This post was originally published to my Substack blog on August 22, 2023.

I’m trans.

You mean you’re going to turn into a woman?

Not exactly. My internal sense of gender has always been feminine.

So why did you wait so long?

Because I didn’t know I was trans.

But you just said…I’m confused.

That makes two of us, hon.

When you realize you’re trans later in life, your mind lunges out in different directions, trying to make sense of it all. Am I a woman now? Was I always a woman? Why didn’t I see it before? Was this or that event a clue I should have seen?

However long it takes, the process of hatching is hard. You will look at the core of your being more closely than you ever have. You may wonder if you have two personalities. You may wonder who the real you is. You may wonder if there is a real you. You may ask yourself, “Is this my masculine face?” And you may ask yourself, “Is this my genuine voice?”

As the days go by, you may find yourself crying more in one week than you have in years. But at some point you will figure out who you really are. It may take a week, or a month. For some it may take years. But after you discover your authentic identity, one question may remain:

Who was I before?

I think about this question a lot. As I write this, it has been two weeks since I emerged from my existential uncertainty as a trans woman. I’m still equal parts terrified and excited–although I’m more joyous than either of those emotions. Every hour of every day, I celebrate who I am. 

I’ve never done that before. After years of ups and downs, dealing with depression and constant change, I had settled into a comfortable pattern of content existence. I felt like I wasn’t a special, unique individual, just another person making his way through life. The egg metaphor is significant. I feel like my life began the week I hatched.

So what does that say about who I was before?

Near the end of my hatching week, I confided in a new friend that I wasn’t ready to lose my old self, to let him fade away. (Dammit, Mae! Your webcomic is so beautifully poignant!) I was terrified of losing the person I was in order to transform into the person I would become.

But I realized that I don’t have two wolves inside of me. I’m not losing any part of myself that matters. The man who lived his life, trying to be a good person (failing more than I’d like to admit, but still trying), was always me. She will always be me. She just wasn’t a man.

So who or what was I?

I keep asking this question, and the only answer I have is, I was me. My “actual” gender was questionable. I lived most of my life as a man, not as a woman, at least performatively. I had everybody fooled…including myself. But it’s not that simple.

Gender is not a hard-coded binary attribute. (Neither is biological sex, but that’s a whole article in itself.) My transition was eased somewhat because I’ve long recognized some of my feminine traits. It’s been over 15 years since I tried to get my beard lasered away. At that time, I was back in school (long story), and my best friend was a classmate who happened to be a lesbian. We got along fantastically well from day one, and I opened up and let her see the real me. 

One thing she knew very well about me was that I was attracted to women, but also wanted to be friends with them (and had almost no interest in friendships with men). Because of this, she referred to me as “a lesbian trapped in a man’s skin.” In that way, she saw me better than I saw myself.

I’ve always had a strong feminine component to my personality, even when I ignored it, pushed it away, or hid it behind a mask of exaggerated masculinity. Does that mean I’ve always been a woman? I honestly don’t know. But the conclusion I’ve come to is,

It doesn’t matter!

I was me, and I am me. The person who was George is the person who is Violet. I’m just being more honest now, both with the world and with myself. Having a masculine body doesn’t make me less feminine. But having a feminine body will make me feel more complete. It will make me a more confident woman, fulfilling my deepest existential desire: to be one of the girls.

And, of course: more hair!

This post was originally published on my Substack blog on August 24, 2023.

After the grand revelation that I had lived (mostly) in hiding for five decades, I experienced a great deal of confusion. One source of consternation was the fact that I didn’t think anyone would ever see me as feminine, including myself. I looked at myself in the mirror, and it was wrong.

I didn’t hate my appearance. After years of not liking my face, I had reached the point where I saw myself as reasonably good looking, and I had worked enough on my body that it was fit and functional. Actually, pretty darn good for a fifty-year-old man. I had even come to terms with my age, and the road ahead into the “second act.”

So, while my revelation shook me to my core, I was more ready to accept it than I would have been at any previous point in my life. But my face… My face was now doubly wrong. I had long wished for a more attractive face, none of this annoying facial hair, and more hair up top. Oh, how I’ve always longed to have hair!

I actually gave up on my hair at a young age. I tried letting it grow long, but it would only grow up. I had that kind of hair. I felt like a cotton ball in a washed-out medium brown. So one day in my late twenties I shaved it all off, and I kept shaving it for twenty-five-odd years.

Until last year. After my wife moved away, I was on my own for the first time in many years. Without the expectation to play a role, I began to discover myself. The girly tendencies I had felt forever started to resurface. I discovered an interest in cute shoes. And I basically inverted my shaving routine; I stopped shaving my head but started shaving everything else. I had always shaved my beard because I hated having facial hair. But the first time I got out of the bathtub with my legs smooth for the first time in four and a half decades (I was an early bloomer), I knew I would never stop shaving them again.

In letting my hair grow, I knew I would never achieve my achingly profound hair goals. After all, I was over fifty. I’m thin on top and there’s a point right at the crown of my head that’s just a tiny bit bald. Yes, I overuse adverbs when I’m in denial. It’s a bald spot. But I was happy with the result when my hair grew in. It felt right… but not half as right as when I first dyed it purple earlier this year. For the first time I looked not just okay, but fabulous!

My awakening was touched off by Doc Impossible’s blog, Stained Glass Woman. I’ve read that blog cover to cover, and I eagerly await her next entry. The article that’s relevant to my post today is Part Five: Panic. I wasn’t quite panicking at that point; I pushed that down until it bubbled up a couple of days later. In that post, Doc Impossible describes putting her face into an app that shows an example of how you would look as the “opposite” gender.

I had to know. I have Stable Diffusion installed on my computer. I installed it locally so I wouldn’t be sending a bunch of information into the cloud. The advantage of Stable Diffusion over a generic app (aside from the privacy issues) is that you can craft your prompt to control certain aspects of the result—and prevent the deformities that demonstrate that artificial “intelligence” deserves those quotation marks.

I dragged the selfie I had been using online into the “img2img” interface and wrote a prompt to turn it into a picture of a fifty-three-year-old woman with purple hair and glasses. When I saw the result, I wondered why whoever trained that model thought fifty-three was absolutely geriatric, so I reduced the age to fifty and specified that the result should have long hair.

I generated a series of images. I couldn’t stop staring at this one. I still can’t

Those are my eyes (for the most part; the algorithm hates different colors, so my blue eyes are a little bit of a gray-purple). That’s my mouth. My nose, my neck, even the cheekbones are all mine!

But I’m not gorgeous!

Could I be? Could a few years of HRT and some surgery on my heavy brows make me look even a little bit like this? And the big question: Is there any modicum of possibility that I could have that hair?

This picture is both me and not me. But the more I look at it, the more I see the me I’d love to be.