It’s a Friday afternoon in Cork and my Relay system seems to be ticking over nicely. Code is coming out, workers are working, everyone seems happy, so I thought I’d turn my attention to this.

This is a subject I’ve been asked about quite a lot. I’ve described, in frankly immense amounts of detail, exactly how I transitioned, what surgery I had done, what worked, what didn’t and all the rest of it. But I haven’t really talked very much about what I’ve done to my face apart from the surgery.

And there has been quite a lot.

This isn’t going to be War and Peace. I’m not attempting to write the definitive guide to aesthetic medicine. I’m simply going to tell you what I did, why I did it and roughly what order I did it in.

Because if you walk into almost any skin clinic, for want of a better term, you will be confronted by a gazillion different treatments: microneedling, RF microneedling, fractional lasers, CO2 lasers, Erbium lasers, IPL, BBL, chemical peels, radiofrequency tightening, ultrasound tightening, PRP, skin boosters, fillers, Sculptra, Radiesse, and an endless parade of machines with names like Morpheus8, Potenza, Ultherapy, Thermage and God knows what else.

Half of them sound as though they should either be attacking a small country or appearing in a Marvel film.

Some of these things are genuinely very good. Some might be very good for you, but completely pointless for me.

That is the important bit.

Before spending any money, I think you need to work out what problem you are actually trying to solve.

Three different problems

This is how I eventually came to think about my own face:

Laxity. Volume. Skin quality.

They overlap, obviously, but they are not the same problem.

Laxity is basically how firm everything is. If you’re pushing 40 or 45, there’s a reasonable chance things aren’t quite sitting where they did when you were 25.

Although not always.

I know one trans woman who is 51. I was sitting next to her in a car the other week looking at her face and she has virtually no skin laxity whatsoever.

You bloody cow.

I did.

The mistake I think people make is trying to solve substantial laxity by throwing hundreds and hundreds of pounds or euros at comparatively small treatments.

€500 here.

€600 there.

Another €700 six months later.

None of these things are cheap. They’re just cheap relative to surgery.

There are non-surgical treatments that can tighten skin to a degree, particularly if the problem is fairly mild. But if you have significant facial and neck laxity and want a significant result, you are eventually getting into facelift and neck-lift territory.

Sorry.

I was.

Volume is a completely different problem. I had lost an enormous amount of it. My mid-face was virtually concave when I started.

I’d lost significant amounts of weight twice in my life and done years of endurance cycling, and I had very hollow cheeks. At the time I thought it made me look lean and masculine.

Which, unfortunately, it did.

It just wasn’t remotely what I wanted when I started trying to make my face look female.

Then there is skin quality itself: thickness, texture, pores, pigmentation, fine lines, smoothness, sun damage and that slightly crepey quality skin can acquire as it ages.

So those were my three problems.

And I started attacking them.

The nuclear option

When I first transitioned, before the FFS, before the facelift, before everything else, I sat down and looked at the enormous list of things I could supposedly do to improve the actual quality of my skin.

Then I ranked them.

Sitting at the top was CO2 fractional ablative laser.

This was the hard hitter. Not the pleasant option. Not the lunchtime option. Not the pop in on Thursday and nobody at work will notice option.

This was the one where I effectively had to disappear for the best part of eight or nine days because I came out looking like a burns victim.

It is brutal.

My God, though, it works.

I’ve had it done twice. More on round two later.

The first time I had my whole face done, my neck and even my eyelids, and I had absolutely no idea what I was letting myself in for.

They put me on a bed in the clinic, anaesthetised the area around my eyes, and then inserted these little metal shields underneath my eyelids. Essentially enormous metal contact lenses with tiny handles on them.

Why?

So they could laser my bloody eyelids.

The things I will do for beauty.

The recovery was horrific. For the best part of a week I looked like some sort of monster.

Then it healed.

And the results started appearing.

If somebody said to me, “You get one serious skin-resurfacing treatment. Pick one,” I’d pick this.

It made a massive difference to me.

Where I initially got fillers completely wrong

My first experience with filler and Botox was before transition. I went into a clinic presenting completely as a man.

And almost immediately, something ridiculous happened.

The doctor spotted my Rolex.

Then we somehow got into that peculiar thing men occasionally do where each one starts subtly trying to out-impress the other.

You know the sort of thing.

A little man-off.

And I participated enthusiastically because, apparently, I was an idiot.

I walked out afterwards and thought:

You fucking idiot, Stevie. What are you doing?

Because not only had I walked into an aesthetics clinic presenting as a man, I had then spent part of the consultation performing masculinity with the bloke who was about to inject my face.

Unsurprisingly, he gave me the most masculine filler imaginable. Definition, angles, chiselling. He had looked at the man sitting in front of him and tried to make him into a better-looking man.

Entirely reasonable.

Also precisely the opposite of what I actually wanted.

A few months later, I tried again.

I was still at the stage where I thought filler might be capable of doing quite a lot of the heavy lifting. I already knew I probably needed a facelift eventually, but my mid-face was badly depleted and everything was rather, shall we say, soggy.

I thought perhaps filler could fill it out temporarily while I worked out what I was going to do properly.

This time I went somewhere completely different.

And this time I told her everything.

I was still presenting male when I walked through the door, but I showed her a photograph of Stevie.

She looked at the photograph.

Then she looked at me.

Then back at the photograph.

Her expression basically said:

Who the hell is that?

“That’s me,” I said.

“That’s the other me.”

So I explained.

From that point onwards, everything was aimed at the female face I was trying to create.

We added volume to the cheeks and it helped to a degree, but I was still asking filler to do far too much.

Eventually I realised that.

So I stopped.

Completely.

I decided I would deal with the actual structure first and come back to filler later, if I still needed it.

That turned out to be one of the better decisions I made.

Botox

That second clinic was also where I started doing Botox properly.

In my head, I divide Botox into two types.

The first is ordinary anti-wrinkle Botox: forehead, frown lines, crow’s feet, the usual areas.

Something I didn’t appreciate initially was how cumulative the cosmetic result could be. Obviously the Botox itself starts working quite quickly, but if you already have established expression lines, one round isn’t necessarily going to erase years of creasing.

What happened to me was that repeated treatment stopped me continually folding the same bits of skin in the same places, and over time everything became much smoother.

I have a before-and-after photograph I’ll include here. Both pictures are pre-FFS. No facial surgery whatsoever.

The difference is significant.

Incidentally, the second photograph is also rather poignant for me. It is the very last photograph of me as a man.

I think about a week later, he was gone.

The second type is what I rather unscientifically think of as atrophy Botox.

The obvious example is masseter Botox, where much larger quantities are injected into the muscles at the side of the jaw with the intention of weakening them and, over time, reducing some of their bulk.

If you are trying to feminise a square lower face, you can probably see the attraction.

I did this twice.

The first time was quite funny. I was still living with my family and I think we had steak for dinner that evening.

Oh my God.

My jaw was knackered.

I sat there chewing and chewing and thinking:

For Christ’s sake, why is eating this steak suddenly an endurance sport?

Whether it made a gigantic visual difference to me, I’m not entirely sure.

But I did it.

Twice.

I’ve also done the smaller tricks, like lip-flip Botox.

Chasing collagen

Around all of this I became increasingly interested in collagen.

I started taking hydrolysed collagen every morning, which I’ve now done for years. Am I absolutely convinced it makes a dramatic difference? No. I do it anyway.

More interesting to me was Sculptra.

Sculptra is made from poly-L-lactic acid, or PLLA. Rather than simply behaving like a conventional filler and creating immediate volume, the idea is to stimulate a gradual tissue response and collagen production.

One of its early medical uses was treating facial lipoatrophy in people living with HIV, which immediately caught my attention because, structurally at least, a depleted face was exactly one of the problems I was trying to solve.

So I had Sculptra.

I liked the philosophy of it: rather than endlessly adding more filler, encourage the face to rebuild some structure of its own.

And, by the way, I also microneedle my face every so often.

The structural work

Eventually I had the FFS and facelift.

Initially, everything looked extraordinary.

Partly because the work was extraordinary.

Partly because my face was swollen to approximately the size of Belgium.

As the swelling disappeared, though, it became obvious that I still had a lot of volume depletion through the mid-face.

So I moved on to fat grafting.

I was warned from the outset that I might need several rounds because not everything survives.

I was deeply unimpressed by this information.

I had rather hoped they could put it in once and we could all go home.

But no.

The first round helped a lot, but I still didn’t have the underlying projection and structure I wanted.

So my next trick was...

Cheek implants.

I know.

I am slightly extreme.

Little incisions inside the mouth, solid implants positioned over the cheekbones, and suddenly the soft tissue had something underneath it that had been missing before.

Scaffolding.

That made a substantial difference.

There was still some hollowing lower down, so I had another round of fat grafting.

Again, better.

Much better.

Still not quite there.

And this is where filler finally became brilliant.

Architecture versus finishing work

By this point, the lifting had been done. The implants were in. The fat grafting had restored a lot of the missing volume.

I wasn’t asking filler to rebuild my face anymore.

I was asking it to finish it.

I had filler placed into the medial cheeks and suddenly it worked spectacularly well. That relatively small amount of additional volume filled the remaining hollow and tied everything together.

That was when filler finally made sense to me.

Early on, I had been trying to use filler as architecture.

Later, I used it as finishing work.

And it was vastly better at the second job.

Lips

I’ve also had several rounds of lip filler over the years because I started with virtually no lips whatsoever.

Honestly.

Two little elastic bands attached to the front of my face.

I haven’t gone for gigantic lips. I just wanted enough to give my mouth some actual shape and definition, and it has helped enormously.

These days all of this is much less intensive. I might have a little medial-cheek filler when it needs it, some lip filler perhaps once a year, and Botox roughly every four months in the normal girly bits.

That’s about it.

At this point you’re probably thinking:

Jesus Christ, Stevie. Is there anything you haven’t done?

We haven’t even got to the bathroom cabinet yet.

The bathroom cabinet

At some stage I researched the living hell out of skincare.

My morning routine is actually fairly simple.

I cleanse in the shower. I buy decent cleanser, although I’m not entirely convinced this is an area where anyone needs to spend a fortune. We still have a few irritating little hairs to shave off as well, which is depressing, but we’re getting there.

Every other day or so I use an AHA/BHA exfoliant. At the moment it’s just The Ordinary.

