Chapter 13: Holy fuck, I’m in. Let the hormones begin

Me working in my new office in the new house. And yes, those cables under the desk are driving me insane. Completely unacceptable. I’ll have them all in trunking within a week. That real estate above the monitors needs some love too, with a few plants and maybe a floating shelf with a few nice things on it.

The peace did not vanish. It just became fragile.

For weeks I had lived inside a quiet balance. Normal life downstairs, and a different gravity in my office. But peace is a living thing. It needs the right chemistry to survive, and mine had begun to slip.

The first time I saw the private endocrinologist, she didn’t bother running any basic hormone tests. This surprised me, because I would have assumed it was standard. But I could. feel the estrogen. I knew something was happening. So I paid for private tests myself, through a company that used Holland and Barrett of all places to draw the blood. When the second round of reviews came, I had the full panels done properly and went through them with my endocrinologist.

She didn’t realise that my levels had dipped because she didn’t know the baseline number. She was more focused on how high they were in the first place. I was the one watching the slippage.

She glanced at the screen and said, almost casually, “You know you have very high estrogen levels for a man.”

I played along as if it were the first time I’d ever heard this. She assumed it was because of the Graves disease and said she wanted to keep a very tight eye on it. Then she added that I might consider external testosterone to balance things out.

I nodded, pretended to consider it, and kept quiet. I did not tell her that I had taken testosterone before, or that I already knew what it did to me. The aggression. The emptiness. The loss of empathy. The way it bleached the colour out of my life until everything turned flat and beige.

I left knowing I would never do what she had just suggested.

That night I sat in my office, staring at the blood-test sheet. The numbers were slipping, and I could feel panic trying to form. The peace I had found these last few months was being undone by the very medication that had saved me from thyroid collapse.

So I did what I always do. I started researching.

Within a day I had found a private gender specialist clinic that could prescribe estrogen properly. I filled out the forms, uploaded the test results, booked an online consultation, and sat waiting in front of my laptop for the call.

The doctor appeared on screen, calm, kind, deliberate. We talked through my history, my bloodwork, my symptoms, and what had been happening to my body over the past year. She didn’t rush me. She just said, “This sounds like something that has already begun. The right treatment will stabilise you.”

By the time the consultation ended, she had written the prescription. When it arrived in my inbox I downloaded it instantly, folded it into my brown leather man bag, and carried it around like contraband.

I wanted to fill it, but I was terrified. This was not makeup or wigs or quiet rituals in my office. This was a lever that could not be unpulled.

When I finally collected the estrogen and spironolactone, I hid the box in the bottom of my office wardrobe, the one where I keep bike gear and tools. I shut the door and walked away.

My black office wardrobe in the background where I hid my oestrogen patches for weeks.

For weeks I did not open that wardrobe. I told myself I was being sensible, giving it time. The truth was that I was scared stiff.

I did not doubt who I was anymore. I had already said the words to myself. I knew I was transgender. But knowing is one thing. Acting is another.

The mirror upstairs had given me recognition. This was different. This was permanent.

And underneath it all, the insecurity never stopped. I kept thinking about how I looked. How old I was. How masculine my face still seemed. I would look at women in the supermarket or on television, women who moved through the world without thinking about it, and I would think, God, I look ridiculous.

Sometimes, on a good day, I could catch the right angle and think, maybe not too bad. But mostly, I saw a man in makeup and wondered what I was playing at.

It wasn’t just strangers, either. Sometimes I’d look at Sarah, really look at her, and notice her jaw, the soft feminine line of it, the perfect proportion of her nose, and feel this quiet ache of envy. Then the guilt would come, hard and fast. What kind of person envies their own wife’s jaw? But I did. Because it was beautiful, and it was something I would never naturally have.

I laughed at myself now and then, a sharp kind of laugh that hurt. You have driven all the way to Dublin for a wig, I would think, but you cannot even peel a patch and stick it to your backside.

The box stayed there. Week one. Week two.

Eventually I took out a small notebook and wrote my rules properly.

Rule One: No shame. That had nearly destroyed me in the past. For so many years I ran away from Stevie. And in doing so, I did terrible damage to myself, both psychologically and physically. Stevie was never the problem. Shame was the problem.

Rule Two: Subterfuge, but temporary. I did not plan on lying to Sarah. For long. I just needed to be 100% sure about what I was planning on doing. Although I was feminizing, it wasn’t necessarily the case that I was going to become a full-time woman at this point.

Rule Three: One thing after another.

And underneath, I added the question that had guided everything so far: after every step, ask yourself, do you feel better or worse?

The engineer in me found comfort in that structure. I thought of it as a closed loop. Inputs, feedback, control. A living system that would stabilise over time. If the feedback was good, continue. If it was not, stop. I had built algorithms on less data.

The problem was, this system had emotions for variables.

Weeks went by. I lived, worked, laughed with my kids. But every time I looked at that wardrobe, that little white box was in there, reminding me that indecision is a decision too.

Then one morning, with no trigger and no plan, I walked into the office, closed the door, opened the wardrobe, looked at the box and said out loud, “Fuck it.”

I opened it. I peeled a patch. I swallowed the Spiro.

That was it. No lightning. No choir. Just a line crossed.

The thing I remember most was the silence, the kind that comes after a storm, when you realise the wind has stopped. I sat there staring at the patch on my skin and thought, okay. We are in.

I did not feel guilty. I did not feel brave. I felt correct.

From that day the process began, slow, deliberate, mechanical in a way that soothed me. Twenty five micrograms became fifty, then one hundred, then one hundred and fifty. Each increase felt like a quiet vote of confidence from my body. Yes. This. Keep going.

My office stayed the same. The screens, the desk, the soft hum of the computers. But it felt different now. Less like a workspace. More like a cocoon.

Sometimes I would stand in front of the huge mirror behind my Smith machine in the gym and catch sight of her there again. The same curve of a smile that had started everything. It reminded me that she was real, even on the days when I doubted it.

The insecurity did not vanish, but it lost its teeth. Because I was doing it. It was no longer theory.

A few weeks later the bloodwork came back again. The levels had risen. The estrogen was stable. I went back to see my endocrinologist, and she reviewed the results with me. The numbers looked tidy on the chart, but what they meant was that chaos had finally found direction.

I told the truth this time, and for one of the first times, other than with my HRT doctor, I said to a civilian, “I’m actually transgender.” It was monumental. She looked at me for a long moment, then simply said, “I see,” and smiled.

She never saw a man again.

I slept properly. I woke lighter. The same peace returned, but this time it was not an accident. It was by design.

And it hit me that I had spent fifty years fighting a system I had never once tried to run. Now, finally, I was learning how.

The physical changes came slowly at first, different this time, deeper. My skin grew even softer, almost velvety to the touch. I could feel real breast growth now, not just swelling. My whole body seemed to lose its old density; everything felt gentler, quieter, more responsive. I could sense the changes before I could fully see them, but they were there, unmistakable.

Other people would notice it later, but I could already feel it happening. My reflection was tilting further toward her, and I knew the world would soon start tilting with it.