Episode twelve of the Some Gender Going On podcast: Transition Experiences. You can play it or download it here:

A bunch of smaller notes or themes from a big list of experiences.

Notes

Some gender going on, episode 12.

I’m Izzy Grosof, and today we’re talking about transition effects.

I’ve gone through a record of transition effects I’ve been keeping and I’m going to talking a variety of things I wrote down there - not just read them out but think about how I feel. These effects emphasize HRT effects, but they’re not limited to HRT effects - that’s just around when I started writing them down. I’ll use those comments as jumping off points for larger discussion.

Seeing my face

””” 9/20/23

So recently I’ve been noticing how I look in some Zoom calls, specifically my face, and going “hey I look cute!”

I think it’s some combination of HRT effects and video processing And it’s such an unexpected and nice feeling I don’t think I’ve felt this way looking at my face before

Yeah, it’s kind of wonderful and kind of heartbreaking That I’ve never liked how I looked even for a moment, to that point where even half noticing myself positively is an unexpected and memorable experience “””

For reference, I started HRT on 4/18/2023, so this was 3 months later.

In retrospect, I never looked at myself growing up, in a mirror, photograph, reflective window, if I could help it. I really didn’t like how I looked. I never did. It wasn’t just that I never liked what I saw, that was a given. I never looked. Not even when engaging in ostensibly asthetic activities, like buying clothes. I was always going to hate what I saw so I might as well get through it as fast as possible. It made certain activities a lot harder that involve looking at oneself in the mirror, like tooth brushing or shaving. Makeup too.

So it had to be accidental, it couldn’t’ve happened any other way. I wouldn’t have looked, my intuitive self didn’t think that anything better was possible.

In the time since then, things have gotten way, way better. When I put it all together, figured out the pattern that I liked how I looked if it was blurred and after a few months on HRT, I started intentionally doing that, downloaded a blur filter and put it over my face and I really liked it! Before too long, I stopped needing the blur of the video processing to enjoy how I looked!

””” 1/20/2024

My cheeks have so many dimples when I smile, and they’re really cute. I’m gradually coming to like how my face looks! “””

By April or so, I even started intentionally looking at myself in the mirror with the expectation that I’d like how I look, and with the intention of cheering myself up. And it worked! And now that’s how it is all the time. I can make myself smile just from imagining past photos!

I’ve certainly come a long way.

””” 8/3/2024 I have freckles now! I think they’re very cute I started developing them about 9 months on E (January), judging from past photos, and they’ve been getting more clear and darker over time “””

I definitely didn’t used to have freckles because I tried freckle-imitating makeup a while ago and I have photos of myself doing that and I didn’t have freckles then.

There’s a recurring theme in my transition of wanting to have very specific qualities, longing for them in an impossible, always-out-of-reach sort of way, and then having those very specific longings come through! Freckles are just a very simple example of that pattern.

I don’t think it’s entirely coincidence or back-fitting either, I think a good fraction of that was just longing to have a body very similar to mine but with a variety of qualities that felt more femme to me. And a lot of that actually turned out to be possible!

Sense of smell and taste

””” 9/20/23

Another recent nice experience: HRT has made my sense of smell stronger, and I ordered a box of bar soap, and I remember before I couldn’t smell this brand of soap at all, but now I can and it smells really nice. “””

I remember that the reviews on the soap included a few people saying they couldn’t smell the soap at all and that they were disappointed, and I didn’t mind that when I bought it because I hadn’t previously had good experiences with soap smells - most of the soaps I had been able to smell had been cloying and unpleasant. So it was objectively a subtle smell, and smells didn’t just get stronger, they also got nicer - less likely to be cloying and overpowering, though that still happens with a variety of scents.

I remember that when I was feeling out HRT, working up the clarity to begin, I called up an older trans woman, a friend of my dad. She mentioned that a stronger/fulled sense of smell was something she’d experienced too, though in her case it was often negative, making public restrooms a worse experience for instance. So I was happy that my first really noticable experience with a stronger sense of smell was positive.

