Cracking Eggs, Taking Names
on being a closeted trans person and coming out to yourself
Being a closeted trans person is a different kind of vibe.
You know who you are deep down. It’s always there. Present in all things, even if through the subtlest means.
Tucked away though. A special private place. Ways you look at yourself internally. Hideaways in your mind. Little playgrounds you create to exist within freely.
Still, most of the time, it’s buried.
That’s why trans people have coined a unique name for their own personal coming out — the inner release of resistance and denial — when their egg-cracks.
You see, when you’re a repressed trans person, you’ve been hiding in your egg. It’s walls have been solid. You’ve been blind inside. All of a sudden the walls crack. Light shines through. You have the strength to break free and you know it. It’s time. You’re going to do it. You know you’re done hiding in that fucking egg.
It was the hardest cry I’d ever had.
The Long Journey
From my earliest memories, there were moments of heart arising to tell me something clearly, which seemed strange.
My body, it knew something.
Not only who I was inside my heart, but that I was destined to be a trans woman.
Even at the youngest ages, I would find moments of blooming self-realization around a found sense of inner womanhood, or longing to be in different shoes.
Yet also, in fiction of all kinds, anytime there were bodily transformations. I remember so distinctively, always having the strongest reactions.
Throughout my adolescence, anytime a character in a film or book was physically transformed, my body lit up. My heart, my soul — when I was a little older, my libido.
The body knows. Mine did out of time. It knew what was coming. I can remember being so puzzled about these feelings when I was young. They were so strong, but I didn’t understand what they were telling me, because trans women just weren’t a thing I’d heard of.
Honestly. These moments from youth were a part of what would give me the courage to pursue hormone replacement therapy when I was so much older. I remembered them. It gave me knowing this was always coming. I was always going to become myself in the end. It was the plan for me to have it coded within my dreams and passions and heart. To be led slowly towards awakening.
Pleading nights as a child were common. Switch me. Change me. Let me just get to be a woman in my dreams tonight.
Those were the best dreams, and the cruelest ones. I wanted them so badly. Even though they hurt so terribly to wake up from.
Despite doing this for most years of my childhood, especially as a teenager — thousands of nights — I still didn’t put together what it meant.
There just wasn’t enough awareness and education about trans people. My most significant examples were scummy prostitutes on COPS; cross dressers.
I was in my very early twenties. I remember some late night, sitting at my computer desk, no idea what triggered it. But I finally accepted it there. I admitted it plainly to myself. I’m a trans person inside.
Also - nope.
To me, at that time, with the way things were culturally for trans people. Mind you, this is like 2008, still such a long ways to go. The only way it seemed possible in my head would be to run away. Because I simply could not face my family, my friends, my job. I was too insecure. Too reliant on approval and other people’s ideas of what success and happiness looked like.
So, I jammed it down. I jammed it down deep.
There would be years and years that I didn’t even make a single prayer at night. Fantasies would still remain. Ways of looking at myself internally emerged that helped a bit. Situations where I could let that inner woman out were found.
All of this allowed me to cement the suppression by routine — my marriage helping push it even deeper — despite growing discontentment.
Always another distraction. Always another temporary fix to help me avoid the one thing I really wanted.
No matter how hard I tried to hold it down, to push it away, to pretend it wasn’t me. The truth was always there.
A fucking volcano I was. And I was about to go active.
Workout Queen
Foreshocks of the eruption to come, in 2018 and 2019, I found myself on a very peculiar mission.
This compartmentalized part of myself was fighting back.
I’d built a cozy spot at work and home with lots of time to play. Lots of rest and leisure. It had given me the opportunity to turn towards myself.
A distorted expression no-doubt, but I found myself deciding to try and do what I’d always wanted at heart, and transform my body to be more feminine.
I wanted to feel sexy.
That meant I needed to learn a whole new set of workouts. Because, for the most of my life, all of my focus in the gym had been to bulk up my slender frame. Having been a very skinny boy, but having been taught false ways to attract the women I hoped to find myself in relationship with, I’d wanted to get muscly.
My upper body is where the majority of my workouts had been focused. Having bulked up a lot in my shoulders and arms, compared to how my body would have looked more naturally.
From December 2018 until the next summer, I was able to spend six whole months in very dedicated patterns of working out, to reduce the damage done and hopefully feminize my body.
I knew what I was doing.
This meant I wasn’t lifting weights with my arms. I was doing calisthenics, cycling, and more booty lifts than I care to admit.
