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Is Your Fear of Gender Transition Really the Fear of Aging?
Time & experience change all bodies, including in ways we might dislike.
Zander paused his transition because he couldn’t stand looking like his dad.
It wasn’t only that his father had mistreated him as a child, though he had. Zander had numerous male cousins who were tender and silly whom he’d also increasingly come to look like, and that helped reduce the pain of resembling his abuser. And the main problem wasn’t the awkwardness of becoming a powerful man after living a lifetime in the fear of men’s power, either. Zander had done what he could to make peace with that.
What really shook Zander about his paternal resemblance was the memories it brought up — of his father on his sickbed, his hair thinned like a passing cloud, his stomach distended with illness, his spotted forehead shining with sweat.
“When I look at myself in the mirror and I see myself looking especially hung over or crappy, I see my dad when he was dying,” Zander said, “All that was left of him, after everything.” He’d never been brought so close to his own mortality.
Zander said he was embarrassed that this had been enough to keep him from taking his regular testosterone shots. Transition had pulled him back from the brink of…
