Transitioning at the End of the World
Solve et coagula et solve et coagula et solve...
Dear readers, this is a little different from what I usually post here, but I do believe it relates to the topic of queer devotion. I think you’ll see what I mean.
I started testosterone a little over a month ago (yay!), and I’ve been thinking (and feeling) a lot about the absolute joy of my transition juxtaposed with the terror of being trans in the U.S. at this time. This personal essay is about what, for me, is the radical hope and self-love of starting T anyway. However, I recognize that I’m in a privileged position (being white, having health insurance that covers HRT, living in Oregon) and that many of my trans kin don’t have access to HRT and gender-affirming care or aren’t in safe enough positions to medically transition at this time.
CW: mentions of needles/injections; mentions of attacks on trans rights and healthcare and anti-trans hate speech. If you’re trans, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming, I hope you’ll find this piece ultimately hopeful, but please take care of yourself while reading it.
xx, Charlie
It’s Sunday, March 16th, 2025, and I’m giving myself my first testosterone injection. My hand shakes only slightly as I point the syringe to the left of my belly button, my other hand pinching a roll of stomach fat to receive the needle. I feel like I should have done something special to commemorate it, designed a ritual of some sort, or at least taken a shower first. But once I had the prescription in my hands, I didn’t want to wait. So I’m sitting on the closed toilet seat in our tiny bathroom, injection supplies arrayed on a handheld mirror balanced on the pedestal sink, my spouse Aaron (who has 10+ years of T injections under his belt) supervising from the doorway while I clamp the edge of my t-shirt between my teeth, slip the short, slender needle into my belly fat, and plunge. I barely feel it. Though the day after, I’ll have a bruise from pinching my stomach roll too hard.
This isn’t the beginning of my transition, though it is a beginning. The usual order is HRT (hormone replacement therapy) first and surgery second, if at all, but I’ve never been one for doing things the usual way. I started socially transitioning, first with my pronouns and then my name, in 2018-2020. In 2022, I had top surgery. Now, in 2025, testosterone.
It might seem like a weird choice to start HRT even as the Trump administration attempts to ban gender-affirming care for all trans people (youth and adults) and eliminate us from public life completely. It’s not ideal timing, I’ll admit. But I’ve always been the kind of person who is twice as likely to do a thing if you tell me I can’t. I can persist on spite alone, meager sustenance though it may be. But I didn’t go on HRT to be defiant. I started T because I am determined to chase my joy, come what may, even as the jaws of fascist transphobes nip at my heels.
It might be too late for me. If the gender conservatives of the world get their way, I might be forced to detransition before I’ve barely started medically transitioning. But better too late than never. I have to try.
T Notes, Week 1
More energy! I feel less tired and more focused. I also feel happier, in a generally better mood. Is this T, or is this excitement about starting T?
Voice getting deeper already?? Is this possible after 1 shot? Power of suggestion? Placebo effect? Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” came on in the car, and I’ve never been able to reach the low notes. I’ve always had to switch octaves in the middle. But I sang it all the way through, in right register. Surprised at how good this feels.
“I want to be more gender-confusing,” I tell my neighbors as we install raised beds in the garden behind our building together. “I don’t want full masculinization; I just want people to look at me and go, ‘That’s a… actually I don’t know what that is.’”
“That’s a they,” offers one neighbor, a fellow they/them, themself.
“Bingo,” I reply.
We’re doing hard manual labor, shoveling and carting five cubic yards of dirt from a mountain piled on a tarp in the street to the beds in the back. There are six of us, and all but one is some flavor of LGBTQ+. I’ve been on T for two weeks, and these neighbors are among the first people I’ve told. It does not escape me how fortunate I am to live in a place like this, among people like these.
“You want to get kicked out of both bathrooms,” another neighbor quips, and we all laugh. I’m not sure exactly how she identifies, but she’s certainly not straight, and last weekend, when she whipped out a heavy-duty power drill and I went, “Okaaaay, Butch!”, she looked pleased.
“I guess that’s one way to have my nonbinary gender affirmed,” I joke.
She shares that she’s been removed from bathrooms in La Guardia and LAX, even before the bathroom bans. “It’s even worse now because of all the attention,” she says. Another neighbor remarks that they won’t be flying anywhere for a while. Another shares that his passport expired and he’s afraid to renew it, lest it have the wrong gender marker or his documents get seized.
The shadow of the transphobic outer world falls over the garden, a cloud over the sun. But we continue to shovel dirt from the wheelbarrow into the beds. We place flagstones like puzzle pieces around them. We transplant bulbs saved from the old, rotting beds into the new, metal ones. The shadow moves on. The sun returns.
