Three Years On T!
Transitioning gets a lot easier once it becomes background noise.
Surprise! This Substack isn’t dead. Time flies when you’re focused on the world around you falling apart. But in a sliver of good news, I’m finally hitting 3 years on T, so it’s time for my Yearly Transition Post™️.
February 17th marks 3 years on testosterone, though my first year on gel felt like it only half-counted. In my first months of transition, I did AMAs every month. In my first and second year, I wrote about transitioning constantly, in ways both positive and painful. I turned my obsessive thinking into testosterone research that’s as close to scientific as I and my lack of formal credentials can manage. It was everything in my life, including the theme of this Substack. And now, as I’m about to start year 3, I’m realizing I… actually don’t have that much to say about being trans?
I never thought I’d say this, but not constantly thinking about being trans anymore is actually the biggest blessing of my life.
Every year now, I read the previous year’s thoughts on my transition. What stands out about Year 2 the most is this:
“Getting here has been excruciating. I’ve spent the past year doing pretty much nothing but transition. I stopped posting Reels and TikToks almost entirely, mostly because I felt too fragile to even give a chance for strangers to comment on my life. I fell off doing comedy in person, I tried and failed to get a full-time job, I isolated from friends— and most of these things happened because I couldn’t bear to go out into a world that I knew didn’t see me how I saw me. Being depressed about transition not changing me enough became a full-time job. Someday, when I have a job and a comedy career, maybe I’ll see it as more of a cocoon year and less of a flop year. For now, I’m trying to pick up the pieces of what dysphoria destroyed.”
The bad news is I meant to take a month off from comedy in June 2025 and have kind of barely returned yet (see: world falling apart around me. That said, you can book me now, if you still remember I’m out there.) The good news is I did get a job— one that I’ve never told I was trans, so it’s mercifully never come up. I don’t know that I’d call the past year a cocoon year. I wish I hadn’t limited myself so much because of how sad I was. I can’t change it. All I can do is celebrate who I’ve become now.
I go weeks at a time without being misgendered, maybe even months. The significant part is that I don’t remember. I pass on the phone 99% of the time. Most strangers finally default to the “he/him” I worked so hard for instead of “she” or the dreaded “they,” which feels like a “keep trying buddy, you’re almost there!” when applied to me specifically.
Most importantly, being trans is just not my first priority anymore.
The world is burning. I’m scared, and many of the people I love are even more scared. What do I care if a crossing guard waves me over with “come on, ladies”? The man I’m standing next to has a mustache darker than mine, so how can I take it personally? Instead of being hurt and spiraling for days, I can just laugh. And I can start greeting that crossing guard when I see her. To know me as a man, she has to know me at all. Part of the solution to what remains of dysphoria is the opposite of what I’ve done: let yourself be known.
I used to speak quietly out of fear that my voice would give me away. Now, I have no issue yelling “BACK DOOR” from the back of a bus. I compliment strangers more. I’m friendlier. I can be in public without thinking about what everyone around me must be thinking of me.
I can’t speak for any other trans person’s experience, but for me, the most important shift in the last year isn’t more gender euphoria. It’s the lack of dysphoria (though the second runner up is my new chest hair). Of course I still love the excitement of becoming more masculine, and I don’t expect that to ever go away. But the biggest life-altering shift is that for the vast majority of my days, I get to feel nothing about being a trans man. It’s my baseline, it’s my background, it just is. The more I pass, the less I care about passing. It’s a hell of a paradox.
I will also turn 30 a few days after my third T-versary.
What once felt like a big scary milestone has been made much lighter by my transition— not just because the world is much kinder to men about turning 30 than women, but also because imagining who I will become as I continue my adult life isn’t so terrifying anymore. The moment that made me realize I had to transition was being at my grandpa’s funeral and listening to the Rabbi say, “recite the first version of this prayer, this one is for burying men. The other one is for women.” It sounds dark, but what pushed me to finally live as a man was the fear I wouldn’t get to die as one. My middle name has the same first letter as my grandpa’s middle name in his honor. Even in death, he’s had a hand in making me the man I am.
As for my other fears…
Year 2: “I have signed my appearance up for an experiment that I won’t know the visual result of until I get there. That’s both exciting and terrifying. That (admittedly shallow) fear was my last barrier to starting T— what if I’m an ugly man?”
I have a slightly more solid idea of what I’ll look like for the next part of my life now, though I pray my preemptive Minoxidil helps me keep my hairline. I wish I could go back and tell the version of me writing this that I don’t need to worry about the ugly thing. This is the part that feels a little too self-serving to write, but that’s not enough to stop me: I’d like to issue a retraction of my former Substack about not being hot. I’m not the same kind of wide-appeal hot that cis womanhood set as a goalpost for me, but at least from my viewpoint in the mirror, I am DEFINITELY hot. I look like every man I had a crush on in my younger years, though did I have a crush on them or want to become them? Jury’s still out. I’m still astounded every time someone is attracted to me, but the external feedback/data doesn’t lie: to the right crowd, I am desirable, specifically for who I am instead of despite it.
More importantly than feeling hot, I feel more myself. 2025 was hands down the worst year of my life. It was also a turning point.
Year 2: “Maybe year 3 will finally feel an uncomplicated kind of good. Maybe being happy will get easier. Maybe people will start to see me how I see me.”
My wish from year 1 was a mustache. My wish from year 2 was to feel better about transitioning by year 3. I’ve had all my wishes granted thus far, so let this be the third:
I want to lose myself so thoroughly in loving and caring for a better world that being trans doesn’t matter.