I'm extremely tired of needing to shave and cover the remaining shadow with makeup every morning. I'm lucky - I've been able to find over $1000 to spend on 10 laser sessions and it's definitely had an impact, but it's still rough when I wake up.

I bring this up because I think a lot of well-meaning people still think trans kids should wait until they're 18 to transition. Cross-sex hormones have irreversible changes. But so does going through the wrong puberty the first time around. Fixing those changes requires money.

Often fixing the changes caused by someone waiting to transition until they've completed the wrong puberty requires drastic surgical intervention. I think I'll probably need to have my 'adam's apple' shaved down so I feel safe when I travel. That's one of the easier procedures.

It didn't need to be this way. I knew who I was when my mustache started growing, when I started towering over my female relatives, when the hair at my temporal lobes started to fade. But I didn't think I could transition and live a happy life, then.

When I first tried to come out, I was towards the end of college. My then-girlfriend was very much not on board. My parents were not on board. Society was not on board. And I was so ashamed of who I was and so terrified, so I waited nearly another decade.

I just hope to live in a world where the younger generation of trans folks finds stories like these sad but also completely unrelatable. It didn't have to be like this.