Rahul

I think I first properly came to terms with it when I was 20 because my friends were quite confused about Ruby Rose’s character in Orange is the New Black or not her character actually but the actual actress. They, I think identify as gender fluid. My friend didn’t really understand it. The conversation felt like to me that she was kind of discredited like the friend was discrediting Ruby Rose’s gender identity and that is when we really got started talking about gender and she kind of confronted me on the fact it sounded like I was very uncomfortable being a woman. I was like, this is accurate. Obviously, I’d had thoughts about being unhappy being a female before, but not really ever considered myself anything other than because the research you do as a young person is very horrifying, especially if you are like 13, 14 which is when I think I first started having these thoughts and actually realising that you could be transgender and there were like surgeries and treatments and you could socially be accepted as a different gender than the one you were born as. It’s a very scary place because the only like kind of resources in terms of like fiction and facts is these kind of like horrible images of like surgeries and being social outcasts and you know, this kind of thing. I’d already, like I’d always kind of pushed the idea away again. Yeah, when I was 20 I kind of realised that that was the case for me and I was more unhappy pretending to be female than whatever consequences I would have living as a male.

My family were very different. I came out to my little sister first and this is actually kind of a funny story. I went to Pride in [city] I think the year after I come out. I wasn’t on hormones yet or anything else. Waiting for Gender Clinic in [city], but I was back in [city] for Pride and I didn’t mean to do join the parade, but me and my friends saw one of our pals walking in it. We joined in. That evening I was on the six o'clock news. Just framed like this two-shot of me and my pal screaming along to YMCA, Pride flags on our cheeks. A full zoom in like a close-up of me and there was it lasted like, it lasted four or five seconds, but that’s a very long time on the screen. So, obviously, at that point I knew that the shit was gonna hit the fan. I called my sister and she didn’t know anything about it and turned out that my parents hadn’t seen the news that night. That meant I still did have to come out to my sister and she was very confused. She didn’t take it very well. She wasn’t, she didn’t make any comments in the beginning. She just made the comment that if I didn’t come out to my parents within a specific time period then she would out me because it was on the like main news channel of Denmark so it meant that someone from our Mosque definitely would have seen it. It was gonna come back to them anyway and she didn’t want people talking behind my parent’s backs, which I understood, I guess. That kind of gave me a deadline and my parents again were very they had strange reactions to it. My mum didn’t really take me seriously at first. She thought I was kidding on. And then, just seemed like a bit pissed off that I was coming out to her. She did also have a very funny comment though, which maybe isn’t that funny, but in context it’s funny. She was basically asking me about my sexual preference but she is very private and so she didn’t directly ask me. She asked me who I was gonna marry. I told her I didn’t know who I was gonna marry [laughs] ‘cos I was 21. She said well, are you gonna marry a guy or a girl? And I am bisexual and so I told her, either. She took that as meaning both. She was like, both? Both? And I was like either or either a guy or a girl. She was quiet for a while and she said, if you marry a woman you are gonna be two women. If you marry a guy you are gonna be two guys. She was just like, it was just turning in her head. It was just coming out homosexual either way and she just couldn't really, but like now my dad actually was, reacted in a very different way. He was mostly upset that I hadn’t felt safe enough to talk with him about it. So, he did still say that he was gonna pray for me for Allah to show me the right way. His main concern was that he was sad that I had felt like I had to keep this to myself or be alone in this.

I was told that I wouldn't be able to do my own injections, which I know I can because my previous GP had told me I could. Then the endocrinologist that had prescribed them to me had told me that I could. It was just an individual nurse who claimed that people could not be allowed to do them themselves. They could not be trusted because you could be selling your hormones onto other people or giving them to other trans people. But it’s not the case. You can absolutely administer them yourself. I was trained in it when I had to go back to [country] for holidays and so I get my injections every three weeks. And if I can’t find anyone to do them for me, I have to do them myself. I prefer other people doing it. But you can absolutely get trained to do it yourself and you have the right to do it yourself if you prefer. So, that’s a good example of people trying to control your injections for you.