Then hyaluronic acid for hydration and a bit of plumping. I’m currently using Vichy, although again, I doubt you need to spend much money here.

The first thing I really care about is vitamin C. At the moment I’m using La Roche-Posay C12.

Then comes the least glamorous but probably most important part of the whole routine: SPF 50.

Every day, whatever the weather. Even when Ireland is doing that weird thing where it looks as though somebody has placed a grey Tupperware lid over the entire country.

SPF 50.

Then moisturiser.

Done.

Night-time Stevie

In the evening I use a serum. At the moment it’s some Clarins one I got relatively cheaply and, if I’m being completely honest, didn’t research to within an inch of its life.

It feels nice.

That’s about the strength of my scientific conclusion.

Then comes tretinoin.

For me, this is one of the serious parts of the routine.

I now use it almost every night, but I absolutely could not do that when I started.

Oh God, no.

Before I’d even had my facelift, I went through a phase of pushing my luck with it. If I used it too many nights in a row, particularly around the eyes, there would eventually be consequences.

I remember waking up one morning and my skin was flaking, the area beneath one eye had dried up and crinkled, and I looked like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.

I stared at myself in the mirror and thought I had finally overcooked it.

So I backed off, started again, backed off, started again, and gradually my skin became much more tolerant of it.

Mine is prescription strength, although I acquired my current mountain of tubes over the counter in Bangkok.

I bought enough to survive a small apocalypse.

At the current rate I should probably make it into 2027.

Then moisturiser.

Bedtime extras

I also have two LED masks, one for my face and one for my neck and upper chest.

Both run for about ten minutes, so I generally use them when I get into bed.

You are imagining me lying there looking like Darth Vader’s high-maintenance sister.

But it’s ten minutes while I’m already doing absolutely nothing, so it doesn’t particularly inconvenience me.

I’ve also just started another experiment: prescription estriol cream on my face twice a week, replacing tretinoin on those nights.

There is some interesting research around topical oestrogens and ageing skin, particularly collagen, thickness and hydration. But there is a fairly enormous difference between interesting research and everyone should smear hormones on their face.

I’m trying it.

That’s all.

Whether it does anything spectacular for my skin remains to be seen.

Ask me in six months.

And finally, the controversial one

Right.

Here we go.

The blue liquid.

GHK-Cu.

Copper peptide.

GHK-Cu is a naturally occurring copper-binding peptide in the body which has attracted quite a lot of interest around tissue repair and skin biology.

You’ll find copper peptides in perfectly ordinary topical skincare products.

That isn’t the controversial bit.

I inject mine.

Daily.

And before anybody starts ordering syringes because Stevie Bennett said so on the internet:

don’t.

Injectable GHK-Cu for cosmetic skin improvement is nowhere near as established as sunscreen, tretinoin or Botox. The evidence base is much thinner and this particular corner of the market can be something of a regulatory Wild West.

I’ve read about it and made my own decision.

That does not make it a recommendation.

The boring things

Beyond all of that, I do the boring things.

I drink a lot of water and have done for twenty-odd years. I don’t sunbathe. I stay out of strong sun where I can. I wear SPF. I generally eat pretty well.

Not perfectly.

I am a human being.

But pretty well.

Day to day, none of this actually feels particularly onerous. Morning skincare takes a few minutes, evening skincare takes a few minutes, and the LED happens while I’m lying in bed. Botox is every few months. Fillers are occasional.

The giant interventions happened over years.

Am I finished?

Not quite.

I still have some electrolysis to finish around my chin and mouth. Once that is finally done, I’m going to reassess the skin in that particular area.

And this is where that second CO2 treatment comes in.

I had another round focused there and, disappointingly, it didn’t make as much difference as I’d hoped.

So there is still some work to do.

The cheeks are a completely different story. Between the resurfacing, electrolysis, collagen work, surgery, fat grafting, implants, filler and simply giving everything time, they have changed enormously. The enlarged pores and roughness I used to notice have pretty much disappeared.

To my eye, if you look closely at my cheeks today, there is nothing particularly unusual about the skin compared with other women my age.

And considering where I started, I’ll take that.

There was never one magic cream or one magic treatment. There were three different problems: laxity, volume and skin quality.

It took me a while to stop asking one treatment to solve another treatment’s problem.

But eventually, bit by bit, we went from a craggy-arsed man with a forehead resembling a topographical map to what I have today.

And one Friday afternoon in Cork, while a small army of synthetic workers quietly got on with writing my code, I sat down and realised that the face I used to spend so much time trying to fix isn’t really a problem I think about very much anymore.

Which is probably as good a result as I could have hoped for.

Well, well, well.

Apparently I am now established.

A few days ago I did an interview for Heroines of My Life, Monica’s transgender blog, which has been running for about ten years. There are hundreds of transgender women on there. I searched for a few women I remembered from years ago, women whose transitions had inspired me when I was still standing on the other side wondering whether any of this was actually possible.

There they were.

And from 15 September, apparently, there I will be too.

So. I’ve arrived.

Sort of.

This isn’t actually an article about that, although if Monica lets me, I’ll publish the interview here too.

This is the article I’ve been trying to write for nearly a year and have made a complete arse of about four times.

At one point, while recovering from bottom surgery, I tried to write about why I had gone to Thailand and how I had chosen surgeons. Then I started another article about how to assess different surgical options. Then, even worse, about nine months ago I started writing an incredibly arrogant article about how to transition successfully.

Dear God.

I had theories. I had frameworks. I had sections about embodied femininity. I had more frameworks. I had basically decided that, having transitioned for about five minutes, I had somehow reverse-engineered the entire subject.

I found it recently.

Slightly embarrassing.

So let me be clearer about what this one is.

This is a guide to what I did for my transition.

That’s it.

It is not a guide to what you should do. I’m not saying this was the optimal transition, or the safest, or the cheapest, or the most sensible, or the most emotionally enlightened.

It is simply the sequence of things I did, why I did them, what I was thinking at the time, and what I think about those decisions now.

That distinction matters to me because my thinking has changed.

I used to have this blueprint idea in my head: this is how you do it efficiently, this is the correct order, why on earth wouldn’t everybody do roughly what I did?

I don’t think that anymore.

People have different bodies, faces, finances, families, health, appetites for risk, dysphoria, ambitions and definitions of what a successful transition even means.

So this is mine.

Besides, I’ve learned something else over the last couple of years. Transgender people occasionally ask me for advice, I give it, and then they bloody ignore me anyway.

Probably for the best.

I ran it like a military operation

I have said before that I treated my transition like a military operation.

That sounds more dramatic than it was, but fundamentally it is true.

I had a fairly definite aesthetic idea in my head of where I wanted to end up, and I worked backwards from it.

I used a piece of software called Kanban Flow.

Every week I would rearrange the priorities.

What is number one?

What is number two?

What is number three?

What actual things am I doing this week?

At the beginning, the objectives were enormous.

Lose weight.

Sort out my skin.

Deal with facial hair.

Sort out my body.

Sort out my face.

Sort out my voice.

There was always something sitting at the top of the board demanding attention.

I still use the same system now.

The funny thing is that the board has gradually become much more boring.

Voice rehabilitation.

Finish facial electrolysis.

Skin treatments.

Possibly RibXcar.

General maintenance.

I think that is probably progress.

At the beginning, though, I had a visual target.

There were five or six transgender women around my age whose transitions had made a huge impression on me. Most of them have disappeared from public view now and I won’t name them. One who is still very public is Victoria Perera.

What struck me about these women was not simply that they had had good surgery.

They looked like women.

More than that, they seemed to understand how to look like women.

That was what I wanted.

Good face. Good skin. Good brows. Good makeup. Good clothes. Good mannerisms. Good surgery.

Not young. Not some Instagram fantasy of being 23 again.

I was in my fifties.

I wanted to look like an attractive, elegant middle-aged woman.

And I’m not going to pretend attractiveness didn’t matter.

It mattered enormously.

Passing mattered too, obviously, but I did not want merely to cross some technical gender threshold while hating what I saw in the mirror.

I wanted to look good.

That was always part of it.

The thing I hid underneath all the planning

Looking back at the organisation, the dates and the way I moved from one thing to the next, I probably look far more confident than I actually was.

I wasn’t confident at all.

I was terrified.

I have videos from early transition where I used my webcam almost like a confessional diary. I look back at some of them now and find them heartbreaking.

There is one from February 2025 that I have watched perhaps a hundred times.

I am sitting in my office and I say something like this:

In two years’ time, I want to be walking down Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork, with my earrings on, wearing a nice coat, heading back to my Range Rover Evoque.

Someone will look at me and say to her friend:

“Is that woman transgender?”

And the friend will say:

“Yes. I think so. I’m not sure. But she looks all right, doesn’t she?”

And I say:

That’s my dream.

Then I joke that what will probably really happen is people will look at me and think I look ridiculous.

That was where my expectations genuinely were.

Not stealth.

Not perfection.

Not some fantasy where nobody would ever know.

I hoped I might look like a reasonably attractive trans woman who made people hesitate for a moment.

I was scared I was about to throw my entire life away and end up looking awful.

And despite all the planning, I don’t think I properly started believing this could work until June or July 2025.

There is another video from around July where I am sitting in my office cutting between footage of myself then and an old video of myself as a man.

I am laughing.

Actually giggling.

“I cannot believe how much I’ve changed.”

I think that was the point where my internal narrative shifted from:

God, I hope this works.

to:

I think we can do this.

January 2025: the nuclear option

Before the major surgeries, there was skin.

My skin was pretty poor around my face.

I had acne pitting around my chin, old shaving damage, texture problems and generally forty years’ worth of evidence that somebody had been dragging a razor around my face.

I had already been having Botox and fillers for a few months, and my cosmetic doctor told me that the nuclear option for the skin was fully ablative CO₂ laser.

I had it done on 11 January 2025.

I would love to show you the pictures.

I am not going to.

I looked like an actual monster.

Not slightly pink.

Not a bit swollen.

A monster.

For about a week I hid in the house.

When I had to do the school run I put on sunglasses and a woolly hat and tried to move through society without frightening children.

It was brutal.

It also made a massive difference.

A few months later I started doing Sculptra and eventually had roughly four or five sessions.

In February I started Botox into my masseter muscles to reduce the bulk of the jaw muscles. I had it done again around July.

