There's a cute meme going around where trans women share pre-transition and current photos with the text:

"I'm just saying, if you don't think you can - you can."

And I want to drill down on the truth in that caption, minus visuals.

The temptation for me, in the closet, would've been to discard those words as a platitude and dissect the before-and-afters.

With many of us, transition is visually astonishing, and the world badly needs more evidence of trans beauty.

... But that wouldn't have been my focus.

Closeted M would have scoured those before pictures, highlighting every advantage that made transition accessible to them-- often thinness & related traits, hairlessness, youth, or some inherent facial femininity that I couldn't pin down but was certain I did not possess.

I think MANY trans women felt this same searching despair, so when we say, "Even if you don't think you can," we hold up those pretransition photos, and-- astonishing though they may be-- we expect viewers to perceive a hopless, hideous masculinity that was mostly in our heads.

Three common experiences of pre-transition transness that don't get talked about near as much as they should:

Unreliable, exaggerated perceptions of your own body
Feeling uniquely ill-suited to transition, compared to peers
Inability to imagine what you would look like

When I started hormones at 30, it was with the tacit, bitter expectation that I would never see a woman in the mirror, but could maybe at least stop feeling like a man and start feeling like SOMETHING else.

Everything that followed felt impossible.

I also felt that, as a depressed, fragile, underemployed, not-very-capable person, that I would not survive the awful, overwhelming stigma and marginalization leveled against trans women.

(I already WAS surviving it.)

"If you don't think you can, you can."

No one can promise that you'll "pass" for your gender (though you likely will, at least sometimes), or that you'll feel beautiful (though you will, at least sometimes).

What we CAN promise is... you can become real. Like the women in those "after" photos.

And we can also promise that we're here, that we see your gender for how you express it-- even if you're unsure and it's more potential than reality. And we're eager to celebrate you, to help you relearn yourself, to live out missed experiences and invent our own together.

(That sounds saccharine. Closet M would dismiss it as a plattitude. And the trans community is far from perfect. But it's true.)

Anyway.

All I'm saying is, if you don't think you can do it, you can do it.