The first month

— Anonymous

I am writing this on the morning of day 33. I took my first Estrofem pill on March 14. I will not tell you my real name, my city, or anything that could identify me, but I will tell you what this month has felt like, because someone reading this is where I was a month ago, and I remember how badly I needed to hear from a person who had crossed the line.

The night before I started, I sat on my bed for two hours holding the foil strip in my hand. I knew I had crossed every line by buying it. I knew that swallowing the first pill was crossing a line I could not uncross — not really, even though physically I could stop and the changes from one pill would not happen. The line was inside me. After the first pill there was the person who had taken HRT, and that person was me.

I cried. Then I took it. Then I did not feel anything for a week.

The thing nobody told me clearly is that the first two weeks are mostly placebo and dread. The hormones do not start visibly working that fast. What I felt was every old fear amplified by the act of having done the thing. Was my brother looking at me strangely at dinner? Did my mother find the foil strip? Did I leave the lab receipt in my pocket? I checked my drawer six times a night.

By the end of week two I had a new fear: that nothing would happen. That this had been a fantasy and my body would refuse to change. I spent hours in the bathroom mirror searching for any softening of my face. I found nothing. I thought I had imagined the whole thing.

Week three is when my skin started changing. I felt it first when I washed my face. The texture was different. By week four other people had not noticed anything — I am sure of this — but I noticed. The oil that had always been on my T-zone had eased. A small thing. The smallest thing. But it was the first thing that was not in my head.

I cried about that too.

I am not going to tell you it has been good. Every day at home is acting. Every dinner I sit through, every conversation with my father, every prayer at the mosque is a performance, and the performance gets harder the more my body becomes mine. I have moments of panic where I think they will see me — see what I have done. They have not. Maybe they never will.

The harder truth is that nothing about the situation around me has improved. The same family, the same country, the same closed doors. The only thing that has changed is that there is now a small chemical river inside me carrying me toward myself. That is not nothing. On bad days I tell myself: the river is still there. Even when I cannot feel it. Even when I am sitting through a meal pretending. The river is still there.

I am not going to give advice. I am still on day 33 and I am not the person to give advice. But I will say this: the people in this collective have kept me alive. The night I almost did not take the second pill, I messaged someone and she walked me through it. I did not know her. I had never met her. She was in another city. She talked to me until I could breathe again, and she sent me a photo of her own face after a year on HRT and said: this is also possible. Not promised, but possible.

If you are sitting on your bed holding the foil strip — I am not going to tell you what to do. I will tell you that you are not alone, and that the people on the other side of the line are real, and that we are reachable.

The river is real. Whatever you decide.

— A reader in Baghdad, day 33