Having gone through a little identity crisis recently, I have been thinking a lot about what makes a gender-identity.

I feel like there are three main building blocks and I wanted to talk about them. Maybe this is also a post about how to pass, I don’t know.

Looks

This is the first thing that another person will observe about you.

There are many different body-features and body-types that get identified as either male or female. HRT will help you to get a body type that better fits the gender that you are. There’s also a lot that you can do with clothing. Clothing can emphasize certain gender-typical body-features. It can also help you to hide certain body-features by wearing really baggy clothing for example.

Apart from clothing and body-type, hair style and skin are also two important factors that contribute to the gender that you’ll get read as on first sight.

Like clothing, makeup is also a valuable skill to emphasize features or to create new female (in my case) features.

Sound

Voice.

Sadly, voice is one of those things that can’t simply be fixed with a pill in every case. If you transition from male to female for example, there is no way around voice training.

But don’t freak out. There’s well known techiques to change resonance and help you speak in a more female manner. The hardware is already there and by essentially learning how to voice act, you will gain a much wider voice range than most females do. Isn’t that great!?

I wouldn’t call it voice acting though. It is your voice that will be adapted to better reflect your gender-identity. Through hard work, a lot can be done to feminize ones voice. A quick search for transgender voice-training guides on YouTube will demonstrate that.

Feels

This one is probably the hardest to describe. It is also seen last. Someone’s gotta know you already or has to observe you closely to know how you feel.

I feel like for most people, how they feel about their gender is already set where it should be from the start. Managing to accept those feelings and coming true to them is the hard part though.

You might have been told your entire life that you can’t be this way because people of your gender usually aren’t that way. It will make you surpress your emotions and it will let you feel disconnected from yourself.

How you feel makes up a big part of your gender-identity. And by accepting and embracing it through looks and your voice you can truly become who you are. Who you have always been.

They play together

For me personally, discovering how strong these feelings are — those feelings of wanting to be woman — was quite a rollercoaster and it still is. Coming true to those feeling feels incredible though.

I get read as female many times per week. It always feels very validating. But something is still missing. I’m already pretty good at looks. I know quite a bit about fashion and what female features about myself to emphasize.

It is still not enough though. There’s many cases where I feel like a boy in a dress because my body-type is just not compatible with some types of clothing. I want to wear more different clothing. I want to have soft skin and a female hair-line. That is why I think HRT will help me a lot.

On the voice part — as no medication can help me with that — I’ll just have to put in the work. Learn how to speak more female. Train the muscles. It will be hard. But oh god will it be worth it.

As for the feels. I have been doing the looks part long enough in public and I have been the girl on the internet for long enough to be sure about my gender-identity. All the exploring has been done. It has always been the female video game character if there was the option. People repeatedly told me in chats that they thought I was a girl until I told them I wasn’t.

How the actual fuck did I not get this.

Well I did get it about 3.5 years ago: Maybe I was always a girl But I ignored it. Which is pretty common, I found out. Please don’t be me. I went though a lot until I could observe these feelings again.

You see. These three parts play together. No part by itself will make me female. Not all parts are required to be perfect for me to be female. Transitioning is a process and not a cut.

I will make a proper coming out post soon enough (You can call me a cracked egg until then.)
Cheers.