One of the most affirming things I’ve done recently (aside from talking to my best friend; nothing beats that) is try FaceApp.
I was feeling particularly boy-mode-ish the other day. Near the start of my transition, I used a locally installed AI app to feminize my appearance, but as someone told me recently, I’ve exceeded that caricature already. But, feeling particularly dysphoric about my face the other day, I had to know how FaceApp would initially identify me. I uploaded one of my favorite recent selfies. It identified me as male, of course. But the feminized pic wasn’t much different.
I tapped the option to make my pic more masculine. Once again, not much difference.
Then I selected a pic with my wig and pantsuit. If the system identified this pic as male, that would confirm my facial dysphoria. But it identified me as female. I hit the option to make me more feminine. Hardly any difference.
I uploaded a dozen more photos, most of which I didn’t save. FaceApp identified me as female just less than half the time. Even a picture in which I thought the light made my face particularly angular, with makeup but no wig, was identified as female.
My face is pretty much gender neutral. I’m the best of both worlds, baby!
While putting this article together, I looked at these pictures in my Google Photos album. Google Photos automatically detects pictures of you and prompts you to add other faces in the picture. If you save a collage of multiple pictures of you, it will only identify one, assuming that the others are different people.
In the first picture in this post, it recognized the feminized version as me and prompted me to identify the face on the left. When I viewed the masculinized version of the same pic, it identified that version as me, and, once again, asked me to identify who the “other” person on the left might be.
Even mighty Google, with all of its invasively collected image data, couldn’t tell the original from the modified version, getting it wrong four out of five times. The only comparison it identified correctly was the one below, and no kidding; I can’t even dream of having that hair!
I’ve been thinking about gender again. Someone happened to include “If you want to be a [gender], you can just be a [gender]” in an article earlier, which planted the … Continue reading If you want to be…or not to be
One of the coping suggestions in SGW this morning reminded me of something that happened to me on Saturday night. That was the day I went to the opera. It was a day to remember, in more ways than I expected.
I was talking to my best friend on the weekend.(1) We were talking about smiling, and how it comes through when you really feel it. I sent her this picture, which was taken on April 16, 2023.
I took that picture shortly after dying my hair purple for the first time, three and a half months before my awakening.(2) That’s about as brightly as I ever smiled in my selfies before I transitioned. Just now I was looking for a selfie taken just before I transitioned, but I don’t have one. The closest one I have was taken in May.
I never used to take a lot of pictures of myself. I created a folder for my selfies in late November because I had started taking a lot more. I went back two years to find old selfies. My new folder contained 19 selfies taken in the two years before I transitioned, and 91 taken in the four months since. As of today (January 29), that folder has 227 pictures in it.
This is a common pattern among transgender people. When you start loving yourself, you take more selfies. A lot more. This one is my favorite:
This picture was taken on January 6 by the person who had just pierced my ears. In 54 years, this was the first time I had gotten a piercing. I was happy. My piercing artist was very affirming. She had just said something that made me smile, and she took three pictures in short succession.
For days, I couldn’t stop looking at this picture. I had smiled before transitioning, of course. I had been happy once in a while. I had smiled specifically for pictures. I smiled when my son was born, and when I got married. But I had never smiled like I did in this picture.
Immediately after leaving the studio, I sent this pic to a bunch of friends. I received replies throughout the day. Everyone said I looked great. I looked so happy. My sister said she had never seen that smile before.
When I got home, I started changing the profile pictures on all of my online accounts to this selfie. I had never loved a picture of myself so much. Before transitioning, I had never loved a picture of myself at all.
This picture is me.
So who was in the previous picture? I looked at the first picture again this morning, and I didn’t recognize myself. It’s me, but not me.
At the most fundamental level, of course I’m the same person. I’ve retained a lot of my thought processes and some of my behavior patterns. But I feel different. I express myself differently. I interact with others differently. And I look different. Part of that is three months of hormone treatment, but more of it results from how I feel about myself since I figured out who I am. Before transitioning, I didn’t look in the mirror much. When I did, I was looking at something specific, not at my face overall. Now I look into the mirror and I see myself.
Look at both pictures again. They’re not the same person. The first picture is a shell I used to hide behind. Me, but not me. The second picture is me.
(1) With this friend, that’s like saying the sky is blue, water is wet, etc., but I have to set the scene for this paragraph.