All the while, mind you, with a wife. Often right in front of her. As these workouts extended into the home.
This strange period of working out in a peculiar kind of way, was one of the things I pointed to when coming out. Among many others. To show her I’d always been living atop a great lie.
In that time of working out so heavily, while my ultimate motivations were obscured — along with who I’d always felt inside — I came clean in a general sense about the motivations of my focused workouts.
It was all the booty lifts. I just couldn’t think of another way to explain why I was doing them. So, I was honest. To feel better about my body. Admitting I’d always wanted to have a more feminine form.
Abruptly ending this six month period of very committed gym activity. Was the realization my plan was not working. My body was hardening in ways that made it even more masculine.
I just stopped. I gave up on the workouts. Deciding at that point to continue eating healthily, as I’d learned to do in tandem with the exercise, and let my body soften.
My ass was a rock.
Even with my disappointment, the last phase of attempted boyhood these workouts ushered me into, saw me the most comfortable I’d ever been in my body.
The little things, which were able to feel even slightly more ‘feminine’, made a big difference.
It would be a couple years later when my true self would come calling again.
Age of Aquarius
2020 was an interesting year.
I was ‘working from home’ after COVID hit — which was actually just comprised of clocking in and out each day — for the better part of two years. Fully paid.
So incredibly lucky. What a fucking grace.
It was throughout this year I had a spiritual awakening. Having discovered yoga and meditation as means to find peace while stuck in a little apartment with a super needy pug.
Honestly, it’s embarrassing. But my first steps towards unravelling were consciously deciding to play video games with female characters, and sitting with a posture that allowed me to put my mind in the experience of being them more thoroughly.
Having done yoga so much in this time. My spine was waking up. And not being less slouchy became a big part of what would make me feel more at home in my body. More feminine.
Throughout the year, I was pelted with reemergence after reemergence of my desire to be a woman.
Discovering so much peace. Holding, literally, verbatim intentions of becoming my most authentic self. I would find myself wrecked in secret with longing for a different life.
Still, I would use my found belief of eternal oneness as motivation to pull back and try to transcend the desires.
I was attempting to spiritually-bypass myself.
I wanted to sing kumbaya about how the universe is one, nothing is needed, and everything was already in the palm of my hand. I began teaching guided meditations, which if wound back in succession, would surely show a path of subconscious feminine awakening. Speaking plainly on following your heart and becoming your own highest self to others.
All the while denying the things which came up again, and again, and again personally. My own soul calling me to wake up.
In the summer of 2021 I went to an ayahuasca retreat. I’ve longed planned to write about this event in my life.
Here I will simply say that it showed me, on the deepest level possible, how we are all eternal.
Each one of us. Who we are at are very core. Is something eternal that will never die. Unique and singular. Forever existing apart from, and a part of, the even greater oneness which is our ultimate self.
I felt free, for once, from the fear of death. Unburdened by every worry I’d had in my entire life. Graced with perspective on how little my life’s petty stresses truly mattered. Giggling for hours about it.
I also discovered how passionate I am about this life on a soul level, despite the pain of it all. How I love living crazy-ass lifetimes, just like this one, where I go through some insane rollercoaster rides of emotion and self-discovery.
I’m here for this shit.
To re-discover that was a revelation. To be empowered with the courage that comes with knowing our purest self does not die — such an unbelievably cosmic blessing.
Empowered by these profound realizations. It was November 2021, when I would do a practice with myself, and sit in ceremony to unpack what came up, finally finding my way home.
She Woke Up
There is a practice I did with myself. Which was very likely gleaned from others, and added to with my own flair, re-purposed for my own needs, all led by intuition.
It went as follows.
Firstly, I set aside all judgement of self for internalized sexism which has been coded into the way I think by society. Knowing, that femininity and masculinity exist within us all. But also recognizing that I have preconceived notions about the feminine and masculine which are incomplete and naive.
To me, at that time, matters of gender still felt like a grey area. A space where I was confused about how to understand it all.
Now, I know that’s because it’s all construct. The way we think about it is a part of our history and culture. Inextricably linked with the physical sex of our bodies, no doubt. But a social construction.
So, to do this practice, you have to forgive yourself. You have to just write down the things which feel right to you in the moment.
I still have the document. It’s something I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of.
