you may change your mind. so what?

“The wind is rising. We must try to live”

Paul Valéry, quoted in The Wind Rises (2013, dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

The thing about transition is that to be allowed to do it, you have to be sure. You have to be the surest of sure in your soundest of minds. Of course, most of us are getting hormones off the internet and scraping together money for laser with no medical permission whatsoever; even if you want it, you can't get it. Outside of the clinic people still generally think that trans people do what they do only when they are absolutely and irrevocably certain.

What if you change your mind?

Well, hi.

There is nothing I advocate more than the act of material self-transformation. Transition is a decision only you can make, because the world doesn't want you to. How we feel is probably not a choice, but taking action to make our feelings real is. It's a choice that made me feel alive when nothing else could. And now I'm a year into detransition, having once again made a choice that has made me feel more alive than I ever have before.

You might change your mind. I miss my tits, and I do not regret top surgery. I wouldn't be here to detransition today without having chosen to transition years ago. Not in the sense that I'd be dead (although maybe I would), but I would not be this alive to my desires and the unique pain of being human if I had never at least tried.

If I show up to the doctor and tell them I've changed my mind, then my judgement will be written off forever. I proved that I was certain and sane enough to get their permission, but now I want something else. I wasn't tricked and I wasn't incapable of apprehending my actions. My desires simply changed, and the idea of the eternally suffering transsexual soul shattered. How can someone who treats the rules as such ephemera ever be trusted to make a decision about their own body ever again?

Transition hurt because the decision to change my body and my self was not mine to make. The state has to approve your documents, and the doctors write your permission slip to the surgeon. Struggling to exert self-determination in a world that will never allow it hurts just the same now as it did then. Will a surgeon treat my desire for breast implants as the sanctioned desire of a cis woman, or that of a deviant who requires psychiatric sign-off? I will have to find out.

It doesn't matter if you change your mind. You'll find a way to live. But only if you find one now first.



i wrote this for a zine that never came out, so i've published it here