So, I started estradiol enanthate about a week ago and while I realise I still have a tonne of testosterone in my body, the estrogen should be at a therapeutic level by now. I’m calm and haven’t been angry for days. I’ve started being productive (well more productive at least). So from the very earliest indicators, it seems to be going well (obviously I’ll know more in a few weeks). This, however raises a number of challenges.
Firstly how am I going to tackle the family stuff? I know my kids would be supportive (and my partner as much as she’s able), but my parents are pretty transphobic. There’s also my children’s classmates and their families. About half the kids in her class throw around racist slurs like it’s no big deal, so I’m certain they’d give her a hard time if I visibly transition. I don’t mind lumberjackmoding for a while, but I’m eventually going to look like a woman with a beard.
Secondly, what to do about documentation. I know I can’t change my gender on my passport (terf island), but as a foreigner I need to have it.
Third, there’s the actual nuts and bolts of transition such as voice training. I get frequent throat infections that leave me unable to say anything for months at a time. Not to mention my family is used to my voice and seems to like it. But again if I’m going to hot-mom-mode in the future, I’m going to need a feminine voice.
Fourth, what about my name? I haven’t put nearly as much thought into it as I perhaps should have. K know im not going to change it officially until my parents expire (they are not good people but they are old enough that starting conflict with them won’t help), but at some point I’m probably going to want to. So how do I pick? It seems weird to choose my own name. It’s not like I picked my ‘on life support name’.
Also what to actually do with the facial hair? It’s going to be largely necessary for groundskeeper-Willy-moding but I can’t shave because my hair is too curly and it causes horrific razor burn. So it’ll need to be IPL/ Lasered off but that would need to be sooner rather than later because I’m at that age where it’s going to go grey and at that point light based removal won’t work.
Suggestions?
I highly recommend electrolysis for removing your beard.
My electrologist told me I have very coarse hair on my face, though it comes out pretty straight, and it greyed early so I have somewhere between 25% and 50% grey hair in my beard. This pretty much made any hair removal except electrolysis functionally worthless to me. Unfortunately red hair, from what I’ve heard, is one of the hardest to remove with any method, so electrolysis will likely be your best bet. The medical industry tends to push people to get laser first because it’s theoretically faster, but generally does not result in complete or fully permanent reduction and for people like me would just be a waste of time. Most people end up going this route, but you don’t need to feel like you have to.
I went straight to electrolysis and I’m really happy I did. By nature of the way hair on the face works, only around 10% - 20% of the follicles are active at any time, especially on the upper lip, so even if you managed to get literally every beard hair in one sitting, it would still take around a year at least of consistent treatment to get every hair. Both electrolysis and laser work this way because they both rely on the hair follicle being in the growth phase to work, but they generally don’t tell people that when they go to get laser, at least in my experience (I got it other places on my body). The nice thing about electrolysis is, generally speaking, once a particular hair is fully treated it will be gone forever, so it’s really only a matter of time until you’re done.
Given how long it takes to finish electrolysis, I would suggest starting soon and sticking with it consistently. You will likely be much further through your transition than you’re expecting before you’re done having your beard removed, so the transition from beard to no beard should be very easy for your family.