It’s embarrassing to share though. Because even now I look at some of the things I attributed to men, versus women, or visa-versa. Which, if I were to do this again, I’d more accurately find to be a universal character trait.
Still, I’m going to share it for you, so you can see how simple it all was.
The first thing I did was write down what qualities I attributed to each gender construct. Women, men — feminine, masculine — whatever.
I just wrote, without judgement, which values I internally attributed to either.
Then, went through and measured my internal value of each one. How much do I cherish this? How deeply do I feel called — on a heart and soul level — to embody this?
Finally, I did a pass where I marked down my best estimations of what level I actually embodied those traits.
A staggering and holistic truth was apparent.
I’d over-embodied everything on the masculine side. And significantly under-embodied everything on the feminine side. While my internal values were the entire other way around.
Complete mismatch between my heart’s values and how I lived.
I circled grace, sensitivity, softness, and flexibility.
Those were the things I valued above all else, and wished to see in myself most deeply, which were also embodied the very least; my most suppressed attributes.
When I finished this practice, I was shook. I sat with it for some time.
Because of these two years of sustained free-time, I’d built spiritual community around myself and my wife.
I had multiple ceremonies lined up that December.
The first was a soulful, spiritual, family-vibe group meditation, in a cozy heated barn. Everyone got to bring their own intentions, opportunities to share truthfully about what was going on for them, to heal together.
I would always lead with the rawest authenticity I could muster to set the tone. And so did. Telling them all that I had been having a feminine awakening for years, and that I was feeling the urge to embody a more complete sense of self. To shed what wasn’t really me. To be free and flow how I needed to, truly happy and whole. More flexible, more graceful, softer.
Thinking all-the while, this was about finding an inner sense of femininity, and that I could stay hidden as a boy and just hold it all better inside. Still trying to spiritually bypass my greatest desires through becoming a zen master.
The very next week I was in ceremony for Winter Solstice with predominantly women, and brought the same intentions.
I felt incredibly healed.
All the while, in secret, those urges to transition were emerging again, in that compartmentalized space I’d held so long.
I’d had dreams over the last month. In one, I saw myself in a bathroom mirror, fully transformed. Unbelieving how pretty I was.
Truthfully, I could never have imagined I’d look how I do now. Even after that dream.
Always, my greatest fear— the biggest deterrent from transition, above everything else — was how I thought I’d look horrendous.
That dream was a grace.
I also dreamt of getting introduced to other women as a woman, being petrified, but finding the warmest community and healing through their acceptance.
Spirit had my back.
Of all the things. On the very last week before I cracked, it was Faceapp that did me in.
I took a picture of myself, and I did a gender swap on it.
My fucking heart — I almost died.
Even after the dream, I hadn’t been able to believe that I could ever look like a woman in a way that would be enough to me. But there I was.
For posterities sake, here it is.
Trans folklore on the internet said Faceapp was a little too good to be true, but sometimes close.
I found myself looking at a subreddit full of people who had been transitioning and sharing their timelines. Able to strangely confirm, in my gut, that people with my kind of facial structure did pretty well.
Also, taking great stock in the fact my natural body, that I had traditionally worked-out to hide, then worked back-out to try and undo, was in fact primed and ready for this transition.
This was when the damn broke. After days in the bathtub scrolling through pictures of transitioners. Staring at that Faceapp picture of myself. Reading a lot about transition.
It was Christmas morning, of all days, from midnight to 1AM on December 25th, that my egg was shattering. Filling that bathtub with tears.
All the running I’d done. All the lying.
I just finally saw it for what it was. That I am who I am. That it was my very heart and soul I’d been running from for so long. And I knew I couldn’t anymore.
Before I went to bed I had messaged therapists. Simply because I needed emotional support to tell my wife.
I prayed that night too. Harder than I’d ever prayed. To not forget this.
To not wake up and lose the courage.
Still, that’s exactly what I did. For a few days after I settled back into a — let’s just try and embody femininity as a man — way of thinking.
I ate ice cream for three days straight. I couldn’t get off the couch. There was no motivation for me to do anything.
That was the end of resistance. When I knew there was no other option. I could either move forward in truth. Or wait to die within the lie.
So, here I am.
Three years and and a handful of months later. A woman.
I’m more beautiful than that Faceapp picture, by a long ways, and still coming into myself.
I will be for years to come.
Joy is mine to have now, to hold. The fires which burned around my transformation are finally flaming out.
The woman I’ve been forged into is here.
I’m ready to live.
💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