp on reality. Then she dropped her voice down low and joked, "If I do this too much, they take away my girl-card." I mean, I thought it was a joke. It all weirded me out too much, and when my girlfriend asked if I wanted to visit on a later date, I declined.

Come back with me to the much more recent time of Summer, 2020. Honestly, this moment felt like it must have been 2018 or 2019 in my head, but there's the date, right on the comic:

My face, as I read along with the comic, didn't change, I'm sure of it. I mean, maybe a little bit. Maybe my eyes widened just a touch on reading that text. I... had been joking with myself for years that I'd be an ugly girl. I'd look in the mirror and examine myself critically, and think, "Good thing I'm not a girl, I'd be pretty ugly." How did this web comic know I'd been thinking that?

Rewind again with me, to my most recent relationship, with C. We lived together in a lovely Victorian house that we could just barely afford. We'd discuss this and that, and on a couple of occasions, I made some joke that I no longer recall, and C would look at me oddly and say, "Is there something you'd like to tell us?" The jokes centered around exaggerating some feminine characteristic of myself, suggesting I was more woman than man. This would have been around 2016 or 2017, before that relationship fell apart. "No," I would invariably and confidently reply, "I'm quite happy as I am."

I pull the now-washed sports bra out of the machine, and out of an abundance of caution, hang it on the line to dry. The previous owner of the house had strung clothesline between the posts in the basement, since line drying outside isn't really an option when it rains so frequently. I know that bras shouldn't go in the dryer. Might as well do it right, right?

My next therapy appointment is this coming Wednesday, and I resolve to really, actually address the question with my new therapist: Am I trans? I'm scared of it. I can feel it lurking in my chest. I think I know what the answer is, but I can't figure out what's locking that answer away, keeping me from really understanding it.

In July of 2021, I joined Twitter. Well, re-joined Twitter. I'd had an account for years, but I didn't use the old account for much. For the new one, I took the same name I'd used on Reddit: Taedryn. The name of my first D&D character since I was a kid, an elven ranger. Female, of course. Why play a male character? I'm already male every day, let's do something different! Rangers have some magic, and Taedryn was also skilled with a bow. It's fantasy, after all. We played for part of a summer at work until the interns left, then the game fell apart.

For my Twitter bio, I carefully crafted my description: "Femme aspect of a confused human." I knew what I was doing. I was giving myself space to try being as femme as I wanted to be. I wasn't lying, this account really was the femme aspect of a confused human. I was desperate that no one should think I was male, though. I only followed femme accounts, mostly in the TTRPG space. Only grudgingly did I start following men, and only after they had each proven themselves safe for women in some pretty obvious way. I set my pronouns to "they/she," to start.

It didn't take long before I was following some trans women. One or two at first, but once I was comfortable with the TTRPG people, I started to get more intent on following trans folks. I found some comedians, and some D&D players. I accidentally followed a couple very NSFW accounts, and had to quickly unfollow them. Sure, I was working from home, but who knew if my employer was watching. It was a company laptop, after all, and they'd crammed it full of jamf (a remote management package). You never know.

Somewhere in there, I ran across someone's tongue-in-cheek "Egg checklist," and it amused me to see I was already about 2/3 of the way through the list, almost exactly in chronological order matching my own experiences. Ha ha, I must be an egg, I thought, smirking at myself. (An egg is someone who is trans, but hasn't realized it yet.)

I'd had a roommate, C (a different C than the ex), from early 2020 through about October, 2021. She was the perfect unicorn roommate. We exactly matched each other in temperament, desire to clean, level of noise preference, everything. It was beautiful. We talked about lots of things, but one of them was certainly my reading about gender and transness. We kept each other sane through the lockdown. She'd moved in a month before the quarantine started, and the streets went silent. It was very fortuitous timing, for both of us.

C ended up being a foil for many of my am-I-trans thoughts, helping me sort through things a bit more sensibly than I could on my own. I won't say she was pivotal to what I was going through, but she was pretty important.

On Twitter, I found myself following more and more trans women. My certainty was firming up: it seemed improbable that I wasn't trans, but something was missing. Reading the Gender Dysphoria Bible's article on feminizing hormones and their effects really unlocked a lot of thoughts in my head: Wait, shoulders can get less wide? My listed pronouns started to morph in rapid succession: they/she became they/she/he became she/they/he became she/they. One of my Twitter friends referred to me as "she" on her Twitch stream as she played Hades, and I was shocked and pleased to hear it.

