1.

You’re probably wondering why I’ve gathered you all here. Normally I’m of the mind that, ahh, I do what I want, and I don’t keep people apprised of my business — not because I am trying to hide it, but because it’s none of their business, and if it was need-to-know info, I would give it to them. Maybe I inherited that frame of mind from my mother. She’s always been the frontierswoman type, real private and industrious, leave you to yours if you leave me to mine, you know what I mean?

But I want to get this all out there. I want people to understand me.

Parts of my life have become need-to-know information for people that interact with me on a regular basis, because I’m making plans to undergo a process that will make me look and behave significantly different, and I want to get in front of that to mitigate any confusion that might arise.

So I feel as though I should provide you with information that might help some of you understand the changes I’m making in myself, the decisions I’ve made that have led me here, and the circuitous route I’ve taken.

I don’t blog often, so I don’t talk about myself much outside of complaining on social media about this or that. So you’re probably pretty aware of my political views, or how I feel about Oxford commas and “Write what you know.” You probably know that I love horror and coffee. You might even already be aware of my “non-binary” status.

So anyway, I don’t do that often, so I figured that since I was about to make some big changes, I might as well pour all that out here and make it a thing.

And besides, I’m a storyteller.

How can I pass up the opportunity to tell you a story?

(Content warning: there’s a brief mention of suicide here in about eight paragraphs, some mild talk about bodily functions later, and a brief description of child abuse.)

2.

The whole thing started a couple of years ago when I and my girlfriend at the time, Jess, were having compatibility issues and the relationship went in a confusing, lonely direction. I had a lot of difficulty processing it and ended up getting really depressed. She suggested that I see a therapist.

Unaware that I had other options (namely, the Alcona Community Health Center, where I go now), I went the yellow-pages route and googled nearby men’s mental-health counselors. I don’t quite remember the exact events that transpired, but I found three.

One of them wouldn’t pick up the phone, so I biked out to his practice only to discover that his office was cleaned out and he had retired. The next one was a total misogynist who told me over the phone not to cry in front of women because it made me look weak and they didn’t like men like that. I don’t remember what happened with the third, but the first finally returned my message and asked me to come visit him at his private residence.

That seemed incredibly inappropriate and gave me total Tusk and Human Centipede vibes, so I called off the search for the time being, discouraged.

Eventually, my relationship with Jess deteriorated to the point that we ended up separating just before Thanksgiving, which devastated me. I spent the winter in some strange, desolate limbo, grieving my lost relationship, soul-searching, haunting a dark corner in the local coffee-shop hangout, skulking around in the snow sobbing like a Victorian La Llorona — you know, all those wonderful things emo writers like me do. That first night happened to coincide with an event at Beards’ Brewery — Game Night, I think, something I had put on my schedule before the breakup and had really wanted to attend — but I didn’t really have any friends then other than my D&D group, who had been scattered to the four winds over the winter.

So I sloshed around the tourist district all evening in knee-deep snow, trying to stop crying, hoping some group of tourists would take pity on me and invite me to hang out with them. My heart was so fucking broken that my body had washed away like old food in a kitchen sink, revealing some kind of ravaged, agonizingly-raw ghost. At several points, it took all I had not to kneel in the snow and press my forehead against the frozen sidewalk and just be like that forever. I had come a thousand miles from home and now I no longer had anything tying me to Petoskey other than a few friends that I didn’t even get to see anymore.

When Christmas rolled around, I didn’t put up a tree. I was done with relationships, and women, and people, and maybe life in general. It had taken me almost a decade to recover from my abusive relationship and begin to regain trust in women. I had gotten back on the horse, and now . . . I was on my back in the dirt again.

My life-long depression came back with a vengeance. I moved my futon into the dining room where the tree usually stood, and lay on it for hours every night fantasizing about buying a long, sturdy rope and doing a scuba flip off the handrail of the Mitchell St. Bridge. Good time of year for it. This useless husk of mine would freeze solid in no time. One of my biggest fears were the insects feasting on my corpse, but in a Michigan winter, that was not an issue.

So as I tend to do when I get my heart broken, I dragged myself out of the mud by my bootstraps, and made a big change.

The first time it happened, when my first wife Jennifer left me in 2005, I joined the Army. I had to get out of town, I had to make a change, I needed a change of scenery.

The second time it happened, after Teasha left me in 2011, I moved to Kentucky to hang out with my stepbrother and make video games in Lexington. That turned out to be a mistake — or maybe a half-mistake, because Slade, Kentucky, where I ended up homeless for a little while, provided part of the inspiration for the Malus Domestica books. But around this time I started writing the Outlaw King series, which was most decidedly not a mistake, and continues to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

This time I made a weird move. I stayed put. I did not flee like usual.

Instead of running away, changing my scenery or my situation, I changed myself. I did not reassemble my broken pieces into what I thought everyone wanted me to be, or what I thought I ought to be. This time I reassembled my broken pieces into what I wanted to be. This time I liquified like a caterpillar in my emotional chrysalis, and began my Kafkaesque transformation into a creature I’d been fantasizing about becoming for a long time.

3.

For a very long time, I’ve known I was different.

Raised entirely by a woman and surrounded by her sisters, I was kind of a shrimpy, bookish kid — adventure-minded, head in the clouds, with a vivid imagination and no friends, and I had trouble fitting in with redneck society — chopping wood, four-wheeling, deer-hunting, fishing, NASCAR, horses. I wasn’t into sports like other boys. I didn’t roughhouse. I wasn’t a Don Juan, even though I’m attracted to women. I was a lonely, nerdy kid, and I didn’t fit in even the least little bit.

Even then there were two sides to me, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time: a dark, headstrong, turbulent side, and a quiet, thoughtful, vulnerable side.

