Sitting with the physician, I wonder if I should have held my friend’s hand. The doctor walked her through this medical choose-your-own-adventure book as I watched her shift in her seat, nodding along. The years of dysmorphia and the betrayal of her own body was coming to an end; she chose her route to girlhood during this hormone replacement therapy (HRT) meeting.
I walked with her into Mabel Wadsworth Center with my eyes straight ahead, only knowing later she was looking side-to-side for protestors. What a different world we live in. Her scheduled appointment revolved around a discussion with her physician. What would hormone replacement therapy would look like? What would her transition look medically? It is broken into steps, with pamphlets on pronoun guides, voice training, different types of hormones and everything in the goodie box of transgender person. “Do you choose male, female or something in between? Do you want to inject, take a pill or smack on a patch?” This chemical transition equation with inputs and outputs seems simple enough. The cultural transition is not as easy as a prescription. One girlhood, please.
Girlhood was always a strenuous topic for me. The bathroom was a solitary place where I dressed for dances alone, waited in line alone and used my phone camera to adjust the back of my hair. A place of vanity, not community. Touch-starved by women, eager to join the laughing and triviality of the bathroom I rushed in and out of. But, the sign on the door was never a complication for any betrayal of my body. When my friend came out to me as transgender, I had a shot for girlhood after 21 years, to be a steward of her dance with gender. I would hold my breath at a dead pronoun and shake my just finger in my allied authority. I lunged at opportunities to share lipstick or prepare for a party together, superficial support maybe. But as a modern woman with an allied fist to the air, and as a girl without a girl, it warmed my heart when she asked me to accompany her to the initial doctor’s appointment.
As a fly on the wall, I saw how different my own choose-your-own-adventure would have been from hers. Before attending her HRT appointment, I would have expected the route through transgenderism as being covert: a tiptoe to the odd end-goal of passibility. The symptom of something greater was being conflated in my head with the thing itself. I did not want company in the bathroom, I wanted everything that supersedes. My friend wanted to opt for the estrogen patch, to stick it on her skin week after week, to let others see the metamorphosis she was partaking in. The transition was an accessory to her girlhood, not the womanhood itself. “I want to show it off,” she would say, which, honestly, I thought was brave. She had no fear of the process, maybe just the needle to draw blood. The patch conversation stuck out to me in the weeks following the appointment.
She was smiling when we left. The plan was made: 1. Blood test, 2. Prescription for estrogen, 3. An appointment in July to check-in, 4. A woman gets to share a girl’s puberty. Her mood will sway from high to low like all girls before her as she navigates the mixed nature of a female coming of age. Over time, her breasts will perk, the distribution of her weight will settle and her hands will feel softer for the next person at her check-in to hold.