I remember turning up at my cosmetic doctor armed with an enormous amount of ChatGPT-assisted research into transgender Botox techniques.

She looked at me as if she had accidentally booked an escaped medical researcher.

I have also had filler in the medial cheek to soften some remaining hollowness, a couple of millilitres in my lips because nature had given me practically none, and the usual Botox every few months.

In February 2026 I did another round of CO₂ laser, mainly on my chin.

That one disappointed me.

The first treatment made a huge difference.

The second one seemed to do remarkably little.

My chin is still one of the things I am not entirely happy with.

Which may already tell you something about the nature of all this.

The goalposts do move.

The face was the big one

Nothing mattered to me as much as my face.

Nothing.

Not bottom surgery.

Not breasts.

Not my voice.

The face was easily the most important thing.

I had spent months playing with AI and trying to create realistic approximations of what I might look like after surgery. I studied other women. I studied foreheads, jaws, chins and noses until I could probably have sat an exam in facial geometry.

The strange thing is that, initially, I deliberately chose not to make FFS my first major operation.

There was a period early on when I still genuinely believed I could save my marriage.

So I started by speaking to ordinary cosmetic surgeons about a facelift, neck lift and rhinoplasty.

My idea was that I could do those first, sit with the result for perhaps a year, try not to make things any more difficult at home, and then maybe come back later for the forehead, chin, jaw and bone work.

In March 2025 I went to see Facial Team in Spain and explained this.

I effectively told them:

“I know this is completely arse-about-tit surgically, but I have personal reasons.”

They thought it was arse-about-tit too.

They were right.

I was trying to organise surgery around preserving something in my personal life.

By May, I knew my marriage was over.

And once I accepted that, my entire strategy changed.

The question stopped being:

How do I make this easier for everybody around me?

and became:

If I am doing this, what actually gives me the best chance of the result I want?

Facial Team remained my likely choice for perhaps another couple of months.

There were things I liked about them.

But I became increasingly uneasy about the aesthetic direction.

I went through their website looking particularly at older women.

I kept seeing phrases like:

“natural result”

“subtle”

“not overdone”

And during consultation I repeatedly heard versions of:

“You need to be realistic about what can be achieved at your age.”

Now, they did not literally say:

“Be realistic, love, you’re an old bag.”

But that was increasingly how it felt to me.

And my brief was quite specific.

I said:

I want to look like a woman over 50 who has had a bit of work done.

I didn’t particularly care if somebody could tell I’d had cosmetic surgery.

I cared whether it was good cosmetic surgery.

Those are not the same thing.

How do you choose a surgeon?

This became one of the harder questions.

Initially, I put enormous weight on before-and-after photographs.

Then I started thinking about what those photographs actually mean.

Imagine a surgeon performs a thousand FFS procedures.

There will almost certainly be five spectacular results.

Those five will be on the website.

What I actually wanted to know was:

What does the median result look like?

And, even more specifically:

What happens to someone my age, with my starting face, my skin, my bone structure and my particular problems?

That is almost impossible to know.

The ideal experiment would be to take a hundred sets of identical transgender twins, send them to different surgeons and compare the results.

Sadly, this research design appears to have some ethical shortcomings.

So over time I relied on two things:

before-and-after photographs, and personal recommendation.

Photographs told me whether a surgeon was capable of producing an aesthetic I liked.

Recommendation gradually became more important.

Several of the women whose results had originally made me believe transition could work at my age had been treated by Jordan Deschamps-Braly.

Eventually I thought:

Why am I gravitating towards Spain because it is convenient when the results I actually admire seem to be coming out of San Francisco?

June 2025: Turkey first

Before I got to San Francisco, however, an opportunity opened up to deal with my body.

Years earlier I had gained a lot of weight and later lost it. I was left with poor skin around my abdomen that was never going to disappear through diet or exercise.

So the core procedure was a tummy tuck.

My theory at this stage was very simple:

If I am going under general anaesthetic, I want to get as much useful work done as reasonably possible.

So I added lipo 360.

And a Brazilian butt lift.

Because who doesn’t want one of those?

I was also very tempted to have breast implants done at the same time.

Right until the last few days, I was considering it.

Again, I held back because of family circumstances. I thought coming home having visibly altered absolutely everything at once was perhaps a little much.

With hindsight, I probably would have done the breasts in that operation too.

The surgery was scheduled for 6 June 2025.

I went in, stripped off, stood naked while the surgeon and his assistant drew circles and arrows over me showing where they were going to remove fat, cut skin and inject fat.

They kept pointing at different bits of me and saying:

“Not much fat.”

“Not much fat.”

“Not much fat.”

Probably the nicest insult I have ever received.

Then I went into theatre.

I was strapped down.

Anaesthetic.

And then I woke up.

Nothing hurt.

Nothing had happened.

There was a cardiologist there. The anaesthetist. Other people. Somebody translating.

They told me they had aborted the operation because my heart rate had dropped badly under the anaesthetic.

After they left, I burst into tears.

My first thought was:

That’s it. I’ve half-transitioned myself and now I’m stuck.

I thought maybe I simply could not tolerate general anaesthesia.

And within minutes I started bargaining with myself.

It’s all right.

I don’t look that bad.

I can live with this.

It could be worse.

There was an added reason I was terrified.

I had previously had Graves’ disease. My heart had misbehaved in the past and had gone into AFib a couple of times. I had failed an ECG before.

So cardiac testing scared the living daylights out of me.

They put me on a 24-hour ECG.

Then they put me on a treadmill with another ECG connected and gradually increased the speed.

I was pretty fit at the time.

They turned it up.

I said:

“Higher.”

They turned it up again.

“Higher.”

Eventually they stopped.

“That’ll do.”

“I could have gone much higher than that.”

Apparently even terror does not entirely suppress my competitive instincts.

The cardiologist eventually came back and told me my heart was healthy.

The problem was how my heart rate had responded to that particular anaesthetic approach.

They could alter the protocol.

All systems go.

The relief was enormous.

On 7 June, they performed the surgery.

When I woke up properly after the tummy tuck, I discovered something else.

Pain.

Christ alive.

It felt like somebody had shot me through the stomach.

I remember basically shouting:

“Morphine. Morphine.”

Somebody came along, gave me some, and the modern pharmaceutical industry restored order remarkably quickly.

The first three days were fairly rough.

Then it improved much faster than I expected.

About two weeks after I came home, I put on something I called my benchmark dress.

It was a fake pleather bodycon dress.

Not something I intended to wander around Cork wearing.

It existed almost as a measuring device.

I still had post-operative leggings on underneath.

I put it on, stood in front of the mirror and took a photograph.

And I remember thinking:

Holy fuck. I look like a woman.

That was the moment.

Not “my waist looks better”.

Not “this surgery has worked”.

It was the first time I looked at the complete silhouette and thought:

That is unmistakably female.

The hotel in Turkey was almost worth an article of its own.

It was included in the surgical package and seemed to be populated almost entirely by men recovering from hair transplants and women recovering from mummy makeovers.

We all shuffled around with drains hanging out of us, nodding politely at each other.

A sort of international cosmetic-surgery veterans’ association.

The whole operation was under €10,000.

For that particular group of body procedures, Turkey made sense to me because it was a huge, high-volume cosmetic-surgery market and this kind of work was routine there.

2 August: San Francisco

On 2 August I flew to San Francisco to consult Jordan Deschamps-Braly.

I stayed at the Taj Hotel beside his office.

The barman and I got talking.

“He comes in here.”

“What do you mean?”

“His name is on the bar.”

I walked over.

There was a bloody plaque with Jordan Deschamps-Braly’s name on it.

Then one day, while I was sitting there, he walked in.

The barman gave me a little wink.

So I went over.

Jordan looked at me.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m tomorrow’s patient. I’ll see you then.”

He was lovely.

I liked him enormously.

He had some connection with Manchester and knew an alarming number of English and Northern English expressions, which was quite funny coming from a Californian surgeon.

I was impressed.

I paid my deposit.

I was ready to proceed.

Then Thailand appeared.

Someone whose opinion I trusted in transgender medicine said to me:

“He is very good. But I don’t send my patients to him. I send them to this surgeon in Thailand.”

That threw everything up in the air.

I did not have the same volume of before-and-after photographs.

It was not about cost.

I trusted the recommendation.

There was another factor.

Other surgeons had told me the facelift and neck lift would need to be separated from the skeletal FFS work.

The surgeon in Thailand was prepared to combine them.

He was also prepared to do my breast augmentation at the same time.

For someone trying to compress the surgical phase into as few anaesthetics and recoveries as possible, that mattered.

So, at the last minute, I changed course.

7 and 8 September: seventeen hours

I flew to Thailand on 7 September.

The operation was too large to perform in a single day.

It became roughly 17 hours of surgery across two consecutive days.

Day one:

• breast augmentation

• lip lift

• tracheal shave

• open rhinoplasty

The nose was a major reconstruction.

They harvested rib cartilage, opened the whole thing and rebuilt it.

Then I woke up knowing that the following morning I was going back under.

And day two was the bigger one.

• Type III forehead reconstruction

• titanium plate

• facial fat grafting

• genioplasty

• jaw work

• deep-plane facelift

• neck lift

I have scars running behind my ears, around them, across my forehead and down the other side.

If you joined everything together at the back, you could probably peel the skin off my entire head.

That recovery was the hardest of the lot.

Not vaginoplasty.

FFS.

Simply because of the sheer volume of surgery.

I needed ice packs constantly.

I was swollen, bruised and absolutely battered.

But psychologically I dealt with surgery surprisingly well.

I approached it in much the same way I used to approach triathlon or endurance sport.

This part is going to be horrible.

Fine.

It ends.

Get through it.

By the time I reached voice surgery months later, the whole theatre ritual had become almost familiar.

Here we go.

Anaesthetist.

Hello boys.

Surgeon.

Nice to meet you.

Let’s do this thing.

Seeing my face

I stayed in Thailand for a month after the facial surgery.

For much of that time I looked as though I had been attacked by agricultural machinery.

But even very early on, there were glimpses.

There is a photograph of me in a bikini only seven or eight days after surgery.

I was still bruised and swollen.

And even then I remember looking at it and thinking:

Jesus Christ.

I look like a woman.

Then, towards the end of my stay, the clinic offered to take me to a makeup artist.