They say authors contain multitudes — we are all full of characters yelling to be heard, clamoring to be set to paper, bickering with each other and discovering themselves. I have come to learn that I have always had two characters inside me: an angry, impulsive, insecure man, and an exasperated, introspective, confident woman who is tired of his shit.

Over the winter, I discovered the term “non-binary” floating around on the internet.

Something about it reached through the dark caul of my post-breakup depression and sparked a light in me. Felt like I’d finally determined a real truth about myself, a secret name I’d had since birth and never known, or perhaps it had simply helped me pull my dual nature into clearer focus, and suddenly I gained some measure of power over Me and who I was.

I was not wholly male — I was both in one.

I was non-binary. I finally knew. I was an “enby,” a nickname for “NB,” non-binary.

❎ Male

❎ Female

✅ All of the above

I consider myself a mixture of the two traditional genders — both male and female simultaneously. I refer to myself not as “he” or “she,” but as “them” and “they.” I am a human Reese’s peanut butter cup — female chocolate and male peanut butter, living together in gooey symbiosis. I contain a dichotomy, a dual nature that is sometimes at odds with each other.

Wikipedia’s entry for non-binary says it is “a spectrum of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or exclusively feminine‍.”

If you’re familiar with Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels, consider me something sort of like Susannah Dean. I am Susannah, the combination of Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes. Long days and pleasant nights, gunslingers.

A quick aside — the Wikipedia entry for “non-binary” also states thus:

Non-binary people may identify as: having two or more genders (being bigender or trigender); having no gender (agender, nongendered, genderless, genderfree or neutrois); moving between genders or having a fluctuating gender identity (genderfluid); being third gender or other-gendered (a category that includes those who do not place a name to their gender).

I consider myself “genderfluid,” meaning my gender expression fluctuates from day to day, dictating my choice of expression and fashion. Today I might be stomping around wearing pants and going barefaced, tomorrow I might be sashaying around, wearing pink eyeshadow and a dress. It depends on how masculine or feminine I feel when I wake up that day (and how much time I want to spend shaving and putting makeup on my face).

Also:

Gender identity is separate from sexual or romantic orientation, and non-binary people have a variety of sexual orientations, just as transgender and cisgender people do.

Think of it like this: your gender and your sexuality are two different things. Your gender is what you are, and your sexuality is who you like. Your gender could be “spoon,” or “fork” — and your sexuality could be “cereal,” or it could be “soup,” or it might be “chili,” or even a mixture of caviar and marmalade. (Cavalade?)

Point is, you can eat whatever you want, but what you are is a spoon.

For the record, as a non-binary person, my sexuality is “pansexual,” meaning I’m a spork, and I’ll eat just about anything.

4.

Another way to conceptualize my non-binary nature: consider my favorite Dungeons & Dragons monster, the Owlbear.

“Short-faced owlbear,” by Carlos Eulefi

I love the Owlbear because it’s a perfect visual representation of my non-binary nature. Half of the beast is a wise, elegant owl, the queen of the night skies; the other half is a hulking, explosive bear, the apex predator of the forest.

And as an Owlbear, I am way too much bear and not enough owl. I want to bring that bear down a little bit, and pump that owl part up considerably.

I’m not sure I can truly and fully define which of my characteristics belong to which nature, nor can I say with authority, “this aspect belongs to this traditional gender,” because strength does not strictly belong to masculinity, and gentleness does not strictly belong to femininity.

But I know that after a lifetime of pushing myself to my limits, including ten years in the Army, this hardy Irish body is strong. I am strong as fuck for my frame. I can one-arm-row-lift an average-capacity water heater at ~100lb. I can suitcase-drag a 250lb refrigerator up a flight of stairs with one hand. I’ve lifted a ~300lb enamel-iron bathtub by myself and thrown it into a Dumpster. Never defeated in Army Combatives (hand-to-hand ground game). If I ever get into the guard position, or if I’m on my hands and knees, good luck. If I get on top of you, it’s over.

And while the pragmatic female side of me has been ready and willing to leverage this strength into achieving many a feat of manual labor, the angry, impulsive Mr. Hyde has a history of using this strength to self-harm and sublimate his frustration in unhealthy ways. When I was younger, I squeezed video-game controllers to pieces, twisted household fixtures out of their mounts. I’ve punched holes in walls, dented fire-exit doors and foot lockers with my fists and elbows. To this day my hands cramp up when I try to write longhand. It’s a miracle I’ve never broken them.

Many people assume this kind of behavior is some kind of chest-beating display of dominance, done purposefully, meant to intimidate. Some men can be guilty of this. But in my experience, it has proven to be an instinctual coping mechanism, a form of self-harm, like cutting or burning yourself, to gain some control over whatever anger or despair you’re feeling at the time.

You can’t control emotional pain like despair or sorrow, but you can control physical pain. You can take the reins of physical pain, and use it to obstruct the emotional pain with it like an umbrella blocks the sun.

Self-harming is emotional Tylenol.

Some people drink to forget, to remove themselves from reality for a while. Some people get high. Some people go running until they puke. And some people hurt themselves on purpose.

Of course, I’m not proud of it. It’s been years since I’ve done anything like that — I don’t have that pain tolerance anymore, I’m no longer in a headspace where I instinctively turn to self-harming when I’m frustrated, and honestly I’m just too old to abuse myself that way these days. The majority of the time now, when I get those urges, I have the self-control to step back and evaluate my reaction to the situation, and the ramifications of losing focus. But my introspective, deliberate female side still experiences no small amount of shame and frustration at how I used to behave.

And as I’ve grown older and wiser, the anger, the confusion, and the urge to self-harm have not completely gone away, but they’ve become colder, slower, more considerate. For the most part I can control it now, or at least consciously dial it back.