Here, we are safe. For now, at least. A bunch of queers and one cis/het woman going through a life change, laughing and sweating in the dirt, planting a garden at the end of the world. It’s far too warm for March. There wasn’t enough rain this winter. Will our plants survive whatever the summer holds? The blistering heat? The wildfires? Who knows.
Still, we plant.
T Notes, Week 2
Voice is definitely deeper!! I moved on from Fiona Apple to Amy Winehouse, and hitting her low notes was easy. I dared to try Hozier, and I can sing most of “Take Me to Church” and “Angel of Small Death.” Only the lowest notes are out of reach.
Increased energy continues. Also I’m feeling… hotter. Even though physical changes are basically nonexistent at this point. And more confident. Is this how guys feel all the time?
Muscles are poppin’! I started training in martial arts two months ago and have been strength training at home, and I’m starting to see the results. New shapes are emerging in my arms and shoulders. My body feels firmer all over. I’m sure the testosterone doesn’t hurt either, lol.
Sweatier.
Smellier.
Each step of my transition has been precipitated, to some extent, by catastrophic events. First, a divorce to realize I’m nonbinary. Then, COVID and escalating attacks on trans rights to realize I wanted top surgery and deserved it even though my dysphoria wasn’t life-threatening, but simply because it would improve my quality of life. Now, Trump’s second term and the rise of American fascism to make me go, Fuck it, let’s start T.
Why is that? Maybe because I’ve become increasingly aware of my transience. I’m acutely alert to time running out, and I’m not willing to waste any of it.
It's strange, transitioning at the end of the world. I’m moving toward something, toward joy and change and embodiment and discovery, while the world is rapidly being torn apart at the seams. Every week, I mark my body’s changes with awe and delight—voice deepening, muscles building, shoulders broadening. Every week, new attacks on trans rights and healthcare, on parents of trans kids and their doctors and teachers, on trans adults in restrooms and trans athletes in sports. Every week, a new horrible thing descending: tariffs, measles, layoffs, aid dismantled, DOGE in our private data, federal grants and funds taken hostage, people being kidnapped on the street and disappeared. I’m not sitting idle. I’m fighting back to the best of my ability. I’ve joined a local mutual aid and resistance group. I’m learning to defend myself and others. I’m learning herbalism so I know the uses and preparations of plants if things really go to shit and civilization collapses. It feels too meager sometimes.
I prepared my taxes this week because I’m too afraid to conscientiously refuse, because I’m trans and my spouse is trans and I don’t want to draw the attention of a government that will target and punish us for who we are. So my dollars will pay the salaries of RFK Jr. and Elon and his tech bro INCELs. A percentage of my hard work, of the labor of my body and mind, will be bundled into bombs and dropped by night on children, whistling through darkness, ending worlds across the globe.
It’s shot day. I give myself the injection. I feel myself coalescing, my spirit becoming more and more incarnate in my flesh.
Around me, lives end. Systems dissolve. Institutions are demolished. Democracy crumbles. Order collapses. Reason dissipates.
Across the street, two young cats play in an upstairs window. Traffic whizzes by below. The sun shines. The pea starters in the backyard beds are already taller. Sometimes, the perpetual motion of the world feels hopeful. Sometimes, it feels cruel.
T Notes, Week 3
I can sing Hozier!! (Not necessarily well, but I can sing it!) Now I’m flirting with Willie Nelson’s “Secretly Fond” and Orville Peck—ambitious to say the least.
Appetite has increased. With grocery prices and upcoming tariffs, this is not ideal. I’m learning all about inexpensive, high-protein and high-fiber vegetarian foods. I’m meal prepping for the first time in my life. Aaron and I will learn to love lentils and cottage cheese.
Maybe it’s the T or maybe martial arts (probably both), but my shape is changing subtly. Hips narrowing slightly, shoulders broadening. I think my cheeks are losing some of their roundness. Is it possible my smile is different?
Also: acne.
On the phone, my mom tells me about the protests back home in Alabama. She’s going to as many as she can manage. She’s holding a sign that says, “Trans Rights are Human Rights.” She’s calling her reps. She texts me photos of crowds and protest signs and people draped in rainbow flags and trans colors—scenes unimaginable when I was growing up there in the 90s and 2000s. She went to the first protest of her life last year, first for Palestine and then Ukraine and now for me.
