Ten years ago this month, on an otherwise ordinary lunch break from my job as an editor at a local newspaper, I received my first testosterone injection from a no-nonsense doctor at a hospital in Boston.
I was 30 years old and desperate to be known. I also wanted it known that despite the media fixation on a trite narrative about what it meant to be trans, I was not “a man trapped in a woman’s body or any cliché like that,” as I emailed my friends and family.
I was a man and I was born trans, and I could hold both of those realities without an explanation that could be written on the back of a napkin. “I will not become a different person,” I wrote in that email, defiantly and, as it turns out, correctly. “I am myself.