In the end I have decided that my male side has done enough driving (and crashing into shit), and it’s time to let the woman in the passenger seat hop behind the wheel.

By that I don’t mean that I want to transition into a woman — I know I am not a woman, at least not fully. But I’m also not fully a man. I just want to hit a midway point that expresses what I am inside, on the outside, biologically.

Think of my non-binary gender dichotomy as a stereo system. Specifically, the equalizer, the bass versus the treble. Right now my bass is up way too high — my trunk is buzzing, my bones are shaking, and I’m struggling to hear the finer notes. So I want to turn that EQ dial a bit off-center, toward the feminine treble, and bring out those higher, more complex and delicate rhythms.

5.

Once I finally rebounded from my depression around March or April, I emerged from my chrysalis as a newborn “enby.”

In order to feminize myself, I needed to find hormone replacement therapy to introduce estrogen to my system. By the time I had rebounded from my winter bout with depression, I had been putting out experimental feelers for HRT options for a year at least, and had done a lot of anecdotal reading and Googling. From what I could tell, I was going to find a lot of pushback, even if there were any local sources, which I didn’t see. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.

I discovered a hormone specialist in Petoskey, but when I called them they admitted that they did not work with transgender people. “There’s an endocrinologist at MacLaren once a month or so that might do it,” she told me, but I wasn’t sure how to even begin that quest, so I put it on the backburner until I could find a clear route.

In the meantime, I tracked down online sources for hormones.

One of them was “Lena,” a trans-woman in the Ukraine selling unmixed tinctures of estradiol through the mail for about eighty bucks, taking payment through an obscure go-between service I’d never heard of. She mails you powdered estrogen; you mix it with castor oil (or the suspension medium of your choice), draw it into a hypodermic syringe, and inject it into your ass-cheek.

I’m no chemist or pharmacist, and I’m not injecting some Eastern-European mystery powder into my gluteus maximus.

By the way, estradiol, if you were wondering, is one of the three main naturally-occurring estrogen steroids in the female body. It’s the primary one. Wikipedia’s article on estradiol says,

[Estradiol is] an estrogen steroid hormone and the major female sex hormone. It is involved in the regulation of the estrous and menstrual female reproductive cycles. Estradiol is responsible for the development of female secondary sexual characteristics such as the breasts, widening of the hips, and a female-associated pattern of fat distribution and is important in the development and maintenance of female reproductive tissues such as the mammary glands, uterus, and vagina during puberty, adulthood, and pregnancy. It also has important effects in many other tissues including bone, fat, skin, liver, and the brain. Though estradiol levels in males are much lower compared to those in females, estradiol has important roles in males as well. Apart from humans and other mammals, estradiol is also found in most vertebrates and crustaceans, insects, fish, and other animal species.

The other two are estriol and estrone. There’s a fourth one, estetrol, but it is only produced during pregnancy.

Anyway, the other item I found during a cursory sweep of Amazon: ProEstro black cohosh pills, meant to treat menopause symptoms, twenty dollars a bottle. I won’t bore you with all the botanic information like rhizomes and stamens, but “Black cohosh,” Actaea racemosa, contains phytoestrogens. Wikipedia states,

A phytoestrogen is a plant-derived xenoestrogen […] consumed by eating phytoestrogenic plants. Also called a ‘dietary estrogen,’ it is a diverse group of naturally occurring nonsteroidal plant compounds that, because of its structural similarity with estradiol, have the ability to cause estrogenic effects. […] According to one study of nine common phytoestrogens in a Western diet, foods with the highest relative phytoestrogen content were nuts and oilseeds, followed by soy products, cereals and breads, legumes, meat products, and other processed foods that may contain soy, vegetables, fruits, alcoholic, and nonalcoholic beverages. Flax seed and other oilseeds contained the highest total phytoestrogen content, followed by soybeans and tofu. The highest concentrations of isoflavones are found in soybeans and soybean products followed by legumes, whereas lignans are the primary source of phytoestrogens found in nuts and oilseeds (e.g. flax) and also found in cereals, legumes, fruits and vegetables. Phytoestrogen content varies in different foods, and may vary significantly within the same group of foods (e.g. soy beverages, tofu) depending on processing mechanisms and type of soybean used. Legumes (in particular soybeans), whole grain cereals, and some seeds are high in phytoestrogens. A more comprehensive list of foods known to contain phytoestrogens includes: Soybeans and soy products Tempeh Linseed (flax) Sesame seeds Wheat berries Oats Barley Beans Lentils Yams Rice Alfalfa Mung beans Apples Carrots Pomegranates Wheat germ Rice bran Lupin Kudzu Coffee Licorice root Mint Ginseng Hops Bourbon whiskey Beer Fennel Anise Red clover […]

The National Institute of Health says in a study of black cohosh,

Studies indicate that flavonoids, like [black cohosh], may act as a “selective estrogen receptor modulator” (SERM), thus inducing inhibitory growth effects on hormone-dependent cancer cells.

At any rate, the Amazon reviews for ProEstro were full of elated exclamations about how their hot flashes and other menopause symptoms had all but disappeared. It wasn’t true HRT — the capsules didn’t contain any real biological estrogen, but they were about as close as I was going to get without ordering mystery powder from “Lena.”

So as far as I could tell, the ProEstro capsules had a pro-estrogenic effect and there was empirical evidence that they helped to inhibit the cancer growth that certain Facebook friends had expressed concern about.

I mean, the choice was obvious.

The capsules showed up a couple weeks later and I started taking them the day they arrived. I had also ordered a lotion called “BiEstro,” which did contain biological estradiol, and started massaging it into my face after every shave.

