The rage of the time lost

I’m going to take this space to help with a little bit of processing that I did at this year’s (2025) Critical Northwest regarding my trans identity. It’s a resolution of a fine point of pain and anger that is commonly faced by middle aged transitioners, and while I see this pain point commonly talked about, I have not commonly seen this resolution of the whole thing, so I’m opting to put it down on paper and throw it out to the world, so that maybe it can help someone out there.

So, if you read a lot of stuff written by trans women, like I have, and see a lot of comments online, over and over, you will read something along the lines of “I’m so angry that I lost so much time, I wasted so much of my life, and I’m only now starting to live”. There is a lot of anger at the self for not recognizing that hormones needed to happen, a lot of anger at society for the Ray Blanchard* regime of trans care, fear about being able to go against that edifice, so on and so on.

Ultimately, in other middle aged transitioners, I’ve seen just this profound sense of loss in the self for having had to live so long like that.

The thing I’ve realized, though, as I’ve gone deeper and deeper into the hormone me, and looked back over my life with clarity, and really remembering is: I’ve always been transitioning, in ways that I never even really knew:

I was voice training when I was belting out Indigo Girls songs on road trips and trying to match Amy Ray’s voice. I was learning to socialize as female when I was hiding from the other boys and trying to fit in with the girls in high school and college. I was learning fashion and dress and what looked good on me and what did not when I was doing the whole “cross-dressing enby” routine. I even had the whole lesbian comphet “dating men and finding it deeply unsatisfying” experience when I went through my stint as a denial twink. There are so many little experiences and efforts and evolutions that make up a life, and it’s wrong to microfocus on “the little blue pill”, as powerful and life-transforming as hormonal transition is (seriously, blocking youth access to transition care will kill kids, fuck you if you want to restrict access, this is not the point I’m making)

So, I guess what I’m saying, is, when I look back at my life, I’ve always been here, even when the boy suit was on full display. I was always doing what I could to break out. And I think it’s fair to give yourself that same grace. Those years might not have been optimized, but they weren’t wasted either.

And what it meant was that, when I was finally in a place where I could access hormones and transition care more generally, I felt free to just play the notes. There have been roadblocks and complications, and there has certainly been danger, but there has been a lot of wisdom gained on the slow path, too. The best time to start transitioning may have been ten years ago, but today is fine too. Be kind to yourselves.

*Ray Blanchard is a sexologist who was very influential in pre-WPATH transition care. He had a now-discredited theory of transsexuality that 1. ignored transmasculinity almost completely, and 2. seperated trans women into two groups, the ” real trans women” who knew their gender identity from a very young age, wanted to present in a hyperfeminine way, and were attracted exclusively to men. Blanchard saw these trans women as an extreme version of gay men, and as objects of pity. If they answered his surveys correctly and they committed to “blending into” society, him and his acolytes would deign to give these women access to transition care.

Everyone else, in the Blanchard typology, was an “autogyenphile”: a fetishist obsessed with making their body into a female one for gratification reasons. They had to be prevented from transitioning at all costs. This attitude was, of course, intensely damaging to both groups, because all of the treatment pretty much prevented the forming of any trans community, or any way to publicly talk about the trans experience. When people talk about “why are we suddenly talking about and seeing all of these trans people?” it’s precisely because the Blanchard system collapsed around 2010-2015, at which point you didn’t risk your hormones by publicly being a trans activist. If you’d like to read more about this gross history, I suggest reading either Susan Stryker’s Transgender History or Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, both of which are landmark works in their own right.