Episode four of the Some Gender Going On podcast: Seeing Myself. You can play it or download it here:

My fourth episode! I have a new microphone, I’m not used to it, you might have to turn up the volume a bit.

Notes

As always, I’ll post my notes that I base the podcast off of, if you prefer reading to listening:

Izzy Grosof

Some Gender Going on Podcast

Episode 4: Seeing Myself

Another more personal episode

Maybe a bit less polished, because I’m leaving town tomorrow and maybe I shouldn’t be making an episode tonight, but to that voice in my head I say “Fuck you, I do what I want.”

So, let’s get into it.

Egg days

I remember when I didn’t look at myself in the mirror. Ever. I couldn’t form an image of what I looked like. That was a lot of my childhood, 0 to 18. I still have trouble now, looking in the mirror, imagining what I look like. I can do it but it feels foreign, I have to search. It’s easier with other people.

I remember when I tried looking in the mirror, tried liking what I saw, when I was exploring, when I was hopeful. I wanted to like, but I couldn’t. Trying doesn’t make it so. Major egg vibes. And even after I hatched, still, no. Couldn’t like how I looked.

It made shaving hard. I learned to shave blind, without looking at myself. I still do that sometimes, mainly only when I can’t get to a mirror like if I’m shaving while walking. I guess I could get a pocket mirror. I should get a pocket mirror. But I used to do it a lot more

I’ve never owned a hand-held mirror.

Some people use makeup for this, to change their appearance enough that they can look at themself. Makeup isn’t for me, for a lot of reasons. Time and sensation and the feeling of concealing who I am, these are anathema to me.

So, that was how it was for a long time.

I hatched

I hatched, I came out as nonbinary. I started wearing feminine clothes and growing out my hair.

People, a sizeable fraction of them, started automatically gendering me female. And I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t intuitively see that in myself. A few people automatically gendered me nonbinary, which is super cool, but that’s like a couple people ever.

And I could only automatically gender myself male. And I didn’t like it. I’d even misgender myself in my head, and occasionally out loud. And again, I didn’t like it.

Consciously, I knew that this was a negative bias in myself against myself. I’ve seen so many people do it towards themselves. I know it’s a pattern, I know that what I’m seeing isn’t what everyone else is seeing. And that’s life and that’s history and that’s my relationship to myself.

But it was more than just being unable to intuitively gender my appearance anything but male.

I was unable to feel intuitively positive about my appearance. I could like how my clothes look. I was able to positively receive complements. But if I was looking at my face or my body, I could only feel neutral at best.

This was a holding pattern for a long time.

HRT

I started HRT, and I wanted to start taking photos of myself in nice flowery contexts, both to document HRT effects, but also hopefully to start liking how I looked. Initially, that aspect wasn’t so successful.

I liked the surroundings, the picture composition, the clothes I was wearing, the prosthetics I was wearing. I just didn’t like how my body looked, especially my face. But Ok, these things take time.

After three months on HRT, I liked how my face looked for the first time.

I remember the first time. It was mid-september 2023, 3 months on e, just started spiro a week ago. I caught a glimpse of myself in the Zoom video preview window and went “woah I’m cute”. It was wildly unexpected. I was stuck staring at myself for maybe 30 seconds. It was amazing.

I had never done that before. I’d never seen myself in the mirror and liked what I saw, before. It was one of the signals (not the first) that told me that I was on the right course when it came to HRT.

Before long, I realized why that was the first context that I’d liked what I saw when I saw myself.

First, I was rarely looking at myself, so Zoom calls were probably a significant fraction of those sightings.

Second, the video compression process in live video streaming applies a bit of blur to one’s appearance, which has a smoothing and softening effect. I think that was the critical component.

I tried applying a blur filter on a selfie I’d taken, and that worked too. It felt hokey, like when Star Trek TOS would applying a very obvious blur filter on any shot of a conventionally-attractive woman. But it worked. I liked what I saw.

Even later, with a few more months on e, I started to occassionally like unaltered pictures of myself. Occassionally.

Then maybe even seeing myself in the mirror could be nice.

