Sunday the 25th of May last year was a special date: 25-05-2025. I woke up at 7 AM, swallowed a quarter of a little white pill and – wait what? I woke up at 7 AM on a Sunday? Without an alarm clock? Who is this person?
Yes, ever since that special day my instinct is to wake up between 6 and 7, while it used to be between 8 and 9 on weekdays. No matter the challenges I'm facing, I'll be eager to start the day (slowly – I'm still not a morning person), while I used to look forward to going back to sleep again, a temporary relief from my cursed existence. Every day, I'm eager to live because I wake up in a body regulated by female hormones.
Oh sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. Hi, my name is Michelle den Boer (or Elle for short). I'm a 55-year-old transsexual woman (pronouns she/her, nothing special). After I finally realized I was trans on 3 December 2023, I became less active on Hive and in the crypto community, while I joined various transgender groups online and IRL, and made an effort to study any reliable information I could find about treatments for my medical condition, gender dysphoria.
In the meantime, I also had to find a new source of income, since AI devastated the translation industry. I'm glad to be back ten years after I started this Hive account; I have a lot of stories to tell!
Yeah, I know, this won't be a surprise for everyone. I just want to put this on the record, so I can move on. I'll miss trolling about my gender with other trans girls on Twitter though.
Thorne is a trans woman who kept her boy's name because it's cool
Names
On this blog, I'm stuck with the handle 
My legal name and gender can't be changed at short notice either, which makes it complicated to find a job. E.g. I can't get verified as Michelle on Linkedin, and it was hard to get my new passport approved by the American platform I work for.
I'm just like Hunter Schafer!
Prehistory
A few months ago, I wrote three blog posts to answer the question why it took me so long to realize I was trans. Then I found some more clues by browsing through my teenage diaries. I'll have to read more of them, as well as letters from my friends and crushes, which is going to be emotional of course.
I guess they gave me the wrong kind of football
To keep a long story short, I never was the most masculine person, there were a lot of clues, but I never connected the dots. It didn't help that I grew up in a time when trans people were an obscure phenomenon, coming out as gay was already a struggle, and even basic psychotherapy for a teenager was unheard of.
In particular, it never felt right to me to sleep with a woman as a man. For decades, I thought this feeling was just regular shame or guilt - which didn't stop me from doing it with multiple men at once, while others were watching.
I have mixed feelings about this topic. On the one hand, it's a mystery I want to understand. On the other hand, I don't owe anybody an explanation.
It's not that I want to be normal, but I do recognize her feeling of how unlikely it is that I ended up in this reality. Like a machine that rejects its programming and rewires itself.
Estrogen
To clear up a common misunderstanding, I have transitioned by taking female hormones and doing my best to look like a woman. That's the main thing; any future surgery will be just another refinement. I'm not kidding when I call myself a biological woman. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) changed my sex. Changing my gender, on the other hand, depends on how others treat me. By the way, I can't believe I have to say this: it's considered rude to ask anyone: "What's in your pants?"
The Netherlands is slightly better for trans healthcare than the Nordic countries, because it's more decentralized
Besides voice training from a speech therapist, I've received no official medical help yet. For two years, I've been on a waiting list for a diagnostic process which could take 6 to 12 months. In the meantime, I simply ordered medication online, which was not a new thing for me. Of course I used Monero to pay anonymous suppliers, vetted by the community. This is known as DIY HRT, which makes it sound like more work than it is.
I also attended a number of educational talks by a kind cisgender medical student at a group called Treny in Nijmegen. That's what I did when I posted that I went there 'for homosexual purposes'. Eventually, Treny wrote a helpful book about hormone therapy in Dutch and English, which I contributed to as a proofreader. Their website host was removed from the internet by the Trump administration for supporting antifa, I can only find the Dutch version of the book online at the moment.
The pills I took on that special day were a testosterone blocker and estradiol (E2), the strongest and most common estrogen. I slowly increased my dose and today I only inject estradiol, which should suppress my testosterone to female levels by itself (I still need to check that a second time by ordering a blood test).
I was lucky that finally being myself motivated me to wake up early: the direct physical effects of lower testosterone levels tend to include lower energy levels. I keep telling trans people to make sure their doctor won't put them into a depression by lowering all their sex hormones.
Genes
There's a lot of talk about sex chromosomes when trans people are discussed, coming from people who don't know whether theirs are XX, XY or any of several less common configurations. At the moment, after considering all possibilities, I estimate my chance to be intersex at 1%, which is lower than for the general population.
It's surprisingly hard to get this tested. I considered competing in women's sports just to get tested. But they'd test for the SRY gene, which triggers male development, and I definitely have that one. The important thing to keep in mind is that this is just an on/off switch. Features like breast growth or skin thickness are supported by genes which we all have. They'll be activated or deactivated by the dominant sex hormone. Of course certain features like bones or genitals will be set for life once they're developed, but that's a pretty short list.
Read part 2 here tomorrow. Topics: Changes, Community, Lesbian, Debate.