Within the month I could see my face feminizing as the fat cells rearranged themselves. I stood in my bathroom, gazing transfixed at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. My skin looked softer, my jaw seemed less square and my face more heart-shaped, my eyes seemed to have become significantly more vivid and prominent, my neck had vaguely narrowed. I don’t know if my estrogen had increased or my testosterone had decreased, but something was struggling to take effect. I gained an almost willowy aspect.

For the first time in my entire life, I felt attractive.

My self-image shot through the fucking ceiling. I was over the moon happy. For the first time in 37 years, I liked the person I saw in the mirror.

In retrospect I think this might have been what is called “gender euphoria” in gender exploration circles — the idea that you experience an automatic, inherent joy through expressing your gender in its proper form. The Gender Wiki says,

“Gender Euphoria is a psychological condition which consists of comfort or even joy when thinking about one’s true Gender identity, often accompanied by a strong desire to change one’s sex to better match their identity or to be called the correct gendered language. “Euphoria can be focused upon bodily attributes, treatment from others. It is possible for nonbinary people to feel gender euphoria too, for much the same reasons as binary transgender people.”

/u/hatshepsut at Reddit says about a female-to-male trans-man’s gender euphoria,

“Does being called [a] man give you euphoria? Perhaps . . . but I wonder if this euphoria is rather yourself coping without the burdens of forced femininity, of feeling relief in the idea of opting out of being female.”

Not sure that’s one hundred percent true, but there is definitely a relief and satisfaction in crawling out from under the weight of masculinity, especially toxic masculinity, and opting out of being fully male.

There is absolutely an allure to being allowed to show my emotions or express my sexuality, and to finally being valued — valued as an intellectual human being and a sexual creature, and not just as a source of income, or being valued solely for how much backbreaking work I can do.

I also find incredible relief in not being perceived as a predator.

When they noticed I was there, many women reacted to my presence in certain environments in a guarded, unsure way — and I don’t blame them for that.

Take the local city park, for example. I’ve been sitting in the picnic area working on a book within sight of the playground, and women give me pointed looks, pack up their kids, and leave. Women make a hasty exit as soon as they see me, or don’t even get out of the car at all. I’ve seen women pull into the parking lot dressed for jogging on the track, sit in the car for upwards of twenty minutes, then back out and leave.

Like I said, I don’t blame them for their caution, there are a lot of terrible people out there — but I’m not one of them. And there is an immense un-burdening and comfort in being able to shed that, and be perceived as a friend and not an enemy. I like being soft vulnerable, and what kids on the internet call “smol.”

There’s also an element of being seen.

As a man, nobody gave a shit about me or the way I looked — I’d never received a compliment in my whole life other than the occasional “handsome” from my aunt. I was invisible. I was a faceless ghost, wearing shapeless mens’ peasant-rags from Walmart: polo shirts and cargo shorts in masculine colors like Dog Turd Brown and Shovel Gray and Who Are You Again? White. I might as well have been a Generic Caucasian Guy cardboard cutout.

But when the estrogen changed my features and I started dressing in feminine clothing, suddenly everybody in my life* was telling me I was “cute,” I was “pretty,” my clothes looked good, I looked good.

The summer before my breakup with Jess, I’d begun to experiment with feminine clothing — chiefly, leggings. I’d found a pair of Halloween leggings at Meijer, fleece tights covered in pumpkins and gravestones, and I was amazed to discover that they were the most comfortable thing I’d ever stretched across this moldy cadaver I call a body.

Started wearing them under my jeans — women’s jeans at that, a pair of black stretch-denim biker jeans that looked really good on me. I bought a couple of “T-shirt dresses” and wore them under my jacket, passed them off as unusually long T-shirts. Found an activewear hoodie made of quilted fabric that came down to mid-thigh, almost like a tunic. I liked the way it looked over the T-shirt dresses; reminded me of Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice.

Everything in black, of course.

By the time I’d discovered who I truly was and started taking the ProEstro this year, I was going in public in full panoply — dress, leggings, eye makeup and all. People loved it. Even strangers were complimenting me every day. I got an anonymous message from a secret admirer telling me I was “beautiful.” My partner Kate told me I was gorgeous every day with this awestruck expression on their face.

All of a sudden I began to exist in the real world like Roger Rabbit stepping through a portal from Toontown into real California. I was no longer a wooden puppet, or a cardboard cutout. I coalesced out of thin air and people started to treat me like someone that deserved to exist.

6.

*Here I’d like to digress slightly and tell you about that “everybody in my life.” By that, I’m talking about the people that I encounter on a daily basis, and my friends here in Petoskey. They have been an exemplary fraction of humanity, every one of them — a stalwart source of support, acceptance, and/or love from the get-go. Jules, Joyce, Mariah, Liam and the rest of the Roast gang, Ari, Sabrina, Zach 1, Zach 2, and Zach 3, Alex 1 and 2 and the rest of the McLean & Eakin crew, Steve, Gary, Lisa, Rocky, Ron and Katherine, Bob and Esther, Haley, Mary, Kenn, Stone, Jake, Sherry, Sylvi, Stell and the Michelsen clan, Matt, Cassi, Marshal, Cody, Cory, and Delainey . . . you guys are the best friends I have ever had in my life.

This list of people is why I am still in Petoskey, Michigan. I’m so lucky to live here with all of these accepting, incredible people. I’m lucky to have been able to afford to move up here.

To a certain extent there’s the ever-nebulous Outlaw Army and all my thousands of adherents on social media, which means I don’t truly know exactly who is in it, how many there are of you, or who’s even still there. But of the ones I interact with on a daily basis, all of them have been accepting and even enthusiastic about my change. Chaser, mostly, and Katie, Monica, Oakes, Ruz, Logan, Marcus, Glenn, Caleb, Emily, Lason, Gallowglas, Chamren, Franck, Shea, Lucas, Coorlim, Barouch, Sandlin, and many, many, many others, known and anonymous.

