Published August 3, 2019

Some of you subscribed to updates on my site primarily to keep up with my transition, and in some ways, I feel as if I have let you down. I don’t write much about it here, although on occasion I will tweet something related to it. More on my reticence later.

Today is a special day: the first anniversary of my taking a big second step in transgender hormone therapy. On Aug. 3, 2018, after months on a testosterone blocker, I put on my first estrogen patch. Please accept up front that I get too emotional about that to be a good enough writer and self-editor for this post to live up to a professional journalist’s standards. Oh, it will sing! But not in the way we in the newspaper business usually mean that when we say it about a well-told story.

A year ago today, after being given the OK by my doctor to begin, I drove to the clinic and went to the pharmacy to receive my estradiol transdermal patches. (Can I just say that I love that trans is part of the word that means “relating to or denoting the application of a medicine or drug through the skin, typically by using an adhesive patch, so that it is absorbed slowly into the body”?) Anyway, I couldn’t wait to put on my first patch, and did so there at the clinic.

I had errands to run, and unrelated medication that needed to be taken with food, so I headed out to a Walgreens with plans to have a sit-down meal after that. Instead, seeing a burger place across the street, I decided that it would be faster to go with that option. I had to be at work in a few hours, and I wanted to make a few more stops before going home to get ready. So a drive-thru pickup later, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot about to eat.

And that’s when it hit me.

I felt a surge of — what, I didn’t know — coursing through my body. The closest thing I could compare it to was the energy surge I’d felt flowing through me when, as I held her hand, my mother died 12 years earlier. This flow of whatever it was warmed me, excited me, nearly scared me, but mostly renewed me. I felt so alive! I realized: It was the estrogen!

Then, I noticed a new smell in the car, strong enough to overpower that of the food. My first thought was that my body chemistry was already changing, and that after a lifetime of having become accustomed to my own smell, the difference was already noticeable. That could have been part of it, but there was a medicine-y quality to the smell, so I convinced myself that it was the patch releasing the estradiol into my body that caused this new scent.

(Detour: Months later, when a batch of patches didn’t produce that smell, I asked the doctor about it. She suggested I ask the pharmacist. So I did. “What smell?” she replied. And I told her. She said, “I’ve been at this for a long time, and I’ve never heard of anyone being able to smell the patch working.” Oh good, I thought, another reason for me to think of myself as a freak of nature. But I soon learned to love it. It was to become my way of knowing that I had a bad batch of patches, something that would be confirmed when my lab results showed my hormone levels going in the wrong direction.)

This is a slow-moving transition, not like the ones of those who start much earlier in life. I am a high-risk case — because of my age and a handful of other risk factors — so instead of taking pills or getting shots, I wear seven-day patches, and at a relatively low dose. Too much too soon could be harmful, even fatal. And even with this approach, my transition is a risky one. But last year my doctor and I agreed that for my happiness, it’s worth the risk.

I am, no doubt, happier. My brain is waking up (that’s a long story for another day). My ADHD brain is soothed, assisted, given a long-overdue break. My body is changing. My only regret about hormone therapy is that I didn’t start it a long time ago.

Oh, and ha! I couldn’t think of a headline for this post when I started writing it. After searching for an image to display with it, I opted for the one above. (Can’t take the newspaper out of the newspaperwoman, the copyeditor trying to write a hed that works with the art as well as the story.) In too many ways to list here, estrogen has started my lady engine, and one year in, I am still totally revved up about it!

Image of estrogen meter by gritsalak karalak/via Shutterstock

Image of ADHD brain cloud by arloo/via Shutterstock