April 27, 2020. The first day I thought I could feel alive. I haven't really thought much about my HRT anniversaries since the first or second one; it feels kinda weird to make a big deal out of the sixth one, especially when I've been kinda on and off it throughout due to financial/gender experimentation reasons anyway. I think moving to a city where queerness is unapologetically everywhere has reminded me of how significant something like starting HRT is to who I am. Sure, the physical changes are nice, but that's not really what makes it so important to me. It gave me the space to figure out who I am, and lately I've started feeling a lot more certain of what that means. Everyone always is and always will be changing, but especially with starting this blog? I want to keep better track of the ways I've changed and will continue to. Lately, the past has felt so distant; I look back on most of the years before 2020, and I struggle to feel like they even happened. It helps to write about it, to connect it to who I am now in some way. So like the last one, we'll be starting pretty early this entry too.
The only good thing to come out of being on the internet at a young age was that I was exposed to the concept of transgenderism pretty early in life. Gay marriage hadn't even been federally legalized yet. However, queerness was alive and well in certain corners of the web back then despite this; coming across those spaces was foundational to me. When I was 13, I used to hang around and post my poetry on this website called Quotev. It was a great place for people to post their original stories, fanfictions, and hastily thrown together personality quizzes. It was like Archive of our Own (A03) but with a modern-by 2010 standards-look, as well as less of a focus on fanfiction. Despite this, fandom culture still dominated most of the platform, and fandom culture might've been the easiest pipeline to queerness around that time. While that's beautiful in a way, it's also the reason that I can truthfully say I would not have started questioning my gender when I did if it wasn't for creepypasta.
As funny as it would be to say that Jane the Killer was my transition inspiration or something like that, the reality is a little more complex than that :P I was pretty much anonymous online when I posted my poetry back then. The idea of anyone else in my school finding my writing back then TERRIFIED me. It was extremely unlikely, sure, but it COULD happen. So I had no personal details, including gender, on my account. Not even a fake name that would imply one. I can't remember my original online username but it was almost certainly related to My Chemical Romance or Bright Eyes somehow. My second one was a Car Seat Headrest reference. I am a creature of habit xD Whatever the case, one of the very few people who actually read my poetry online had sent me a message. Come to think of it, that might've been my first time speaking directly to someone else online about anything that wasn't on a game-specific forum about said game. We talked a little, and a few messages in he had introduced himself; his name was Alex.
I hadn't really known what it was like to have an online friend before then, or a friend in person for that matter. I didn't talk much when I was a child. Counselors regularly checked on me; I even got put in this program for kids who don't have any friends when I was in third grade. It didn't really help, and even by seventh grade when I got a bit comfortable with speaking sometimes people still didn't really like me. I got bullied a LOT, and had a very tulmutuous home life, so somebody showing me kindness felt like the most wonderful and scary thing in the world, even from a few states away. We had that in common, so we talked a lot.
We had lots of similar interests and experiences. We both were emo kids living in homophobic southern states. We liked pop punk, screamo, creepypasta, all the stuff that hits different when you're a closeted queer kid with parents who shut down your expressions of queerness when you were a kid, before you even knew what being gay or whatever meant. So when I started developing a bit of a crush on Alex, it felt so freeing. The feeling was mutual too; during one of our ooVoo (if you know, you know) video calls, Alex said that he had feelings for me, but that there was something else he needed to tell me. He looked so scared in the moment; I think he could tell that I had no idea he wasn't just a cis guy. After a long minute or two of trying to work up the courage to say it, he told me he was trans.
I had seen the term transgender before; I WAS on tumblr too, after all. However, a lot of what I had heard was rooted in tragedy back then. Don't get me started on how the internet treated Leelah Alcorn. I wasn't very familiar with the specifics, however. I've kinda never felt super attached to the idea of gender, but thinking about it for myself back then made me feel scared. Especially in a place like Texas, I just didn't want to find out I was and have to live with all that entails. I kinda avoided doing any real research on it for a bit. But now here I was, face to face (720p camera to 720p camera?) with an actual trans person. I learned so much from him.
Shortly after we met, I started using the name Lillian online; I eventually began using the name Catherine with him though, as well as the two other friends I made on Quotev (shoutout Dawn, who is also trans now and the only friend from this era I still have contact with!).
