October 24th: For some, it’s a pretty mundane day of the year. Sure, it’s a few days before Halloween, and some of y’all were probably neck deep in assignments, projects, and study sessions (my condolences to those who were); but like, can you name anything interesting that happened on the 24th day of the 10th month of the year? I sure can. This past October 24th officially marked one year since I started Hormone Replacement Therapy!
It’s been a very chaotic first year on estrogen, with lots of personal (and physical) growth, emotions that I never thought were possible in my 22 years of life, and anxiety over the possibility of the powers that be taking my rights away. But despite everything, I’m starting to feel complete and happy; the joy I feel looking in the mirror and seeing the puzzle pieces of the woman that I am falling into place is difficult to put into words. For the first time in my life, I’m actively looking forward to aging into myself. The possibility of being someone’s cool-goth-transfem wine aunt makes me feel all jolly inside!
This milestone has given me a lot of room to look back on my journey and see how exactly I got here. For me, it’s hard to reminisce given the discomfort that I felt toward myself at that time and how foreign those past experiences feel to me now. But, in this article, I’ll try my best to discuss my journey and how Evanescence’s concert last year played such a huge role in that process of self-discovery.
I wasn’t like a ton of other trans girls who’d known that they were trans since they were kids. For me, figuring out my identity was like scaling a mountain on a foggy day without any kind of guide. Sure, I wasn’t really into traditionally boyish things when I was little, but trying to figure out your queerness in a homophobic elementary/middle school environment is like trying to convince a 45-year-old metalhead to listen to Sabrina Carpenter.
For a long time, I kind of pushed everything I considered “girly” away, forming a protective bubble of boyhood to protect myself from being bullied by my peers. During middle school, I vividly remember resenting the girls in my class for buying and playing with Monster High and Lalaloopsy dolls when, deep down, I had such a strong yearn to hold a Draculaura doll in my hands (and I still do!). Looking back, knowing that I couldn’t play with them — even though I REALLY wanted to — out of the fear of being ridiculed and shunned by everyone around me definitely had an impact on me.
For such a long period of my life, I had felt lost. It was like I was dressing up as a boy for Halloween, but instead of being limited to a single day of the year, it was like this for about the first 18 years of my life. This shield of boyhood-turned-toxic manhood lasted up until my first semester of college, after I had a really bad experience with a professor in an online class that made me look in the mirror and think “girl, what are you doing with yourself?”
The following semester, I stepped into campus post this nuclear bomb hitting my entire sense of self. I felt isolated, trying to come out of my shell while also cowering inside of it. I suffered the same fate as most of my peers during their first semesters: sitting forlornly in your Gen-Ed building like you’re waiting for a bus that’s always running late. I would people-watch and draw in my sketchbook to cope with this new, scary place that I found myself in after two years of seeing all my classmates through a small Dell laptop screen. During that time, I saw so many other students around campus who were femme-presenting, wearing frilly black dresses and dyeing their hair the coolest colors, and I’d always get a weird feeling in my chest whenever I would look at them. Not necessarily a lack of something, but a state of unease that I couldn’t really put into words back then.
Fast forward to early last year. Evanescence announced that they would be performing a concert on May 9th at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico. Unsurprisingly, the entirety of the Puerto Rican alternative community went crazy over the news, and one of my friends and I enthusiastically bought tickets as soon as they were up for sale in February. We discussed so many things that we were excited for in regards to the concert: songs that we needed to hear the band play like our life depended on it (to this day I’m so sad that there was no love for “Tourniquet”), the clothes we were going to wear, how we’d get to el Choli, bands that we wanted to come to the island, etc… We knew that this was a cultural shift, and that we were gonna be a part of it. Two months later, on April 30th, I had inconspicuously decided to schedule an orientation with a clinic that specialized in trans healthcare. I was especially sneaky about this, with the only one that knew the tea being the pages of the diary that I had at the time. When was this orientation scheduled? Coincidentally, on the 9th of May, just a few hours before Amy Lee and Co. would perform to thousands of excited emos, punks, goths, and other subcultures!
During this time, I met two of my closest friends who were openly queer (and who also happen to be in this HC chapter… y’all know who y’all are), and they helped me figure out so many things about myself within a college environment that had mostly been dominated by cisgender people. I talked with one of them about childhood experiences that made us feel that something wasn’t right with our identities and that helped me understand my fledgling queerness in so many ways. I had a talk with them recently about those experiences, and they kept telling me how “different” I was, and how comfortable they felt opening up to me even though I identified as a “man” at that time, which I find really interesting looking back.
Fast forward to the day of the concert: Thursday, May 9th. I had taken my classes, had one of my high school friends visit me, said hi to one of his friends (who also happened to be transfem!), and, around this time, I got an inconspicuous phone call from the gender clinic. My friend and I decided that we should each head back home to get some food and rest before the show, and they would pick me up a few hours later. Looking back, my outfit was something, to say the least: a beanie, a Neon Genesis Evangelion Garfield T-shirt (yes, I am not kidding) with a white long sleeve undershirt, and these (admittedly) really cool looking alternative pants that I got at Burlington. He picked me up at my place, and we went off to have the night of our lives. It was raining like crazy when we made it to Uni, so we had to stay in his car while we waited for the downpour to stop before giving up and running to the train station with our umbrellas. My friend ended up seeing one of his college bandmates while on route to the train, a girl who was fully glammed out in goth makeup and attire, and we stepped into the long line del Choli as a trio.
