When I started hormone therapy a few years ago, I didn’t quite realize this had set me on a path to claiming my womanhood. What I did know was that I couldn’t bear being seen as a man anymore. When people treated me as if I were a man, I felt powerless and small, without control of my life. I felt like I was being crushed into nothing. Starting hormone therapy was a first step in claiming myself, but even though I knew what I was running from, I didn’t quite know what I was running to.
Still, I did know what effects the hormones would have, knowing that my body would change, as would the way I experienced my emotions. But, as it turned out, I didn’t know everything that the hormones would do. One day I woke up and realized I was completely still inside. Experiencing this new inner stillness made me realize that, up until then, I had always been pacing up and down inside myself, filling my inner space with unending motion. I knew, intuitively, that this inner peace was directly connected to the chemical changes in my body.
And then the surprises really started.
Inside that stillness, I started to feel as if I was always laughing. Even when I wasn’t outwardly laughing there seemed to be, deep inside me, a constantly bubbling spring of laughter. When I told my therapist about this, she asked: “Do you know what that feeling is called?” When I said no, she replied “That’s joy.”
And then one day Jesus walked into this still place of quietly bubbling joy and said, “Now that there is room for you to sit down inside yourself, there’s room for me to sit with you.” And he sat down and has never left. It was a genuine surprise to discover that one of the outcomes of hormone therapy would be a mystical encounter with the Divine.
Carrying Jesus within me in this way opened me to God’s love in ways I’d never been before, and the joy being born in me then opened me to a womanhood I had hardly dared imagine, but to which God had long been calling me.
