(trigger warning: suicidial ideation)

It’s late March 2014 as I set out on this story. I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for about twenty and a half months now. I’ve been out to friends and family for three months less than that and myself at work for again three months less than that. I was out to many friends I knew only online and a couple of family members previously.

Getting to that point was not easy. I’ve been privileged to have very low external barriers, but for me transition was the end result of painful years of scrambling to get out of something I could not understand. Arriving at the decision to go ahead was… well. That’s most of this story.

This is my story. Nothing here is applicable to every trans person; no story ever written is. I’ve done things differently than a lot of people I know, and none of them have done anything wrong. I’ve done them, I think, the right way for me.

If you take one single thing away from this, let it be this: Trans lives and trans stories are as complex and variable as all others. My story is right for me because I was allowed to write it.

This story involves a lot of sexuality because for me, my sexuality — not my orientation, the whole thing — is very strongly linked to identity and even gender.