Everything seemed normal at first for the most part; looking at the crowds of people made me kind of feel envy for how much less dorky they looked than me, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t simply brush off with an “Eh, it’s fine.” After a long while of waiting outside on a dark and murky Thursday evening, we stepped into the stadium. The girl that my friend knew split off from us to get to her seating area, so my friend and I decided to wander around the rounded hallways of the stadium. We saw crowds of people walking by and a small but (probably) extremely overpriced merch booth that sold a few Evanescence shirts. I also saw one of my friends (one of the friends in this chapter that I mentioned earlier, you know who you are) that had a really sick Amy Lee patch that he DIY’d! The excitement was high, to say the least.
After a little while of wandering, we were almost ready to go inside and witness Evanescence doing their thing. Before that, however, my friend decided to go into the bathroom. What followed was probably the most harrowing 8 minutes of my life. I sat there people-watching like I did so many years ago during my first semester. But instead of seeing college students passing by, I saw so many femme-presenting people, wearing pretty black dresses and the sharpest eyeliner ever. Instead of feeling awe because of how hard they were serving, I instead felt an intense pit of despair in my stomach. My head felt heavy and as light as a feather at the same time, and I could feel my eyes tearing up. All I could do was sit there, and think about how much I lacked everything they had. I felt my sense of self disappearing before me, my frail masculinity poking at me like daggers. Dysphoria pounded on my door, and all I could really do was look at it in abject horror.
Unfortunately (or fortunately maybe?), my first dysphoric episode came to an end as my friend had come back from the bathroom and it was time to finally head to our seats. All in all, despite the fact we had to be at a constant 45-degree angle, we had a pretty cool view of the whole show. A band called Holy Wars opened the night, and they did such a good job; I remember the lead singer’s stage presence and their sound leaving my jaw on the floor. It was also my first time hearing live metal music in person, and the sound blew me away; it felt overwhelming and oddly soothing, like I could close my eyes and see the music. After their set was done, we waited with bated breath for Amy Lee and Co. to get on stage, still so hyped after the opener.
We saw the Evanescence logo on the big jumbotron screen el Choli has and from that moment we knew we were witnessing history. For me, it felt like a mix of elation and relief after the dysphoric episode that I had gone through just a few hours earlier. While the whole concert was nothing short of magical, and I could seriously write a whole article about how good it was, there is one moment from it that has stuck with me a whole year and a half later. After performing the song “Imaginary” off their debut record, Amy Lee made a call to the crowd: “Ladies! Gentlemen!” with everyone in the crowd cheering respectively. In a moment of personal defiance, I screamed with the ladies. That scream was so liberating, like an internal Magical Girl transformation. All in all, it was a rollercoaster of a night in the best way possible.
There’s so many more details that I could talk about post-Evanescence that played such a key role in my transition: watching I Saw the TV Glow in theaters, officially coming out to my friend group as transfem and going girl-clothes shopping with one of my closest friends. There were so many moments that brought me to where I am now. But, for the sake of brevity, I’ll mention probably the most key point of all of them.
I went in person to the transgender health clinic on the 10th of June, five days after my birthday. I remember waking up super early and telling my parents that I was going to go eat breakfast with some friends on a scorching summer day. Instead, I took a 15-dollar Uber ride to the gender clinic with the most hyperactive butterflies in my stomach. After getting to the clinic and waiting for a bit, I got a full-fledged orientation about Hormone Replacement Therapy, the changes I would and should expect, and the other aspects of my transition that I should investigate, such as my social and legal transition. After getting needles stuck in me to measure my blood hormone levels, I also got the date that would change the course of my life completely: October 23rd, when I would get my prescription for 25mg of Spironolactone and 2mg of Estradiol. The next day, before my volunteer shift at the museum, I took the train to Sagrado Corazon, then the bus to Santurce, and I walked to the pharmacy to pick up my medication. The rest is history. My name is Eden, and I am a Trans woman.
Like I mentioned near the beginning of the article, there were (and still are) so many mixed emotions related to my transition: from pure euphoria over the formation of the truest version of myself, to guilt related to my conservative parents and the loss of their son for a daughter that they probably won’t accept with open arms, and a lot of anger over the idea that all of this could be avoided if I had simply been born a woman. There are days where I feel extremely dysphoric and only see a confused man in the mirror, and some others when I feel like the daintiest woman ever. It’s very much an up and down process, but I’m just grateful that I have my friends and my wonderful partner to make me feel so validated despite what my brain thinks. And despite how rocky of a road that this year has been, I can find comfort in saying that going to see one of my favorite bands live became a key part of discovering my inner woman.