“that’s so unexpected. you seem so happy here” an old uni friend replies to my instagram story when i first announced i’m moving to naarm/melbourne. whilst happiness is definitely a component of my life, and probably the one i’m most comfortable sharing publicly, i wouldn’t say it’s the characterising feeling of my life. if i did have to identify one, it’d probably be spiralling.
for the last eight months i’ve been preparing myself for this move. i’m moving somewhere i’ve never been to, have no connection to, no job lined up and that’s also the furthest away place possible i could move to from london. whilst i love nothing more than a fresh start - most of my house moves, new jobs and romantic break-ups have always happened concomitantly, triggering a full life reset - i question whether this particular fresh start is more an escape.
for the last eight months, i’ve been bombarded with questions on why i’m moving, and what am i going to do in australia. my two standard replies have either been: ‘i’m going on an adventure!!!’ said with an exaggerated grin and a slight deranged look behind my eyes, or ‘i had a menty b that went too far…’ said with a half sarcastic tone and my brows awkwardly raised.
for the last eight months, i’ve also been asked what’s going to happen to oestrogeneration, a magazine platform i founded in november 2021. with a focus on highlighting the voices of trans women and transfeminine people in the uk, it reached significant success over the last two years, more than i could have ever predicted. “business-wise” it feels like a foolish time to relocate. when asked this, i tend to awkwardly smile, reply ‘i’m taking a break from it’ or ‘it’s time to pass it on’.
for the last eight months, i have found myself riddled with uncertainty, wondering what will love look like in my future, what job do i genuinely want to do and, most overwhelmingly (and directly tied to the first two), whether i am actually trans.
certainty is upheld as a must-have condition for trans people. there’s a pressure of needing to know for certain that we are definitely x and not x - especially if we’re going to medicalise that process. and for a while certainty was a key part of my story. my certainty remained unbothered when, at a house party, a gay man’s response to my desire to transition was “but you’re so good looking!”. it persevered through the constant misgendering and the heightened sexual attention i started experiencing in the streets. it didn’t quake as my body started changing.
alas, all good things come to an end, and sprinkles of uncertainty started creeping in.
there was the one time where, after smoking too much weed with my straight-adjacent ex boyfriend, i ended up crying in his arms and ranting about the fact i wasn’t sure i was actually a girl and i was worried he wouldn’t love me if i wasn’t. he didn’t know what to say, as he sat with the realisation we weren’t going to have sex that day after all.
another time, as i was spending christmas with my family for the first time in many years, i found myself confused at the feeling of discomfort i was experiencing. i was watching trans girls on twitter complain about their biological family misgendering them and not accepting them whereas i was being called a daughter and a sister by my supportive family - and feeling unexplainably inauthentic in that.
that same christmas, i also became obsessed with the realisation i am likely the only person in my family able to pass on our bloodline. a bio essentialist take i never gave a fuck about all of a sudden started consuming all my brain power. too aware that the medication i was taking was actively jeopardising that possibility, i started feeling guilt. a part of me felt like it’d be a disservice to my brother, who died at a young age, not to carry on our lineage. a part of me had a narcissistic desire to know what a child of mine would look and act like.
other factors that have triggered uncertainty include struggling with my desirability, especially in queer spaces, likely to stem from internalised transmisogyny whereby I no longer perceive myself as attractive to other queer people, a sudden desire of wanting to pass but it feeling like an unattainable goal and spending hours down a rabbit hole reading terf opinions.
i’m a big believer that doubt is positive. that doubt leads to self-growth and new possibilities.
but, for me, this particular source of doubt felt paralysing.
not only had i spent thousands of pounds, and countless hours, in moulding my body into the form it reached, but it felt like i’d made transness my whole identity.
i felt like i couldn’t question my transness because my transness was also my job. i felt like i would either have to fully undoubtedly commit to this identity, or my career was over. i felt like people surrounding me would be put off by the lack of palatability surrounding my story - i wasn’t a girly with crippling gender dysphoria that fixed it all when she started transitioning, i was the confused girly who ultimately doesn’t know who they are. at a time of polarising politics surrounding transness, where the validity of trans people is being questioned, and detransitioners are siding with transphobes, not-knowing-who-you-are felt like a dangerous identity to claim. i found myself simplifying my existence. packaging my identity in the most digestible way to others as that felt like the least threatening way to navigate the world, especially when i was also monetising out of my identity.
ultimately, i’ve come to realise that my value and assets, as a person and as a worker, go beyond being trans. but, i’ve also come to terms with the fact that i need a break from doing work surrounding transness in this next era of my life and understand what my transness feels like when it’s also not my job.
i spent the first half of my twenties in a “straight” relationship, which was the relationship that introduced me to romance and sex.
it was a relationship where i lacked consent, freedom and agency. it was a relationship i actively avoided thinking about for years, awkwardly joking with my friends about my “straight era” whilst swiftly moving on from ever going into too much detail. only in the last year or so i’ve actually been able to process its impact.
what i’ve realised is that a large part of my uncertainty is about the fact i will never know what my identity would have been had my self-exploration not been impeded by that dynamic. i find myself obsessing over all the ‘what-ifs’. i wonder if i would have stayed a devout religious person and never explored my queerness at all. i wonder if i would have just been a gay man. i wonder if i’d be exactly where i am today anyway.
ultimately, i will never know who-i-would-be-today had that never occurred. but i owe it to myself to honour my curiosity.
so, a decade after moving to london with that person, i move to naarm on my own.
whilst i’m not sure what my future/career/love life/transness will look like, i am now in the very lucky position to be surrounded by people who don’t resent my uncertainty and who don’t place an idealised version on me, but let me be as messy and contradictory as i want to be. who don’t resent, and actually welcome, the fact i change my mind like a girl changes her clothes.
i’m not the same person i was two and a half years ago - when i first started transitioning - and i won’t be the same person in the years to come.
i stopped taking hormones three months ago, and have been watching my body re-masculinise with some dread, but with the awareness this is what feels right at this stage of my life. i may go back on them tomorrow. or next month. or in twenty years. i may not.
i’m uncertain about my future, but i’m excited. i’m excited at the possibilities that uncertainty grants. i’m excited because i feel like i have agency.
so today, on the longest plane journey of my life, full of agency and full of uncertainty, i do feel happy.
I've felt so much of this. Best of luck in your new chapter. 💗
i love this so much. uncertainty is space for yourself!!