My testosterone and me: Deciding to start T

Reflections on the anniversary of my life-saving decision point

Sometime around 4 am, I realized that when I published Gender transition isn’t what you think it is, Part 4a: Hormonal Transition, I didn’t include my usual personal touch—weaving in my own experiences. That angle that says, “hey, we’re real people behind all this rhetoric.”

My brain loves remembering anniversaries, like the date I got my new driver’s license (Feb 19, 2019) and the date I realized I’m a man (Feb 5, 2018). Today, March 5, six years ago (2019), is the date I decided to start taking testosterone. And get a divorce.

Divorce is not inevitable when one partner comes out as trans; the divorce rates are the same as with other couples. But in my case, medical transition and divorce were intertwined. This is a big reason it took me a year after telling my therapist “I want hormones” to tell my (ex)husband. I was scared of him. I didn’t realize that back then.

If you’re tracking the dates, it was 13 months between fully admitting to myself I’m a man and finally making an appointment for the first T injection. And two and a half years since starting my active gender exploration. We do not rush these things.

That first week of March, I was in Barcelona, Spain, of all places. At the time, I had moved to the US to socially and legally transition. My new passport with my new name and gender marker, M, arrived the day before my flight to Spain. Cutting it close, universe!

My (ex)husband, let’s call him Ray, still lived in Tanzania, the country that’d been my home for several years. Spain was in the middle, LGBTQ-friendly, and Ray had some business he could take care of there. We’d been to Madrid, but never Barcelona, so why not? I booked us a little apartment in El Pablo Sec.

At that time, I didn’t know how to process difficult emotions. I repressed them, so they came out sideways as illness, chronic pain, and dissociation. In this instance, the emotional overwhelm manifested in a migraine—rare for me. After I got to the apartment late Sunday afternoon, I slept until Ray woke me up for Monday dinner. Then I slept until he woke me up for Tuesday lunch. Each time I drifted awake, I still felt exhausted.

Does anyone remember those old Buzzfeed lists where people write in about the moment they knew their marriage was over? Like, “For our fifth anniversary, I commissioned a painting of us from my favorite photo on our honeymoon, and he forgot.” I had one of those moments on that Tuesday lunch.

We wandered a couple blocks to a neighborhood falafel place. I ordered a falafel pita, but he’d already eaten, so he sat across from me to keep me awkward company. The pita was piled with shredded iceberg lettuce—and a long hair—and, yes, this is gross, feel free to skip down to after the Subscribe button—which I discovered when it was partly in my mouthful of lettuce and falalel. I began gagging and, well, some of the food went in rewind.

Instead of the concerned face of a loving husband, ready to metaphorically hold my hair back for me, I saw his face of disgust. Revulsion. Like he wanted to get as far away from me as possible. It was the face of a stranger, this man I’d been with for 20 years. Not a partner. He didn’t ask, “Are you okay?” He didn’t grab more napkins. He didn’t make a fuss to the server about the hair in my food. He stood up and left the shop, expecting me to follow.

But at the time, I filtered that all through my well-used “I have a good husband, and it must be my fault” filter. No one has lied to me as well as I have.

After that lunch, we still hadn’t discussed what we had come together to discuss. He said he had some work to do and turned to his laptop.

I decided to go on a solo walk to think things through. I had booked a video session with my therapist for later in the day and asked Ray to join me to talk through our impasse. His stance was that if I did “nothing medical,” he could stay in the marriage and try to make it work, but if I started T or got chest surgery, he would “get off the bus.” For my part, I thought that love is greater than body parts; why throw away a 20-year marriage without even trying?

In my denial/bargaining, I had hoped that perhaps social and legal transition would be enough for me. After a few months, I discovered it was most definitely not. I needed T. But was it worth ending my marriage, too?

Mind you, I was raised Mormon, and though I’d been out of that faith for 14 years by then, their teaching about the utmost importance of marriage—that marriage is necessary to get into heaven—was unconsciously wired into my brain. That vision of what my life was supposed to be, a stay-at-home mom with five kids, always nagged at some deep part of me. I was my harshest judge.

On that walk, I meandered through the gardens up the back of Mont Juïc, Barcelona’s highest hill. At the top, I was startled into the present by tourists, cars, and buses zipping to and fro. I paused at a street, waiting to cross.

At that moment, I imagined injecting the first dose of testosterone into my belly. It was the first time I conjured up that image for myself.

I cried. In joy, in happiness. That moment was mine.

The crosswalk signal glowed green.

That evening, I booked the appointment for my first dose, one week later.