It’s been a while. Three years ago this month, I took my first dose of hormone replacement therapy. Two and a half years ago, I took to my grandstand for the first time and wrote my first essay the same day as I introduced myself. And it felt like time to share some thoughts, check in and tell you (dear reader) what I’ve learnt.

But - again - first, the headlines. My name is Morgan, and at the time of writing, I am a 30 year old not-so recently hatched trans woman living in London. This post is somewhat self indulgent, but I think it might be helpful if you know me, if you’re trans and you’re somewhere on this journey yourself, if you’re friends with another trans person that you’re trying to support, or if you’re a teacher, a health care worker, a politician or anyone else who can influence the lives of trans people (one or many). As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

And a reminder before you read that trans experiences are not universal. I’m only qualified to tell you about mine. And, with that in mind, here’s what I wish I knew three years ago.

Hormonal transition is only the start.

I initially saw my transition as a project - a project with a deadline. I planned every minutiae, because I am a planner. And my plan ended on the day I published my last blog post, came out to the world, sent off my passport renewal form and became Morgan. In retrospect, I couldn’t have been more wrong about that end date.

It’s only now, some two and a half years later, that I really feel truly comfortable in my own skin. There’s so much more to learn and figure out about the world and your own place in it after you emerge from a transition - how to feel comfortable each day, how to interact with other people, how to present to the world in the way you want to be perceived. That’s where the real work begins and where the real challenges lie.

The public can be awful.

One month after I transitioned socially, in the midst of our COVID enforced lockdown, I went out for a walk. I was on my own, minding my own business, looking at the light interplaying with the branches of the trees. A car pulled up alongside me on the almost empty road, driving at the same pace as I walked. I heard the mechanical whirring of the window being pulled down. A cisgender woman, about my age, stared at me out of the window. “Go kill yourself, freak.” She sped away. I bought AirPods that day, and I didn’t leave the house without them in and blaring music loud enough to shut out the world for another year.

Walking home from work one evening about a year and a half ago, a child pulled out my sleeve. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old, and I was worried about him. Maybe he was lost or needed some kind of help. I took out my AirPod. “You’re a man, and you always will be.” If we teach the young to hate, they will. If we teach the young to love and accept, they’ll do that instead.

On a cold November night last year, on the way back from the cinema, a small group of men started following me. My music blaring, I didn’t notice until it was too late. They pushed me to the ground, leaving only bruises in their wake and stealing nothing. I don’t know if it was a transphobic attack, but if it wasn’t, why did they leave me with all of my possessions intact? I turned down the volume on my AirPods. I avoid the darker streets.

You’ll lose people you thought you wouldn’t.

When I presented as a man, I was a different person. Isolated, insular, shy, incredibly socially awkward. That’s not who I am anymore. A lot of those closest to me back then valued those traits - perhaps shared some of them too. If you change the very fundamentals of who you are, you can’t expect to keep the interest of the people who valued who you were. And that’s OK. You don’t need to bring everyone along on the journey.

Some people disappeared seemingly overnight, a hard cut off. Some drifted into the vast caverns of time, re-emerging every once in a while to check-in. That can be nice. Some reconnected immediately after the news, only to disappear again after their curiosity was satiated. That’s OK too. It’s all fine because it has to be, but also because it provides some implicit evidence that this is working, that the changes you feel are seen and perceived, that you are truly becoming a newer, better, improved version of yourself. It’ll take a while, but as you build yourself back up, you’ll find new people later down the line.

You’re going to be a teenager again. Forgive yourself.

When you start hormone replacement therapy, you know you’re in for a second puberty. For me, this sounded incredibly exciting - truly like the best thing in the world - redistributing and moving fat around my face and body to give me more feminine, beautiful features - great! Forming breasts - exciting! No longer being at risk of losing all my hair - incredible.

But being a teenager is also an angst filled anxiety pit, and a second puberty really does give you that too in spades. That queazy feeling in the pit of your stomach when you think about certain things and people? Back. Worrying so much about how you’re perceived that sometimes you can’t bare the thought of leaving bed? Back. That awkward energy that teenagers have in their social interactions when the hormones first kick in that make them jumpy and fidgety and over-eager-to-please? You’d better believe it’s back, baby.

There were days, particularly in the first couple years or so, where it really did feel like the hormones were in charge of me rather than the other way around. Thankfully, just like the first puberty, the storm has now mostly settled - but there’s a lot of waves to weather, and they ripple around everyone you know.

At first, it’s a performance.

If I never see a bottle of ultra-high coverage matte foundation again, it’ll be too soon. I wore ultra-high coverage matte foundation to go to the supermarket and get a sandwich. I wore ultra-high coverage matte foundation to make a FaceTime call. I wore ultra-high coverage matte foundation to go downstairs with the rubbish.

And when you can’t leave the house without ultra-high coverage matte foundation, a make-up routine that takes an hour or so on a good day, the temptation is there to simply not leave the house at all. Discarded theatre tickets, cancelled plans and days in bed for ‘mental health’ become quickly commonplace, because unless you can be the very best version of your most feminine self, you don’t deserve to leave the house goddammit. You’re letting team trans down.

