"Hello, my name is Will..."

Hi there,
I figured since this is like my thirteenth draft for the introduction of this new blog, I better start out with a whopper of a post. Ugh... No pressure.

So, here's the deal: I'm a trans guy, and have been charting my course over the past three years of taking injections of male hormones to make my female body appear more masculine. Yep, I said it.

I was born female in 1975, where my artistic parents named me "Lani" (which, in Hawaiian means "heavenly") and raised me as a girl.



Nearly all of my life I was what could have been considered a tomboy. I typically had shorter hair, and was a bit too rough and tumble to get away with the frilly Easter dresses my mother had chosen for me when I was still young and pliable. But as I got older, my tomboy 'phase' didn't seem to be ending anytime soon, and slowly we all began to get nervous about what would this mean. Would I grow up into a full fledged lesbian? Or would I become one of those mannish women who settles down with a nice, 'open minded young man,' where we'd start a small business teaching golf lessons to retired suburbanites?

Growing up is challenging enough even when you seem perfectly 'normal' to the outside world. But at a very early age I knew something was askew. For me, I always felt like I was meant to be a boy. By the age of three I went around telling my older brother that I was half boy and half girl, and that if he beat up my girlie half, the boyish half would kick his ass. (To be noted, I would draw an invisible lateral line down the center of my body – one which could not seen, but one that I emphatically declared was there.) Now, I'm no developmental psychologist, but – that is some pretty insane shit to be spouting as a 3 year old. (Maybe all three year olds spout this kind of arm chair forecasting, and I just haven't been listening.) So, yes, it was a glimmer of foreshadowing that my life would prove to be a bit unusual.

At 15, I started dating women, and hoped that being 'queer' would somehow be the catch all answer to my identity crisis. The problem was that considering myself queer couldn't fix the incongruities I felt being in my own body. Being gay or lesbian is hinged on the thesis that a member of one sex romantically or sexually prefers other members of their own sex. Since I never felt like a woman, and had always internalized that there was some sort of biological or medical mistake where I *should* have been a boy (I will reference this in another post called "The Oprah Effect"), calling myself a lesbian never felt adequate. Even though I appeared boyish in my clothing ensembles and selections of hair cuts, my shy and coy demeanor tinged with self-deprecating humor was anything but 'butch.' I was more of a dandy, with a Victorian sensibility, and penchant for all things old, prudish and dusty. (Think Cary Grant, not Ulysses S. Grant.)

When I was 19, I attended this small progressive, liberal arts college in Vermont, and the woman I was dating showed me a Details Magazine article about a female who started taking male hormones to look like a dude. I obsessively scanned those published images for any such remnants of femininity left on that human form. I saw none. It was insane. In those pages depicting a thirtysomething year old guy, with salt and pepper cropped hair, big black Buddy Holly style glasses, a black t shirt, perfectly distressed Levi's jeans, and ragged old black boots – I saw my future self. Never in my life had I ever felt so connected to another life story, watching the threads spontaneously emerging in my own life, linking me to this man I suddenly adored.

I didn't know it was possible, and therefore the thought of changing genders never crossed my mind. I mean, sure, I had seen a bunch of men who became women by way of 'freaky' surgeries back in the 19060s and 70s, but their experiences didn't resonate with my body. I had never heard of any females going in the opposite direction, just women who wore pants. Big deal. Katherine Hepburn, Queen Christina, even Cher wore pants. But seeing this *man* (who used to be a woman) before my eyes, forever changed my life.

Great. I wanted to be a man when I grew up. How the hell was that supposed to happen? I was 19, and scrambling in college to figure out every other element of my confusing late adolescence. When would I know that I'd be ready to take the plunge, and start my hormone injections to get this 'man party' started?

The main problem with contemplating a radical change in one's life is you have to know Point A to Point B, and the route to take between those two points. But with this endeavor, I'd have to predict literally every single element that would be affected by such a dramatic change – it was a shotgun affect, and not a linear path.

It was easy to imagine myself looking dapper in men's well-tailored suits, but everything else was a blur. Would my family still love me, or would they be too freaked out, and disown me? Would I ever date anyone again, or be cast aside as too much of an outsider weirdo, and grow into a sad and lonely old man? How would I be able to get jobs – would they do back ground checks, and have to find out my intimate secret?

And how would I even know if I would like who I would become? Would the hormones change my personality? Would I even like the person that I might become based on these chemical shifts in my body? Into infinity... You can imagine that it left me with more questions than answers, and all I had was that one lousy article to illuminate one single person's experience. (Mind you, this was just before the big internet boom with search engines that make it possible to find virtually anything that anyone has ever thought of before... Back then we just had cable tv, and card catalogues to expand our minds.)

