(10 YEARS LATER) THE QUIET BEFORE BECOMING: My First Steps in Transition

PROLOGUE:

After ten long, uneven years, I fear I’ve committed the quietest of mortal sins: complacency. There are days when I feel like I should drop to my creaky knees before the altar of my long-suffering WordPress site and beg forgiveness from whatever god happens to be trending. What once felt terrifying and electric—sometimes in the same breath—has become routine. The fuss, the drama, the small glories measured in biweekly CCs of hormones and the ritual pilgrimage to doctor appointments have slowly calcified into nuisance, something I now half-loathe and mostly overlook.

A decade ago today, I could never have imagined the ground I’d cover in becoming the woman I always knew myself to be. But somewhere along the way, that reckless cocktail of fear, hope, joy, and ferocity thinned out. The raw, vulgar, untamed emotion that once propelled me forward has gone soft around the edges. I got busy. I stopped counting injections. The wild kid inside me was quietly replaced by a more practical, less fun lookalike—a version of myself I don’t always recognize.

So here I am, trying to excavate whatever remnants remain of that early wonder and pride. As an act of return—and maybe a small act of defiance—I’m going to read and publish, for the first time, the private journals I kept at the start of my transition in July 2010.

What follows are those original entries: letters to myself meant to be a “somewhat reliable witness” to the slow, imperfect unfolding of my transition, tiny markers of time and proof that I was here. When I wrote them, I had no idea where I’d stand in 2020—or whether I’d feel at peace with how far I’d come. And yes, transitions rarely end; they stretch, shift, and continue in ways we don’t anticipate. Mine certainly has.

Thursday, July 29th, 2010 (Day 1: Week 1)

Today should have been simple to describe. It is, after all, one of the most important days of my life. And yet whenever I try to name what I’m feeling, the words slip away. The past few days have carried me through a kind of summer-bright elation, a gentle undercurrent of peace, sudden bursts of confusion, and a fragile anxiety threaded with hope for a future I can’t yet picture. Even layered together, none of those sentiments fully capture the tectonic shift happening within me.

If not for the maze of administrative demands that stood between me and hormone replacement therapy, I might have been swallowed whole by emotion. Instead, the psychological assessments and battery of medical tests became anchors—frustrating ones, yes, but grounding all the same. They gave me something to focus on while the rest of my life moved as though in soft blur.

Over the past weeks, life’s routines continued with mechanical precision: newspapers delivered and ignored, breakfasts eaten without remembering the eating, commutes completed as if by muscle memory alone. Meanwhile, running on only a few hours of sleep, I felt myself pulled toward a quiet threshold. These last two days, especially, have been both tender and painful—an initiation of sorts.

On Wednesday, a dear friend accompanied me to my third Intense Pulsed Light session, one more step in shedding the coarse, gratuitous masculine features that never felt truly mine. And then today came the moment I had avoided, anticipated, feared, and longed for: my first injection of estrogen. A simple act, delivered bluntly into the flesh of my backside, but one that felt like the turning of a cosmic key.

None of this would have been possible without the people I’ve met here in Korea. Five years ago, I had the improbable good fortune of stumbling into the lives of two women—Yoon, Hee-Jung and Ji, Hyun-Ju—who have since become sisters to me. They held my hand through the early, uncertain stages of transition, and in a country that was not my own, they made the unfamiliar feel survivable.

More recently, a kind nurse named Shin, Ji-Ae entered my life, offering guidance that seemed small to her but monumental to me. Through these three women, I found the medical support I needed: professionals who understood, who listened, who treated me with respect.

Yesterday, as I waited in the soft quiet of a skin clinic’s VIP lounge, Hyun-Ju phoned a transgender-friendly medical centre whose number Ji-Ae had given me. She asked the questions I was too anxious to ask: Could they prescribe? Could they monitor me safely? Were they truly equipped to help someone like me? When she hung up with a confident yes, something long-stalled inside me finally shifted. I decided that today—appointment or not, directions or not—I would go.

Months earlier, in May, I had completed the required psychological evaluation affirming that I was mentally sound and fit for hormone therapy. And yet, despite having the permission I had once ached for, I froze. Anxiety built a quiet cage around me. One afternoon, while procrastinating at work, I watched videos of another woman celebrating her transition milestones. I felt envy, grief, and self-reproach twist together. And then, with a force that felt less like clarity and more like blunt common sense, I realized that nothing would change until I changed it.

So I left the industrial familiarity of Ansan and made my way into the dense pulse of Seoul. At the clinic, Dr. Kim and I discussed my options, and together we agreed that the time had come. His nurse—lovely, intimidating, efficient—asked me to lower my skirt and administered my first intramuscular injection before I had fully processed that it was happening.

I am now on a 10mg dose of Estradiol, one millilitre every two weeks. There are reasons I chose this form of therapy, and I’ll share them in time. For now, it is enough to know that this path feels right. Safe. Mine.

And so here I am: exhausted, hopeful, terrified, grateful—standing on the threshold of a life that finally feels possible.

This photo was taken on July 28th, 2010.

This was originally written on July 29th, 2010, with a prologue added February 21st, 2020, and then edited again December 6th, 2025.

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