Something I found fascinating about him was that he seemed to resonate a lot with certain characters to the point where he'd headcanon them as transgender. His account was like, halfway a Ticci Toby roleplay account. While the phenomenon of calling your favorite characters in media trans is pretty commonplace now, it was my first time seeing it. I started finding myself doing the same, ESPECIALLY with video game characters. Even now, the Y in my name comes from Alyx in Half Life 2. My last name is Celeste, and ANY trans person who is broadly familiar with indie games knows where tha comes from. After spending so much time on GameFAQs and spending lots of time reading older posts there too, it felt cathartic to call Freya Crescent (the anthropomorphic rat girl from Final Fantasy IX) transgender in my head. The gaming community still has a queerphobia problem, but it was much worse back then. This was the first time I realized playing around with my gender could be intrisically linked to the more important and definitive parts of who I am than gender.
Another thing I learned of was the concept of hormone replacement therapy. As we got more comfortable being short-lived online boyfriends, he talked a bit about testosterone. He wasn't on it yet as a 14 year old closeted trans kid in Alabama, of course. I sure hope he is now. The way he explained it made it sound like magic. And it IS magic, but it took me a little while to learn that. When he told me that trans girls also have a form of HRT, I spent the next week or doing lots of research into it. This was by the point that I had sort of stopped caring about public school and my grades and such, but I reallyyyyy locked in for this.
Alex was a good friend of mine, even after we broke up because neither of us really knew how relationships worked anyway. Both of us felt so trapped where we were too, and having something that felt like hope but felt so far away could be torturous at times. We drifted apart as we both started spending less time on Quotev. The next year or so, I had fallen into isolating myself again. After a failed suicide attempt at age 15, I decided it was time to start living as myself or I wouldn't live at all. I started living as a girl, except at home. I still didn't really think I'd live long enough to start HRT, but at least if I had died there'd be some people who knew my name.
Two years later, I was a 17 year old working a shitty job that didn't pay much. A lot happened in between, and I was going by the name Katya online and in person now. My family knew as well; my dad disowned me when he accidentally found out I was a girl I started saving up to start HRT, in between helping pay for food at home since my dad was a neglectful bastard. Anyway! I scheduled my first appointment for March 27th, 2020. My 18th birthday. A better, different life started to feel possible. I did my first bloodwork for HRT, the doctors found out that my hormones were kinda weird already, but they cleared me to start HRT when I came back a month later to sign my informed consent paperwork. I waited 50 minutes outside the pharmacy (Covid was still very new!) with my 3DS, and I finally had it. I took my first dose of it in a nearby crumbling, empty Houston parking lot, and I sat there in silence for the next ten minutes or so before the Texas heat had made me rush to order my Uber. I was surprised by how small it felt in the moment, but something had changed. I didn't instantly feel happy, but for the first time, it felt like someday I could be.
There's a lot I could write about my actual experiences with HRT, which was my original idea for my six years anniversary entry. But as I started typing, I realized that for the most part now, HRT mostly just feels like a part of my daily routine that I don't really think about. It's mostly pretty mundane; some days you look in the mirror and realize that you're barely recognizable from older photos of yourself (most of which, physical and digital, I wiped from the face of the Earth as best I could a week or two before I started HRT). I could describe physical changes, but that's boring. I could describe emotional changes, but I can't really attribute nearly as much of that to HRT as much as growing and learning from the world and people around me, as well as no longer being in a hostile environment surrounded by two decades worth of trauma. So I thought it'd be fun to do a little bit of recap on how I found out I wanted to start in the first place :3
It does get to me sometimes how much of this feels like someone else's life now. Even the same day last year feels that way, to an extent. Two years ago, I was going through a divorce and the worst crashout of my adult life. But six years ago, that quiet moment where it felt like for a second, it all washed away and I could be someone I loved, still feels so vivid. I can remember every single detail like it happened yesterday. I remember when I saw myself in the mirror later that day. Nothing had changed yet, but it was the first time it felt like I could bear to look at myself in the mirror without feeling disgusted at what I saw. It felt like I was someone new. Someone who could be free. Now, when I look in the mirror, I feel love.