The idea was to disguise the remaining bruising and let me see the face underneath properly.

I cannot imagine many clinics in the West offering that.

Obviously I said yes.

She did the makeup.

I looked in the mirror.

And for the first time I could really see it.

The strange thing is that psychologically I accepted the new face almost immediately.

Within a couple of weeks it simply felt like mine.

The physical settling took vastly longer.

The forehead came in relatively quickly.

The chin took months.

The skin around the jaw and neck kept changing.

And the nose took the longest of all.

The tip gradually lifted and refined itself over months.

I used to look at it and think:

I’m not sure.

Now I actually quite like it.

If I compare photographs from one month after surgery with photographs now, the difference is enormous.

At the time I thought the one-month result looked wonderful.

Now I look back and think:

Oh dear.

I had a chin like Bo’ Selecta.

That is one of the stranger things about facial surgery.

A couple of millimetres here or there make an enormous visual difference.

At one month I now see swelling.

At one year I see my face.

And the part I love most surprised me.

My eyes.

I never particularly thought:

I hope I end up with lovely eyes.

But they are my favourite thing now.

I think they look natural.

I think they look feminine.

I like them.

I never expected that.

There are still things I would change.

I wish my nose were slightly smaller.

The surgeon explained that he could potentially have reduced it further, but that he was concerned about function.

I would rather be able to breathe, thank you.

I wish my chin were fractionally smaller.

I wish the facelift had been slightly tighter.

But these are now refinements, not catastrophes.

11 January: while you’re in there…

Four months later, on 11 January 2026, I went back to Thailand for vaginoplasty.

I have already written quite a lot about that:

So I am not going to reproduce the entire story here.

But I did continue my slightly deranged habit of asking:

If I am already under anaesthetic, is there anything else useful we can do?

My mid-face was still slightly hollow after the original fat grafting.

Jordan Deschamps-Braly had actually told me that facial fat grafting often required more than one round because not all of it survives.

So, while I was having vaginoplasty, I added cheek implants.

And some upper-back liposuction.

Because apparently I am incapable of booking a single-purpose anaesthetic.

I also asked about a leg lift.

The surgeon said no.

There are limits.

A leg lift and vaginoplasty put too much surgical tension and too many wounds in the same area.

So that one stayed off the list.

The vaginoplasty recovery itself was surprisingly manageable.

I had an epidural, which helped enormously.

What I did notice by then was the cumulative effect of all this surgery.

I had compressed a huge amount of physical trauma into a short period.

My exercise routine repeatedly disappeared because every time I started to recover and train properly again, another operation arrived.

I seemed to get ill more easily.

I had colds and flu more often.

I developed some horrible nerve and shoulder pain after vaginoplasty and had a few episodes of back trouble. I suspect some of that may have been connected to long periods immobilised on operating tables, although that is only my theory.

There was a physical cost to doing everything quickly.

Would I therefore conclude that I should have slowed down?

No.

That may be the lesson some people expect me to have learned, but it isn’t mine.

For me, getting through the major surgical phase quickly was still the right decision.

Makeup: the Laura Ashley years

One thing I underestimated massively was how much work goes into presenting yourself the way you want to.

Skin.

Brows.

Makeup.

Clothes.

Exercise.

Treatments.

Maintenance.

It is like painting the Forth Bridge.

You finish one end and immediately discover the other end needs doing again.

When I first started experimenting privately with makeup, I bought some cheap products online and vaguely remembered how I used to do makeup in the 1990s.

I looked like a model from a Laura Ashley catalogue.

I wasn’t completely clueless.

I had worn makeup before.

But modern makeup?

Correct foundation shades?

Not looking dated?

Not looking ridiculous?

I had work to do.

So I watched tutorials.

I experimented.

By April 2025 I would say my makeup was still a bit shit.

By July it was getting better.

Around November I booked a proper lesson.

I was supposed to be there for an hour.

I stayed for nearly three.

I offered to pay extra and she said it had been a pleasure.

She did say I already knew more than she expected, which was nice, but more importantly she taught me a lot.

Then a friend recommended another makeup artist, so I booked her too.

Again, I learned more.

That is basically how the whole thing worked.

Try something.

Get it wrong.

Improve it.

Repeat.

These days I can put on liquid eyeliner without making a complete arse of it.

I regard this as progress.

My two-mode eyebrows

My eyebrows were hilarious.

Even before I was fully out, while I was still sometimes presenting as male, they were already becoming suspiciously well shaped.

I had two eyebrow pencils.

One for female presentation.

One for male presentation.

If I was going out as myself, I would emphasise the arch.

If I was going out in male mode, I would literally colour the arch back in to make the eyebrow look less shaped.

A kind of eyebrow witness-protection programme.

The funny thing is that almost nobody noticed.

My wife occasionally did.

She would look at me and say something like:

“Jesus Christ, the state of your eyebrows.”

But somehow I mostly got away with it.

Three wardrobes

Clothes also went through phases.

I effectively have three generations of wardrobe.

The first is the pre-coming-out stuff, much of which I don’t particularly like anymore.

Then came the emergency wardrobe.

I suddenly needed enough women’s clothes to actually function, so we hit Shein hard.

Cheap dresses.

Cheap tops.

Experiments.

Some worked.

Some very much did not.

Then, gradually, my actual style developed.

I think that is inevitable.

You buy too much.

You try things.

You discover that something you loved six months earlier now makes you wonder what on earth you were thinking.

Eventually it starts to sort itself out.

I generally knew the direction I wanted to go in from the start.

Not theatrical femininity.

Not costume.

Just an attractive, fairly elegant woman in her fifties.

One problem disappears, another becomes louder

One thing I noticed repeatedly during transition was that whatever bothered me most would dominate everything.

Then I would deal with it.

And almost immediately something else would move to the top of the list.

Initially, the face was everything.

Nothing else came close.

Then the face was done.

And suddenly my attention moved elsewhere.

I would look at myself without clothes and think:

Christ.

This configuration now looks a little bit like a porn star.

There are trans women who are completely comfortable with that.

Fine.

I wasn’t.

So bottom surgery moved up the list.

Then bottom surgery was done.

And what was left?

The voice.

I don’t think the goalposts ever completely stop moving.

What changes is the urgency.

Earlier things felt like:

I need to fix this.

Now something like RibXcar feels like:

That would be nice.

Quite a difference.

The voice

Originally, I genuinely hoped I would avoid voice surgery.

I worked with Seattle Voice Lab.

I practised.

I tried.

I got frustrated.

And I became disappointed in myself.

I thought I was just bad at it.

By around March or April 2026, I had begun thinking:

I am probably going to have to operate on this.

Later it turned out that I had an unusual congenital problem in my larynx and extremely abnormal airflow characteristics.

That changed how I looked back on the whole thing.

I had spent months thinking I was failing at something that, anatomically, was going to be unusually difficult for me in the first place.

I have written separately about choosing VFSRAC and going to Yeson in Seoul:

The surgery was on 15 July 2026.

Physically, compared with everything else?

Nothing.

A walk in the park.

I was discharged the same day.

The hard part was the silence afterwards and the slow recovery.

What shocked me came later.

I played a video recently that I had recorded the day before surgery.

Oh my God.

My voice sounded so male.

I had not understood quite how male it sounded.

What should have told me was the reaction I used to get in public.

I would walk up to a counter.

Someone would greet me normally.

Then I would speak.

And I could see the tiny flicker of recognition.

Oh. You’re transgender.

When I was completely mute after surgery, that stopped happening.

Which was a fairly useful accidental experiment.

Now I am speaking again.

And increasingly, that reaction does not appear to be coming back.

Yesterday was the first day where the voice came out of my mouth almost exactly the way I had hoped it eventually would.

Softer.

Sweeter.

Not forced.

And I thought:

Wow. I think we’re getting there.

What would I actually change?

The obvious retrospective lesson would be:

You moved too quickly.

Slow down.

Take your time.

Spend years finding yourself.

Oddly, that is not my conclusion.

For me, moving quickly was one of the decisions I would make again.

There are things I would change.

I might have done the face before the body surgery because the face mattered more to me than anything else.

Although, ironically, doing the tummy tuck first may actually have helped the overall schedule because I needed recovery time before vaginoplasty anyway.

I probably would have added breast augmentation to that first Turkish operation.

I would probably have booked the voice surgery earlier.

I might have asked for the facelift to be slightly tighter.

These are details.

What strikes me more when I look back is how modest my original expectations were.

I genuinely believed that perhaps, after all this, strangers would look at me and think:

Yes, probably transgender.

But she looks all right.

That was my dream.

The outcome exceeded that dream.

I’m allowed to be pleased about that without pretending it means there is some universal formula behind it.

The thing I thought I would have to learn

Another thing I got wrong was mannerisms.

I genuinely assumed I would have to learn how to move like a woman.

How to sit.

How to gesture.

How to hold myself.

Somewhere in my head, I had created another entire training programme.

Then I started watching myself on video.

And realised:

Oh.

A lot of it is already there.

That was one of the stranger discoveries.

I had expected femininity to involve much more conscious performance than it actually did for me.

Instead, quite a lot of what I thought I would have to construct simply appeared once I stopped suppressing it.

Money

There is an important caveat to everything I have written here.

I had a financial advantage that many people do not have.

Cost did not dictate my choice of surgeon.

That obviously changes the available options enormously.

And even with that advantage, transition cost an astonishing amount of money.

I have never added it up.

I don’t want to add it up.

It isn’t only surgery.

Flights.

Hotels.

Consultations.

Clothes.

Makeup.

Laser.

Electrolysis.

Skin.

Treatments.

Everything.

It is a bloody fortune.

I would prefer not to know the number.

The other cost

The financial cost was not the most important one.

My transition cost me almost everybody in my life.

I had to start again.

Some relationships are slowly rebuilding.

Some are not.

There are people who were once extremely close to me who have never come back and may never come back.

That belongs in any honest account of what happened.

I don’t want to turn this article into an analysis of those relationships, so I will leave it there.

When transition stopped being the main project

Something changed around March this year.

Transition stopped being the main thing in my life.

Not because there was nothing left to do.

It just lost first place.

And what replaced it?

Work.

Obviously.

The crazy bitch who works fourteen hours a day came back.

Technology.

Software.

Learning.

Building.

Ideas.

Trying to understand things nobody has asked me to understand.

I basically moved from one obsession to another.

