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31 Dec 25 - reflecting on the past year

I could see 2025 as a failure. 

After all, I started the year with the intention to begin my transition. I still haven’t started. 

I made initial contact with the endocrinologist clinic about feminising hormone therapy, but then didn’t progress that at all as soon as I encountered the blood test hurdle. 

Here at the beginning of 2026, I am no closer to living as a woman than I was at the beginning of 2025. I have not come out to anyone, I don’t have a hormone prescription, my body is still male, my presentation is still full time male, everyone still knows me only as my male name. 

Has the longing to be a woman gone away because I haven’t done anything about it? No. Obviously. 

Although I have not begun transitioning, I have achieved a couple of things this year. 

One is that I survived my wife catching me out and finding a pair of knickers that I had forgotten to hide. It was awful, and she was terribly upset, but I got through it and that is something. I failed to then use the opportunity to tell her all of my story, but she was in such a state and was unwilling to hear me, that it wasn’t really possible to push it. 

A big achievement was going out in London presenting female. Looking back at my journal, I wrote not so long ago that I could not imagine having the courage to do that. But I did!  I wore a dress and walked through the west end and went to a lesbian bar. I had dinner in Wagamama.  I was visibly presenting in a dress in public, for longer than I had ever done before and it was fine. I even tried doing it at breakfast in the hotel, which was less positive an experience and someone did laugh in my face, which was rude, but even though that was uncomfortable. I was okay. I did it again at the end of the year, walked through Paddington station (the very place I had previously thought I’d never have the courage to go dressed female), went on the underground and walked down a busy Oxford street to the same bar. I didn’t interact with anyone, which I am disappointed by, but still I went out in public, and was highly visible wearing a dress and it was fine. I know these aren’t true everyday experiences, but they do show that I could do it. I really could go out into the world presenting as a woman and live that way. In some ways, this is one of the hardest parts of starting transition: going out into the world in a new way, being vulnerable, knowing that you don’t pass and that everyone can see through the disguise and judge you. What really matters is doing this with the people you know already, but being able to exist in the world of strangers is a big thing too. I have shown myself that I am capable of doing that.  

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