There’s also my agent, Leon, and my editor, Diana.

Last but not least is my partner, Kate, who has supported me and my decision since we met, and thinks I’m beautiful. They love the way I look when I’m dressed up and find it extremely attractive.

I am surrounded by loving, wonderful people, and I am astronomically, desperately lucky to have that.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve encountered anyone yet that hasn’t been receptive, or at least not openly hostile. I’m hoping that doesn’t change, because there are probably a lot of people in my life reading this essay and learning these things about me for the first time.

To them I just want to say: as much as I’m telling you about monumental changes and how amazing and incredible this “new me” is . . . in the end, the new me is really just the old me with most of the shit I don’t want replaced with new and better shit.

I still love you as much as I ever did. That never changed.

That heart is still under there.

7.

So I stared at the half-feminized face in the bathroom mirror.

I didn’t see a factory robot. I didn’t see a potential assailant. I didn’t see a ghost. I didn’t see one-note Adam, the ugly, hairy, depressed lump-of-shit “ogre” and “Frankenstein” and “Undertaker” whose only redeeming feature was being able to perform manual labor for money.

I saw S. A. Hunt, the attractive, complex intellectual who looks good in an empire waist and choker, who wrote all those books and has lots of cool friends and spends their days writing in the local-hangout coffee shop.

I saw Sam, the graceful cryptid that loves ducklings and good coffee and rainy days and mellow folk-rock music from the 60s.

I cast off the worthless husk of my old one-sided lie of a facade, and found the child of Aphrodite and Hephaestus looking back at me, a rock-and-roll demigod with black-painted nails and anvil fists.

I finally made eye contact with my soul for the first time.

And it was exhilarating. Intoxicating.

8.

Meanwhile, a molar in the back of my mouth next to an old wisdom tooth socket had been slowly deteriorating over the last few years into just a broken stump, and finally started to hurt in earnest, a sharp, electric, bone-deep ache that reached up into my eye socket. As the months wore on, it got worse and worse until it became unbearable, only alleviated by so many applications of clove oil that the corner of my mouth blistered. I had to go to a dentist.

During my search for a therapist the previous autumn, I had somehow accidentally managed to end up with some surprisingly good health insurance, so I tracked down a dentist and had the tooth extracted.

A side effect of getting the insurance was that I also landed a primary care physician, and I was finally able to make an appointment to see a doctor and get a checkup — the first physical I’d had since my days in the Army almost ten years ago. Hopefully, I told myself, if I made an appointment with my new primary care physician, perhaps I could somehow talk them into referring me to the endocrinologist at MacLaren Hospital.

That didn’t happen. I think I mentioned it during my appointment, but with my anxiety and my tendency to be shy about advocating my own issues, it sort of got lost in the discussion about my health — kind of like yelling to be heard in a noisy bar — and by that time I had just about written it off as a long shot, so I didn’t push it.

Plus, I got the feeling that the doc wasn’t familiar with transgender issues, maybe even uncomfortable, and was kind of reluctant to even talk about it.

However, I was finishing up my physical when my new PCP mentioned they had a therapist on-site, an honest-to-God mental health counselor, a woman no less, and that it might benefit me to visit them. “Now, I’m not saying you’re crazy,” the doctor reassured me. “Anybody can benefit from seeing a therapist.”

“Does my insurance cover it?”

“Yep!”

Excitedly, I agreed. I’d been wanting to see one for the better part of two years ever since things had gone south with Jess (too little too late, I guess, but better late than never), but now I had a secondary motive — hopefully I could find a way to hormone replacement therapy through proving myself to the therapist.

From my research into the process of becoming transgender that there were certain documents, I knew I would probably need to achieve HRT, called a “letter of informed consent” — basically an affidavit swearing that you, the Patient, are consciously aware of the side effects of the transgender process, you’re not being coerced into the process, and you still want to go through with it. And I figured that if I could prove my gender dysphoria and non-binary status to the Alcona therapist, I could at least get somebody on my side in the uphill battle to come.

That didn’t quite prove to be the case, but the therapist was at least positive about my decision. My primary care physician pointed me in another direction in my HRT quest: the local Community Mental Health office. I wasn’t sold on that, but I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence if I didn’t chase down every lead I got.

To my surprise, the paperwork I received from my PCP after my physical contained a diagnosis of “gender identity disorder,” which I didn’t agree with, considering gender identity disorder was obsolete; it had been removed from the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013, and I didn’t consider my feelings to be a mental illness.

At any rate, my gender dysphoria issues had been recognized by my PCP, with very little pushback, so I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Meanwhile, I was still taking the ProEstro black cohosh supplements, buying them when I could afford them, but the facial feminization had worn off and I considered abandoning them because I didn’t see the point when they were no longer contributing any visible change. One nice side effect, though, was that my mood had significantly improved, and it was definitely tied to the supplements. Kate could always tell when I wasn’t taking them because I had a shorter fuse, thinner skin, and a more solemn temperament.

An odder side effect was that after seeing myself with feminine features, I could more easily recognize my masculine features, and I could see the handsome side of me better. My self-image and self-esteem went up on both sides.

A rising tide lifts all ships, they say.

9.

The day I went to CMH was a femme day, so I was wearing eye makeup and one of my black T-shirt dresses with a pair of leggings. “. . . We don’t do that here,” the receptionist told me coldly but confusedly, looking at me like I was Mork from Ork.

“Oh,” I said, awkwardly. “Thanks? I guess?”

I left.