And strangely, that made me realise how much of me had stayed exactly the same.

All the things I genuinely liked about myself before transition were still there.

Technology.

Finance.

Exercise.

Learning.

Improving myself.

Building things.

The difference was that I was calmer.

Less angry at the world.

I used to spend an enormous amount of time trying to understand everything outside myself.

Politics.

People.

Systems.

The entire bloody universe.

Looking outward, perhaps partly because it stopped me looking inward.

I don’t do that nearly as much now.

I am also less interested in material accumulation.

I still have ridiculous ambition about doing things.

Achievement still matters enormously to me.

But bigger house, bigger car, bigger everything?

Not so much.

The idea of living in an enormous house now sounds exhausting.

Five bathrooms?

Why?

I’ll have one, thank you very much.

In some strange way, transition did not destroy the person I had been.

It made me a happy Stephen David Bennett.

That sentence probably sounds odd.

But it is what I mean.

Same person.

Much more peaceful.

Age

I also want to look young.

There.

Like practically every other woman, I would quite like time to stop attacking my face.

I was never under any illusion that I was going to transition in my fifties and emerge looking 25.

But I absolutely wanted to look good for my age.

Hormones changed things.

Skin treatments changed things.

The facelift changed things.

Fat grafting changed things.

The whole face changed things.

If somebody asks me what my anti-ageing secret is, I do not pretend it is green juice and positive thinking.

My standard answer is:

Seventeen hours of plastic surgery.

RibXcar

There is one more thing I am considering.

RibXcar.

I am speaking to a surgeon in Poland on 9 Octobe

r

Do I need it?

No.

That is the difference.

The face felt urgent.

Bottom surgery became urgent.

The voice felt urgent.

Rib surgery does not.

It sits in a completely different category.

Nice to have.

I just want to look fucking snatched.

That, more than anything, is probably how I know I am approaching the end.

I may have another facelift when I am in my early sixties.

The first one was done alongside enormous skeletal changes, so there was always going to be an element of judgement about how aggressively to tighten everything before all the swelling had settled and the bones had found their final position.

If I have another one later, I would not really count that as transition.

That is just ordinary vanity.

Gravity can still fuck off.

One year later

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the second and biggest day of my facial surgery.

One year.

And a huge amount has happened since then.

My face has finally settled.

My voice is beginning to arrive.

The enormous items on the Kanban board have mostly disappeared.

My work has taken over my brain again.

I am about to appear on Heroines of My Life, which still feels faintly surreal given that I once looked at women on sites like that and wondered whether I could ever get anywhere close.

And yet there is one thing that has not happened as quickly as I thought it would.

Last week I recorded another video.

In it, I said something like:

I cannot fucking believe how often the word transgender still appears in my day.

Still.

In conversations.

In my thoughts.

In things I read.

In things I write.

In the way I analyse myself.

I thought that by now it would have faded further into the background.

It hasn’t.

Not yet.

And I cannot wait for it to.

Not because I am ashamed of being transgender.

Not because I want to rewrite my history.

I just don’t want it to remain the organising principle of my life.

Maybe transition doesn’t end with the final operation.

Maybe it doesn’t end when your face settles.

Maybe it doesn’t end when your voice changes.

Maybe it ends on some utterly unremarkable Tuesday when you suddenly realise:

I haven’t thought about being transgender for a day.

I think I would like that.

Until then, there is still some electrolysis.

A voice to finish rehabilitating.

Possibly some ribs to rearrange.

And, finally, rather more life than transition to get on with.

This week: I try very hard not to become a fitness influencer, explain why your shoulders may not need another bloody hypertrophy block, and ask whether the body-planning system I built for trans women is useful, mad, necessary, or all three.

I get asked about my body quite a lot.

Not by random women in changing rooms, because this is not a Carry On film and I do not spend my life being erotically appraised beside a row of lockers.

It is mostly other trans women.

They see a photo. Or they read something I have written about training. Or they notice that I have somehow managed to get from a 108-kilo dad-shaped catastrophe to something that now reads much more like an actual female body, with hips and a waist and a bum and all the bits I spent most of my life assuming were simply not on the menu.

And then the question comes.

How did you do it?

I understand the question completely, because for trans women this is not just fitness. It is not beach-body nonsense. It is not about having visible abs so we can stand under a ring light drinking electrolyte water and pretending we discovered discipline.

For many of us, the body is one of the loudest things in the room.

It speaks before we do.

Before our voice, before our name, before our clothes, before our carefully practised walk through Tesco where we are trying to look casual while also monitoring every reflective surface like a meerkat with trauma.

Our shape announces things about us. Sometimes things we do not want announced.

So yes, when another trans woman asks me how I changed mine, I take it seriously.

I wrote about it properly in my earlier piece on building a great body in your forties, fifties and sixties. The system is all in there: diet, training, psychology, habit design, the whole slightly deranged architecture of how I rebuilt myself.

How To Build a Great Body as a Trans Woman (Even in Your 40s, 50s, or 60s)

But an article has a problem.

You can explain everything. You can pour your entire brain into three thousand words. Someone can read it, nod along, feel a little spark of hope, and then, two days later, be back at lunch having eaten the calories of a Victorian Christmas before 1pm and wondering why their shoulders are still auditioning for a rugby squad.

Knowing is not doing.

It never was.

So the next question started appearing.

Will you coach me?

And the answer is no.

Absolutely not.

Not because I do not care. I care a lot. That is the problem. If I took people on properly, I would care far too much, interfere far too much, overthink everything, write twelve-page explanations, and end up emotionally invested in someone’s lateral raise technique at midnight when I should be asleep.

Also, I do not want to become one of those online fitness people.

You know the model.

Nice body at the front. Payment link underneath. “Community” in a WhatsApp group. Then behind the curtain, everyone gets basically the same programme with their name pasted into the PDF and maybe a slightly different glute bridge variation if the coach is feeling festive.

I am being unfair, obviously. Some of them are good.

But a lot of it is nonsense. Very shiny nonsense. Nonsense with abs. Nonsense with a ring light and an affiliate code.

And for trans women, the problem is not merely that some online coaching is lazy. The deeper problem is that a lot of the default fitness advice is actively pointed in the wrong direction.

The hypertrophy problem

Most mainstream training programmes are built around hypertrophy.

Build muscle. Add volume. Progressive overload. Train hard. Push more weight. Chase the pump. Make everything bigger.

That is fine for some people. It is not morally wrong to build muscle. I am not standing here with a candle and a haunted expression saying “never touch a dumbbell.”

But for a lot of trans women, especially those of us who come to this later, the issue is not that we lack muscle everywhere.

It is that we already have too much of the wrong muscle in the wrong places.

I did not arrive at transition as a delicate little woodland creature. I arrived with years of sport in my body. Cycling, Ironman training, lifting, general male-life nonsense. Broad shoulders. Thick back. Traps and lats that had not received the memo that we were now trying to go in a different direction.

That upper-body shape read male before I opened my mouth.

So what does a generic hypertrophy programme do to a woman like that?

It preserves the problem.

It trains the shoulders. It trains the back. It trains the arms. It maintains the exact silhouette she is trying to soften, and then calls it progress.

Six months later she looks in the mirror, feels like nothing has shifted, and concludes that she has failed.

But she has not failed.

The programme failed her.

It was the wrong tool.

For many trans women, the answer is not “train harder.” It is more specific than that. Sometimes it is “train less there.” Sometimes it is “stop feeding that bit.” Sometimes it is “move the work downward.” Sometimes it is “we are not trying to build a bodybuilder, we are trying to change a silhouette.”

Glutes matter. Thighs matter. Core matters. Waist-to-hip matters. Fat loss matters. Softening matters. Cardio matters. Not in a punishment way, but in a body-composition way.

And, crucially, restraint matters.

That is the bit almost nobody sells, because it is very hard to charge someone £150 a month to tell them not to train their shoulders like a deranged canoeist.

But for some of us, that is exactly the advice.

The annoying part

Once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

You look at the available options and think: right, so the choices are either generic fitness apps designed for a population that does not have this problem, or online coaching that often looks trans-specific from the outside but still runs on the same bodybuilding engine underneath.

That annoyed me.

I am very good at being annoyed. Annoyance is one of my core productivity systems.

I did not want to coach people one by one. I still do not. I do not want clients. I do not want a WhatsApp group. I do not want to become the bum at the front of the sales funnel. Nobody needs that from me, least of all me.

But I also did not want to keep watching trans women get handed the wrong map.

Because there is a method here.

There is judgement. There is pattern recognition. There is a way of looking at a trans woman’s body, her goals, her history, her equipment, her hormones, her surgeries, her injuries, her time, and saying: right, this is what we are actually trying to do.

And that judgement is not magic.

It can be structured.

It can be encoded.

It can be turned into software.

So, because I am apparently incapable of seeing a practical problem without turning it into a platform, I built the machinery.

It is called Become.

What Become is

Become is a body-planning system for trans women.

That is the cleanest way I can describe it.

Not a generic fitness app with a trans option bolted on.

Not a chatbot that spits out workouts.

Not a spreadsheet with lipstick.

A proper body-planning system, built around the problems trans women actually face when we are trying to change our shape.

It starts from a simple idea: two women can look superficially similar and need completely different plans.

One might be early in transition and still able to build muscle quite easily.

Another might be years into hormones, post-surgery, and working with a completely different hormonal engine.

One might need to soften an overbuilt upper body.

Another might be under-muscled and need careful strength.

One might need fat loss and habit-building before anything else.

Another might already be lean and need lower-body shaping, posture work and refinement.

One might have a full gym.

Another might have resistance bands, a bedroom floor and twenty-five minutes before the dog starts eating a charger.

Those are not details.

They change the plan.

That is what Become is built around.

How it thinks, without boring everyone to death

Underneath Become is a decision system.

I am deliberately not going to explain every cog and sprocket, because nobody needs to read the full wiring diagram unless they are trying to steal it or fall asleep.

But the broad idea is this.

Become builds a multi-dimensional picture of you.

Not one crude label. Not “beginner.” Not “apple-shaped.” Not “fat loss client.” Not “trans woman, therefore glutes.”

A proper picture.

It looks at the things that genuinely change the mission of the plan: weight, upper-body muscle, feminisation, hormonal context, training history, consistency, aspiration, available time, injuries, surgeries and equipment.