I did three appointments. The first one I was mainly talking about my childhood again, like really fabricating this narrative that I was very focused on having a trans identity from the beginning. I think the second one was more focused on my relationship with my parents. It had very little to do about gender identity in general. It was about my personal relationship with my family and friends and predominantly with my parents. That one was cut short because I was stuck in traffic. At the end of it, she told me she didn’t feel comfortable basically allowing me hormones yet, even though what I’d said was sufficient because she didn’t personally feel comfortable giving anyone hormones after just two meetings. I don’t really think is a good excuse. We waited another month and the last one was the one where she asked me about my general mental health and we talked a little bit about it.

I ended up lying about how I felt and then that conversation was mostly because we knew that I was probably gonna get green lit for hormones so that conversation was supposed to be about [coughs] life after hormones and how my family and friends would react and what expectations I had about my life and then she was very stuck on the fact that I had not come out to my parents yet and insisted that I give her some sort of verbal promise that I come out to them before starting hormones because she, even though I was financially independent of them and lived in a different country and had been identifying and living as trans for more than a year at this point, she didn’t feel comfortable signing the papers until I guaranteed her that I would come out to them that following month because I was going home for Christmas [coughs] because she was essentially convinced that if someone’s parents have a very, someone’s close relatives or friends have a very bad reaction to them coming out as trans then that can put them off transitioning essentially or getting hormone treatment for it. So, she didn’t want to put me in a position where I no longer wanted to transition, but was on hormones even though I assured her several times that that would not be the case. But those were the three.

I was initially offered three ways of getting testosterone. The first one was as a testogel that you would apply every day. The second one was as an injection that you get every three weeks and you are like intramuscular injection you would get in your buttock area and the third one was also an injection, but it was every 12 weeks I think and it was a higher percentage, more, more hormones obviously. I think that, that one was more sore and they were kind of already like advising me not to take that option. I ended up taking the injection options still but the every three week one.

How did you make that decision?

I didn’t want to be dependent on taking testosterone every single day. I was worried that like if you like go away for like two or three days you would immediately kind of I think at that point because I was so obsessed about getting hormones and like masculinising effects you would immediately be worried about not being on these hormones any more. I didn’t want something that was dependent on, because I was also going to [country] so often and I didn’t want to like end up at home for a month and having lost my testogel you know whereas if I was home for a month and didn’t get any injections then or like any testosterone then through injections, you would only be missing one and the 12 monthly one did sound quite like intense and hefty. For me, the three weekly ones sounded the most convenient because it still felt, it also felt like it would be more effective or serious than a gel because I think even on a not so rational level you kind of think oh an injection, that’s going straight into your body like that must do more than something you are rubbing on your skin. I guess it’s also feels like you actually are getting somewhere.

That makes perfect sense. You have your first injection and how is it?

Very sore. The actual injection wasn’t that bad it was just a tiny prick and then I could feel it kind of like going in a little bit. Nothing major. It wasn’t painful. It’s wasn’t an issue. It was fine. It was the day and the day after I could really feel it like I had difficulty walking because it was just very, very sore. But after that, it got better. The first time was very sore. I wasn’t expecting it. You kind of feel like it in the muscles for like a day or two after. I think they didn’t really tell me either that you are supposed to kind of keep the muscle warm like maybe keep walking or do some exercises straight after the injection to help stretch and stretch the muscles because otherwise they’re just going to swell up and that testosterone is quite oily in fact it’s just going to sit in one of the muscles and disperse very slowly. You want to kind of squeeze it out of there and make it move faster than just letting it rest. If you just let is rest and it makes you more sore.

That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve been told that either. It makes perfect sense. How did you find out about that?

I think it was just because I got back to my next injection and they asked me how it was. How I had been feeling after the first one and I told them that I’d been quite sore. I think the nurses then suggested that I A) relaxed the leg that the muscle that the injection had been given. The side of the body the injection had been given and while it’s given and then I kind of tried to walk it off and don’t sit down for long periods immediately after because it helps to keep the muscle warm. And over the years I’ve been told different like not different from bad. But like other handy things like it helps to warm up the oil first and the specific one I am on is sustonone and it helps warm it up because it’s quite thick when it’s cold. And that can also be more painful, but if it’s warm and you keep it in your pocket or if you run it under a tap of hot water before giving it then it runs easy and it’s injected easier to your muscle and it’s less painful and so small things like that that I kind of had to collect over time.

