Maybe this is past due, or maybe this is another of many projects that I'll prove to be very erratic in updating.
My name is Rey, legally and officially, but it hasn't always been. I'm a late bloomer on a long and convoluted path, and being transgender is only one piece of who I am. These days it's a piece that's pretty big in my focus, though, in part because of where I am on that journey right now, and partly because shortly after I started to figure it all out for myself trans people suddenly became a hot political topic. That makes it a little hard to ignore.

I'm planning to make transcriptions of my FtM journey videos here, so there will be backdated earlier entries, but this one here is the first actual entry marking the start of this blog. Sometimes it's easier to put things in text on a page than to say them out loud to a camera. So here we go, comment, ask questions, nothing is off limits unless you're flat out trolling.

The basics are that I am less than a year away from turning forty, and I've been on testosterone for roughly a year and a half. I'm in a successful long term relationship with a ciswoman who is pansexual, and we've been together for over seventeen years but married not quite one year yet. I'm white, from a lower middle class American background, but I'm not particularly proud of any of that. I've learned and grown a lot, in my life. I know that I have a lot more learning and growing to do. I've never had surgery in my life, unless you count getting my wisdom teeth out. I am looking forward to future surgery with both longing and a lot of worry. I worry how to pay for it. I worry about the sheer logistics of going under anesthesia and being cut open. I worry about the health system finding a way to take surgery options away before I can find the means to get it.

I live my life as openly trans, because I can, and not everybody else has that option.

This blog is about where I am, where I've been, and where I'm going.
Here's my journey.

The face in the mirror tonight is an older man’s face. Not old, but rapidly approaching middle age. Lines on my forehead showed up a few months ago, and I’m at about 50/50 for grey hair vs brown, now. Also while thinking about all this, I cut myself shaving, because that’s something I’m still relatively new at. I was never a young man, I skipped straight over that stage and into this.

When I was a young woman, if that’s what we’re going to call it, I mostly paid attention to the lessons of older men. There were some awkward attempts at learning about make-up and clothes, at feminine things, but I approached them with confusion and uncertainty. What I focused on and learned swiftly were which hand to shake with and why, and how to talk confidently about cars and other habits that I deemed manly, or at least knowledge a gentleman should have. I could not have explained why. By high school I carried a pocket watch and a handkerchief, because one should. Once I graduated, a pocket knife was added to the collection. I was an old man, when I was a girl.