Some of those things are core drivers.

Some are modifiers.

Some change the whole direction of the plan.

Some simply change the exercise selection.

That distinction matters.

A dodgy knee matters enormously, but it does not necessarily change what the plan is for. It changes how the plan is built safely. Carrying a large amount of upper-body muscle from a previous athletic life, on the other hand, may change the entire mission from “build” to “soften.”

That is the kind of judgement a good coach makes.

Become makes that judgement through a structured decision system.

The best shorthand is probably this: it is closer to a clinical triage model than a fitness quiz.

Not because it is a medical device. It is not.

But because the seriousness is closer to that world than to the usual “tell me your goal and I’ll generate a plan, babe” nonsense.

It does not ask you to diagnose yourself and then reward you with a PDF.

It reads the situation, weighs the relevant factors, and commits to a lane.

That lane defines what the plan is actually for.

Sometimes the mission is sustainable weight loss.

Sometimes it is habit-building first.

Sometimes it is upper-body softening.

Sometimes it is lower-body shaping.

Sometimes it is strength.

Sometimes it is posture and refinement.

Sometimes it is simply getting someone moving safely without overwhelming her life by Tuesday lunchtime.

That is the first major difference.

The plan is not built from a template.

It is built from the mission.

Where the AI fits

Now, I need to be careful with this bit, because the phrase “AI fitness app” makes me want to climb into a cupboard and live there with a torch.

Most AI fitness products are basically chatbots in a vest.

You ask for a plan, and the model improvises something plausible-looking from the internet’s giant soup of fitness advice. Sometimes it is fine. Sometimes it is nonsense. Sometimes it will cheerfully tell someone with a rebuilt shoulder to do overhead presses because the internet has lots of overhead presses in it and the chatbot woke up confident.

That is not what Become is.

The AI does not get to sit in the driver’s seat wearing sunglasses and making things up.

The important decisions are made by the underlying methodology: the decision trees, the rules, the constraints, the trans-specific logic, the things that stop the plan doing something stupid.

The AI is used where AI is genuinely useful.

It can help interpret body photos.

It can help understand what you say about yourself in your own words.

It can notice when your description adds something that a form field did not catch.

It can turn the system’s reasoning into clear, human language instead of producing a dead little gym PDF that sounds like it was written by a protein tub.

But it works inside fences.

It does not invent the whole plan from scratch.

It does not get to override the methodology because the vibes were strong that day.

That matters to me enormously.

I do not want a system that merely sounds clever.

I want a system that makes good decisions.

There is a huge difference.

The photo step

One of the things Become can do is look at body photos.

That sounds simple. It is not simple.

For trans women, body photos are not casual.

They are not “upload your transformation selfie, babe.”

They can be loaded, exposing, dysphoric, frightening and sometimes humiliating. I know that. I have lived that.

But they are also useful.

A real coach can see things from a body photo that no questionnaire will capture properly: shoulder width, upper-body mass, posture, waist, hips, fat distribution, muscle balance, the overall silhouette, the mismatch between where someone is now and where she wants to go.

Become uses that information as part of the assessment.

Not as content.

Not as social proof.

Not as a cute “before” picture.

As private intake.

The point is not vanity.

The point is accuracy.

Because a plan for a slim, under-muscled trans woman just starting out should not be the same as a plan for a former male athlete with broad shoulders, strong lats and a lower body that needs to catch up.

Obvious, you would think.

And yet here we are.

Why the plan explains itself

This is probably the part I care about most.

Become does not just tell you what to do.

It tells you why.

That sounds like a small distinction. It is not.

It is the difference between obedience and understanding.

A normal plan might say:

Face pulls, three sets of twelve.

Fine. Technically correct. Also completely disposable. The first busy week, that exercise is gone, because it is just another line on a list.

But suppose you have had breast augmentation and posture matters to you.

Then face pulls are not just a random gym accessory movement. They are doing a job.

The weight of implants sits forward. Over time, that can encourage the shoulders to round and the upper back to collapse. Face pulls strengthen the rear delts, mid-back and small stabilising muscles that help hold the shoulder girdle in a better position.

Now you understand why the exercise is there.

That makes it much more likely you will keep doing it.

The same applies everywhere.

If the system reduces upper-body training, it explains why.

If it biases glutes and thighs, it explains why.

If it avoids a movement because of your knee, your surgery history, your equipment or your goal, it explains why.

Not in gym-bro Latin.

In plain English.

Because women do not need to be barked at by PDFs.

They need to understand the logic well enough to trust it.

The part that matters most for trans women

There is one piece of this I care about more than almost anything else.

Become has to be honest internally.

It cannot build you the right plan if it lies to itself about where you are starting from. If the system needs to know that you are carrying a lot of upper-body muscle, it has to know that. If it needs to know that your body is early in feminisation, it has to know that too.

The machinery has to see the truth.

But the system does not have to throw every truth in your face.

That distinction is everything.

For trans women, body-read information does not land neutrally.

Some of it is useful.

Some of it is reassuring.

Some of it can go straight into the wound.

Being told, even gently, that your body reads less feminised than you hoped is not just “feedback.” For some women, that is a small emotional catastrophe. It is exactly the sort of thing that makes someone close the laptop and never come back.

So Become separates what the engine needs to know from what the user needs to hear.

Internally, it is honest.

Externally, it is careful.

It does not hand you a cruel little report card on your own dysphoria.

It does not say, “Here is your feminisation score, enjoy your afternoon.”

It uses that information to build a better plan, but it talks to you in terms of method, direction and opportunity.

That is not dishonesty.

That is care.

A doctor does not need to read your blood results out like a sports commentator. A good coach does not need to say every technically true thing that passes through her head. The point is not to display the system’s cleverness. The point is to help the woman in front of it.

And this is where I think being trans matters.

I know what that information can do when it lands badly.

I know what it is like for your own body to hurt your feelings before breakfast.

So the system is designed with that in mind.

Not bolted on afterwards.

Built in.

The machine is honest where honesty helps the plan.

It is gentle where bluntness would only hurt the person.

That, to me, is the difference between a fitness product that happens to have a trans option and a product actually built for us.

Why I am talking about it now

I have had Become simmering for a while, partly because I have been working like a dog.

Not “busy” in the LinkedIn humblebrag sense.

Actually busy.

Writing, building a lot of software, recovering, working, dealing with life and feeding a tiny dog

Become has been on the back burner.

It has not gone away.

And I am talking about it now because I want to know who actually wants it.

That is the honest reason.

I can sit in my software cave building elaborate systems until the walls start speaking C#, but at some point you have to put the thing in front of real people and ask:

Does this solve a problem you actually have?

Would you use it?

Would you trust it?

Because I know the problem is real.

I know the generic advice is not good enough.

I know trans women are out here trying to solve body problems that mainstream fitness does not understand and was never built to understand.

What I do not yet know is how many of you are waiting for something like this.

So this is partly me showing you the idea, and partly me asking.

For a stretch of my life, roughly eighteen to thirty, I was reckless.

Not charmingly reckless. Not the memoir sort, soft-focus photograph and a lesson at the end. Actually reckless. Drink, drugs at points, weight going all over the place, impulsive decisions, fast decisions, and a general sense that I was living in a body wired up by a bored electrician on a Friday afternoon.

The part people misunderstand about chaos is that it often coexists with ambition. I always wanted to be better. I wanted to drink less, stop smoking, get my weight under control, become the person I kept imagining in those bleak little moments after the damage was done, when the energy had gone out of the room and all that remained was the bill.

And every time, I did the same thing. I made a vow. *This time I mean it. This time I have learned.* Then I relied on the raw force of that vow to carry me through the next temptation, which is a beautiful system provided the temptation lasts about nine minutes and you are never tired, bored, lonely, ashamed, hungry, frightened, drunk, or alive.

So the pattern repeated. Decision, effort, collapse, shame, decision again. And I spent years thinking it was a character problem, that discipline was a thing other people had and I’d been issued the Poundland version. Some people had the proper moral engine. Mine had a warning light on and made a funny noise when cornering.

I now think I was wrong about almost all of it.

Not completely. Willpower is real. It can get you through the immediate moment, shove you back from the edge, survive the first exposed hour. But it is not a life system. It is sprint fuel.

Willpower runs on glycogen.

Forgive me. I came up with this at midnight and it involves exercise physiology.

Glycogen is the fast fuel: immediate access, high output, limited tank. It powers a sprint, a hard climb, the ridiculous decision to chase someone up a hill because your ego has briefly overruled your cardiovascular system. It’s brilliant and essential and it depletes hard. Burn through it and you hit the wall. You bonk. Your legs become two bags of wet sand and no amount of moral conviction will persuade them otherwise.

That is willpower exactly. It works beautifully for a while and then it empties, and once it’s gone you cannot motivational-quote your way around human biology. You cannot grit your teeth into a second liver.

And yet this is how most people try to change their lives, stop drinking, diet, get fit, fix their finances, their sleep, their phone, their entire personality, all on the same tiny emergency fuel source designed to get them through a short, sharp crisis. Then when the tank empties, they conclude they’re weak. They’re not weak. They’re running a marathon on sprint fuel. That was me for years. I wasn’t short of desire. If anything I had too much, which is why I kept designing transformation as a heroic event, the big decision, the clean line in the diary, the new version of me arriving with lighting, music and possibly a small brass section.

But human beings are not changed by speeches. We’re changed by systems.

The thing that made me think about all this again was drinking. Three weeks ago I stopped, after a year on and off the booze that followed about fifteen years of not drinking at all. And the strange thing is that it has been easy. Not white-knuckle easy, not “bravely staring into the middle distance” easy. Genuinely, boringly easy, not constitutionally easy, but system-easy, which is a different thing. I sit in the garden with cranberry and ginger in a wine glass, watch a documentary with tonic and berries, and fall asleep before I finish the second glass, like a deeply wholesome woodland creature with excellent glassware. A few weeks ago the same evenings would have ended in gin.

If that were willpower it would have collapsed by now. Willpower can get you through the first evening, maybe a week if you’re especially furious with yourself. It does not hum along quietly in the background for three weeks while you wonder whether the documentary about ancient trade routes is as good as the reviews said. So whatever is holding this, it isn’t willpower, which is what sent me down the rabbit hole of working out what self-control actually is.

The opposite of willpower is not weakness. It’s habit. Or more precisely, habit plus belief.