What were the first effects that you saw or felt?

I think it was either facial hair or actually I think maybe my voice started breaking before. That was very strange and I never had my voice break before and I found myself saying things and then suddenly I would just jump in like tone or the I was able to sing along to things I was no longer able to sing along to. That was very strange one as well. I think it was either voice or facial hair.

What did you see and how did it feel?

I was never too fussed about facial hair to be honest. I didn’t feel like it was something I needed. I still prefer being clean-shaven. It doesn’t like it right now because I have been very lazy and been working a lot. But I think the voice was the major thing for me. At the time, I was working in a retail job as well and even though my colleagues knew I was trans or I was introduced to them as male every single customer would assume I was female because of my stranger voice being very high. I know if other people you have this, but me, when I’m talking to strangers or the bus driver, someone I am paying money to, immediately my voice is like, Hi ya, what can I do for you like it’s up there and it was so much worse when I didn’t have testosterone and so people would just, even if they were in doubt they would hear me and they would assume that I was female. I think that was one of my main things that I was worried about that I felt was coming across as a way of misgendering to people and so the voice was definitely the big one for me when I could hear it starting to change. I was very excited about that.

It was a very exciting period of time like my chest hair was a fun one because I would be constantly updating my friends like showing off the chest hair. I got these two little swirls at either side that matches the swirl I have on the back of my head that was pretty funny as well. And it was like a weird kind of, it almost felt like a second puberty because there were a lot of changes. It is kind of like second puberty. I was getting zits all over again, like pimples my skin was not having the greatest of times. So, voice, facial hair, body hair as well, of course. My leg hair was getting more intense. Trying to mentally go through my body. I could generally, after a while see how the body fat distribution was moving in my body because I used to have more of a waist and I was just kind of the fat was kind of moving away from the hips and I was becoming like rounder around the stomach. Maybe I was just gaining weight. But it didn’t feel like that. It did feel like I was just kind of becoming more of a square which was desirable for me. And the weirdest one was probably like I did genuinely have like a jump in libido like I was just more sexually aroused than I—well this could also be like a, what’s it called, placebo effect or whatever. That is the thing that I noticed. Of course, like not having periods any more was the absolute best. And I stopped having, I think when I started hormones I had one more period and then they were gone and I have never had them again. It was just the best thing ever. It was just so good. It’s mental to think about how you needed to go through that back in the day. And now, I haven't had a period for more than three years.

I asked questions in my consultations, I asked people in Facebook groups that I knew had had surgeries from also the same clinic or at least in the UK. I researched things on pages like Reddit and stuff like again mostly blogs, YouTube channels by UK residents talking about top surgery and different options for top surgeries. And again, very little of that information was kind of like official health sector NHS kind of information. I think I was given one kind of like pamphlet kind of thing that was going through the different surgery options like a little brochure that also covered like hormone replacement therapy and trans feminising surgeries. It was just a little section and that talked about I think two or three different kind of top surgeries for trans men. That were like two or three pages and that was like the most official document that I think I referred to. But mostly I was looking at people’s experiences, personal experiences.

From what I remember, you need to bring slippers to hospital. They tell you this in a little letter like please bring these things. What I wasn’t sure of was whether or not I was supposed to give them my phone or leave my phone with my friends. And I think the best, for me it was more convenient to leave kind of like my more valuable things with friends or family because they can get those things to you faster than if you leave them with hospital staff. The hospital staff will get them when they have time. They are very busy people. So, that’s a good thing to know I guess. You are not supposed to eat I think, at least 12 hours before the surgery, the night before the surgery I think I could stop. I have to stop eating at 6pm and the surgery was at 9 or 10 in the morning. With most surgeries, that’s the same case as well. So your friends and family can follow you up until a certain point, but it’s pretty much just up until the waiting room and then after the waiting room you get taken to get your clothes changed and put all your belongings in a bag that you then give to the nurse that is walking you to the operation theatre.