Very recently, I intentionally looked at myself in the mirror because I thought I’d like how I looked, and I did. It was magical.

At the meetup group that week, when it was my turn to share something nice that had happened in my life, I just said “I’m cute”. Because for the first time, I felt that way.

Other people

How other people see me has changed a lot faster than me seeing myself.

People started automatically gendering me with “she” and “ma’am” a significant fraction of the time about 6 month after starting e, and it’s only gotten more so from there.

Other people saw that in me a long time before I saw that in myself.

I remember asking my girlfriend, who is a lesbian, if I looked like a girl. Because my conscious mind was telling me that in all likelihood I do, but I couldn’t believe it. She said I did, and I trusted her.

I give my pronouns as “they/she”, and a lot of cis, straight people without much pronouning experience just use “she”. That’s new. That’s nice - they is still my first choice, but if people are choosing she then they’re a lot farther from choosing he, and that’s what I want.

So now, other people can see me and see someone nonbinary, with a femme vibe. So now, I can see myself intentionally and like how I look. It’s been a long time coming.

Is that the end of the journey?

Not quite.

I don’t look different (But I do)

Because still, when I look at myself, I don’t see that my appearance has changed substantively. I look at my transition photos over the last five or six years, and it’s all the same. It’s all the same face. And of course it is, it’s all me.

But also, of course it isn’t all the same. Of course it has changed. Other people’s reactions to me, ranging from strangers to friends and allies to the people closest to me, have all changed significantly. So I must look different.

Of course it’s changed substantively, because how I feel when I see myself has changed, and how I look is presumably causing how I feel. I don’t think I’ve just become a lot intuitively kinder and more positive about myself. Maybe, I’ve tried, but what’s changing is almost certainly my appearance.

If I really focus on my timeline photos, I can see changes in details. The curve of my jaw and cheek has gotten a bit smoother. My balding has reversed a bit. My eyes are a little more open than they used to be. My skin is a bit smoother/creamier/glossier. And the larger scale things, like haircut and makeup and whatnot, those I can see.

But if I’m not focusing like that, all I see is “Yep, looks about the same”.

I don’t know if I’ll ever think differently, if I’ll ever go “Wow I look really different from those old photos.” I think this is something a lot of trans people like about “full face” makeup. It provides that very immediate and dramatic appearance change. I don’t like makeup for reasons of time and skill and effort and sensation, but I do see the appeal.

And I know that I’m experiencing a pattern that many, many, many trans people experience. I’ve seen plenty of very pretty trans women on social media, where everyone can see how pretty they look except for them. I haven’t see it as much with trans men just because of the social circles I’m in, but I know it happens as well.

But knowing doesn’t change it.

I want to look different (But I do)

And I do want to change, I do want to see myself and think: I look different, and I look good. Because it’s true, and because I spent plenty of years avoiding myself, and I want to internalize the fact that I don’t need to avoid myself any more. I’ve made it.

I’d like that. I don’t feel it.

Also, I’m not yet at the point where I can look at myself in the mirror and like how I look all of the time. When my facial hair is at 8+ hours growth or my sweat is sticking down my hair to my head and emphasizing my scalp, I don’t feel good. I don’t like how I look, then. But I know what I can do. Shave, towel, brush, and I’m pretty much good to go.

So that’s where I am. I can look at myself in the mirror and say “wow! I feel cute and pretty and lovely and beautiful”. I can look forward to that. It makes me happy. I’m proud of myself.

I can’t yet look at myself in the mirror and say “I look different”. I can’t yet say “I don’t look like him”, the mask I wore, the mask that was placed on me, the mask everyone else saw, the mask I saw. I like how I look in spite still feeling like I look like that mask, not because I don’t see that mask in me anymore.

So it’s not a comfortable, peaceful enjoyment of how I look. It’s tenuous and tentative and one foot in the door. An act of rebellion and reclamation and tiptoeing through a minefield.

Maybe the future will be different.

Maybe the future will be more of the same.

I’m on a good path. I’m doing well. I’m enough. I love myself. I’ll be Ok.

Thanks for listening. I hope you too can love yourself. Good luck, and I’m here for you.