Habit and belief are the other fuel system. They’re fat oxidation: enormous tank, low effort, sustainable for years, but slow to build and frustratingly invisible while you’re building. It’s zone two training. It feels too easy to be doing anything. Nobody is filming a montage. You’re just there, repeating the thing, almost embarrassingly. And then weeks or months later you realise you can hold aerobically what used to take everything you had.

This is the bit I missed for years: I confused effort with effectiveness. I thought the thing that felt hardest must be the thing that was working, the burn, the strain, the enormous emotional charge of *never again*. It felt virtuous because it felt difficult. But most of what actually changes you doesn’t feel serious while it’s happening. It feels boring. Repetitive. Almost too small to matter. Which is exactly why people abandon it. The walk that isn’t very hard, the slightly better breakfast, the tonic in the same glass, the small act of not negotiating with yourself at six in the evening, none of it feels like transformation.

That’s because it isn’t transformation yet. It’s installation. And installation is boring.

One of the most useful things I’ve learned is that you often have to saturate yourself in the thing you’re trying to become. You cannot hear the truth once and expect it to rewire you. You have to drown in it, repeat it, bore yourself half to death with it, until the message stops being a message and becomes part of the weather.

That’s how I stopped smoking. I read Allen Carr’s book, which at the time I thought might be the worst-written book in human history, the same points over and over until I wanted to climb out of my own skull. *Yes, mate, you’ve mentioned this. The point has been made. The point has bought a holiday cottage and is now living in the village.* And then I stopped smoking. Years later I realised the repetition wasn’t a flaw. It was the mechanism. The book wasn’t trying to impress me. It was trying to seep into me.

Alastair Campbell said something similar about politics. You repeat the line until you’re sick of hearing yourself. New Labour, new Britain. By the time everyone inside the campaign is bored rigid of it, the public are only just beginning to hear it. Behaviour change works the same way, except the electorate is your own nervous system. You have to campaign at yourself, not once, not with one grand manifesto launch in the bathroom mirror, but again and again until the new message becomes more available than the old one. Familiar, then available, then plausible, then normal, then obvious. That’s the order. Most people want to jump straight to obvious.

They want to *become* the person who doesn’t drink, doesn’t binge, doesn’t spiral. But identity isn’t updated by declaration. It’s updated by evidence. Every day the habit holds, it produces evidence; the evidence updates who you think you are; the updated self-concept makes the next day cheaper, because you’re no longer overriding an impulse with the same force, you’re acting like the person you’ve begun to believe you are. Day one, you’re a person trying not to drink. Day twenty-one, you’re a person who doesn’t. Completely different operating cost. The first is expensive. The second is nearly free.

This is where belief compounds. Every small repetition pays a tiny dividend, one walk, one decent meal, one early night, one bottle not opened. Nothing with cinematic value. But the dividend reinvests. The behaviour creates evidence, the evidence changes belief, the belief makes the behaviour easier, the easier behaviour creates more evidence. Slowly at first. Then suddenly load-bearing.

I know compounding. from trading and investing. The money I made, I made from boring positions held for years, compounding quietly while I got on with my life. The money I lost, I lost from high-intensity, high-leverage strategies that produced spectacular numbers right up until they tried to remove my face.

Leverage is glycogen. Compounding is fat oxidation. And it’s the same story in three costumes. In fitness, the mistake is training everything anaerobically because suffering feels like work, you batter yourself, plateau, and decide you’re not fit enough, when really you never built the aerobic base. In behaviour, the mistake is changing everything through willpower because effort feels like virtue, you vow, strain, deplete, relapse, and decide you’re weak, when really you never built the habit base. In investing, the mistake is chasing intensity because movement feels like intelligence, you lever up, trade too much, and discover that spectacular numbers go in both directions, the little bastards, when really you never respected compounding. Different fields, same lesson: the thing that feels powerful often can’t last, and the thing that lasts often feels embarrassingly underpowered at the start.

So I’ve stopped asking “how do I become stronger in the moment?” Sometimes that matters; sometimes you genuinely need the sprint fuel to get through the next ten minutes without doing the stupid thing. But the deeper question is different. How do I make the moment less expensive? How do I design the evening so the decision isn’t heroic? How do I preserve the ritual while changing the payload?

That’s why the glass matters. It sounds ridiculous but it doesn’t. The cranberry and ginger in the wine glass preserves the shape of the old ritual while removing the part that was harming me. Same chair, same evening, same tiny ceremony, different chemical payload. That’s a system. And systems beat vows, because a vow says *I will be different* and a system says *I have made different easier*. That’s the whole game.

Which is why I’ve become wary of the word discipline, not because it’s bad, but because people use it as though it were a moral substance some people are issued more of. I don’t think that’s how it works. What looks like discipline is usually architecture. The disciplined person isn’t standing there in permanent heroic restraint. She has simply built better defaults and exposed fewer stupid decisions to the weather. That’s not moral superiority. It’s infrastructure. And the good news about infrastructure is that it can be built, slowly, repetitively, without brass sections.

If I were trying to change something now, I wouldn’t start by asking how much willpower I have. I’d assume the answer is: about the same as everyone else, which is not much, and nowhere near enough to run a life. Then I’d ask better questions. What’s the smallest version of this I can repeat? What ritual am I preserving, and what payload needs to change? What do I need to saturate myself in until the new idea becomes boringly available? And above all: how do I stop confusing strain with progress?

Because the first weeks of change are deceptive. The system adapts before you can see the adaptation. You don’t expect one zone two session to turn you into a diesel engine, you do the boring work and trust that something is happening beneath the level of drama. Behaviour is the same. The first repetitions don’t feel like identity change. They feel like faffing about with tonic water and pretending it’s a personality. Too small, too domestic, too easy.

Good. Easy isn’t cheating. Easy is the point. The goal was never to prove I could suffer. It was to build something that doesn’t need suffering as its fuel.

That may be the most important thing I’ve learned. Willpower can start change. It cannot carry it. Habit carries it, belief carries it, saturation installs it, compounding strengthens it. And after a while the thing you used to fight becomes the thing you barely think about, which is the closest thing to freedom most of us are going to get.

I spent my reckless years thinking I lacked discipline. Then I spent years, without quite realising it, building better systems, fitness, food, work, health, thinking. I read, watched, repeated, failed, adjusted, repeated again. I bored myself into becoming someone else. So now, when something changes easily, I don’t mistake it for magic. I assume the groundwork was already there, and the visible decision was only the moment the system surfaced.

That’s what happened with the drinking. I didn’t discover a heroic reservoir of willpower. I’d spent years changing the machinery underneath. The old evening arrived and simply didn’t find the old infrastructure waiting for it.

For years I thought self-control meant gripping the wheel harder. Now I think it means building a better road.

Willpower is useful. But it’s glycogen. It gets you over the hill. It doesn’t take you across the country.

I’ve got half a dozen Substacks sitting in my drafts folder like abandoned Lego sets. Towers missing pieces, half-built spaceships, one good idea perched next to three piles of waffle. I quite like it. Ideas need to stew and I like wandering back to them when something clicks. Today something clicked.

Before I say anything else, I know I’m going to annoy a few people. I will await the Reddit pushback, the “this is AI”, “you’re a shill”, “this isn’t real”, “there’s no trans woman called Stevie Bennett”. I have heard all of this before!! You can’t please everybody, so I will speak the truth.

I’m going to show three photos.

One of me pre-transition, at my most muscular.

And two of me now.

And I’m not going to pretend: the body transformation is not pretty bloody good. I’m in my late fifties and I’ve achieved something quite rare. I sense, now and then, a flicker of resentment. The odd comment about money, surgery, luck. I get it. But the truth is that even before surgery I was 41, 33, 41. And once I got serious, I brought my waist to 28 and nudged my hips into the low forties. Surgery refined what was there. It didn’t conjure anything out of thin air.

You cannot get amazing surgical results unless the underlying structure is decent. That applies to cis women, trans women, everyone.

And here’s the thing: I didn’t start transition in peak condition. I’d drifted into an old dad bod. The injuries had piled up. A complex meniscus tear in my knee. Damaged vertebrae in my lower back from bad deadlift form. A minor cardiac issue from too much endurance training well into my forties. My triathlon days were done. My long-distance cycling days were done. That broke my heart, but the reality was my body had quietly changed shape and I had to deal with it.

But what I did still have was something vital: I’d done this before.

Years earlier, I’d taken myself from nearly 280 pounds to a lean endurance cyclist. I knew how to set goals, break them into pieces, track macros, build training cycles, decide KPIs. I knew how to make a body do something it wasn’t designed to do.

That skill, not genetics or money, is what saved me.

Losing Weight: The Unromantic Bit

When I started transitioning and went on estrogen, I did something very simple. I stopped looking at other trans women and started observing women my age. Real women. Women in their fifties who were slim, elegant, composed.

I watched how they ate.

At parties, they’d cut a slice of cake so tiny you’d think it was a misprint. Hours later they might take a single extra corner. To the casual observer it looks like “Oh, she’s been nibbling cake all afternoon.” In reality, it’s surgical precision. Moderation disguised as indulgence.

And it wasn’t just the cake. I’d watch their plates at meals. The portions were small. Deliberate. They’d take two potatoes, never three. They’d load up on vegetables, not as some performative health gesture, but because that was simply how they ate. Their plates were light. They didn’t build these enormous, heaped constructions the way men often do. They ate slowly, purposefully, like people who had long ago accepted that food is not a recreational sport.

To anyone who genuinely loves food, this is a sacrifice. A real one. There’s no point pretending otherwise. But the truth is this: this is how thin women eat. Not all of them, not every day, but often enough that the pattern is unmistakable. It’s not magic, and it’s not metabolism. It’s behaviour.

I realised I had to do the same.

At the start of my transition, I was a whopping 108 kilos (238 lbs). I had gotten a bit fat!!

I needed to lose sixty lbs. So I created a narrow corridor of calories and walked through it. Fourteen hundred calories a day, then twelve hundred, for seven or eight months. Since then I’ve eased off but the weight still drifts down gently. I’m essentially the weight I want to be now, 78kg (170 lbs). A pound or two less would be nice, but that’s universal female vanity speaking.

What’s sad is how clearly I can see the mistakes others make.

Mistake one: eating like a man.

