I wanted to stand out. Now I don’t.

It’s been almost four years since I came out, but less than a year since I went on hormones. I’ll explore at a later date what medication has meant for my way of thinking, but something I didn’t expect it to change was the way I presented. [As usual, I want to make clear hormones do not make someone trans - you do you; it's a matter of personal judgement.]

In my first two years of transition, I obsessed over clothes. Admiring 'fits had been one of the biggest reasons for wanting to transition. Dresses became a shorthand for liberation for me, even though I was always dimly aware that women in the early part of the 20th Century had begun to move to trousers because they allowed for the impression of greater freedom and equality. Makeup was the play, the artform, which I had denied myself for most of my life, and it was now available to me I was going to try all the things. We are in an era when almost no women wear high heels unless for a very fancy evening function. Early on, I wore them every weekend.

Some trans women say the “baby trans” era is something that just has to be got-through. You’re making the mistakes you hadn’t felt able to make throughout your early life, and you’re doing it in a compressed period. I wasn’t able to see - or didn’t care - that I didn’t fit in. The excitement at living out what had been a fantasy was greater than any fear.

What changed? My sense of self did. Most of my friends now are people who have always known me as a woman, or have got used to it. Even the people at work (one of my works) got used to it, although they struggled to use my name in emails. Whether or not I looked good wasn’t a question for me, and as I became more comfortable in myself, others sensed that. In bars I no longer scanned to see who was staring at me. I knew somebody likely was, but I also knew they would anyway for a different reason if not for the one I was thinking.

My question early on was “how much of my new-found self can I present all at once?” It was like a drag act I was performing just for myself. My closest friends were convinced of my womanhood a long time before I was, and consequently there was widespread relief from their side when they stopped having to answer my questions about whether what I had on was too much or not.

As time moved on and I could feel the changes happening inside me, I was in an unexpected position: I was getting all I wanted. What next? When the dog catches the car, what does it do? In my case a bout of financial hardship after starting my medication led to introspection. I stayed at home at first because I couldn’t afford to go out, and then because of a more prosaic reason: I had lost my reason to display. When I met friends, I did so in more muted outfits. I toned down the makeup to a few products, lightly applied. I started to welcome visitors to my flat wearing no makeup and essentially ‘boymoding’. I felt more secure in my internal self, and so there was less need to shout about it, I felt. The internal questions became, "do I need to wear makeup to this?" or "what will everyone else be wearing?"

There’s a lot of my wardrobe that I won’t wear again. Princess dresses, cocktail skirts, shiny blouses… all of it taking up space, a museum to the person I thought I’d become. Someone else, likely someone much younger than me, needs to enjoy them when they buy them from the second-hand shop I’ll donate them to. I am much more careful with my money after last year’s near-wipeout, but I plan to introduce some subtle separates in the next few months that can all be paired with each other. Just like a mature girl, I guess.

A shortform video creator named Sabre (@bottleneckloser) said in one of her recent videos that early-on after coming out, a trans woman puts on a bra after work. Years later, she takes the bra off after work. It’s not that I don’t want to be trans any more, or that the magic of presentation has worn off. I’ve just realised that most people couldn’t care less if I wore jeans or leggings, a pretty dress or an ugly sweater. They saw me how I hoped, a long time before I did.