Come Out With Your Hands Up

issue 256 - 19th May, 2024

by Corey Jae White

Some of you might have noticed that I slightly changed my name at the top of the newsletter recently, and you might have wondered why. Some of you might follow me on Bluesky, in which case none of this will be a surprise, but I’ve got an announcement.

I’m not entirely sure what I want to say here. One obvious option is to say “I’m trans, deal with it,” then add the falling sunglasses gif.

But hell, I don’t even know if a gif will work in the newsletter…

Another option is to say “I’m trans,” and drop a screenshot of David Lynch as Gordon Cole saying “Fix your hearts or die.”

Both are valid options – anyone who can’t deal with it, or isn’t willing to at least try, has no place in my life. They can fix their hearts or die, as far as I’m concerned. It took me 40 years to reach this realisation, and I’m not going to slow or doubt my transition to make anyone feel comfortable. If that sounds harsh, it’s only because - with my long and sometimes-constant history of suicide ideation - the idea of interfering with my transition in any way feels like a risk to my safety.

But maybe that’s all needlessly defensive. The truth is that everyone I’ve told – with the exception of my parents, who at least seem to be trying – have accepted the news easily, many with excitement or even joy. I feel so loved, and with the (so-far only partial) shedding of my self-loathing that transition has allowed, I can even find love for myself. It’s impossible to overstate how important that has been. Even typing the words bring tears to my eyes, because I lived for decades with depression, self-hatred, and body dysmorphia (distinct to dysphoria). I feel more like myself than I ever have, and seeing a new self in the mirror, and one that I can love, is life-changing. Maybe life-saving.

A lot of trans people are able to recognise their true gender early in life, whether or not they are able to act on it at the time or not until later (sometimes much later, and sometimes never, I’m sure). But it didn’t happen like that for me. Rather, right from the start of puberty I hated my body, was self-conscious about it, hated the way things worked or didn’t, hated myself. There was never a thought in my mind that said “If I was a woman I would be happier” – any latent desire I had to be a woman was utterly disconnected from the reality of transition being something that real people in the real world did and therefore that I could do. (Though interestingly, I always felt queer. I thought I was a cis man, and I only dated women, but I still felt queer. Makes sense now, of course.)

I have to thank pandemic lockdowns for starting me on this path, and from social media anecdotal evidence, I think the same is true for a lot of people. For me, it probably wasn’t even as big a change as some – I worked from home before the pandemic, so the only change was not going out socially, but even that was enough for me to realise there was a significant gap between the masculinity I performed and wore as a costume, and how I actually felt within myself. At the time I settled on “agender” and honestly I think it’s only because it was the least scary option. I didn’t have to consider the spectrum of possibilities inherent in being non-binary, and I didn’t have to face the fact that I could actually be trans. But even saying that now, I can admit that at the time I still recognised that it likely wasn’t the end of my journey. I told myself, “There’s probably like a 10% chance I’m actually trans.” (This is obviously not something a cis person would think, and if they’re being honest with themselves, it’s probably not something an agender person would think either.) Eventually that percentage ticked up to 30%… and, well, I can’t remember what thought it was, but one day I had a thought that was so incredibly trans that immediately after it I thought to myself, “Okay, maybe it’s more like a 90% chance I’m trans.” And then immediately after that I thought to myself, “You idiot; you’re trans. Of course you’re trans.” And I knew it was true.

It still took a couple of weeks to accept. Even as I came out to those closest to me, I had doubts because it’s fucking scary. Not just changing your body and self, but the ways in which everybody else will change how they relate to you. And more than that, the increasing demonisation of trans people by a loudly bigoted minority. But once the cat was out of the bag, I couldn’t stop. Once those doubts were gone they never returned. And with certainty at my side, the only thing to do was to start making the changes, even if that process is a slow and long one. (On the plus side, the HRT process is a fascinating one - the ways that swapping hormones can utterly alter your body is incredible.)

Transition hasn’t cured my depression, but I didn’t really expect it to. Even after I realised how much dysphoria I’d lived with for most of my life, I still recognised that the depression and anxiety were seperate and distinct things. That said, transition has helped a lot – the baseline for my mood is so much higher than it used to be, and people in my life have told me how it seems like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, that I seem lighter, that I’m glowing. My psychologist recognised that I’m more hopeful about the future now - something I’ve struggled with since around about the same time I started to hate myself and my body.

Sometimes I still get pissed about that last 30%, but it’s easy enough to remember that the bad thoughts, the shitty voice in the back of my head, and the low moods, these things pass. And after they pass, I’ll still be here, still a woman, still forging my true self out of the detritus of the old and all the brilliant gems of the new that I’ve allowed myself access to.