There was a moment, when I was about six years old, when I truly thought I was turning into a dog.
I had been playing in a stand of giant bamboo at the bottom of our garden, tearing away skirts of dried bark from the bases of the canes. The bamboo grew in interlocking segments, like fused vertebrae, and as I stood there peeling the brown bark away to expose the green skin underneath I glanced down at my hands and saw – oh, horror – a cluster of dark brown bristles growing along my knuckles.
As a child, I spent a great deal of my time pretending to be something other than what I was: usually a dog or a boy or a fairy, and so when I noticed the bristles on my hand it was startling, but not particularly unexpected. After the first fright, what I mostly felt was resignation. Okay, it’s finally happening, I thought to myself.
Standing there, solemn but reconciled, I pictured the transformation: my spine lurching forward, my face elongating into a muzzle, a tide of prickling hairs creeping up my arms until my entire body was furred and shaggy. I would drop forward onto all fours, a tail would sprout from my haunches, and from my mouth would issue not words but barks and growls.
But before that happened I had to tell my mother what was happening, tell her that she would no longer have her youngest child but instead another pet dog, a dog that would hang out in the garden with Ebony and Aslan and Cookie but would also always be slightly special, that would perhaps be allowed on the beds? So I ran as fast as could to the house, up the stairs and on to the veranda where she was.
I held out my hand to show her the hairs on my knuckles, beginning a garbled explanation, but as I did so I saw the bristles were not quite as bristly as they had been before. And when I brushed at them with my other hand they dusted off easily.
All they had been were tiny bark fibres, so fine that they had been able to embed themselves upright in my skin. Which meant I wasn’t turning into a dog after all and when I realised that, I was both disappointed and relieved.
These days I think about this moment quite a lot, though now I am turning into a man, rather than a dog. And this time, I’m wholly in charge of the process.
I’m experiencing the equivalent of male puberty, brought on by a twice-weekly injection of a synthetic testosterone ester called Sustanon 250. Yet even though I have chosen to do it, it doesn’t mean there aren’t moments where I look at myself in the mirror, or glance down at my pale, hairy shins, and think oh my God, what have you done to yourself? Because there is something almost supernatural about taking testosterone.
You undergo a metamorphosis, you wake up to strange and unfamiliar things. You still look like yourself, but it’s a thicker, coarser, oilier, less pretty version of yourself.
It’s not that I dislike what is happening to me, mostly I love it. Being a teenager, the second time around, is so much more fun: by this point in life you’ve hopefully gotten good at having sex, you can buy alcohol, do better drugs, and you no longer have to live with your parents or go to high school. With this adolescence I’ve learned to, mostly, leave my acne alone and I have much improved my personal style.
A lot of the time I completely forget that I didn’t use to look and feel like this, but then I see an old photo of myself, or catch a certain angle of my reflection in the mirror, and remember: that’s right, I used to look like a girl. There’s also part of me that still can’t quite believe this process is even medically possible, that this new body and face, this funny boy who looks like me, was actually here all along, just waiting somewhere in the wings.
I know that many transgender people would say that I was always a man and that taking testosterone has just made my exterior better reflect how I felt inside but for me, that isn’t true. I don’t think I was ever really a woman but I certainly never felt like a man. I don’t even know what I mean by feeling like a man, it’s just a word and a set of connotations that has little to do with the many men that I know and love, but more to do with newspapers and suits, legs planted far apart, barbeque tongs, a hand clap on the back and a braying laugh. It’s a word, that’s all. And I am still waiting for someone to adequately explain to me what it means to be a man, or a woman – and I’ve asked lots of people. Nobody has any authority on anything, beyond what it means to be themselves.
Becoming a boy for me feels like a story: like a funny, sad, joyful, cathartic coming of age story
For me, becoming a boy is an amazing thing, it corresponds with how I think the world should work. I’ve always lived half my life in the world and half my life inside books, and I feel able to move between the two easily: for instance, right now I am sitting in the Victoria University library surrounded by other diligent students tap-tapping at their keyboards. I’m hungover and I really need to pee and I’m trying to covertly see what TED Talks the girl next to me is watching but at the same time another part of me is somewhere inside Graham Greene’s scrupulous prose, accompanying a fugitive priest through a thunderstorm in 1930’s Mexico.
Needless to say, I have wild expectations for the world and for my life. I want romance and adventure and unlikely heroes. I want people to have fatal flaws and dark pasts, I want there to be something in the forest, and there to always, always be more than meets the eye. This means that I tend to apply the standards of fiction to my life, a habit that always nearly ends in disappointment. An exception to the rule, however, seems to be transitioning. Becoming a boy for me feels like a story: like a funny, sad, joyful, cathartic coming of age story.
Last summer, when I had been taking testosterone for about three months, I decided that instead of flying or taking the ferry home to Nelson for Christmas I would walk there. It would be an adventure. So I went by myself and took only Jack London books and slept under the stars and washed myself in the river, half serious about this ridiculous idea of boyhood, and half laughing at myself.
On the third morning, after waking up on the bank of Pelorus River, I wandered along to the café at the DOC campground to have breakfast. It was early in the morning, no tourists awake yet, and the world was still cool and green and expectant. I could feel the day ahead of me unrolling like a spool, waiting there for me to start walking into it.
Testosterone has changed how I live in the world. There is a lightness to my life now, like someone flinging open a window in a stale room
At the café I ordered eggs and coffee and sat in the window eating, my pack at my feet, feeling magnificent. When I went up to pay for the food, my eftpos card, as it often does, declined. The brisk, middle-aged woman who had served me looked at me shrewdly over the counter, taking in my backpack and grubby, slept-in clothes. She grinned: “Ah hah,” she said, “a boy with no funds!” And when she said that I saw myself, suddenly, as she saw me, which for the first time was exactly how I wanted to be seen.
Testosterone has changed me physically, but it’s also changed how I live in the world. There is a lightness to my life now, like someone flinging open a window in a stale room. Nothing seems to stick to me anymore. And sometimes when I’m walking into town at night, I break into a run, and start sprinting and grinning. It’s like there is a wind roaring through my chest: I want to yell and dance and make out and hurl rocks into the sea and get into fights and kick things and jump off jetties.
What I’m trying to say is, life is finally living up to my expectations.
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