Transfemininity and the Pain of Perpetual Becoming

CW: Offhand mentions of sexual abuse/assault

I don't know how to start this one off, if I'm being perfectly honest. Usually when I'm writing one of these, I'll...open with some disorienting flashbang of an intro statement, that intrigues you enough that you simply must know what comes next. Or I'll just go straightforward with a thesis statement.

I don't have a flashbang for this one. I don't even have a thesis. Because, in truth, I don't think I'm quite ready to write this one yet.

I must confess dear reader. I lied to you in the title. There is no "perpetual becoming". In fact, many of my trans sisters have already quite become. Certainly, they would not admit as much, but that is because in truth no one ever "finishes" becoming. But they have escaped the pain I aim to describe here.

I don't speak here with envy. People often confuse me for a defeatist. In truth, I am a naive, broken little optimist, clutching hope to her chest because it is the only thing this world dare not take from her.

I said earlier, that I'm not quite ready to write this one. That is because of the lie in the title. Because the pain is not perpetual. But I have yet to escape it. And so in effect for me it's the difference between whether the blood gushing forth from my riven heart is crimson or maroon.

I said earlier, that I don't know how to start this one off. Again, a confession; I do not know what to put in the middle either. I'd quite like to give you some smooth gentle ramp into my big massive whinge but...I'm afraid there isn't one.

Dear reader...

Yes I know very crass of me but I really don't know how else to say it. This fucking sucks! There is a me deep within me, concealed beneath a thousand pupal folds, a brilliant angel in chrysalis, and she yearns to be free. She yearns, so desperately, to come into this world, to be of it, to be real.

To become.

And she can't. I can't help but blame myself for it, in truth. I feel as though, in a very real sense, I haven't done anywhere near enough to help make this world a place she can come into, that she can exist in, a place that will allow her to burst forth from the chrysalis and spread her brilliant wings wide and proclaim the incontrovertible truth of her existence — without being beaten down bloody and broken for stepping too far out of line.

From A Fag To A Tranny

My queerness has been...a journey. A sequence of transitions, not just a singular one. Many thresholds walked, not just a single switch flipped somewhere that goes from "Boy" to "Girl" (and if such a switch did exist, it would've gone from "Fag" to "Tranny").

I first realized I was queer by realizing I was bisexual. This happened at that age where all the boys in your class start putting on muscle and growing suddenly noticeably taller and you find your thoughts wandering to places that would most CERTAINLY not be regarded as filial.

Increasingly, I became a lanky, nerdy, awkward boy, who everyone could tell was ever so slightly Off (and based on all the sexual harassment I received in my Schoolboy years, they weren't just picking up on the autism).

I don't remember an exact date or even year when I started identifying that way, but I remember that gradually, I grew increasingly secure in my identity as a bisexual man (yes, I am an ex-grungler). I began hanging out around queer spaces — where I felt rather invariably unwelcome, shocker — and around nerd spaces, which often had considerable overlap.

My egg cracked in 2020. The Pandemic did many things, most of them cruel and unnecessary and terrible, but flowers bloom on untended graves. I realized I was a woman, all my romances became retroactively gay, I engaged in a prolonged but ill-fated dalliance which was het (though I'd never regard it as straight), and I went through a few names before ultimately settling on my present one which, if you're reading this, you probably already know.

I started Hormone Replacement Therapy — HRT — on 15th January 2026.

It was fucking terrifying.

It was also the best decision I have ever made.

If you're on the fence, stop wondering, and go do it. I'm a friend of Valerie's; you should be too!

So, very quickly, let's tally up the score: from a schoolboy faggot, to a clueless terrified boymoder, to a full-fledged card-carryin' tranny.

You may note the exclusions of "Boy" and "Girl", or "Man" and "Woman" from the list of things I've been over my life.

This may strike you as another sour note of my characteristic crassness, or an attempt to shock you and keep you hooked because Brookie pays me extra if I keep you here past the 1,000 word mark. It is neither.

In truth, I find this dichotomy, this exclusion from both Boyhood and Womanhood to be the most...honest? Expression, of my lived experiences.

Never a bride, never even a bridesmaid, but just pretty enough to be an altar boy. Just so long as I keep my hair the right length, and don't make any noises that might pull God's eyes beneath the cassock. Pretty enough to fuck, but not enough to kiss.

[The above paragraph was cut in the original publication of this Pckt because it read more like an excerpt from my dear friend Ashley Finch's novel Maidens — which you should go read — than something that would be decipherable by people who didn't live these things firsthand.]

I was never quite a boy, because I never managed to perform heterosexual masculinity to a sufficient standard of quality to be granted entry into that terrible fraternity. Yet, as I sit here writing this...I do not feel, in my entirety, like a woman.

To make this point abundantly, painfully, bashing-you-over-the-head-with-a-lead-pipe clear, no, this is not the fault of women. Every woman in my life that I've been out to has been wonderful and supportive and unerringly welcoming into the sorority of womanhood (I would name some of them but they might end up reading this and then it'd be weiiiiirrdddddd).

And yet...I dress like a boy. A boy with C-cups, sure. A boy whose facial bone structure is slowly but surely warping to become softer, more rounded, more appealing, more feminine.

But society still refuses to acknowledge me as a woman. My CNIC still says "M" on it. It still has my deadname on it. The photo is still of a sharper, frankly uglier me, with short brushy hair. I still have to go to a men's hairdresser, and I still have to modulate my voice down to a low register when I speak to customer service on the phone (a register that I find is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, oddly enough).

I'm happier now, certainly, than I have been ever before. I am more, now, than I have been, ever before.

But I am not a woman.

The woman within me remains still encased in that guardian shell, nurtured and cultivated by me, through these little meaningless resistances I put forward against the encroaching miseries.

Of course, people do see me as a woman in one critical sense. They see me as enough of a woman to leer at. Not desire, of course, that would be...queer of them. They think they're slick but I notice the glancing side-eyes at my chest and my hair from people who think I'm too engrossed in whatever conversation to notice, or the unimaginative catcalls of young boys who seem yet unfamiliar with the finer instrumentations of the tongue — though I pray for the sake of any woman who might be forced onto their hand in marriage that they learn by the time they grow to my age.

I still notice the offhand comments about my weight, and about my figure, about how my ass is too big.

I certainly noticed the doctor's hands on my chest, the last time I dared muster up the courage for a visit.

To put it all succinctly, I am a woman insofar as a woman is a convenient object (in the grammatical sense) of sexual desire. A passive recipient, with no preferences of her own, and crucially, no right of complaint.

I do not qualify for the dignity of a woman. I do not, in fact, qualify for so much as the title. I am robbed even of the privilege of speaking my authentic name, for even that would be too great an affordance to grant to someone like me.

Thus, I say that I am not a "woman", per se. Thus, I say that I have transitioned from a Faggot to a Tranny.

There lies within me a woman, I know. And one day she will burst forth, and her ascendancy will be a beautiful thing to witness. I will not be there for it, for each instantiation of this one's personhood cannibalizes the last in the process of coming into being.

But until the day she takes my flesh, my will, my mantle onto herself, and lives the life I feel ashamed to admit I so desperately crave — a life of joy, of beauty, of loud, unabashed authenticity, a life without fear and without shame...

Until that day, I will bear, with a grin that refuses to be broken no matter how bloody the teeth belying it get.

The Pain of Perpetual Becoming.