Goodbye Hello

 

June 22nd, 2025. The day before I turned 40. My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I said I wanted her to take the kids to the movies so I could eat and drink alone at my friend's bar. Wish granted, I housed a plate of wings, had a burger, multiple gin and tonics and decided I would transition. 

No, it wasn't the alcohol talking. For weeks, I'd known that I was ready to do it after years of making excuses, a full year after blurting out loud to my therapist I want to love women as a woman and allowing myself to wonder how nice that would be. I look forward to one day sharing a very dysphoric photo I took on 6/22/25 for the kind of before/after-HRT collage trans people are so fond of posting. 

There was one problem with finally coming to terms with my gender: I wouldn't be able to do anything about it for two weeks.

I had to accompany my family on a cruise, a summer routine that allows my wife and I some downtime from the kids. I figured being trapped on a boat, traveling to foreign countries, and spending a large amount of time in the presence of my wife, parents, and children was not the right time to begin discussing transition. I didn't even know yet what transitioning would mean to me or how I would do it, much less how I would explain it to the people I love. 

So I hit Reddit. And girl, I hit it hard. 

Daily and desperately, I would scrounge for wi-fi on the boat or on land, engage a digital Batcave-like protocol to log in, and peruse the subs. Word-for-word. There is no manual to transitioning, no driver's permit, and it wasn't something you could comfortably speak on out loud even before Trump II. All of my trans knowledge came from other people sharing their trans knowledge on the internet. I ripped off 5-7 responses a day about how eager I was to do this. The people I addressed had no idea behind the phone was a sad, depressed egg who had yet to do anything aesthetically feminine. 

I grew up in late-90s Dial Up AOL Chatroom Culture. For millennials of a certain age, we have a savviness of how the internet can best be used for better and worse. Even back to the beginning of my transition, I hoped Reddit would have a shelf life. But at the time, I didn't know any trans people. And I had yet to go out in the wild and interact. Those two weeks were an incubator of trans education, flimsy though it was.

I'd like to look back at that time with fondness but it's hard to see that crash course instruction as anything more than survival. There are too many bad faith actors on Reddit (and social media writ large) to consider what was actual "help" and what was creeps and chasers trying to play me. I made one friend off of it but outside of that, I retained no relationships, all for the better. 

The Sunday after returning from the cruise, I went out for the first time in a clumsy attempt at social transition, documented here (and well-worth your $25).  It was embarrassing but I've come to believe those 5-6 hours living as an IRL trans woman for the first time were more helpful than the two weeks I had spent breathing recycled air on an overstuffed cruise liner looking at r/eggIRL memes. Being Stateside, I took what I needed from Reddit and began the process of moving on. But I kept my account.

___

For the longest time in my life, I knew that I would never get a tattoo.

While honeymooning in Berlin, my wife and I planned to get tattoos. She held up her end of the bargain, I chickened out. I just couldn't imagine something being on my body for the rest of my life. What if it was a mistake? What if the artist screwed up? What would my parents think? My in-laws?

I felt confident in the knowledge I would never get one. My body is a temple, that temple must be protected, yada yada yada Bible talk.

Of course, when I went on HRT, I wanted one almost right away.

Before transitioning, I felt no connection to my body, which is probably why I was comfortable for so long in online spaces. Online spaces still require ableism to operate but they do not require you to share more of your corpus than need be. Hell you can lie about it and nowadays, it's not even considered weird (at least not on the internet, which has become a floating dumpster). I carefully crafted an online persona of a too-cool-by-half Progressive Pastor and Sports Dad. 

It's very easy to look at all of that and say "dysphoria cope" but in this case, there's truth to it. I yearned to be a different person, someone new, and the internet let me do that for decades. My body was not a factor. The face I didn't like, the back that always quit, my total lack of flexibility...none of it mattered. I laundered the embarrassment I felt towards my body through the internet and convinced myself that my persona came back clean. 

That mentality was still ingrained in me on that early September day when I striped my skin with adhesive estradiol and swallowed the first dose of spironolactone. I don't know what I expected but one way Reddit helped was encouraging me to keep expectations realistic. I knew I was not going to look like Emrata with a yellow pill and glorified patch of tape. I would have to "do the work" but I didn't know what kind of work I would have to do because trans biological science from the last hundred years* has boiled down to "Should trans people exist?" and not "How does transitioning work?" 

Indeed, it has not solved everything but it has made me comfortable in my body for the first time in my life. It shut up the angry man voice in my head, replacing it with a warm pink light I feel inside me. I want the world to see my body now. I want to improve on it and take care of it. I love it.

