Erins Tips For Those About To Transition

I get a lot of DMs from people who are early in transition and want advice. Over the years, I've developed my go-to tips in the hundreds of conversations I've had. I hope these help!

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

A long time ago, I was part of a community that was designed to help people with their early days of transition. I found it completely by chance after years of believing that transitioning was no longer an option for me. Because of the people I met there and the things they said to me, I was able to gather the courage to be my authentic self and to live and be seen as the person I always wanted to be. Now, four years later, I am seeing so many newly out trans people as well as people who are on the verge of coming out but don’t know where to start.

Transition is like a large snowball. It takes effort at first to build, you have to roll it around and it gets messy and awkward. Once you get it rolling, however, you’ll find that suddenly it takes on a life of its own. The energy to sustain your transition will come from the joy it brings you and the improvements to you mental health that come along with running on the right fuel with hormone therapy. My goal with this article is to help you or your trans loved ones get to that point so that they can reach it as easily as possible and find the happiness they deserve as a result of being who they are. So, here are my five tips to early transition:

1. Get A Gender Therapist

This may seem like a strange one from someone who has been an outspoken advocate for informed consent hormone therapy without therapy letters required. I truly don’t believe that therapy should be mandatory for anyone seeking to transition - therapy can be cost prohibitive, for instance, and therefore inaccessible to the those without resources. That being said, if you can get a gender therapist, they can help you so much with your early explorations and they can help you with all of the big moments of transition such as coming out or experiments with your gender presentation that don’t go as planned. They also often have the local knowledge to refer you to good support groups, inform you on the best local endocrinologists, and help you with finding positive spaces in your area.

The best way to find a gender therapist is to go to Psychology Today and then click on “find a therapist.” Put in your zip code and then once you get results, go to the top filters and click on “issues,” then click on transgender. This will give you all the therapists in your local area that specialize in gender identity. You will want to click on several of them and browse their profiles. There are a few things to look for: WPATH certified is often going to be an amazing option, though many areas do not have WPATH certified therapists. If they talk about writing letters or emphasize that they are queer and trans positive in their bios, they are also usually great options. Lastly, I have had very good results with therapists who name their pronouns and present a queer-forward identity. This can be extremely helpful for someone new in transition because you know the person who you are talking to and who is advising you has gone through some level of transitioning their gender presentation themselves.

2. Find An Informed Consent Clinic

This is going to only be applicable to my US readers: informed consent hormone therapy is the easiest option for hormone therapy for most people. Informed consent clinics allow you to begin hormone therapy without first obtaining a therapy letter - a process that can be prohibitive for many people and one that can take a very long time. Furthermore, informed consent clinics typically let you start quickly. What you will want to do is to visit my informed consent map that I consistently keep up to date. You might find that there is a clinic very close to you that will allow you to transition.

I have found that this is an extremely big step for a lot of people that are considering transition. Knowing that there is a place nearby that will direct your medical transition quickly whenever you desire it can be such an empowering step to take. It takes transition from being a theoretical thing to something that suddenly seems imminently feasible. Whenever a person is considering transition, they often don’t have the institutional knowledge that allows them to understand how easy the process might be. This in and of itself can help a trans person make the final step and begin medical transition if they desire it.

3. Wear An Article of Clothing That Is Gender Affirming (Even In Secret!)

This step was extremely helpful for me in that period between deciding I was trans and publicly transitioning. Early in my transition, I knew that I would not be able to be publicly out for a few months. I wanted to let some of the changes from my hormone therapy take effect first. That period in my life was characterized by some heavy dysphoria - having to present male in public hurt me especially after realizing how much transition was something I wanted. Someone gave me a tip: wear gender affirming clothing and accessories that you can hide.

So I did! I obtained a little rainbow bracelet and kept it around my wrist at all times. I changed my underwear choices - something that nobody else can see! I found cute socks and wore them. I shaved my legs and wore pants - though nobody noticed when I wore shorts. I even put clear-coat nail polish - something that nobody ever cared about. All of these steps put me in such an amazing place and gave me the strength to go about my day while waiting to transition publicly. Just knowing there were items on my body that felt gender affirming, even if nobody else could see them, gave me the peace of mind that inside, I was who I knew I was.

4. Include Trans People In Your Media Diet

Newly out transgender people often still carry baggage with them about transgender identities. This baggage comes from years of a media diet that makes transgender people out to be the punchline of jokes and something to be feared or ashamed of. It is no secret that trans representation in media has been extraordinarily poor. In fact, one of my biggest recommendations as it pertains to this is to watch Disclosure, a documentary on Netflix that details the way media has shaped our reactions to transgender people. One of the best ways to work through all of the negative internalized transphobia that so many of us carry early on in transition is to listen to transgender people’s experiences from their own mouths and see them represented in our media.

I have so many recommendations that were huge for me during my transition but feel free to reach out to your networks or online or even leave a comment to find other good pieces of trans media. For books, I absolutely adored the Dreadnought series by April Daniels for fiction and Whipping Girl by Julia Serano for nonfiction. For those who like graphic novels, The Deep & Dark Blue was incredibly cute. Trans and queer representation abounds in the sci-fi Wayfarers series. Lastly, I would suggest The Fifth Season which has some trans and queer rep from an amazing black queer author - read the whole series. For television, I loved Sense8 and Jamie Clayton was so big for my early transition! There are so many trans creators on Youtube and Tiktok as well - explore and find the ones you enjoy!

5. Explore The Territory, Not The Map

One of the most common questions new trans people ask is, “What am I? Am I a trans woman/man or nonbinary? Or am I just gender nonconforming?” The uncertainty over labels is extremely common in trans people figuring out their identities. It makes sense - gender identities are convenient wrappers for how people live in their bodies. They are great maps that indicate common experiences. So often though, I find that new trans people find themselves lost in “exploring the map and not the territory.”

What I mean by that is that people often look to these maps, these labels, as directions that are rigid for how they should experience their bodies and direct their transitions. A better way to handle early transition is to explore the territory itself and map it out later. Early in transition, figure out the things that bring you joy and the things that alleviate your gender dysphoria and pursue those things. If you want to have less body hair, go get laser hair removal. If you want to change the quality of your skin and bodyfat distribution and see breast growth or reduction, go take the hormones that apply to you. If you want to wear clothing that feels affirming, go and do that. If you want to go by a name that feels like it belongs to you, do that! Experiment a little. The identity itself will come later - these identities were never meant to be rigid prescriptions for how you should live your life and experience your transition. The labels will come naturally later.

Final Words

Early transition can be a difficult time but it is also a beautiful one. Early in my transition, someone told me “Oh, you’re new! Take this piece of advice… enjoy this part of things. This is the most fun you’ll ever have.” I didn’t realize what she meant back then but I do realize it now. When you are adjusting your media diet, starting hormones and seeing those first changes, making new friends and taking care of your body and mind, things change and often so much for the better. By taking steps to affirm yourself and get you through the early days of transition, you will find so much happiness and fulfillment when you look back and realize you’ve made it to the person you’ve wanted to be. I hope that these tips help get you or your trans loved ones there.