The White Dress Rehearsal - Eight months of transition
This one is probably about six months after Driver 21.
By this point, I had been on hormones for a while, and you can see it beginning to happen. My body is changing. My face is starting to soften. I still have the cheap blonde wig on, and I am still entirely private. Nobody has seen this version of me. Nobody really knows she exists.
But I can see her.
The setting is almost absurdly revealing. I am sitting in my office, surrounded by the machinery of my old life: trading screens, code, a podcast microphone, a gym rack, weights, cables, monitors, all the equipment of the hyper-functional, hyper-controlled person I had built to survive. And there I am in the middle of it, in a white dress and tights, with little red shoes with bows on the front, trying to understand what I am looking at.
I was starting to get a little more polished by then, but only just. My face was still carrying a lot of the old bone structure. The wig was cheap. The makeup was still rough. I was nowhere near the woman people see now.
But I was so happy.
In this video, I am absolutely astonished by what I am seeing. I keep looking at myself as if I cannot quite believe that this is possible. At one point, I say, “I’m astonished. I’m absolutely astonished that I can look like this.” Then, a few seconds later, I just keep saying “wow,” because there is nothing more intelligent available to me at the time.
It is not glamorous confidence yet. It is not public confidence. It is not the finished version of anything.
It is the shock of recognition.
The feeling of looking at yourself and thinking:
Oh.
There she is.
Maybe this might actually work.
There is also something very funny about what happened next. After recording this first bit, I started making a whole series of imaginary coming out videos for people in my life.
Some were for people I loved.
Some were for people I absolutely did not love.
Those videos can never be shown to anyone, for obvious reasons, but they are very funny. Somewhere in the archive, there is a version of me in a white dress, privately rehearsing my coming out speeches to half the known world, including a few people who would not have received the gentle version.
The public part is this: the beginning.
The moment where I look down at myself, show off the shoes, laugh, swear, panic slightly about fake tan, realise I look okay, and then immediately decide that the next logical step is to start coming out to people who are not there.
That is transition too.
Not just the solemn parts. Not just the medical parts. Not just the devastating parts.
Sometimes it is a woman in a cheap wig, sitting between a trading desk and a gym rack, wearing tights, looking at herself on camera and saying:
Holy fuck.
I look all right.