dear elle, from me
a letter to my younger self
I have been seeing a lot of amazing posts for Pride lately. So much joy, excitement, humor, exploring and becoming. June is probably my favorite month of the year, not only because the weather is the best, but because of all of the buzz in the air. Last week I saw a post by
where she wrote a letter to her younger self. The letter was part of a bigger publication by The Seattle Stranger where multiple writers also penned messages to their former selves. You can read the full issue here. Reading Ari’s piece, I was captivated by this idea to talk to your pre-transition self. While as trans people we may sometimes want to forget our lives before embracing who we know that we are, I think it is powerful to be able to reflect on the ways that we grow. That is why being trans is so miraculous. So… I thought about what I would say to young Elle. Maybe I would offer her support, tell her who she really is, let her know that one day she will thrive and it will all make sense but also none at all. I doubt that she would listen, but here’s what I would say…Dear Elle,
You are 16 now and I know that your skin and bones feel heavy while they carry you from classroom to classroom in a place you would rather not be. You are heavier than I am now. Not only in weight, but in heart. The weight of the world is sitting on your chest and flattening it. You wear the same black beaten-from-the-sun Converse everyday and recycle five band t-shirts… one for each school day. Your hair is disheveled and unwashed but you do always remember to brush it; something you learned that you have to do once it starts to kiss your shoulders.
High school is hard, and you don’t have many friends. You tend to stay at home and play your music loud on your stereo rather than go out and be a kid. Even though you hit puberty a few years earlier in middle school, it didn’t bother you too much. You were always insecure about the hair that grew from your upper lip, though. I remember the first time you asked Dad to buy you shaving cream and show you how to get rid of it. It felt good to have smooth and soft skin. Middle school always felt easier than high school. You kissed a boy once. You kissed a few girls too. It all felt a little more free.
I know that you are struggling. I know that you have become a shadow of yourself. It is one that is forged with insecurity, anxiety, and antisocial behavior. It casts over you like the hair that you’ve refused to cut for at least two years now. Ultimately, I know that you are sad. But being a woman isn’t even on your radar. You think that the trans and queer kids are weird… and you are doing everything you can to avoid being bullied. You are already a bit of a misfit after all. How brave the kids who are out of the closet are… and how brave you aren’t. In many ways you are weak. But only because of a system designed to remove your strength… one that will always seek to clip your wings.
I want you to know that deep down you are actually a very brave person, even if it finds itself in dormancy. I know that you feel confused. I know that you question why this is. I know that that only makes you more confused. I think that you are brave for putting on pink nail polish and going to school, even if you pass it off as being a punk rock kid who just doesn’t care about gender norms… or anything for that matter. As a senior you will learn what they/them pronouns are. You’ll run a thought experiment on what it might be like to tell people to stop perceiving you all the time, to relinquish control of who the world wants you to be, to feel a little less like the dark side of your moon. You are brave for even letting the thought cross your mind, even if it isn’t fully imaginable. You are always filled with so much creativity, but it is hard to create who you want to be in the world just yet.
I know that you want to be free. Everything will change when you are on your own. You will meet lots of people just like you, but you might not know you’re like them at first. During your first year of college, someone you barely know in the campus dining hall will talk about their queerness with you. You will tossle around the verbs and consonants of such a word. They will spin around before touching down in your heart. You are queer, too. Shortly, you will learn more language and find a way to articulate the multiplicity of your identity. You are they and them now. You will put on a dress for the first time in front of mirror… (cliché trans girl, I know). The feeling will be like coming over the curve on that old wooden roller-coasters that you grew up going to in Washington. The wood could break at anytime… or it could be impermeable by even the strongest rainstorm. Everything and nothing at all. That is how this will all feel.
Eventually, you will grow to love how powerful it feels to wear women’s clothing. The way a skirt lengthens your already long legs, how you have to sit a dress underneath you when you sit down, and how a tiny top with straps lets your arms feel free. But you are afraid to wear these things in public. You will only wear them to friend's parties where you know it will be safe. There’s one time where you will wear a small top with straps, showing off your broad shoulders and *somewhat* muscular biceps in public. People will stare at you, inciting incredible paranoia that everyone is in fact looking to hurt you. Your MO will be; pretend to be someone you’re not in order to protect yourself. One foot in… one foot out. Your footsteps are not yet in unison.
During your final year of university in New York City, you will become close friends with a trans woman. She will be your first friend that is beginning transition when you meet her. Because of her, you will learn a lot about what it means to be free. It is then, at 22 years old, that you will learn that it is possible to become who you want to be. You haven’t eaten eggs in years but will feel your own beginning to crack. Teeny tiny fragments of shell lining your feet at the altar of you. You will resist. It may feel like walls (or maybe your shell) closing in on you, ready to swallow you up and disallow you from living any sort of normal life. What is being normal anyways? Isn’t it more normal to be yourself than to fake who you are for your whole life?
