My first egg cracked in 2016. I came out as agender. changed my name to Andi and my pronouns to they/them, started wearing dresses/skirts/crop tops, and dyed my hair all sorts of funky colors. I was starting to be happier with myself in a way I'd never really been as a boy. No one. Not one single person, in real life or on the internet, ever made it seem like being a woman was an option for me. Everything pointed in the opposite direction.
I watched the election cycle that year with dread. I watched the vote totals come in at bar with some friends after my teaching gig for the night was over. We drank in silence and in misery. I cried in my truck on the way home, knowing that life was just going to get harder for people like me. I still couldn't call myself transgender. I didn't think that word was for me.
I read Tranny by Laura Jane Grace. I really identified with parts of it, but her story as a punk rocker and an addict was so dissimilar to mine that I didn't think I could be a woman, didn't think I would ever be allowed to call myself that.
I drank and smoked myself almost to the point of death over the next two years. I was working nearly 100hrs a week between bartending and teaching, and was semi-regularly driving the few blocks home from the bar slightly drunk. Not intentionally, but y'know. If something happened and my life ended? No big deal. Every relationship in my life crumbled around me. It wasn't until I hit rock FUCKING bottom that I thought to myself "what if I'm a woman?"
If anyone had told me, even once, that maybe I was a trans woman. Maybe estrogen could help. Maybe transition might make me happier. Maybe I wouldn't have been driving a 2005 F-150 with almost 200k miles on it 90mph an hour and a half to sleep with a girl who hadn't loved me in years. Maybe I wouldn't have buried myself in half a bottle of whiskey every night after work. Maybe I would've never started smoking. Maybe I'd still have any of the friends I made before the pandemic. Maybe I Wouldn't Have Been So Fucking Miserable.
So yeah. Forcefem today. Forcefem tomorrow. Forcefem every day forever until not a single girl has to go through what I did, or worse.







