Hi y’all, I’ve been (slowly) doing my transition for almost 2 years now and it’s mostly good. I didn’t really have any plan in place when I started, just the vague idea of maybe transitioning. I think I’m running into this problem because of how my brain developed. I’m really bad at planning out past a year because all my life I assumed I wouldn’t make it past 21. So, is there some sort of guide on the steps of transition? Preferably a wiki sort of thing. I’ve looked a bit but nothing has caught my eye.
It’s not super important but it’d really help me figure out how to proceed. Like okay, I’m on HRT and that’s going fine, so now what? I guess I’m a bit lost.
I think it’s next to impossible to write a guide on how to transition. It’s so multidimensional and personalized that any guide saying do x, y and z is going to be wrong for someone. But maybe something very, very general can be written.
You’ve actually been at this longer than me so maybe you have a better idea of what transition is to you but I split mine into three broad categories; mental, social and medical.
Mental transition is working on how you view yourself and how you fit into the world. For me it mainly involves reflection on what exactly do I want, how do I get it, and why haven’t I. Usually unpacking internalized transphobia for me but also involves integrateing ‘girl me’ me into my view of myself. Slots in with medical transition in that you may want to talk to a therapist to assist you with it and helps you decide if and how you want to medically transition. Fits in with social transition in it is how you decide to transition and overcome inhibitions to transition. Maybe the hardest easy thing to do.
Social transition is changing how you interact with the people and the world around you. Probably the first thing most people think of when they say transition. Covers a huge range of things like how you groom yourself, clothes, pronouns, voice training and many many more. How, when and why someone does one thing or another is going to be very personal and specific to them.
Medical transition is basically anything you need a doctor to help you with. I include feminizing HRT here even though you could technically do it by yourself in a lot of jurisdictions. I would also include any mental health consoling here. My advice here is to basically get in line the second you have an inkling that you are going want or need help from the medical community. The wait times for it can be months or years depending on location. If when you get to the front of the line and decide you don’t want anything you can always decline and they’ll go to the next person.