Performing femininity becomes an obsession. I didn’t wear trousers for the first year - spending my winter freezing in mini skirts and semi-opaque tights, dressing not for myself but to prove the world wrong. Every occasion deserves a dress, every event requires heels (and going to the shops IS an event). By the end of the day I looked into the mirror and saw my face literally melting off so covered in poorly set ultra-high coverage matte foundation it was. But at least I’d tried. I’d shown the world. I’d been the best and most feminine disaster that London had ever seen. And I had the three or four outfit changes to prove it.

Sometimes, you’ll feel like a threat. You’re not.

If every day you wake up to a Twitter feed, an endless stream of news, that tells you you’re a threat to society in general - to other women in particular, there are some days where you’ll truly believe it. Or at least, you’ll believe that’s what everyone else believes.

In the early days, so eager you are to make it incredibly clear that you’re not going to harm anyone, you cross the road whenever you see someone walking towards you on a footpath. You dart across the road, zig-zagging about on every walk that you undertake (honestly, if this is universal, transgender women early in their transition are probably more likely to be killed in road traffic accidents).

In an attempt to appear reassuringly non-threatening, you’ll construct the most impossible logic traps. “Want to grab a drink?” becomes “Hey - I was thinking - and truly only if you want to and you’d like to and it wouldn’t be a problem for you and absolutely just as friends - it might be nice to maybe go and get a drink at some point?” The irony is that your attempts to seem safe and sane will make you seem ever-so-slightly unhinged. Until you learn the art of simple, direct communication, you’ll always feel a little on the back foot. It’s a trap that - even now - you find yourself falling into.

But the reality is you’re not a threat, you never were. And the people that matter to you have always known it.

There are days you’ll question your own reality.

I remember standing, looking square at myself in the mirror and seeing the reflection of the me of the past. “This is who you really are”, my brain seemed to tell me. It’d been a tough week mentally - a few too many stares on the tube, one awful comment, a bad week at work. And I seriously considered whether I had the strength, the gumption to carry on. Whether it might be easier just to go back to the simple yet depressing life I had before.

Transitioning is really hard and like anything worth doing, people have second thoughts and moments where clarity is lost along the way. Particularly for those without a support network, without people to turn to and talk to, it can be really easy to throw in the towel. I love my life now, I love who I am and I would never turn back the clock. But in the first year or so, I thought about it - seriously, properly genuinely thought about it. Five or six times. I’m glad I didn’t listen to my brain.

It gets easier.

Eventually, the performance ends. You wake up, brush your teeth, put on some (much lighter) make-up, get dressed and go about your day. You don’t pass all of the time, but you pass reliably enough that nobody is going to clock you from a speeding car, from across the road. There are days that you feel attractive, beautiful, hot even. People have called you these things, and you’re starting to believe them.

The news cycle bothers you a little less each day now. It’s noise, and you’re learning to filter it out. The people who are close to you - who care about you and who love you - don’t believe any of that bullshit. And if they don’t believe it, why should you? Your femininity is an embodiment of who you are as a person, of how you carry yourself, of how you perceive the world. But it’s not performative anymore. You’re making the choices you want to make. Your favourite perfume is unisex and musky and it smells fucking incredible from across the room and it doesn’t have to come in a pink bottle with a pom pom and be endorsed by Ariana Grande. It’s you. It’s a part of who you are.

You fall over less in heels. It’s rare that you have to re-do your lipstick again because you’re getting pretty good at drawing within the lines. You don’t need to put on foundation to take out the bins - or ever, actually. You have great skin and it doesn’t require full coverage. You don’t feel a need to disclose your identity to every single person you meet anymore - just to those you want to bring into that circle. Some days, your trans-ness feels like a huge part of who you are and other days it fades away. It’s becoming just that little bit less relevant to your day to day decisions.

And just as people left your life, new people enter it. They fill it with support and love. With joy and laughter. With beauty and hope. They refill your heart and give you purpose. You enjoy beautiful meals, explore new corners of the world, see new shows and art together. And when something goes wrong, you know they’re there to pick up the phone, just as they know you’re there too.

You haven’t thought about de-transition in nearly two years.

But it’s still not over. You’re still a work in progress.

I still don’t know when my transition will be ‘over’, or if it ever will be. I think I want to get top surgery to round out my slightly-too-conical-for-me breasts. I’m on a wait list for bottom surgery. I’ve got a few sessions of electrolysis left to root out those pesky white hairs that the laser hair removal left behind on my face. And whilst I’ve shed much of the physical weight of more than a decade of dysphoria and depression, there’s more to do there too. After all of that, I’ll be pretty much physically done with transition (at least one person will literally murder me if I do anything to my face).

But mentally? I’m not sure if transition ever ends. I made a decision early on that I didn’t want to be ‘stealth’, to hide who I was or my origins from the world. Some people do an incredible job at that, but it’s not me. I don’t think it ever could be, and even if it could I wouldn’t want it to. Being open, honest and vulnerable is the only way I know how to do this. That won’t change.

Some notes of thanks.

I finished my last post with some thanks for those I told before I came out to the world. Today, I’d like to close by thanking those that have been there for me since. I won’t name you - because if you’ve read this far and you resonate with any of it you know who you are.

But if you’ve talked me down when I’ve been scared about some new piece of legislation or something in the news - thank you. If you’ve comforted me when the intolerable has happened - thank you. If you’ve built me up and made me truly believe that I am worthy of being loved, of being wanted or of being desired - thank you, and know that I love you too.