actually, i'm going to add this as a double post because of second thoughts on the matter. i think i might have been engaging in a little intellectual dishonesty there, with myself, just to prove a point, and the truth is somewhat more complicated. like everything with transition, really, but in this case i have a lot of feelings on the matter.
my hair-trigger response whenever i see thoughts like this is to affirm them, to say that people don't have to change, mostly because i've just seen from experience too many people who clearly change themselves purposefully to appear closer (and, perhaps to themselves, more legitimate) to what constitutes a man or a woman or anything else in our society. so i build a narrative where that's me, too, where i don't change at all, and i just built up a facade to fool the gatekeepers while the part of me inside laughed and reaped the benefits.
but that's only one narrative, one perspective of mine, and it may or may not be the most accurate one.
the truth is that sometimes i changed to scary degrees, to the point where although i ACT a lot like the person i used to be, i sometimes can't even remember being him, can't even begin to understand how i changed from this one person to another, not when the changes were this great in three years. because three years ago? three years ago i was still trying to shed off the mantle i had built for myself that i was an effeminate straight guy. which is only one facet of the story, i guess. because two years ago i was getting into a relationship with a lesbian and not really feeling it, and in the moment i'm definitely sure i thought i was straight. which isn't me at all, but there you have it. social pressures on women are pretty rigid and compulsory heterosexuality is a stronger one than most people who transition really anticipate, i think.
somewhere i figured out that this post-transitional metaphase wasn't real, either, but that leaves a couple possibilities. was i acting like who i really was before transitioning? because right now that image feels about as fake as the one where i dressed myself up to be a straight girl. i think back to three years ago, and i think, that's not me. that's not the person i am today. i still can't decide whether that's because i've simply changed by small amounts over three years or whether that's my brain's defense mechanism to seeing this toolish fae boy and recognizing that yeah, my consciousness was doing its thing in there for a while. for a long while, actually, and for way longer than i've been "me", whatever "me" is.
so yeah, i've changed. it's slow, and sometimes i didn't recognize it, but it happened.
i guess the other aspect of my response is that physiologically, i didn't feel that differently. but i can't really separate, like, having hormones from actually transitioning, so i can't tell if one's affecting the other and if so, to what degree.
