Sophie

Summer learnings of a trans woman

Puberty is a time span of ten years. - But if you start your transition afterwards, you will go into a second puberty, into a second time span of 10 years. But this puberty is much harder. We transitioners trying to catch up everything we missed. - While having a fixed identity from our first puberty. - And beyond the experiences from the new identity, we have to overcome old socialisation and patterns, of our non-conforming gender behaviour, which crashes into our daily life, while we're facing a lot of changes in our mind (and hopefully bodies), by the new hormone level.

And we're working against 100 reasons of shame, 1000 obstacles in the mirror, and some very deep written pictures of cis-gender in our-selves and others. And one of the main duties in transition, is to glue all this together, into one human, one existence, into one life.
Transition can be a full-time job. But you have to cope with it, as one task from multiple others: Earning money, looking for help, care for family members, explaining yourself to the world (even if you don't have an explanation for yourself), attend the gym, cooking, maintaining other relation*ships, filling your social media accounts and office chair and feeding the cat.

We learning, to accept ourself, the status quo, becoming patient in dozens of topics (e.g., legal changes, changes by hormones, etc), and we adopt new behaviours, changing old pattern and requesting ourself always: “Is the person, I’m becoming now, feeling right?”
Or do we behave like copycats, who overtook some strange behaviour or styles, which didn't fit into your life and beings, because we wrongly assume, they belong to our official gender now.

I'm in the middle of my second 10-year puberty, and I learned a lot during this summer. First and most important: Pain is for growing, and I hope, I dived into any stitch which was presented me, by this summer. - I learned, how to cope with my phases of trans-downness in a better way, and about my optimal reaction of getting misgendered. (I understood now, that this is like a Terry-Pratchett message, out of the parallel existing universe of cis-heteronormativity.)

I also meet persons, I thought, 'Wow I would like to date!', and that I will use the non-binding term "dating" in future. Stopping the desire for a never-ending-true-deep-love-lifetime relationship. - Spending two evenings per week together, giving our skin touches and kisses to your necks, should be adequate to stay healthy and enough to push each other into a stable state. - But this means a lot of honest communication. (So maybe it's easier to stay in the never-ending-love narrative.)

This is what I learned in my summer of '23.