Dear Cisters: How do I get past wishing I had transitioned at a younger age?
This question (and its many variations) comes from any of us wishing we’d started transitioning sooner.
QUESTION
Dear Stephenie,
This is awful. I hate it.
My body isn’t mine. It just isn’t.
I spent way too many years with the wrong hormones, the wrong clothes, the wrong voice, the wrong EVERYTHING.
And now here I am. I missed out on all of the things I should have had.
School. Friends. Career. Romance. Failure. Success.
I did it ALL as the wrong gender.
I feel desperate. I want to do this. I want to transition.
But I can’t help but wish that I had done it sooner.
I can’t help but feel like I wasted ALL THAT TIME.
Why didn’t they let me do this sooner?
Why didn’t I let myself?
Sincerely,
Literally Every Trans Type Under the Cishet Experience (LETTUCE)
ANSWER
Dear LETTUCE,
You know that part of Back to the Future where changing something at one point in time changes stuff at ALL points of time? Marty’s actions in the present affect the future, which affects the past, which affects the present, which rewrites the entire timeline…
(Let me know if you’re too young to know what I’m talking about, it helps me feel like a mom lol)
Transitioning is like going back in time and being born cisgender. I know it might not feel like that’s true early in your transition, but each step you take deeper into transitioning in the present pushes your transition further and further back into your past.
The more you see yourself as the right gender identity TODAY and tomorrow, the more your mirrored selves in the past will transition along with you.
I DID IT AND SO CAN YOU
Take me, for example. I am not becoming a girl. I have always been one.
Did I always know I was a girl? Did the people around me always know that? They did not. But my memories tell me new truths based on seeing myself as a girl at points of my past that used to confuse and shame me.
Your memories, you see, aren’t really memories. Well, they are, but we don’t contain MEMORIES as objective things. When we remember something, we are remembering the last time we remembered something.
You follow?
And your memories are 100% determined by your current perception of yourself. You can’t change those memories without reshaping how you manifest your true self today. It’s like trying to travel back in time without a flux capacitor. It just doesn’t work.
WTF IS A FLUX CAPACITOR?
In Back to the Future, the flux capacitor is responsible for preserving the timeline. Without the flux capacitor, the DeLorean would never cross the barrier between now and then. But with it?
Everything suddenly makes sense.
Transitioning is your flux capacitor. Build it. Use it. The more you do, the further back in time you’ll travel. And eventually, the changes in the present travel back to when your desperation was first born.
Your eagerness to go back in time to before you were born and make sure that person was ALWAYS who you were meant to be?
You’ll see yourself as you truly are.
You are a woman. You always were.
The end
Hi, it’s Stephenie!
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