Way back around the age of five, I had a dream, which has stuck with me through my life, though I never knew why it was so persistent in my memory. In the dream, I'm in a small room, with a table in the center. Sitting atop the table is a device of some kind, with a blank face and a small lens in the front, facing me. Standing next to the table is an angry, bitter-looking old man with white stubble on his face. He grimaces at me, and says in his bitter-old-man voice, "I hate little boys! This device kills little boys!" and he moves back to what is presumably some kind of control panel as he shifts it to aim at me. Thinking quickly, I sort of fold my penis under, so my crotch is just an amorphous blob, look up at him and shout, "I'm not a little boy! Look!" I feel like there was some more impactful ending to the dream, but that's where the memory runs out.

My reaction to this dream, until very recently, was basically, "Huh, what a weird dream!"

I go down to the basement, and check on my new sports bra. Dry, after the weekend was spent being distracted by other things. It's been on my mind, though, and the distractions haven't been complete. I don't think about it very much. I can't think about it very much. But I definitely need to try it out. It's Monday night, the 28th of February.

I struggle into the slightly unfamiliar tight embrace of the bra. I've never been comfortable with tight shirts, disliking my slightly pudgy belly. My shirts have always been XL and fairly loose. I've never been well-muscled in my upper body. The bra feels alright, and I go check myself out in the bathroom mirror. Interesting enough.

I grab a pair of knee socks, which I have greatly enjoyed wearing lately. I separate the two socks, and unceremoniously jam one into each cup of the bra, giving myself the appearance of small breasts. Interesting. I try putting on one of my fleece dresses, to see what that looks like. Also interesting, but nothing momentous. Looks pretty fake, honestly. A person my size should have bigger boobs than that.

I grab a second pair of socks, and add them on top of the first, one to each cup. Back on with the dress, and into the bathroom to look in the mirror.

You know that effect you see in movies sometimes, where the glass breaks in front of the camera, and falls away, leaving a clearer picture? That is my feeling in this moment. My world is exploding, in slow-motion, and all at once. It happened in a flash: one moment, I was a confused, questioning cis guy. The next, I see what I should really look like: a person with breasts.

Almost immediately, my heart starts running a mile a minute. My breath comes in gasps. C moved out months ago, and I'm glad of that, for she would probably think I'm having a heart attack. But I'm not, I'm finally seeing a reality that's been lurking under a microscopically thin layer of self-deception.

To the sound of my heartbeat thudding in my ears, to the feeling of my cheeks flushing from hyperoxia as I breathe far too fast to keep up with my racing heart, I sit down, not quite sure where I am, or what I'm doing.

Somehow I calmed myself enough that night to get in the car and drive down to Fred Meyer and bought another copy of the sport bra, in a blue color that didn't appeal to me as much; but it was obvious to me I'd need more than one.

The days after this are something of a blur, but my journal tells me that I:

• Settled on a new name
• Signed up with a new doctor who specialized in gender-affirming care
• Came out to my family, close friends, and a few coworkers
• Signed up to the waiting list for vocal training
• Scheduled a laser hair removal consultation
• Bought two different sizes of silicone breast forms and bras to match
• Bought a bunch of tight femme tops that finally made sense

And found myself sitting at the computer on the last day of March with a pile of estradiol patches next to the computer, writing my next journal entry.

In short, I was ready to go, and as soon as I got the signal, I went.

My journal has reminded me of other things that came before the big crack. After my second therapy session, during which I abjectly failed to address the actual question, I started a document on my phone, listing questions and facts I wanted to bring up with the therapist, and every time I thought of something that seemed relevant to the question of whether I was trans, I'd write it down.

That list is essentially meaningless to anyone who's not me, but I had started assembling it before what I had taken to calling the Epiphany, and by the time the next therapy session rolled around (two days after the Epiphany), between the list and the bra experience, I had become thoroughly convinced. I started that third session with the words, "I figured it out. I'm definitely trans."

I recall that the thudding heart and quickened breath feeling remained with me for days. I don't think my heartrate dropped below 120 BPM for three days. I only took off the sports bra to shower, and I think I even wore it to bed, stuffed socks and all.

I started looking for a doctor, a day or two after realizing I was trans. Thinking about it for 30 seconds, I realized that my old doc (who I hadn't been comfortable with for a while) would be a bad choice for transition care. On the website where I was searching for specialties, I saw the words "Transgender care" next to a doctor's name, and absolutely unbidden, started sobbing. I texted this reaction to a friend, and said this seemed like maybe not a normal cis person reaction. They replied, "Lol, nooooope!"

On that last day of March, 2022, with my stack of estradiol patches next to me, I took my usual shower before bed, and being careful to ensure the clock had passed midnight, I unwrapped my first estrogen dose, and pressed it to my torso. It was April Fools Day, 2022. An appropriate date for my big joke on the whole universe.