Fast-forwarding to near the present,

””” 12/2/2024 I’ve noticed that my flavor preferences have been shifting, in a way that seems plausibly like an HRT effect. Specifically I haven’t been liking spicy foods as much as I used to. I notice them less and enjoy them less when I eat them, and they hurt more later. I’m also enjoying salty foods more, including just directly eating salt “””

To be clear, enjoying salt is so common as to be a meme among transfem people on E. The classic version is a craving for pickles, but I’ve just gone for a block of salt. People attribute it to spironolactone, which is a diuretic. Either way, I’m getting a sense of what I like and it’s different but still nice.

Terms of address

””” 10/1/2023

An increasing fraction of strangers trying to get my attention are using terms like “ma’am” rather than “sir”. This is very nice! Not sure whether it’s due to HRT, moving to Atlanta, or some other reason. I’m enjoying it

”””

I also liked ‘Dear’ by an older man who worked at a resteraunt I frequented.

””” 7/20/24 A bus driver was trying to get my attention by saying “hello, miss?”, I didn’t realize he was talking to me. He repeated himself several times before he started waving at me, at which point I realized. I was the only passenger on the bus. There’s a lot of gender stuff here. I don’t feel like a “miss”, and strangers definitely see me as one. I’ll need to think about how I feel about that, whether I want to feel like a “miss”, and what I’m going to do about it “””

It’s interesting to see how related but subtly different terms feel different. Ma’am is possitive, miss is “Who’s that?”. I’m not sure why.

Also, I have complicated feelings around “girl”. There’s three different contexts where I’ve primarily encountered it. As a prefix in girlfriend, I prefer enfriend, which isn’t particularly common but I like it. As an intimate term in the context of a relationship, girl can be nice. And then there’s as general term of address, like “girl, I don’t know how you keep getting into spots like this.” I’ve heard it called the “gay voice” or gay dialect, though I’ve mostly heard it from trans women, though that says more about my social spheres that about the usage itself.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. Complicated. I suppose it’s not my preference but maybe not strongly disprefered enough to ask people to change? Not sure.

Smoother and softer skin

This is perhps my favorite change. “”” 10/28/2023 My skin is feeling smoother and softer in areas where I don’t have hair, like my forehead or the top center of my feet. I like it! “””

It’s a very dramatic and intense change and it’s so much better, though the difference is only that dramatic in a few areas.

””” 3/17/2024 My skin is getting a lot smoother, softer, and more uniform in color “””

It’s not just the texture, it’s the look too. I remeber really dislikin the shape of my arms because it felt like my muscles protruded in the wrong spots, and it’s a lot better now. It took a long time for me to be comfortable wearing sleeveless tops, lke tank tops and some dresses, and now I really like them.

A friend recently said that I had very feminine looking arms, in the context of HRT effects they were looking for, so I’d say that things are going very well, and I appreciate the compliment!

Talking

””” 11/7/2023

I learned how to talk today! By which I mean I was doing some voice training and found a voice I really like! I wrote a poem about learning to talk: https://isaacg1.github.io/2023/11/25/learning-to-talk.html “””

Let me read this poem, in the voice that it refers to.

If I could only talk In a way I could not bear to hear, Did I know how to talk at all?

Now I am learning to speak And learning to hear myself speak In a way I can take joy in.

I am crying to hear myself speak, The pain of a voice I fled from hearing, And the relief of knowing it might not be forever.

I only knew how to make sandpaper and rusty nails Come up out of my throat, And the best I could do was try not to hear them.

Now, I’m learning to make smooth, glossy, clean, new, musical, liquid, translucent, pure, alive, sounds. All from the same throat, the same me.

Learning to speak is hard, Because learning to speak means learning to hear, And I hurt to my core to hear my in-built voice.

But hard is not impossible, And pain is surmountable, And the future is bright and vibrant.

Now, I can speak. Speak, and hear myself. Hear, and feel joy.

That was a miracle, a milestone, to be sure. But it wasn’t the end of the story by any means. I could perform this voice which I liked much better, and sometimes it would feel like my voice. Sometimes I couldn’t intuitively tell if I was enacting this voice because it felt so much like mine and then one I speak in by default sounds so much not like mine that I’d lose track. But I can tell which is which by how I feel about them. The generally pattern is that if I’m introspecting deeply on my voice and I feel Ok or even good about it, it’s the new voice. If it brings me to tears, or I block it out, or soldier through, that’s the old one. It’s very consistent, more consistent than my intuitive sense of “used to this”.