The summer of 2023 is when you know that you have to take hormones. Once the egg is cracked there really is no piecing it back together. It will start to make a lot of sense, though, why you had struggled to find confidence in yourself and your body. Of course that is it… you have been a woman being told to be a man all along. Maybe we should start telling J.K. Rowling that she is actually in fact a man… in order to hammer home to transphobes how dysphoria feels. Hmm… ok… perhaps that is fighting fire with fire, but one can only dream of sticking it to such a hateful person.
Now that you have pieced most of the puzzle together, you hope that HRT will help uncover the final missing pieces. They are the dusty pieces that fell behind the sofa years ago, buried too far for you to reach with your testosteroned hand. You will need some acrylic nails on there first. You will write countless poem after poem, dancing around words that circle your fear. Are you really trans enough? I’ve always thought that if you are asking yourself that question then yes, you are. I never understood the word “enough”, anyways. We say it when we have “had enough”, “enough of that”, or “that’s enough”. Usually it signals you are being too much, not too little, of something. The English language doesn’t make sense anyways.
Coming out yet again might feel exhaustive and superfluous, like your life is a sentence without a period, instead just a series of commas strung out, burning from the inside, there is never one way to do this, so you will have to get creative, find a way to make them all see that this who you have been all along and that nothing is really changing, rather you are aligning yourself to who you know you have always been, and you will cry and cry, and probably keep crying, you are letting all of those buried feelings out, singing to the world in tears until after all, you know that you have had enough.
You will make an appointment with Planned Parenthood to begin hormones. However, they’re booked up and there isn’t one until the end of the summer. The waiting game… Like tennis, or baseball, or a marathon. It’s a game that you’d just rather just be over. Really, you should feel lucky to live in New York City; a city where everyone comes to chase and achieve their dreams. What if my dream is to be a woman? There are so many women chasing that dream here, cis or trans. It’s a place where there are so many trans people that not even a massive healthcare industry can handle us all. You will have to wait… but I want to pass on some advice that I received recently. Don’t be patient, be excited. Know that you have completed the hardest part.
The air is disgustingly thick. It is the end of August and the Big Apple is rotten. You will travel over an hour through Jell-O air to The Bronx, amidst bustling crowds at 149th street, and try to track down the Planned Parenthood. You hope that no one will see you, but everyone and their brother seems to be out today. Using Google Maps to find your way, you’ll stumble upon an old sandy brick building, which will display no sign indicating that this is the clinic. Tilting your head higher, 349 will appear in big block stickering. That is the building number, after all. How wonderful Planned Parenthood is for creating anonymity for us who enter.
You will be nervous in the waiting room. You might fidget and squirm. But here’s the deal: the doctor is going to believe you when you tell them that you want to do this. They are going to hear you and understand you. You are just one of many that they have probably already seen today. A blip in a slew of people chasing their dreams. But I want you to know that you are still special. This all really is miraculous. A majority of the population in this world don’t live with honesty. In English we don’t even spell the word correctly… forget the H. If honesty is pronounced without it, it’s onesty. The same day as your appointment, you’ll secure a prescription to begin 2mg of estradiol. What do they say? This is the first day of the rest of your life? Yeah… that. It is ok to feel scared. Know that it comes from excitement.
Now, I sit here writing to you 7 years later in my Brooklyn apartment in the gayest, queerest, transest (we should make that a word), neighborhood in the city. We are 9 months into HRT and it finally feels like things are all shaking out how they’re supposed to. We don’t have hardly any more facial hair (thanks laser hair removal), and our body is soft. Hair has been falling off to make way for pools of smoothness. When you take your fingertips to your arms, legs, hair, face… it will all feel right. We swim on the beaches of Thailand in a bikini for the first time and for once don’t feel the same daggered eyes in our direction.
Our breasts are still small, but progesterone is making them bigger. We are petite but still have some womanly curves (again… thanks progesterone). We get more mood swings now. We cry more. We laugh more. We love more. We feel more… We are forged with a wealth of expansivity. Every inch of our bones now sing in tune with the muscles that they uphold. We walk with purpose now… while in women’s boots.
Peace is an interesting word. It is the same as the word piece. What separates the two is only one single letter. You are a piece of me, now. This is to say that you are only a piece of yourself because you are so young and so damn tired. You are just trying to preserve and protect what little piece you are in the here and now. But one day you will change the I. You will flip the script. You will go from being a piece to being at peace. All you had to do was change a letter.
Here is what I have to leave you with, young Elle. Always be bold, fearless, and honest. Everything will make sense but so will nothing at all. Don’t ever be patient, be excited. You will become.
Love from,
Elle xoxo
Thankyou for sharing this, it helps me understand my wonderful daughter a little more 🥰
I loved this. Thank you for writing to yourself with such kindness.