It's not my identity that changed.

I remember when I was in therapy right before I started hormone treatment, my therapist asked me to write a eulogy for my “female identity” I honestly didn’t do it, because I didn’t get it. More recently I’ve tried to do things like that but it’s never felt right. Probably because it’s really like writing to somebody else’s imaginary friend.

The truth is I wasn’t killing off an identity and birthing a new one, that was really the view of someone looking from outside at what happened to me. They watched an illusory person disappear, and the real person take its place; it might have been a great assignment for my mother, but that person never existed for me.

I don’t have a clue if any other trans person feels like I feel, perhaps some people did have a former identity. But my truth is: my identity is the same identity that I was born with, I didn’t change it or kill it off, I just exposed it.

Don't get me wrong, my therapist was amazing, I will forever be grateful to her, in truth she gave me tools that I didn’t have before I met her, and I probably wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for them. But if I were going to change something, I would say, instead of asking me for a eulogy, ask me for a thankyou letter.

Ask me to thank my body, for putting up with the binders, for taking the shots, for letting blood work be done over and over again, for allowing 2 pounds of my own flesh to be removed just to help me feel a little more at home within it.

I think an exercise like that would have been far more transformative for me than a pretend eulogy to a pretend person. As a trans person, personally, I haven’t always been on the friendliest terms with my body, but it’s the closest body to me, it's the only one I’ve got, and gratitude is a great way to start the process of finding peace.

The more I think about it the more I wish I’d written a letter like that, especially before surgery, because the truth is maybe my body and I don’t always agree, but it does a lot for me. Actually it does all of the things for me, even when it’s hard or physically damaging. Showing somebody a bit of gratitude tends to lighten their burdens, so shouldn’t I start with lightening my own?