I’ve not been using a men’s restroom since September 2022. Why I know so precisely? Because in September the incident happened. It’s not dramatic, more a bit funny I guess. So lets start with the situation, shall we?
I was attending the first company retreat after Covid, a month before I officially joined the company. It took place at the wonderful De Vere Wokefield Estate. Three days of getting to know new colleagues and listen to talks and workshops.
As this was my first time as a trans person in the UK I had thoughts … many thoughts … about my bathroom choice. Not that the situation back then was as dire as it is nowadays (2026), but I decied to be cautious.
There is a narrative about transfem people saying that they have been socialized as men. While this might be true for some or even a lot of transfem folks, nothing could be more wrong for me.
First there is no definitive definition of what socialization means. One possible version is: Socialization is the process by which individuals learn the norms, values, and behaviors that are expected in their society. It is a lifelong process that begins at birth and continues throughout one’s life.
CG Jung said “Shame is a soul eating emotion.” And I know a lot of people, especially trans people, in many situations feel intense shame. So lets talk about it!
Let me add one more quote, this time by Brené Brown: “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”
My mother tried to raise me without any violence, in sharp contrast to her own upbringing. Instead she used sentences like “What will the other kids think of you, if you […]” to gently push me to do what she wanted me to do. Only that this wasn’t gentle.
She had the best intentions, but this left deep marks on my self-worth and behavior. It took decades to understand and overcome this.
I had NO idea I was trans, that would take me another thirty years.
My mother looked at me and said: “I know, you told me when you were a child, maybe six or seven.”
I asked: “What did you say?”
“I asked you, how you would like to be called instead,” she said.
And I didn’t have an answer.
I read and hear a lot about long it took people to make a decision about if they want to or can transition and how they fought with it. Here I talk about my timeline.
Photo by Getty Images via Unsplash
Let me start again with sort of a disclaimer: I’m not bragging here. I’m not proposing that anyone but me should take the approach I took. This process was and is very much a “me thing”. Every way or approach you choose to take is valid!
This is not an easy to write post. Because it’s important to me, but can be very easily misunderstood. It’s about feelings of body horror and discovering things from my adolescence.
First I definitely need to mention some disclaimers:
I fully support bodily autonomy of every human being.
I would never confront individual people with thoughts or feelings that might/will hurt them.
For a long time now I noticed a really uncomfortable feeling of something similar to body horror when I see pictures or videos of early transition transmasc people or nonbinary (afab) people celebrating the first effects of testosterone.
I felt (and still do!) embarrassed by these feelings and after this post I will probably not talk about this anymore.
As we transition, we sometimes have conversations with cis people. Some of them funny, some rather awkward. Since I had some of them that were really entertaining or funny I thought I write a bit about these short episodes. Note that there might be situations readers would not feel comfortable with reading about.
I will tell these stories as micro novels. So feel free to skip the ones you might not be comfortable with or not interested in. But now let’s start with the strange encounters of the curious kind 🙂