After 11 years of grappling with the paralysis of limitless questions of all the ways my life *might* change if I decided to take male hormone injections, I realized that the only was around was through it. The only way to know if it was or wasn't the right choice for me (after 11 years of weighing every pro and con) was to begin hormone treatments, and grant myself the option to stop them at any moment I felt unsure that it was right for me, or conclusively sure that it was the wrong choice for my life. There was no longer any way to hypothesize my way through it. I had to take action, and keep myself open to what I would find there. (It came at a pretty rough period of my life, where it felt as though things couldn't have gotten any worse. Sometimes a break down is needed for a break through, as someone once told me...)

And so I began. Three years ago I started taking bi-weekly injections of the male hormone testosterone, and have absolutely no regrets. I could go on about all of the physiological changes that I have observed about myself: my hairline receding, bouts of acne in the very beginning of treatment (as this is literally my 2nd puberty – guh!), my voice deepening within the first three months, body hair getting thicker over the past few years, including heavier and darker facial hair now coming in, the fat migrating from more feminine curves (like hips and butt) to more masculine areas of fatty deposits (ie: 'beer gut'), increase in general energy, and a much easier time with losing weight with less effort than before, without testosterone's aid... Also, it has become much more difficult to cry. My emotional reactions have changed, but also the physiological component to actually producing tears has changed, making it much harder to cry or even tear up. Interesting...

Then other bizarre changes like my dietary craving went from a sweet tooth to wanting bacon cheeseburgers with a chocolate malt chaser. (With that said, my perfect cholesterol levels skyrocketed instantly, not only from my 'meat infused' new diet, but the 'T' directly hits the liver, and spikes cholesterol levels, even with the same exact diet and exercise regimes.) Related most likely to my diet was a new scent of my body that was unfamiliar to me, and the pH balance of my sweat changed, actually burning my skin for the first several weeks. (That sucked!)

I became much less shy, much more assertive, aggressive and angry, as opposed to weepy and mopey pre-T. My sex drive increased exponentially, which is both awkward and embarrassing whether you are dating someone or not. I have a much more difficult time with spelling and grammar now, than I ever did pre-transition. And I was most recently diagnosed with having Attention Deficit Disorder, which I could have had pre-T, but may have been exacerbated by the testosterone, as it is a stimulant directly affecting related structures in the networks of the brain. Weird stuff! (I jokingly say that transitioning made me stupider... Or is it 'more stupid?' See?!?)

Okay, now that we have ALL of that out of the way... The real reason I want to start writing this blog is that after three years of my new life, I am only now starting to truly comprehend the various levels and dimensions that have changed since I started hormone therapy. I talked at length about my bodily shifts, some of the changes to my personality, and how my brain even functions – but what I am understanding in vivid detail now is the context in which my life has changed. The way the world around me now assumes certain things to be true based on the guy they now think they see before them, and how much we all have to navigate through these kinds of projections.

These issues have never been more apparent and obvious than in the realm of dating. It is the one place where all of these dimensions intersect, like some hauntingly bad Venn diagram. While trying to catch up with a few old friends and exes, I sent out a few emails about my experiences in the dating world as of late, and padded my messages with a few pointed comments asking these women to "help a brother out" and offer up some lofty advice, since my old track record (which was pretty damn good, might I add!) has sadly been erased. I thought it would be like AP credits in high school, where I could apply them to my new 'School of Life: Dude-style' – but just like I wasn't in AP classes in high school, (and my hippie dippy liberal arts school wouldn't have taken them anyway) I'm shit outta luck! Nope, none of my charms and perfected techniques for wooing have made the leap with me, which sucks. My context has changed, and therefore, my methods and deductive reasonings are like a foreign currency, that is now defunct. Awesome!

This blog will highlight some of these newly discovered angles, (and lowlight some of my less attractive features). I will try my damnedest to prevent myself from the spiraling into lazy, stereotypical descriptions of how men are, versus woman, and so forth. (But sometimes, I think I will have to trace some of those outlines, so I hope you, as a reader, can bare with me, with faith and trust that I am not some male chauvinist pig, spouting off misogynist verses.) I am trying to get somewhere, and I hope that you will come with me, and maybe even start to see the context of your own life in a new way. Well, maybe...

I chose the name of this blog based on a suggestion that an ex gave me. I feel like I've gotten a bit lost in my transition, and not all of what I thought I knew translates to this new life of mine. I am here, where I've gotten lost in trans-lation.





Thanks for reading! Best ~ Will