I’ve been around some trans women and I’ve watched this happen over and over again. Full-fat soft drinks. Going back for seconds and thirds. Full fried breakfasts. Huge portions. Fifteen hundred calories before lunchtime. And here’s the bit nobody seems to grasp.

Once you’re on oestrogen, your muscle mass drops. It’s normal. It’s part of the process. But when your muscle drops, the amount of calories your body burns just by existing drops with it. That number is called your maintenance calories. In scientific terms it’s TDEE, total daily energy expenditure, but all it really means is the amount of food you can eat without gaining or losing weight.

If your maintenance level was around 2,200 calories before transition, it might be only 1,600 afterwards. You simply can’t eat like you used to. The maths changes. Most people ignore the maths.

Mistake two: clinging to male gym culture.

Some trans women cannot stop chasing hypertrophy. They were gym rats for decades and they cannot let go of the pre-transition rhythm of volume, pump, shoulder caps, traps. They want to be women but they want to train like men.

A muscular cis woman can still look feminine. A muscular trans woman often can’t. Our margins are narrower. Big deltoids plus a trans frame reads very quickly as masculine. So you have to train wisely. Not starve your upper body, but train it down, soften it, shift the proportions so your silhouette reads correctly.

Momentum And Belief

My transition was fast. That helped. Momentum is real. People four or five years in who haven’t got the body they want often lose belief. It’s the same psychology as long-term weight gain, diet, relapse, diet, relapse, and eventually the belief drains away. When belief drains away, adherence collapses.

The trick is to build systems that don’t require belief.

How I Actually Did It

Diet, diet, diet - 90%

This is not a prescription. I’m not telling anyone what they “must” do. This is simply how I did it.

Ninety per cent of your eventual figure comes from diet. Movement matters, but diet is the keystone. Brisk walks and pink dumbbells won’t build a waist. Food will.

The second truth: motivation is useless. Everyone starts motivated. Motivation evaporates. It always does.

The solution

One: immersion

Years ago, when I quit smoking, I read the Allen Carr book ‘Easy way to stop smoking’ and I remember thinking it was the most repetitive, tedious, badly written thing I had ever endured. I couldn’t believe something that sounded as though it had been written by an eight-year-old could possibly work. But it did. And the reason it worked is because the repetition isn’t a flaw, it’s the method. It’s immersion. It bypasses willpower entirely.

That was the penny-drop moment for me. Willpower does not work. Not for long. Not for anything that requires months of consistent behaviour. You can walk up to a fridge and chant, “I’m not eating cake today,” but that kind of internal heroism lasts a couple of days at best. Then it dissolves. Willpower is a short, sharp burst of nitrous oxide. It’s what you use for the final half-mile of a bike race, or to squeeze out the last bit of effort in an emergency. It is not what carries you through seven months of caloric discipline or body re-composition.

Long-term consistency comes from the subconscious, not the conscious mind. And the subconscious only learns through saturation. The trick is to overwhelm the conscious mind the thinking mind with so much information, so much repetition, such a constant stream of the same message, that it leaks downward and rewires your deeper patterns. That’s where behaviour changes stick. That’s where belief forms. That’s where discipline comes from, even when you don’t feel particularly disciplined.

So I did exactly that with nutrition. I immersed myself. I read Peter Attia, Outlive, Huberman, metabolic studies, endocrinology papers, longevity research, everything. I soaked my brain in it until the ideas no longer felt like concepts I was trying to remember, but truths I instinctively acted upon. Once your subconscious buys in, you don’t need motivation. You simply behave differently.

And there’s another part to this that people often forget, which Robert Greene writes brilliantly about in Mastery. Every new skill begins with an apprentice phase where you know nothing and feel useless. Then, slowly, you move into the practising phase where you make progress but still feel clumsy and inconsistent. Eventually, if you keep going, you cross into mastery—the point where the behaviour is automatic and integrated, and you can do it without thinking about it at all.

Diet is exactly the same. You have to accept being the apprentice. Accept that you don’t yet know what you’re doing. Accept that you will be clumsy and frustrated. But if you immerse yourself long enough, the subconscious takes over. Then you don’t need willpower because you have something far more powerful: embodied, automatic belief. The behaviour simply becomes who you are.

Two: Remove decisions.

Most people have the same breakfast every day. They don’t consciously decide. They don’t wake up each morning thinking, “Hmm, what shall I have today? Perhaps I’ll roast some vegetables, assemble a little panini, whip up a feta salad, maybe a fruit compote while I’m at it.” No. They grab toast. They grab cereal. They autopilot it.

So extend that principle. Take that same autopilot into lunchtime as well.

I designed the most nutritious 180-calorie breakfast possible. I worked out the exact macros. Then I ate it every day without thinking.

Lunch was a giant mackerel salad. Mountains of spinach. A rainbow of vegetables. Exactly fifty grams of mackerel, no more. A splash of Korean sauce. Repeat, repeat, repeat. 380 calories.

And dinner? I kept that simple. I ate whatever my family were eating. Obviously this was back in the days when I actually had a family before they threw me out for being transgender a long story for another day but the principle still stands. I didn’t cook some separate, monkish little meal for myself. I sat with them, I ate with them, and I just adapted the portion.

The rule was: it had to fit on a side plate. Nothing bigger. I’d cut the carbs down, pile on whatever veg was going, and fit the rest around it. But the key thing was the plate. A side plate enforces the portion without turning dinner into a maths lesson.

And there was something else I learned the hard way: if you live with other people, you can’t shove your weird dietary habits onto them. They will get annoyed. Food is ritual. It’s social glue. People sit down together and share the same meal, and if you suddenly declare, “I only eat steak and eggs now, sorry,” and then repeat that every night like some carnivore evangelist, they will eventually want to throttle you.

I know this because I did it. I’d been on extreme keto diets, carnivore diets where I insisted on nothing but steak and eggs, bodybuilder diets where I limited myself to chicken, broccoli and rice, nights where I’d scrape half my plate aside because it wasn’t “allowed.” It doesn’t work. Your family will strangle you. Eating is communal. You need to be flexible. The diet has to fit around your life, not bulldoze through everyone else’s.

So that’s it. Dead simple. No tricks.

Two out of three meals on autopilot and designed to perfection. One meal a free-for-all, but portion controlled. And that’s it.

Seven days a week I lived inside that loop. On Fridays I allowed myself one packet of crisps, purchased as part of our weekly, almost ritualistic Friday treats after school. I’d pull up in the pickup truck, my daughter would jump out and run in to get ice creams, drinks and crisps for herself and her siblings. And every week she’d emerge with a single, solitary packet just for me. I would take it home, open it with the reverence of someone unwrapping a Willy Wonka chocolate bar in search of the golden ticket, and then eat those crisps as though they were Michelin-starred amuse-bouches. I practically salivated over them. Those little moments kept me sane.

Once the routine locked in, the weight came off predictably. Body fat moved. Shape altered. That was the real foundation for everything that came later.

Training: The Physique Architecture Bit — 10%

Strength matters. Although I’ve said that training only gives you about ten per cent of your feminine look, that figure is misleading if you think long-term. Yes, the visual return is small at the start. Strength work won’t give you curves or a waist or hips in the short run. But in the long run, it’s non-negotiable. Strength is what protects you in your fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond. If you don’t train strength, you decline faster. You lose independence earlier. And the future version of you will pay the price.

And let’s be honest, for those of us transitioning later in life, the longer we can remain hot chicks, the better. We didn’t get to be 22-year-old women. We’ve only got the years we’ve got left, and the fitter and stronger we can stay, the longer we get to enjoy being our actual selves.

Everyone starts from a different base. Some women begin transition with very little muscle. I began with far too much in the wrong places. My upper body was overly developed from years of sport. That silhouette read “male” from fifty yards away.

So in my case, I made a deliberate choice: for the first six months I didn’t lift anything with my upper body. I let it atrophy. Once the volume softened, then I reintroduced strength work at half my old loads but with similar volume.

I shifted my training downwards glutes, thighs, core. My strong cycling thighs helped, but I doubled down on glute work to pull my proportions lower and widen my visual base.

Everyone’s needs differ. Some need to build. Some need to shrink. But if you were athletic as a man, you’ll likely need to reduce upper-body training unless you want a deliberately muscular female look. Personally, I’d rather have Anne Hathaway’s arms than a docker’s.

Posture, Gait, Silhouette

One thing nobody tells you: posture is a feminiser.

Pelvic tilt.

Shoulder position.

Scapular glide.

Centre of gravity.

Gait.

When you strengthen glutes, loosen the chest, allow the shoulders to drop, and walk from the hips rather than the lats, everything changes. People obsess over hormones and dresses. They should obsess more over posture. It’s free and transformative.

Skin, Soft Tissue, Ageing

Body composition also includes skin.

Oestrogen helps, but collagen declines with age.

Rapid weight loss can slacken tissue.

So I kept protein high.

Hydration high.

Soft-tissue health supported.

Curves matter, but so does the surface they sit on.

Identity Friction

People don’t fail because they’re lazy. They fail because their identity is fighting them. If you still subconsciously see yourself as a man trying to lose weight, your behaviour will sabotage you.

The day your identity settles, “I am a woman building a woman’s body”, everything clicks. Behaviour aligns automatically.

Longevity: The Long Game

Everything I did, I did for the future.

Less mass = less joint stress.

Glute and core strength = fewer falls.

Better balance = more independence.

A tighter frame = easier ageing.

Final Thoughts

None of this is magic. None of it is luck. And none of it was some genetic blessing I secretly had tucked away. It was a system, one that anyone can build.

A diet you don’t have to think about.

A routine you can repeat.

A training plan that nudges your body into the proportions you want.

A mind shaped by immersion rather than unreliable willpower.

Bodies are systems. Systems can be steered.

Even at fifty-six.

Even with injuries.

Even with a rocky starting point and a whopping 108kg.

And if you’re trans, you already have the most important ingredient: courage. The courage to transition. The courage to face yourself. The courage to rebuild your life from the ground up. Compared to that, refining your diet and training is just another skill , one you can pick up exactly the way you picked up everything else.

I’m not special. I built a pattern. I stuck to it. You can build your own. It won’t look exactly like mine. It doesn’t need to. But if you build the system, the system will carry you. And one day, not instantly, not magically, but inevitably, you will look in the mirror and see a woman who feels like the truest version of you.

The version you’ve always hoped would appear.