I am a little in awe of her, my sweet, gentle mother now a burgeoning activist. I can feel how much she loves me—and Aaron, and my middle brother who depends on disability and Medicaid, and her refugee ESL students—in every action. I think of how I can’t go home to Alabama anymore, and it’s almost enough to make me miss it. I still think of it as “home,” even though I haven’t lived there since 2009. My parents, my brothers, the house I grew up in, my memories, a distant land where I can no longer travel. It makes me tender, like pushing on a bruise.
I figure it’s as good a time as any to tell her I’m starting testosterone, so I do. I tell her I’m still nonbinary, still they/them. I tell her what I’m hoping for (“androgyny,” I say, “like David Bowie,” a reference she understands) and why (“because people still gender me as female and it doesn’t feel good,” and “I might feel even better this way, and I want to try”). She takes it beautifully. She tells me about all the women she knows who are on HRT for menopause or to delay wrinkles. She tells me my late uncle used to take testosterone. She tells me about two moms she met in the past week alone who live in their neighborhood and have trans sons under 19, and how cruel it is to deprive them of gender-affirming care and cause them this sort of suffering. And for what?
“I’m glad you moved to Oregon,” she tells me, for the first time ever. She’s been trying to get me to move home for 16 years. “I hate that you’re so far away,” she says, “but I’m glad you’re not here.”
Still, my mother holds a sign in front of the courthouse, in Railroad Park, on a sidewalk somewhere in Birmingham, fighting for my right to exist, for my right to come home.
T Notes, Week 4
I try on the blue suitcoat I bought for my brother’s wedding last summer, and it’s too narrow on my shoulders. It was expensive, so that sucks, but it’s also euphoric, this tangible evidence of change.
I’m becoming a total himbo! I’ve been taking selfies of myself flexing in the mirror. I text them to Aaron at work and to two friends who are also strength training. Many fire emojis ensue. Who am I?? lmao
I did a YouTube Live interview for Queer Devotion and loved the way I looked and sounded. Loved. I sent it to my oldest BFF, and she confirmed my voice is lower. Aaron watches it with me, and I catch him sneaking looks at the side of my face. “What?” I ask. “You can’t stop smiling,” he says, his own smile huge and glowing.
I can sing Orville Peck! A lot of his songs, at least. I was told to expect my vocal cords to feel tight for a while, and maybe that will come later, but right now they feel long and rich. I feel like a whole new cavern has opened up somewhere in my chest, and when I drop my voice into it, my whole body echoes.
Today I’m revising a new essay I wrote for The Rebis on the tarot’s Devil card as transgender liberation. The revisions are minor, but today, it’s hard work. Today it is hard to read my own words on the history of the monstrification of trans people and the demonization of difference and feel defiant and bold instead of small and afraid. Today, it is hard to read the words “dishonorable,” “untruthful,” “mutilation,” plucked from executive orders, and not cry instead of rage. My soul feels tired. My resilience quakes.
Every day, I read the headlines, and I hurt. In the UK, the Supreme Court has decided trans women aren’t legally women. Earlier this week, Planned Parenthood of Arizona suspended all trans care, for minors and adults, and later reinstated it. A couple weeks ago, a young trans woman was arrested in Florida for using the women’s restroom. The U.S. government is expected to release its own junk science report bashing trans care, Cass Review-style, by the end of the month.
I’ve feared for Aaron, for my friends, for all the nameless strangers who are my trans family, but now that I’m on T, I fear for myself too. The fear is sharper and more desperate now. When I feared for others, my fear was emboldening and protective, a fire in my belly that spurred me to action. Now that I fear for myself, it’s metallic and cold, like blood-tinged ice chips in my mouth, threatening to freeze my tongue.
Though I am weary, I revise the essay anyway. When I’m done, I read it aloud to myself—a practice I have with all my writing because hearing it out loud helps me catch clunky or convoluted sentences. I read it aloud in my newly deeper voice, starting with the epigraph from a 1993 performance piece by Susan Stryker:
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie.1
Something happens as I read, as I tumble the vowels in my throat and they come out ringing with a new, warmer resonance. Maybe it’s the magic of my trans voice intoning another trans person’s words of defiance and autonomy across the gulf of 32 years. Maybe it’s the simple, easy pleasure of my deeper voice that I can’t stop fawning over, that has brought me more gender euphoria than I ever expected from a thing like a voice. But I feel better, stronger, bolder, my resilience firmed up for the day. Today, I won’t give in to fear. Not today.
Sometimes, I am angry that the joy of my transition is tainted by fear. Then again, no transition is free from fear. And maybe fear is not a bug but a feature of transitions. Maybe this fear is instructive. Maybe this fear teaches us how dear our desires, how strong our devotion, that we are willing to risk so much, just for a chance at being happier, more embodied, more ourselves than we are today. There’s something sacred in that, I think. A love so powerful it risks itself for itself.