Can’t say I was surprised. Around here, CMH is who you call when your mentally-ill neighbor is running around naked in ten-degree temps with a kitchen knife, talking about how the government keeps untying his shoes when he’s not looking.

Not who you go to for gender identity help.

10.

Around that time, we scheduled Petoskey’s first annual Pride Walk.

Not a whole lot of people came to that first walk — about thirty, including two dogs. We assembled in the plaza in front of the Crooked Tree Arts building to get ready to walk through the downtown tourism district.

My partner Kate had purchased a bulk box of little rainbow flags on Amazon and we passed them out to the assembly, along with bottles of water from a cooler.

Jake and his mother Sherry sat at the periphery of the throng, Jake in a wheelchair, holding a rainbow flag. Jake is a slender boy with glasses and an undercut, seemingly small for his age, with the punkish je ne sais quoi of a teen protagonist from an 80s horror-adventure. I knew him from Roast & Toast; I’d seen him working there for quite a while, and we’d become passing acquaintances. But what I hadn’t realized until just then was that he was a trans-male. Vivid mastectomy scars peeked out from under his sleeveless shirt, like the scars of fresh war wounds.

After the Pride walk, we all connected on Facebook, and Kate told me they and Sherry had spoken about the process the Howards had gone through pursuing transgender therapy.

Apparently, three hours south of us in a little town called Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, was a “gender services clinic,” owned and operated by a counselor, psychotherapist and patient advocate named Deanna Heath. Jake had undertaken his personal journey there, and after accruing a couple years of experience of the process by his side, Sherry was all too happy to be our sherpa.

11.

Are you wondering if you were given the wrong gender label at birth?

Have you decided it is time to explore gender transition and make a decision about whether or not to go ahead?

These issues create difficult situations in every area of life, relationships, work, health, family and social life. Through therapy these issues can be explored and your path can be developed.

Areas of identity, especially gender identity are issues at the heart of who we are. Our practice provides comprehensive services for those exploring their gender identity and those on the path to transition and beyond.

We provide referrals to trans friendly professionals such as physicians, attorneys, speech therapists, surgeons and more so you are assured a positive experience as you transition. Advocacy is an essential part of what we do.

At Greater Michigan Gender Services, we offer in-office consultation, coaching and therapy sessions, referrals, advocacy as well as online sessions using a web camera.

We help you sort out your place on the gender spectrum and determine if transitioning is an appropriate course of action. If it is, we can assist you through the various stages of the transition process.

Benefits while attending therapy:

Clarity about your gender and what action to take, if any.

Knowledge about the various stages of the gender transition process.

Self-awareness related to how your transgender identity fits within your individual identity.

Referrals to physicians for hormones, electrologists and laser specialists for hair removal, speech therapists for voice feminization and masculinization

Referrals to surgeons for facial feminization and gender confirmation surgeries, along with top surgery for female-to male patients.

Issuance of carry letters.

Direction to hair stylists and make-up artists.

Guidance in movement, voice and wardrobe.

Recommendations for internet sites, films and books to further your personal gender exploration and transition.

Coming-out guidance for friends and family, at school and on the job through letters, presentations, and one-on-one conversations.

Screening and treatment for psychological and emotional issues that may co-occur with gender dysphoria.

Sense of well-being, as the gender therapeutic process moves forward.

Deanna herself holds a Clinical Master of Social Work degree from Michigan State University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and Sociology from Central Michigan University.

Her professional website says,

My work experience includes 25 years in hospice and health care along with experience in college student issues, adoptions, the court system and facilitating loss and grief groups. My training and my work experience have provided me with wide ranging experiences which are very valuable in my work as a therapist.

I’d found my Holy Grail.

Emailing Deanna through the contact form on their website, I gave her a rundown of my situation and goals. A couple days later, she emailed back to set up an appointment: Tuesday, September the 3rd. Four in the afternoon.

And, I was incredulous to discover, my insurance would pay for everything.

A miracle.

The ball was finally rolling.

12.

In the meantime, I had continued to wear feminine clothing and shave my arms and chest. I purchased a pair of silicone A-cup breasts from Amazon, and wore them on the days I felt like “going femme.” Something about them felt natural when I looked down and saw them resting under my shirt, and the weight of them on my chest. Evidently they made pretty good pillows too, as my partner Kate had developed a habit of lounging on my new chest while we watched TV.

You might notice that I didn’t say I shave my legs. Shaving my legs is generally not a good idea, because the hair is so coarse, and when it starts to grow back the next day, it itches so bad my digging leaves sores, and I get ingrown hairs. Lotion does nothing.

Over the summer, I bought an epilator, but man, that shit is rough.

An epilator uses a rotating barrel covered in dozens of tweezers to pull hair out of the skin at power-drill speeds. It’s like shaving with a belt sander. And it doesn’t last — over the course of a couple of days, I made it all the way from my ankles to my knees and it only took a week or so for it to start growing back. I will definitely have to take advantage of the gender clinic’s hair removal offer.

It occurs to me that you might be thinking, “you’ve mentioned ‘going femme,’ but what about ‘going masc’?”

To answer that, it might be prudent to tell you how I started dressing femme in the first place. Like I said earlier, it started with the Halloween leggings I bought at Meijer. Not only were they comfortable, but in retrospect I think I was experiencing the “gender euphoria” I mentioned before, in a small, incremental way. “Micro-experiencing,” you might say. I began to consider it “stress relief” to get home, get out of my clothes, and lounge around the apartment in my leggings, and I think now that the pressure-valve feeling I got was the gender euphoria coming in a little bit every night.