And then you can say bye to your friends and family and you walk through to the operation theatres and you wait some more and you are sitting there, half naked with a dressing gown without really knowing what’s happening. And then they ask you to well, they asked me to lie on the table and so it was also kind of strange, because I kind of always imagined that I would be on this bed and I would be wheeled into the operation room, but you put yourself on it and you are talking away with people that are then putting the mask on you while they are asking you questions and then yeah, you become unconscious and when you wake up you are kind of like very confused. I didn’t ever feel very unclear like I woke up, I was aware where I was and what was happening. I was being told to move from one bed to another. I was awake, no, wait, sorry I am mixing up my tonsil surgery. I remember kind of being aware what’s happening when I did wake up and being wheeled down and talked to, having conversations with people and feeling like I was clear headed enough to be in the moment. I was expecting to be more hazy on like medication and painkillers but I also was very exhausted. And then I stayed for a night in hospital and that was a terrible night because you could not move very well because my chest was, not even in that much pain. I thought I was gonna be in way more pain than I actually was in. It was quite manageable, I guess I was also on heavy painkillers, but it felt more numb than pain because that is the thing, they also cut all the nerves and so it’s not like it’s super sore. It feels more weird and numb and like not really part of your body more than actual painful.

I think people have different priorities. My priority was definitely the flattest option over what’s it called, aesthetics. Except I didn’t want, I think it’s called, the anchor cut when there is a line that goes from your nipples down and then it meets the line that is under your chest. That one always seemed a bit weird to me and unnecessary and so I didn’t, didn’t want that. That was kind of the only starting point I had. I didn’t want that surgery. And then some of them are also specific according to the size of your breasts there is some of them that you just can’t do if you’re larger or smaller chested. So that also limited my options. It kind of like, it’s obvious to what you have and what you want out of the surgery what option you should go for. And obviously, if you consult with the surgeon who will tell you the pros and cons of the different ones. My surgeon specifically agreed that she didn’t do the anchor ones either, the ones that have line down and across. They can also relate to what which ones your surgeons are comfortable doing and confident doing and you might want to go with their confidence level as well because you also don’t really want to do a surgery that your surgeon is maybe doing for the first, second or a seventh time. Maybe something that they are more confident in, will give you better results. There is a lot of things to factor in.

For me the main result was always about just being flat chested and it’s just all the small things that you just appreciate now like you can run downstairs without having to hold your chest and you can lie on your stomach without feeling that you are being suffocated. You can get dressed so much faster in the mornings you literally throw on a t-shirt, you don’t have to wrestle with a bra or a binder or a sports bra and again, you don’t have to wrestle with binders, ever. You don’t have to try to get one on when you are wet from a shower. Don’t have to remember to take one off when you are like drunk and passing out. So many small things. It’s just so freeing. I think my nipples, don’t look identical. I don’t really mind. I thought I would, before surgery I was more worried that I would be devastated if I had a weird physical result. I was worried that that would maybe take away from the happiness of finally like having the surgery because obviously you have so much time to kind of hype yourself up for the surgery and how it’s gonna change your life and how everything is gonna be better from after that point. And I don’t think anything drastically changed in my life other than just like that convenience and happiness of finally being flat chested. It wasn’t like I was being misgendered any less or, I wasn’t being misgendered that often in the first place sort of thing. It wasn’t like a confirmation of now I am a man or something like that. It was just what I needed. I wasn’t after that it was just, it wasn’t really important what the actual chest looked like, it becomes a normal part. I think maybe it’s different for some people though maybe they start fixating more on how they’re unhappy with their result or but I think for most people they will just realise how unimportant it actually is, what exactly it looks like and how perfectly it looks like a chest. It looks like a chest.