T Notes, Week 5
I’m not afraid of the needle anymore.
Giving myself T injections is changing my relationship with my belly fat. I no longer feel as sensitive about my stomach; instead, I’m starting to love it. It’s the part of my body that receives the T every week, that absorbs it and passes it into the blood stream. It strikes me as appropriate, perhaps, that I’m injecting this magic juice just inches from my belly button, where the umbilical cord once fed me inside my mother’s body. Another gestation. Another birth.
I’ve noticed a pattern: At the beginning of the week, right after my shot, I feel slutty, hot, and confident (possibly over-confident, lol). As my T levels decline toward the end of the week and reality sets in, I look back at myself and laugh. Not in an embarrassed way but an affectionate way. I never thought I’d feel this good in my skin, this free. I’m reminded of when I got glasses for the first time. I walked outside the optometrist’s office and looked up at a tree across the street. I could see every leaf and twig rustling in the breeze. It made me dizzy. My vision had been blurry for so long, I didn’t know it was supposed to be clear. I never knew such clarity was possible. I never knew what beauty I’d been missing, until then.
My one-month on T was a few days ago, so I look back in my tarot journal to the day of my first shot. I pulled two cards: the Ace of Wands and The Lovers. I didn’t know my prescription would be filled that day, that my first shot would be that evening. In my journal, I recorded notes from Susie Chang and Mel Meleen’s Tarot Deciphered:
The Lovers is the card of Gemini. Gemini aligns with the 3rd stage of alchemy, separation, which “isolates the parts that arose from dissolution and discards those rejected. Solve et coagula describes these processes as solve, to break down, and coagula, to recombine, assumedly in a higher form… To state the saying backwards, when one door opens, another closes. When we make a choice, something is rejected.”2
By starting T, I have opened my heart to more excruciating loss. Because I have discovered how good it is possible for me to feel on testosterone, I have discovered how horrible it will be to lose it. By finally giving my body the transformation it yearns for—by witnessing my muscle and fat rearrange, by spelunking the new depths of my vocal range, by finally embodying my body for what feels like the first time in 39 years of life—I have taught myself how very much I have to lose if I’m forced to go back.
And yet, I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t take it back. I wouldn’t trade the knowledge of this feeling for anything, even if it makes me more of a target, even if I only get to experience it for a handful of months before it’s ripped away. I refuse to hide, despite the threat. I refuse to comply in advance. I refuse to make myself small or quiet or appropriately gendered to anyone’s liking. I refuse to betray myself, not anymore, not ever again. I will chase my soul’s truth. I will fall in love with myself and this flesh and this earth over and over again. I will build a good home for my soul in the earth of my body. I will make my heart more tender, my body stronger, my will sharper, my relationships dearer. And I will not stop, for as long as I can, though the world as we know it creaks and slips from its foundations. What is an ending, after all, if not a transition? Solve comes before coagula. Dissolution before recombination. The world transforms, and so do I.
These days, every time I get in the car or cook or wash dishes, I play my test songs—Hozier, Orville Peck, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash—and sing. This has become my litmus test, my transition tracker. In the kitchen, I press play and let my voice drop in my throat like a sounding line, a weight on a rope that measures water depth. I can feel a new openness in my voice box, a hollowness or clearness around my vocal cords, like some tightness or blockage has been removed. I wonder about the anatomy of it, about what was there before, about my insides subtly rearranging. My body is making room for depths. My body is making room for something.
I skip to Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah.” This has been my most challenging test, and I can sing the whole thing, almost. “Hallelujah” is from the Hebrew for “praise” or “joyous song” (hallel) and the name of God (jah for Yahweh). When I hit the low notes, my chest vibrates like a cello. Now it’s only the fourth Hallelujah, the final one that dips so low on the jah, the name of God, that I can’t quite reach. My voice goes gravelly, scrapes the well’s bottom. I’ll try again tomorrow, next week. My body is making room. One day soon I’ll hold that jah in my chest, my throat, my mouth. I’ll vibrate with it. I’ll sing.
Before you go, Queer Devotion comes out next month!
Pre-order here. I’ve got several upcoming events to celebrate, including a class, book release party, and author talk! Learn more here.
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 247.
T. Susan Chang and M. M. Meleen, Tarot Deciphered: Decoding Esoteric Symbolism in Modern Tarot (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2021), 69.
every word of this is just perfection. so happy for you in this particular moment of joy 🖤
I could not love this more. All of this. All of you! 🔥🔥🔥 This is so beautiful and real and holds so many truths all at once.