In order to facilitate my femme days, on the days I dress masculine, I don’t do any upkeep. Basically when I “go masc,” I go back to the way I was until this year, and present as a man. It’s all about how you want to “present.” When you go to a job interview, you want to present as a sleek, competent professional. When you go to your next boxing match, you want to present as a natural-born gladiator, ready to beat some ass.

These days I consider dressing like a guy “slumming it,” because I’ll be honest with you, one thing I’ve learned this year is that guys have it easy when it comes to their appearance.

Guys don’t have to worry about buying a hundred types of makeup (eyeliner, shadow, brow pencil, mascara, foundation, concealer, lipstick, blush, etc, plus beard concealer for me) and spending time putting it on with a brush set they also had to buy; they don’t have to worry about different underwear fabrics (wearing Spandex too often can cause a yeast infection) or buying different types of bras (different kinds of support, different fit, different style — sports bras aren’t as nice or sexy as lacy, soft ones, but you don’t want to go jogging in lingerie) . . . and, you know, that’s not even getting into the feminine products like tampons, which thankfully I don’t have to deal with.

No, when I go masc, I just slap on a T-shirt, joggers, and sneakers, and call it macaroni. Yankee doodle dandy.

Sometimes I don’t even bother doing anything with my hair. I don’t shave, and I just wear a T-shirt, sneakers, and pants — usually a pair of “joggers,” sometimes a pair of jeans. All black, of course. But the point is to let my face rest. If I shave every day, it gets to the point where I’m really digging to get that subcutaneous hair, the hair I can only feel if I stretch my cheeks, and it gives me serious razorburn.

Makes my face blotchy, makes the beard-shadow worse, and I despise having a beard-shadow. On the days I go masc, I want to code as masculine, and pass as a guy. But on the days I go femme, I want to code as feminine, and pass as a girl. And having that blue-gray dirt smear across my face makes it nigh impossible.

Hopefully the estrogen will do something to my facial hair. It most likely won’t stop growing altogether, but it might be easier to deal with, easier to pluck or wax. As an assigned-male-at-birth, most of my body hair is coarse and rooted deeply, especially my facial hair. My mustache and beard have heavy, bulbous roots a quarter of an inch long, and require a considerable amount of force to pull out, even moreso than the hair on my head.

To further the comparison to Dungeons & Dragons, I’m trading a couple points of Strength and possibly Constitution for points in Dexterity, Wisdom, and Charisma. One of the effects of estrogen therapy is that I will not be as strong as I used to be.

I’m okay with this, because at my age — two years from 40 — and at this stage in my life, I’m already not as strong as I used to be. And my female side doesn’t need this strength as much as I did when I was perceived as one-hundred-percent male. So I’m happy to give it up.

Estrogen will make my skin softer, and redistribute my fat, changing my silhouette and the shape of my face. Hopefully this means I’ll lose at least some of my gut and regain it around my hips, thighs, and ass.

Another effect will be a smoother temperament and reduced anxiety, the effect I discovered while taking black cohosh. I won’t be nearly as irritable or generally angry — things roll off my back easier, I’ll take things more in stride. I don’t lash out or experience a loss of control anymore, and that will certainly be the case when I start HRT.

It will also eventually cause me to develop breasts, which I am more than cool with. I mean, seriously — I’ll have my own boobs, real ones, not silicone. All mine.

There are other effects it will have, as well as other procedures I’m planning with Deanna, but I’m not sure I feel comfortable discussing them in this blog post. You are more than welcome to ask me any questions you may have, though. I am an open book.

13.

The next couple of weeks leading up to my appointment passed at a crawl, but finally, the day came. We set off from Petoskey just before lunchtime, with a pitstop in Charlevoix to switch cars, and then we were on the road in earnest.

Since Kate’s car wasn’t quite reliable enough for the road trip, we borrowed their mom’s vehicle, a snazzy new Ford Escape with all the bells and whistles, including GPS, the most important tool in our road arsenal. I’d loaded my iPod with podcasts to listen to on the way out there, but we ended up listening to music instead, to free up our attention for the GPS director.

The drive was nice. Mostly interstate, with a few turns through our satellite towns — Charlevoix and Gaylord, chiefly. Since we had a little extra time to get to my appointment, we stopped at a gaming store in Gaylord called “Geniehobbies,” where I bought a copy of Monster of the Week. Pretty amazing place, lots of cool stuff, and a large game-play area upstairs, with a secret mini-painting room in the back that looks like a Mafia backroom-deals table, dark and secluded. Apparently there’s a pretty sweet indie bookstore in town called “Saturn Booksellers,” but we didn’t quite have time to check it out at the time. I should be doing a signing there this winter, though, so I’ll get in there eventually!

Rest of the drive passed without incident, and as we came into Mt. Pleasant, I was struck by how idyllic the town looked in the afternoon sun. Lots of browns and beiges in the architecture, bread-colored bricks paired with angular metal and glass, and with the low skyline, it all came together in a very satisfying mid-century-modern way, like a transplant straight out of the Seventies or Eighties. Sort of looked like the set of Halloween or Stranger Things.

After we found the gender clinic and parked, we realized we were hungry and still had a little time, so we walked around the neighborhood and found a co-op grocery store to buy something to snack on.

Then it was time.

The gender clinic was in a suite in a stately-looking building, accessible through a lobby of marble, where a fountain burbled quietly under a skylight giving us a glimpse of a listless white sky.

The next thing I noticed was that one of the office windows was a counter window with thin bars across frosted glass, and a hand-painted sign that said STAMPS, or something of that nature. On the other side of the glass, I could see books and a potted succulent. Apparently the gender clinic used to be a post office.

Kate sat in the waiting room with their laptop to work on a project, while I wandered into the receptionist’s office to confirm my appointment. For some reason they seemed surprised to see me, as if I’d never had an appointment at all, but then Deanna Heath showed up and everything worked itself out. They took down my preferred name and pronouns, then I filled out a medical-history questionnaire in the waiting room. No, I don’t smoke and never have. I don’t do drugs.

