I’m a trans woman. It’s not an identity I picked out of a catalog. It’s a truth I had to extract from pain, exile, and silence. It’s not a passing whim. It’s an existential urgency.

And when that kind of revelation hits you, it tears through your entire timeline. There’s a before you endure, an after you build, and in between: the void.

When you’re assigned male at birth but you know deep down you’re a woman, you learn to fake it early. You play a part. You become a model student of gender, repeating the gestures, the voices, the attitudes expected of you. Judith Butler calls it gender performance. And for many of us, it becomes a prison.

Transitioning is refusing that role. It’s saying no to the script. It’s risking everything to access your own truth.

And let’s be clear: transitioning isn’t escaping an identity. It’s breaking free from one. It’s an act of clarity. And courage.

It’s also a deeply political act.

In other cultures, people like me held a spiritual status. Among Indigenous peoples in North America, there are the Two-Spirit people—seen as mediators between worlds. In Mexico, muxes play a recognized social and cultural role. In the West, we were pathologized, medicalized, pushed to the margins.

But the truth is, transition touches every level: biological, psychological, social, sexual, existential. It’s not just about hormones or surgery. It’s a complete reconfiguration of self and world. A metamorphosis.

Transition is a templeless initiation. An inner alchemy. There’s no clergy, no doctrine—just a truth carving its way through flesh and consciousness. I’ve known dissociation, self-exile. And then one day, I walked through fire. And on the other side, I was there. Naked. Real. Present. That’s my spirituality. Not a belief. A crossing.

And it needs to be said: this is an experience few will ever have. Few people will consciously be reborn. Few will die to a false version of themselves in order to stand fully in the light of who they are.

There’s something deeply human, deeply moving in this journey. It’s a quest for self taken to its breaking point. An initiatory path, like the ones found in myth. Most people will never question their gender. But we did. And from that ordeal comes a kind of raw truth, a brutal beauty that, even in pain, demands respect.

And this metamorphosis is painful. Because it happens in a world that resists anything that doesn’t fit. People stare differently. Your social status shifts. Your rights sometimes erode. The violence escalates. In a matter of months, you move not just from one gender to another, but from one social class to another. Being a trans woman often means living at the bottom. Poverty. Rejection. Objectification.

What society does to us—beyond the stares—is steal our future. A trans woman is four times more likely to be unemployed, unhoused, assaulted. Bureaucracy exhausts us. Doctors interrogate us instead of treating us. The state barely tolerates us. We live in a world that would rather make us invisible than protect us.

And yet.

I’ve never felt more alive than since I decided to be myself. Truly myself. Transitioning is saying yes to life. It’s choosing to love yourself, even when the world teaches you to hate yourself. It’s building a self that’s inhabited, chosen, and free.

And let’s drop the biology argument: serious scientists today agree that sex isn’t binary—it’s a spectrum. There are chromosomal, hormonal, anatomical variations that dismantle the fantasy of a clean divide between “natural” men and women. Gender, too, is a social construction. Historically situated. Culturally variable. Gender in France isn’t gender in Japan or Senegal. What we call “obvious” is usually just an invisible norm drilled into us from the start. Trans identity isn’t a biological error—it’s a crack of truth in the collective fiction.

Sexuality, too, I had to relearn. To be desired differently, in a new body, with unknown sensations. It wasn’t about performance anymore, but presence. Not about domination, but reciprocity. It’s not just my body that changed—it’s how I feel it, how I desire it, how I inhabit it.

For the first time, I was inside it.

So no, I didn’t “become a woman.” I am a woman. Period.

There’s the life I had before, and the one I live now. And between the two, a chasm no photo or word can bridge.
I don’t reject the child I once was.
But I won’t be forced to embrace her as a boy.
My past is a language I’ve had to translate backward.
A memory I’m rewriting in my own words.

And I am living proof that we can change.
Deeply. At the core. And yes, that scares people.
Because it shows that nothing is fixed. Not gender. Not norms. Not destiny.

And if the world can’t handle that—well, too bad. We move forward. We invent ourselves. We reinvent ourselves. That’s our strength. And it’s contagious.