On March 15th 2011, I smeared my first dose of testosterone onto my arms and awaited the results with bated breath. Ten years on I’m still waiting, really! It turns out that thanks to the way my body works, my testosterone uptake is fairly limited. Hence the lack of beard and rather ‘light’ (that’s putting it politely) voice. I won’t bore you with the intimate details of how my body has changed – it’s all there in the blogposts I wrote all those years ago. However, I will say that the hormones are doing their job just fine, and as you can see from the pic above, changes have definitely occurred!

I remember someone asking me how testosterone ‘felt’. I told them it was like running on unleaded petrol all your life, then getting a tankful of four star. In fact, I have a tattoo of four stars to make my point, and it’s an analogy I stand by. Have I ever regretted starting testosterone? Never. Not once. Not one single day in ten years.

What I do remember from that first day of changing my hormonal mix is the relief of finally really starting my journey, of being taken seriously, and being able to bridge the gap between body and ‘self’. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. These days I am rarely misgendered, and I recognise the privilege of being able to laugh it off when people get it wrong. But public acceptance aside, the joy of being ten years on is no longer thinking about my gender all the time: it’s no longer constantly at the top of my list.

It does pop up occasionally, though. This time last year, March 16th 2020, I went to London for the first part of my phalloplasty surgery. If you’ve read my blog before, you may be aware that this surgery was never the ‘Holy Grail’ for me – other parts of my transition were more important, for a long time. It took many years for me to decide it was right, and once I had, there was a long wait to get as far as the operating theatre. I was ready, my head was in the right place, I’d organised my life.

Unfortunately, Fate was against me – there’s never a good time to discover you have a serious allergy. Almost as soon as I was given the anaesthetic, I suffered anaphylaxis, and to cut a very scary story short, the surgery was cancelled. A week later, the country went into lockdown. I’m still waiting for another try at surgery. We now know which of the anaesthetic drugs I’m allergic to, so that’s sorted, but now, like so many others whose lives have been suspended in the current pandemic, I just have to wait.

Life goes on. I flatly refuse to make banana bread, and like everyone, I can’t wait for life to be a little more…lively. Apart from anything else, lockdown has emphasised how hard it can be when you’re alone. I’ve written before about my frustrations in the dating world – suffice it so say that I am still middle-aged, free and single. If ever finding open-minded love in a small town was difficult, that has been made nigh on impossible by Covid. But that’s not really a “trans problem” so much as just life. I guess that’s the point I’m able to make, ten years on, in that whilst I still have plenty of problems, both physical and with mental health, they are rarely, any longer, “trans problems”. And that’s quite nice.