Narratives of "transition" always feel hard for me. It's not as if I was once one gender and have now become another. It's not as if my identity, my personhood has ever been defined solely by gender. Rather, it's that I (and by the way I think you, too) am in a constant state of transformation and gender is just part of that. The constellation of ideas and people and aesthetics and places I have encountered in my life have fundamentally changed "me."
I struggle with how (Western) society is obsessed with the idea of having one self/identity. I struggle with how the only way we talk about gender is as an identity. I think gender just like our "selves" is relational. I think we have been and will become many selves for many different people. So pursuits like "authenticity" aren't about striving for some far away truth, but rather an acknowledgement (perhaps a submission) to the constant ebb and flow of change. We are all just sort of orbiting around and responding to a whole host of emotions and ideas and experiences and sometimes that involves is changing how we look, how we describe ourselves, the words and images we use to give meaning to our interior life.
Which goes to say here is a #tbt photo of me four years ago when I wore different things and said different words and used different language to describe my body. I don't experience this person as masculine or as a boy or as wrong I experience this person as a product of his/her/their time and place. And that's okay.
So here is to not being confined to the dilemma of the "now," here is to a sincere commitment to relationality, here is to a world that remembers how to believe in one another's infinite capacity to transform. We are far too tremendous to be reduced to the prophecy of perpetual sameness.
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