Getting on testosterone feels like one of the best decisions of my life.
As my arms & shoulders squeeze into, stretch out, or simply can no longer fit into my old tops, as my thighs fill my jeans in a different way, as I see my body in the mirror morphing slowly but surely, one of my oldest, most vivid memories from childhood comes back to me. I must have been somewhere between 5-8 years old. My father had one of those home-exercise resistance bands made with springs, also called “chest expander”, to strengthen the upper body, particularly pectoral and bicep muscles, that he kept stowed in one of the lower shelves of one of his closets. I wasn’t allowed to use it, of course, as it was deemed “dangerous” and also “very inappropriate” since I was AFAB (even now if you look for these devices on Amazon, for instance, they’re still aimed at a very “buff” male audience). And my vivid memory is this: of me sneaking to find this device and use it whenever I could, when my parents were out and I was free to do my thing. And I truly loved it — not just the thrill of doing something forbidden but also, and mostly, the fact of doing something explicitly and clearly meant for boys/men!
But what does one do with a pretty little girl with golden locks and big blue eyes (at least of my generation whose own mother had wanted to do ballet and hadn’t been allowed to by her own mother)? Of course, you take her to a ballet school and put her in a tutu. So for years I did ballet, slowly starting to do other physical activities such as running track, sprinting and playing soccer, as my light and lean body grew to be “just a little too muscular” for the “perfect dainty ballerina” (which was then the unhealthy model of classical ballet dancers). And here pops up another vivid memory: my fellow ballet students continuously amazed by my biceps and even some of my ballet instructors commenting on them (although by that time I had stopped using my father’s device).
When I finally quit ballet and started swimming at age 15 and proved to have an excellent breast-stroke, my mother forbid me to compete on a swim team as well as to play water-polo seriously (so I only played that on an amateur co-ed side team) because of the risk of my “shoulders becoming too big and unfeminine and unattractive”.
OMG, if my mother saw me now!
The point, though, is that what I’m feeling now is not at all a rebellion against, or revenge or victory over, my parents forbidding me to do things as a child/youth. What I’m experiencing is much, much deeper and stronger and more positive than that: I feel that I am really coming into myself, becoming MYSELF: at last becoming my real self, that person that I had always felt & known that I was, since the youngest age.
In the words from Dorothy’s song What’s Coming to Me, “I got what’s mine comin’ to me”.
The Little Prince and the Fox 