With the surgery specifically I got my drains taken out two days after the surgery, I think. I had the surgery on Monday morning and then I think I had my drains taken out Wednesday or Tuesday. But I think about I want to say three weeks after that. You still have dressings on at that point to, that basically like cover the scars, the nipples and then the two patches that your tubes came out of. So, about three weeks after that, the dressings came off. I had to go back to [city] to get those off. They did another check they didn’t need to reapply any. So, it was fine to like let the scarring and healing begin at that point. And then, about six months after you get called back in to do a follow-up on the actual healing process and if you need any like follow-up procedures if you have some swelling or folds or anything that needs to be corrected or that you find that you feel like you need to be corrected. In my case, I was quite happy with the result. I didn’t need any follow-up procedures. The surgeon felt the same. So it was pretty much the end of the line for me there. But I think if you do have some issues the process takes a bit longer, but that’s basically the end of surgery care. You get officially discharged at that point and then that’s your top surgery journey over.

Personally, I didn’t want to use the LGBT counselling because, in my head I was convinced that it would then become, my mental health would be centred around the fact that I was trans which is why I was being suggested LGBT counselling in the first place by this GP. I didn’t feel that my mental health was related to my gender identity. I used university counselling which then also kept returning to my gender identity and when I tried to reinstate that I did not think it was related to my mental health was related to my gender identity. It, they were trying to like again do the hot potato and move it over to maybe my religious upbringing or my conservative parents. So, there were a lot of like I feel, personally, for me shortcuts that they could make to explain why I wouldn't be in a good mental health, a mental state of mind and the transgender element was definitely like the first shortcut that it kept returning to just it didn’t really believe that it was not related to it. I am not saying that it wasn’t. I am sure a part of the frustration I had at the time was also to do with feeling like I wasn’t going anywhere and I kept having to convince people that I was who I was saying I was. But yeah, I think it’s hard in a counselling mental health issue like situation to convince people that you have other issues in your life than being trans, because it kind of overshadows a lot of other things.

Well, I had considered whether or not I was trans in the past and that the reason I kind of mentally pushed it away was because I thought that I would make my life harder. I thought it would be too harmful for my parents. The way that I stopped myself from feeling too guilty about being trans and what that would do to my parents was because I knew that if I didn’t come out as trans like I didn’t really want to be alive. At that point, I didn’t really want to continue being alive as a woman. I think a lot of people have that breaking point, but don’t really talk about it, you know. It’s not really an easy thing to just bring up like when did you first find out that you were trans? When I decided that I either wanted to die or be trans. That’s not what people want to hear mostly when they ask. But that’s I think the reality for quite a lot of people it’s a last resort, it’s not something that you just wake up one day and you are like, that would be fun.

I think, obviously It’s gonna be hard for most people with like devout religious parents to come out to them especially if they’re not accepting of the idea of transgenderness in general. But I think the hardest thing about, for me, coming out to my parents were not so much my parents’ ability to accept it or wrap their head around it. It was the preoccupation they had with the specific kind of like mosque or church or temple culture where everyone knows everyone else’s business. It’s very much more about appearances than it is about what their actual feelings are and I think that’s something to maybe look out for that if your parents are Muslim and they react badly, it maybe doesn't mean that this is how they feel about you personally. This maybe, this whole idea that there is a big idea in Muslim communities of well not losing face, I guess. I think this is why I didn’t come out for a long time because I felt like I couldn't do it to my parents and that was one of my main reasons that I didn’t come out for so long, because I felt like it was something I was doing to my parents. You kind of have to distance yourself from that and realise that you aren’t doing anything to your parents by being who you are and it’s their decision if they want to care about how they come across to other people or not. If they think you are ruining their reputation, hopefully they are eventually gonna realise that this is not the important things in life.

In my mum’s Indian soaps there were a few characters that were, well very few but still I remember being very shocked because there was a group of people in India called Hijra people. I don’t know if you are—yeah. So, they were like these hijra characters in the soaps that my mum was watching, which was very confusing to me as a child because I didn’t know exactly they were. But I could see that they were some sort of gender queer characters. She seemed quite happy to watch something that had them in it and which portrayed them in a positive light. That is when I think it, I at least acknowledged that it wasn’t 100% taboo.