But that doesn’t mean I can maintain it. When I speak this was, my voice slowly relaxes out of it back towards and towards the old voice. I have to conciously keep pushing myself into this voice to stay here, and that’s a very adversarial way to engage with myself. Recently, I’ve been taking a different approach where I place myself in this new voice and then just let my voice drift where it will. Even if it relaxes back, I’m gaining experience with out the heavy wait of self-adversariality. So it’s worth trying. I might go for a voice therapist as well, still not sure about that.

Fingers

””” 12/7/2023

Also I looked at my fingers (how often do I actually look at my fingers) and they’re getting slimmer. Like I compared them against some old photos and they’re definitely thinner than they used to be “””

I like slimmer, longer fingers. I didn’t like when they were stubbier. They felt too big and clumsy and now they’re much better.

””” 3/7/2024 I have really nice nails/hands now: “””

Nails got much more transparent, which means the pink background is much more visible, rather than just the more opaque color of the nail itself, and more irridescent as well.

Body Hair

””” 1/25/2024 I have decided that chest hair on [cleavage] is allowed to be cute, and that mine is. This message brought to you by non-binary body positivity.

I’ve had a lot of insecurity over the years about wearing clothes with a neckline that shows my chest hair, based on worries about how it’ll be viewed. And those worries have gotten in the way of my own feelings about myself.

I think part of where that comes from is that most transfem people who post photos on the Internet have essentially no visible body hair - partially this is an HRT effect, partially shaving or other depilation techniques, partially because the people who are posting a lot are often people who are more conventionally attractive, partially because other transfem people who look more like me aren’t as much of a fan of how it looks. And it’s ok for me not to fit in to that, and to take joy in not fitting in. I’m free, baby, I can take joy in whatever I want “””

I’ve also checked and my chest hair was much darker and denser before HRT, and a lot of what was going on with the insecurity of and dysphoria was not recognizing that my chest hair had gotten much lighter and thinner and is now only noticable in a few areas. Reviewing some old photos, it was really different back then before HRT.

But I kept the mindset towards myself and my chest hair that I’d built up back then, for a long time.

””” 3/27/2024 I no longer have hair on the upper two-thirds of my back. By which I mean that I don’t feel hair there, and I’m pretty sure I consistently felt hair there before HRT. No removal, just stopped growing. “””

I was so surprised when this happen, doubting my older memories, just in disbelief. For all that I’d heard and seen that this could change, I didn’t really believe it, I think this was the first that I’d directly and undoubtably noticed the change.

””” 11/22/2024 My leg hair now blends in with my leg skin - it’s no longer visible. I remember it used to be quite visible, so this is a very significant change, though I’m not sure exactly when it started changing because I always avoided looking at it for dysphoria reasons “””

This lessening of visibility, even though it isn’t completely gone, that’s been very important for me. On my legs and my and stomach, what used to be denser, coarser, and near-black in color has become less dense, less thick, and just less noticable. Now, to be clear, when I wrote that it wasn’t visible at all, that was a case where I wasn’t wearing my classes and I was looking for a couple feet away. Still, even with my glasses, I have to focus intensely to see anything from this distance, and in low light I don’t see it.

And when it comes to my chest, I have a little diamond shaped patch of chest hair on my upper chest/cleavage area. It lies flat along the skin, giving the impression of neat little parallel rows. And it’s a light grey/brown color, definitely not black. And it feels smooth and gentle and soft.

I’ve really come so far.

I remember a few years before I started HRT, maybe 2021, a roommate mentioned that he thougt it was cool that I, a person with a masc-looking chest and chest hair, was wearing femme-cut tops and that it had inspired him (a gay man) to also wear tops that showed more chest. It’s a nice sentiment, and I conciously understood that it was intended as complimentary, but I had so much built up dysphoria and shame and wrongness that I couldn’t accept the compliment or talk about the subject at all, just clam up and be sad. And now I conciously wear clothes like that all the time and talk about these experiences and it’s so very different.

