Jane, 45. Transition is the opportunity for change and growth.

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My midlife experience is also my experience of transition

Up until the point when I came out as a trans woman about 10 ½ years ago, I wasn’t super invested in life. I didn’t feel attached to my identity.

Because it was all so chaotic and confusing inside, I didn’t have any attachment to the greater scope of what my life meant. I wasn’t really actively driving—I was sort of a passenger. Because of that, everything kind of collapsed in on me one day.

The moment in my life when I took the wheel

I’ve talked to other queer people, particularly trans people because there’s such a visual transformation that happens. One of the things that I think is beautiful about transition and being trans generally is that there’s a moment in your life where you take over creative control.

At some point, you’re like, “OK, this is the thing I’m doing.” That may not happen for people who come out in adolescence, but certainly for people in early midlife, there’s just a moment where suddenly you’re taking control instead of allowing things to happen.

Not only am I now in the driver’s seat, I’m teaching others to drive

When I first came out, I knew one other trans person. I began to think about what it would be like if I could be the person I really needed to have in my life when I was 17. So I have really tried to do that and be that person. I see very young people to people more my age that have just come out trying to figure out how to dress, all of these medical things we have to deal with.

I’ve been through it all, and so I find myself not just being in the driver’s seat in my life but also being one of those people that’s teaching others to drive. I can say, “I’ve been there, I’m comfortable and secure in who I am, and I’m happy to help.”

It’s almost surreal to feel this stable and this secure where I am today versus 10 years ago when I was just coming out, and 10 years prior to that when I had no idea what was going on in my life. It’s impossible to describe the difference in maturity and the degree to which my life is developed today. I don’t think 20 years ago I could even conceive of 10 years into the future.

My presence is valuable

I leapt at the opportunity to work in the youth program in my church. One of the parents came to me one day after I had been taking care of the kids and said to me, “I’m so glad that you’re here, because I can’t provide who you are with your experience to my trans child who’s just coming out.”

Up to that point in my life, I had never heard a positive comment about my contribution to the life of anyone else. It was always that I was tolerated, accepted and included in a space. But never, “Thank you for being who you are, and who you are is valuable to other people.”

How I learned to advocate for my health

I think that doctors have a lot of learning, and have reasons for doing the things that they do. But fundamentally, I think we should be treating people and understanding their lives and their larger context.

If we as a society are not treating people in a way that makes them healthier and happier and able to wake up and live their lives, what is it we’re doing?

Coming out required me to do a lot of things that I was explicitly told were not good ideas. So at some point, I was forced to take the risk, and that meant that I had to do a lot of reading. I don’t recommend anybody base their medical decisions on what’s on Google—that’s a terrible idea.

But at a certain point, I developed the ability to come with a lot of knowledge to a medical setting and say what I know and what my thoughts are, and have a conversation with the doctor. At this point in my life, I can’t work with a doctor who is hostile to questions or even to my being misinformed. If I’m not correct, I want to know why.

That’s an immense amount of self-advocacy because it doesn’t start when I walk into the doctor’s office—it starts months in advance when I’m educating myself. You have to have the self-respect and the freedom to say “No, this isn’t working” and walk away. I’m super aware that the position I’m in today is so different than when I talk to young trans people. I’m just so sad that they don’t have the relationship with medicine that I do, and I wish that could be the norm.

Life transitions are a chance to clean house

There’s a book about turning moving houses into a meaningful life transition. And for me, I see it that way. I get to figure out what I’m keeping, what I don’t want, I have to plan everything out. So if you do it right, you wake up in your new place and it’s not traumatic. You’re in this new place and can learn new things and meet new people and find the new coffee shop nearby, or whatever.

I think of many transitional processes in life as opportunities for change and growth. Often I feel that people become or allow themselves to be stuck in familiarity.

Loss and grief are important for us to experience new things

For me personally, the nicest part of life is these new chapters where you turn a new page and now you live in a new town, or have a new partner, or a grandkid, a dog… these things that we lose when we resist change.

Transition is an extremely destructive force—the life I had the day before I came out is largely gone. I think I have one or two friends left, I’m living on a different coast, an entire career is behind me. But at the same time, while I lost all of that I have this incredibly different life that I love.

After we’ve been alive long enough to develop a certain amount of stability and consistency, certain things can come along that really rock the boat and cause you to have some kind of transition. You don’t have to change your pronouns—like, your kids can go to college and you realize you don’t know what you’re going to do with your day. When we approach these things with fear, and try to keep our world the same, we lose that opportunity for growth and change and newness.

Through all of the changes, I’m still here

I think I embrace change a bit more because, well, I came out. That’s one giant change. I was married for 15 years. Then I’ve had a couple of really severe health scares. So all these things have happened, and the one constant is that I am still here. I have made it through.