As my government worked overtime to take control of my body, I felt the urgency towards getting a tattoo. If they are going to forcibly detransition me, I will not let them forget who I am. I will have a sign on my body. It will shine bright.  Even if my body mutates to its previous form. Even if my mind is defeated by the forces of hate. Nothing they do will ever "make me a man" because I am not one. 

I've written before about my thoughts on I Saw the TV Glow. It's not a favorite movie but it's an informative one. Having now seen it before transitioning, in the beginning of, and more recently, I cannot think of any other piece of media that defines me as a trans woman. Which is why I knew the first tattoo I got would be the Pink Opaque symbol. 

Truthfully, I didn't understand what the symbol meant the first two times I saw the movie. It took Tilly Bridges, she of the great Tilly's Trans Tuesdays, to break it down for me in her comprehensive examination of the movie's trans themes...

PINK is the most important, where it stands for transness, or access to your transness, transition, etc. The very name of the “show” (the true reality) that Owen and Maddy are obsessed with, The Pink Opaque, is also part of this. 

“Opaque” is there because this movie is from the perspective of Owen, a pre-transition, pre-egg-crack trans woman, and when you exist in that state, your own transness is a mystery to you. It’s opaque, you cannot see through it to what waits on the other side. (for those unfamiliar with trans colloquialisms, an “egg” is someone who doesn’t realize they’re trans yet, and their “egg cracking” is when they realize they’re trans)

In fact, this is also why The Pink Opaque tattoo is a pink ghost. Pink = trans, ghost = spirit. It’s a signifier that your spirit, your soul, your true inner self is trans.

My inner self will always be trans. My inner self will always be a woman. Even if the feeling of pink light is carved out of my body, the truth of who I am will remain. I know this. God knows this. The false prophets who claim my God do not know this. They have excised the gifts God has given them in the act of what bell hooks' refers to as the psychic self-mutilation. That is their problem. They make their pain my problem. 

But they did not make me. And they are not making me.

___

My dear friend is not from New York and she does not understand the significance of St. Mark's or why getting a tattoo there is a BFD or why I am making a BFD of doing it. She simply says, "Hey if you wanna get a tattoo, I'll come with."

I drag her along, excitedly telling her of the area, places I know and have been in states of drunkenness and sobriety. I had wanted to wait until summer to do this but tonight, feel the urgency of the moment. Transition has taught me to trust instinct. I'm with the right person. I'm in the right neighborhood. It's a nice night. My body is ready. 

Twenty-five minutes and a pain-induced-scream-sermon later, my ghost is on my body to tell the world: my true inner self is trans. 

___

I posted a photo of my tattoo in I Saw the TV Glow's subreddit page the next day. 

And then I realized: it was the only subreddit I post in anymore.

The trans subs had the same stories and memes of which I had seen countless versions.

The lesbian ones were stuffed with unmoderated transphobia and people whining about their singleness. 

What else was there?

I had outgrown Reddit. Really that had happened months ago but now, I was ready to admit it. My body is in a better place. I escaped the Midnight Realm. Rather than a single, Easter Day flourish of resurrection, God showed me over time who I was. All offline. 

Reddit is not Scripture. It is not community. It was never those things. It was a starting point. A tour guide I abandoned to wander through the Louvre. In life, I have held on to things for too long without realizing why I was holding them in the first place (this will be a major theme in Allison Lore one day). With Reddit, I always knew the reason but had made excuses why I didn't get rid of it. 

The first thing about being trans is not taking things on but figuring out what needs to go. I often burn chaff before I grow plants but the garden is beautiful all the same.

Taking a final glance at my page before wiping it, I laughed that my last non-ISTTG post was one I made on a lesbian sub about being a big dumb lesbian; the precipitating event being a recent crush who had a habit of standing in my space, their mere presence giving me heart palpitations. Something I had worked on jokingly but in a friendly spirit. I was about to press a button and send that all to the ether, a digital record of me kibitzing with other lesbians on the random things women and femmes experience that fire the starter pistol of our respective hearts. 

I appreciated these people, or at least their Online selves. But I do not know these people. These are not people who had seen me at my clockiest. They had not stayed up nights listening to me cry like my dear friend. They had not done my makeup like those I wrote about in the anthology. They (probably) do not know the woman whose proximity to my presence puts me in danger of cardiac arrest. 

It's ok to let go. 

My digital imprint on Reddit is no more. The tattoo is forever. Two different ways of saying I'm a trans woman. The most important one remains. 

*If you know someone who is opposed to our government but also squeamish about trans people, be sure to tell them that the Nazi book burning photo they share as a meme depicts the bad guys destroying world class trans biological research.