Hijra people are people I think almost exclusively people that are born male that grow up and then realise that they are gender queer. There is a concept mostly located in India probably places in Pakistan as well. They, it’s traditionally starts out as people being queer men. And then identifying more as female and recognising themselves as being part of a hijra community. There is a lot of traditions associated with them as well. I think in some villages it’s traditional for them to show up before like childbirth or weddings to celebrate this joyous occasion. But their role in society very interesting because they are not, they are not like a plague on society at all. They co-exist with villages and like even very traditional mindsets. They are just an accepted part of queerness in those areas where they exist.

I think in general, there’s, especially in the gay male community is not the best for anti-racism or even queerness honestly. There is a lot of, you know, patriarchal bullshit in the gay male community and a lot of people that are unwilling to acknowledge that a preference can be racist and your preference are maybe predisposed by your racist upbringing or like your idea that you are not attracted to any black people, any brown people is maybe more than just, you know, a harmful preference, a harmless preference. That thing is hard. It’s hard to also kind of feel like you’re educating people on issues of racism, especially ‘cos some people who are queer are convinced that they do not have any issues because obviously they’re queer. They are a minority themselves. So then, they are not willing to accept that they can still also even be homophobic even while being queer, like those are things to look out for and have patience with but any, that’s the main thing I think, the preference thing that people don’t recognise as it’s more than a preference. It’s pretty difficult. But other than that, it’s not been the worst.

I only ever thought I was attracted to males, men until the same summer I realised I was trans. And it was kind of weird ‘cos they went hand in hand a little bit. I don’t even remember which one came first. I think maybe I came out as trans first and then I realised that I had also had feelings for my female friend at the time. So, they kind of overlapped a little bit. It was a very strange realisation ‘cos it was as if now my idea of gender was already being subverted a bit. And at the same time so was my idea of my own sexuality. I thought that I was very monosexual before and I kind of realised that I had in the same way I’d kind of suppressed being trans and also suppressed my attraction to women. And I started remembering like sexual awakenings that had to do with women or female characters so that was very strange. And I think after being trans and like getting this more grounded identity. You know what I mean like having a more grounded sense of identity, I also felt more comfortable exploring and acknowledging sexual attractions to different people, ‘cos I feel like now it seems strange for me that you could limit yourself to just one gender especially because there are people that fuck with gender. There are non-binary people and there are like intersex people and then the question is, how can you be so binary about the people that you are in love with or attracted to, which is a thing that I no longer understand in the same way that I don’t really recognise gender as a binary concept anymore. I think it’s kind of just like made me way more open-minded or just have a different perspective to sexual attraction and be more honest about people that I’m attracted to.

It’s good and bad, ‘cos obviously it’s important to highlight trans issues. But at the same time I think a lot of the media representation is just allowing everyone to make it into a debate, ‘it’s like everyone gets a say, but everyone doesn't get a say because a lot of people don’t even know what the fuck they are talking about. This woman, at my work was telling me how it’s horrible that they are forcing people to take drugs and I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she was talking about hormone treatments for 12 year olds, which it’s not a thing that exists. There is a lot of misinformation out there, which is just fuelling like transphobia and I think that in some cases it’s a very deliberate move to print headlines or to write articles in a way that if you just skim them and if you don’t read them people that are transphobic or have transphobic or even don’t have opinions they read it as abuse or read it as yeah, harm to kids or young impressionable people.

Just to be honest and not try to fit into these moulds that you think that you’re gonna, you need to fit into if you do suspect that you’re trans like you don’t need to label yourself straight away. I don’t mean like don’t say that you’re trans, obviously. Just take some time to figure out how you feel about yourself and who you are and talk with people about how you feel. Talk with your friends. Most importantly be honest about how you feel if you feel like you are not the gender that people say you are. Maybe try to see how it feels when people call you different pronouns or if you feel more non-binary. Don’t rush into being trans female just because you don’t feel trans male, no, don’t rush into calling yourself a female just because you don’t feel like a male and vice versa. But most important, just focus on being happy and that’s the most important thing. If you’re not happy then there’s no real point of you doing anything.