“Sam?”

Peeling myself off their leather couch, I wandered back into the office, where I was ushered into what looked like a small Victorian sitting room. The subtle grandeur of the lobby had filtered into the building’s deeper recesses, and washed-out sunlight seeped through a window high in the wall. I took a seat on the sofa and an attractive young counselor relaxed in an armchair in front of me.

What ensued was basically a recap of my life up to that point, with a focus on my decision to come here, the discoveries that had led me to realize I was non-binary, and the traumas that had helped shape me.

14.

It began with the recalling of how a man central to my life had at one point told me I should have been born a “nigger girl,” because I wasn’t working hard enough to meet his standards. He and I were digging up chunks of limestone the size of footballs and basketballs, and throwing them into the back of a pickup truck.

I was seven or eight years old.

Never forgot it, not even a little bit. What he told me has reverberated in my head at least once, every day, since.

In retrospect, I think perhaps I have resisted my recent revelations, and my recent changes, and my true nature, for so long . . . and fought so hard, and pushed so far, and did so much, and sought so much recognition for my efforts at presenting a straight, hard-working man to the world because I didn’t want him to be right. I didn’t want his disdain and disgust to be validated. I was the man of the goddamn house. I worked off 74 pounds in Basic Combat Training in 2005, and ruptured a disc in my spine just before going to Afghanistan in 2010, pushing myself past what he told me that day. I have worked my body half to death my whole adult life trying to stay ahead of his insinuation that I was unworthy of being.

One day when I was little, I was lying on my bedroom floor drawing happily, the light off, facing away from the door. Mid-afternoon sun drifted through the windows.

Suddenly the room shook and I was four feet in the air. It had happened so abruptly I didn’t even realize what was going on until I was on my feet. He had wordlessly stormed into my room, grabbed the back of my shirt, and yanked me bodily up off the floor. He started yelling at me about not having done my homework.

It scared the hell out of me. He scared the hell out of me, all the time. My heart-rate is going up just typing all this out.

He died in a car accident the year I turned fourteen.

“You’re the man of the house now,” someone told me at the hospital.

At his funeral, I cried on my biological father’s shoulder. I sobbed. For a very long time, I had no idea why.

Even beyond the fact that I had taken on that rebellious, self-absorbed aspect of a teenage boy, I was not given to crying at funerals — I’m still not, honestly, I’m usually clear-eyed and wandering around looking for other people to console. And I was especially not given to considering my father a source of comfort. He was traumatizingly abusive, an enormous, bearded Harley-riding biker in a motorcycle gang, a drunk and a cokehead, the reason why he and my mother had divorced when I was six. He is one of the reasons why I can’t handle being around erratic people, or men shouting angrily, and why I can’t handle loud, sharp noises.

He is one of the reasons I have PTSD at 38 years old. Not Afghanistan, my father, the “man” who should have been the bedrock of my fucking childhood.

No, it must have been tears of relief.

Over the next couple of years, I did my level best to comfort my widow mother on her darkest, loneliest, most devastated nights. And it never once even occurred to me to use him, or his death, as an emotional weapon against my younger brother and sister. I love all three of them, and I never would have let my feelings about him erode our relationship.

But I had been absolutely terrified of that man. And the disdain he had for me as a young man has been chasing me into the grave ever since.

15.

The Japanese have a concept called “kintsugi.” It refers to the practice of rejoining broken crockery or pottery with gold.

Wikipedia says,

As a philosophy, “kintsugi” can be seen to have similarities to the Japanese philosophy of “wabi-sabi,” an embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Japanese aesthetics values marks of wear by the use of an object. This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage. Kintsugi can relate to the Japanese philosophy of “no mind” (無心 mushin), which encompasses the concepts of non-attachment, acceptance of change, and fate as aspects of human life. […] Kintsugi is the general concept of highlighting or emphasizing imperfections, visualizing mends and seams as an additive or an area to celebrate or focus on, rather than absence or missing pieces. Modern artists experiment with the ancient technique as a means of analyzing the idea of loss, synthesis, and improvement through destruction and repair or rebirth.

Masculinity represents a poison that’s been sickening me since I was barely out of diapers. It has been the wedge, the crack that’s been separating me down the middle my entire life, eroding my male side, forcing me to repress my female side.

So, yeah, I’m done being a “man.” I’ve had enough, thanks. My life has been a series of being failed by men and a society domineered by men, and my quest to, at first, meet their demands, and then to push myself beyond them. And out of guilt and fear, I’ve very nearly destroyed my body and my soul in the process.

I wanted to be a better father than Joe Hunt, but I never got the chance. So I try to be a good father to the people around me. The youths in my D&D group. The authors struggling beside me. The queer kids in my social circles. My friends, both offline and on.

These are the things that I told the therapist that day at the gender clinic in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. I didn’t need or want that overwhelming physical strength any longer. It’s time to kintsugi these two halves back together and restore the real me, the best me, the non-binary me, the worn-out and battle-scarred me, the Me who is both of these genders, and become my true self, who I should have always been: Sam the gold-veined owlbear, who knows what they are, and what they are capable of.

“You won’t be as strong anymore,” the counselor told me, explaining the effects of HRT. They had agreed to give me a letter of informed consent and set me up for estrogen. “But from what you’ve told me, it sounds like you won’t need it.” 🦋

S. A. HUNT is a U.S. veteran and speculative fiction novelist, the author of the award-winning Outlaw King series and the Amazon top 10 horror series Malus Domestica. They live in Petoskey, MI. They are non-binary.

sahuntbooks.com