Amateur: Transitioning Is Not as Simple as "Before" and "After" Photos Show
Why narratives that frame transition as a linear process with a “beginning” and “end” are failing us.

BY THOMAS PAGE MCBEE

A secret: Sometimes, I look in the mirror — still — and see a stranger.

I’m not supposed to feel anything but joy when I look at my reflection. I mean, I’ve been on testosterone for seven years. For the 30 years before I started hormones, that same dissonant feeling — perhaps best soundtracked by the famous Talking Heads song, “Once in a Lifetime” (And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here?) — dogged me daily, the volume increasing until I finally made the decision to transition. My “before” body melded into this “after” one. Don’t get me wrong — when I catch the bearded guy in the mirror now, I mostly feel clearer, calmer, more familiar. But sometimes, especially after a hard day — a misunderstanding with my wife, maybe, or jangled tension with some guy on the subway platform — I see myself and think, “Who the fuck is this dude staring back at me?” That wondering used to scare me. It doesn’t anymore.

I share this because I’ve begun to question where I first thought to frame my trans body in these neat terms of “before” and “after” in the first place. It’s not that I catch myself looking back and expect or want to see the “before.” It’s just that thinking of myself in terms of “after” sometimes obscures the whole story. This passing — as a cis man, a man who had a boyhood, a man others can stereotype and make snap judgements about — hasn’t ever felt quite right, either. Despite my hard-won muscle definition and lower voice, the best way for me to quiet my own clanging dissonance has always been to see myself as a sum of the lives I’ve lived, not a man divorced from my past. I’ve never been good about fitting into boxes; not when I was a masculine teen slinking around in backwards baseball caps, and not now either.

The notion that there even is an “after” to my transition — that I’ve completed some great journey in the years since I began injecting testosterone — feels like someone else’s narrative. I’ve come to see it as a shortcut, a story about my body to make other people feel more comfortable with it, and sometimes maybe myself, too. How nice to think that transitions have a definitive ending and not face the scarier truth, regardless of gender: that life is nothing if not a series of transitions — births and deaths and breakups and new loves and new jobs and cross-country moves — with new parts of ourselves illuminated and integrated along the way. If anything, those small moments of calm between transitions are the exceptions. They’re certainly not the destination.

We know this in other contexts, of course. Mothers who give birth do not leave motherhood when their children arrive; they enter a new, messier phase of it. Voting does not make one an adult, sadly. When people who are well over the age of 18 claim to be “adulting,” they are slyly acknowledging that adulthood is a state one occupies gradually, and in a way that sometimes takes us by surprise.

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