This post was originally published on my Substack blog on November 20, 2023. Almost a year before my egg cracked, I started wearing makeup. Or at least trying to. Over … Continue reading Putting on my best face
This post was originally published on my Substack blog on October 21, 2023.
When I came out to my mom a few weeks ago, she had some questions. She’s very analytically-minded, so they were insightful questions. One of them was about gender expression. Why do trans and gender diverse people put so much emphasis on feminine expression? My mom rarely wears anything more feminine than jeans and a t-shirt, and rarely wears makeup, but it doesn’t make her feel less like a woman.
I know the reason I want to express my identity clearly is because I spent so long expressing myself as a gender that didn’t suit who I am inside. And not just expression; all of this “terrible T” did a great job of giving me a masculine body, and is starting to rob me of my hair. Now that I know who I am, I feel like I need to turn the tables.
Not all at once; I’m still only part way out of my sturdy, comfortable closet. But I started dying my hair purple a few months before I was consciously aware of what I was trying to express. I wear makeup when I go out with my friends (another habit I’ve had since before I was conscious that I was transitioning). And I’ve recently started painting my nails.
Out of all of the forms of expression I’ve adopted so far, my nails are the most satisfying. I don’t have enough hair to do much with it, and I don’t have the shape for feminine clothes. My makeup game is improving, but my face still isn’t quite right. But my nails are a small victory.
I compulsively bit my nails for decades. I tried to kick the habit many times, but always started again, unconsciously in most cases. If you’ve ever tried to quit a bad habit like smoking, imagine if you had cigarettes constantly attached to your fingertips. You don’t need to take any action besides raising your hand to your face. So when I first applied clear nail polish, it was mainly because I wanted a stealthy form of gender expression, but secondarily because I thought maybe it would discourage me from biting my nails.
I don’t know whether it was the polish or my egg hatching, but I haven’t bitten one nail since.
A beginner’s how-to
For anyone who is just getting started, nails are one form of expression you can get the hang of fairly easily. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
With some polish, you can paint one coat on your unprepared nails, let it dry, and go on your way. But it won’t last very long, and you won’t have a smooth finish. I always apply multiple coats.
Before I paint my nails, I prepare them. First, I use nail polish remover to completely remove the previous polish. Then I use a coarse file to make sure the upper surface of my nails is smooth. After a few times, you won’t need much coarse filing. Then I use a fine buffing block to smooth out the surface. Finally, following a tip from a helpful employee at Sally Beauty in Edmonton, I give each nail a swipe with acetone-based nail polish remover to get rid of any dust and dehydrate the nail surface.
Next comes the base coat. Some friends recommended Essie, so I bought their Strong Start base coat. You just need a thin coat to protect the nail and help the next coat stick.
After applying the base coat, your next step is to wait.
Then, when you think it’s time to apply the next coat, wait a little longer. Even if your polish is marketed as “Insta-dry,” well, “insta” must mean something completely different in marketing speak.
You can speed up drying with a fan, but I’ve found I still have to wait a minimum of two minutes to ensure that the next coat covers the previous one instead of trying to blend into it.
The color coats require some practice. The tutorials I’ve seen recommend covering each nail with no more than three strokes. Unfortunately, this isn’t always easy. The color I’m wearing right now is Y’Orchid-ing from Finger Paints’ Naturalism collection. I love the color, but the brush is so tiny it takes at least five strokes to cover my thumbnails. Essie and Sally Hansen both have much better brushes.
My nails with two coats of Y’Orchid-ing covered by one coat of Fig Flash
Practice your brush work to get each coat as even as possible with few strokes. You’ll have to find the right thickness. Too thin and the color is blotchy, even after two or three coats. Too thick and it will flake off.
I’ve gotten nice coverage with two coats, but you may want more. Some people advise adding four coats or more.
After your main color, this is where you can add the magic. My favorite overcoat is Fig Flash from Sally Hansen’s Insta-Dri (haha) collection. It’s a semi-transparent light purple glitter coat that adds depth to the color underneath. That’s what I’m wearing in the picture, over the Y’Orchid-ing I mentioned above. It transforms a nice, deep burgundy red into a scintillating wine purple.
Finally, don’t forget your top coat! I’m currently using Essie No Chips Ahead. It seems pretty effective, although I do a lot with my hands, so I get wear on the leading edge pretty quickly.
If you have more nail tips, leave a comment below!
This post was originally published to my Substack blog on September 7, 2023. This is the story all about howMy life got flipped, turned upside-downSo if you’d like to take … Continue reading My awakening
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.
I Am Violet 