Name

””” 3/27/2024 Also, I’ve started to write Izzy as my signature on all my emails, and putting it as my primary name everywhere. Isaac will never be wrong, but I’ve decided to make it secondary. “””

So to clarify, Isaac is my birth name, Izzy is the name I primarily go by. Isaac will never not-be my name. This is very much unlike a lot of trans people I know, whose birth name is dead and very much not to be used.

That’s not the experience I have with the name Isaac. Isaac is still me - I hear peoplke use that name and my mind respnds that they’re talking to me, though in reality there often talking to other people - I know multiple other nonbinary people named Isaac. If you’re listening, Isaac, hi! Love the name! But I like the name Isaac, and I maintain my claim on it. I have a piece of artwork depicting my name that I specifically brought aross the country to my new apartment, because I want to keep it with me.

I like the name Isaac. I’m not accidentally keeping it in my email and website name and all of that. It’s on purpose. They’re both mine.

That being said, I don’t like how society views Isaac. Isaac is a patriarch of the Torah, it’s treated as always-male, with no room for people like me. It makes it hard. Izzy is nice - in my age range, it’s female by default but with enough variety to leave some extra room. I know male Izzy’s and female Izzy’s and nonbinary Izzy’s. This is what I want.

Stretch marks

””” 4/2/2024 I have my first stretch marks: on the fronts of my upper thighs, a lighter tan than the upper skin, vertical striations. I like them, they’re cute! And I checked, definitely an HRT/second puberty thing “””

By “I checked” I mean that it’s an experience that other people have had, especially on E.

””” 7/16/2024 I have belly stretch marks from fat redistributing away from my gut! I love them, they feel really nice! “””

I really like the visible signs of my shape changing!

This experience with stretch marks helped me understand that, while I didn’t like my body shape and I’d previously attributed that to weight, the core of my dislike of my shape was the maleness of that shape, more than anything else. Stretch marks are decisively femme-coded for me, and so I like them, end of story!

Eyes

””” 4/7/24 I think my eye color has gotten lighter - from medium-dark blue-grey to a lighter blue-grey. I think the resting position of my eyes is also more open “””

This is one of those very subtle things, hard to determine outside of a careful photograph or mirror or someone looking deep inside me. But I do thik it’s happened, and I like it!

Cooler temperatures

””” 4/14/2024 I have developed a preference for cooler temperatures since being on E - more comfortable outside in cooler temperatures and/or with lighter clothing, less comfortable with hot temperatures in my apartment, preference towards cooler showers This is interesting because it’s the opposite of the commonly reported experience on E. Most people get much less cold tolerant, prefer warmer temperatures “””

This has definitely been an interesting experience, playing against type to this extent. It might have a little overlap with menopausal hot flashes, though HRT is designed to treat that specific symptom so it’s more than a bit odd.

But yesterday it was 45F and I was overheated in my coat so I took it off and experienced the colder air and it was so nice.

Pronouns

Announced using she on 1/19/2024.

Before that, they/them only. I had someone use she for me in an application letter to grad school, and people use she for me just guessing on vibes in Atlanta, and it was clearly better than he, so I decided to settle and put it in the list. It’s fine. It’s whatever. It’s Ok. It’s not like the joy of they.

””” 10/4/2024 I’m trying out another pronoun set, at least with people who I think will get it: ae/aer pronouns. Sample usage: Izzy gave a talk about aer research. Ae is really excited about it, you should talk to aer. Ae’d love to talk, the pleasure would be aers.

Ae is pronounced like the letter A, and aer is pronounced like the word air.

I like ae equal with they, and I like both better than she, though all three are good to use.

If you’re up for it, I’d appreciate it if you try out using ae for me so I can see how I like it! “””

Adding ae was part of coming to terms with the fact that I really don’t like she that much. like it’s fine but not good, if that makes sense. It’s a compromise. Ae is better.

Part of why I like ae is its associations. It’s ae like they, it’s aer like her. It draws on both identities. I like ae the way I like ae.

That’s everything I have to talk about here. Thanks for listening, thanks for thinking, and I’ll see you next time.