Full moon in Pisces
The story of my first dose of oestrogen.
My mum likes to tell the story that when she went into hospital to give birth to me all the trees were still green but a couple of days later when she was omitted with me in her arms they had turned into every shade of red, brown and yellow. I am a true autumn baby. Growing up I was always jealous of the kids who got to throw their birthday parties in the summer. I grew up by the sea and so summer was the season, my season. Summer meant salty skin, whole long days on the beach, diving head first into breakers and sand everywhere. Autumn meant the end of summer and back to school. I was always meant to be a summer baby.
It was late spring 2023 when I finally made the decision to start hormones. I was already imagining my first ‘hot girl summer’. But first I had to wait for an appointment with the endocrinologist and have my blood tested. In Switzerland you can be prescribed gender affirming HRT ‘off label’ with informed consent. This means that you do not require a gender dysphoria diagnosis and that, if the doctor believes you to be of sound mind to give your consent, you can be prescribed hormones after being informed of the affects. So in the early summer, after my blood results had come back and I had given my ‘informed consent’, I was handed a large paper bag full of bottles of Oestrogel by my endocrinologist. I was ready to trans myself.
The only problem was I had since decided to freeze my sperm and could not start hormones until I had banked a sufficient load. The next available appointment was not until mid September and so I was going to spend the summer with a stockpile of oestrogen in my bathroom cabinet as I waited to wank into a cup. I wanted to be a summer baby. I wanted the new me to be born in the sun.
After years of indecision those weeks of waiting suddenly felt like forever. My only hope of being a summer babe was that an earlier appointment would become available.
Where was I in the queue? What was the bottleneck that meant I had to wait weeks for an appointment? How many people’s sperm could they freeze a day? How many people were hunched over a cup in the University Hospital each day? Where was this bank and how big was it?
That summer, like every summer now, was the hottest on record. When I wasn’t working I spent the days at Werdinsel, a small island in the river Limmat, a few kilometres downstream from lake Zurich and the city centre. I kept my phone close to hand, always hoping for a call from the hospital telling me that an earlier appointment was available.
At this point in my transition public swimming posed a problem. I was dressing femme most of the time, my hair was long and cut in a distinctly feminine way and I always wore large hoop earrings. It felt confusing to arrive at the river in a spaghetti top, with my long hair and make-up on only to strip and pull on a pair of boy’s swimming shorts.
I didn’t have the confidence to wear a woman’s swimsuit. I had yet to start laser on my body hair and didn’t have the heart to start shaving it. Dreading the on-going battle this would commence and the dysphoria it would trigger, I simply left it, resolving to tackle it later. I had already been lasering my face for a while and on a good day, a couple of weeks after a session and freshly shaven, I was fairly stubble free. I had yet to teach myself to tuck and didn’t own any tucking underwear.
My body, my gender presentation and my body image were an array of contradictions. There were the signifiers I could control (clothes, haircut, make-up) or had somewhat tamed (facial hair) and then there was those yet to change (body shape, body hair) and of course my genitalia. The less clothes I wore, the less signifiers I could control or cover. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, I felt more confident naked.
At this stage wearing a woman’s swimsuit was too terrifying and wearing a man’s too strong a masculine signifier. Having my genitalia on display felt like less of a masculine signifier than wearing men’s clothing. Personally I often feel more dysphoria when my cock refuses to discretely squeeze it into women’s clothing than when it is on full display. When naked all the signifiers I can still control align with my gender—my hair, make-up, jewellery, even the way I hold myself. I have had strangers recognise and address me as a woman even when I stand before them naked.
Now, two years or so into my transition, this has shifted. My body shape has changed, I have almost no body hair and wearing a bikini I often feel at my most passing. Swimwear is perhaps the last type of clothing that remains staunchly gendered and in this way I find it to be one of the easiest clothing items to pass in. Most people only pay you a glancing look when determining your gender and a bikini gives them an instant answer. Despite this I still often swim in nudist bathing spots but now it feels like I do it more as a personal challenge—to not hide my body or change my behaviour and, also, to claim space for other gender non-conforming bodies to be present in nudist areas.
Back in summer 2023, before oestrogen had transformed my body, the only place I felt comfortable swimming was at the Werdinsel nudist beach. Werdinsel is about a kilometre long and only a hundred or so metres wide at its widest point. The island is divided into two distinct crowds. The half downstream is nudist and the most active cruising spot in the city, the grass is left to grow long and the bushes are often full of men fucking, especially on warm Sunday evenings. There is little to no infrastructure here, just a few steps down to the water. In order to swim here you have to throw yourself into the stream where you are quickly swept along a couple of hundred metres of river before reaching the end of the island. The river on this side of the island has tall trees growing on either bank. The branches stretch out above the river almost touching in the middle and forming a sort of hollow way through which you are pulled along. Suspended in the water the landscape seems to move around you like a reel of film cranked through a projector.
On this side of the island are the bushes where most of the cruising occurs. As you float along you can spy naked bodies amongst the trees. Early in the evening you mostly see lone men waiting in the undergrowth, nursing a hard on with one hand, the other hand refreshing Grindr. Later, after sunset, the bushes are often full of men fucking. The stream is fast, too fast to swim against, and these scenes flash by. A guy being fucked simultaneously in the arse and mouth, a group of men surrounding another on his knees as they all jerk off. These scenes are often dramatically lit by the phone lights of other men who are are simultaneously jerking off to the scene. Occasionally one of the diorama glances out at the river and you lock eyes for a moment.
As you near the end of the island you need to position yourself near the bank and swim hard against the stream into the slower shallows where you can then clamber out. You then have to walk naked back up the island to wherever you left your clothes. The walk back takes you past the bushes of men. Small paths are worn into the undergrowth and there are often men waiting by the entrances to these pathways. In the bushes the ground is more rough and so they often wear socks and trainers but nothing else—always a comical look. The practicality of this single item of clothing makes it look like they are preparing for some particular sport, which in a way I guess they are. Most of the time they still clutch their phones in one hand. Even here cruising occurs both offline and online. The main path back up the island to the meadow is of course a bit of a catwalk and you can feel the eyes on you. Most of the time I am able to enjoy it.
I remember when I moved back up to London aged 18 and I visited Soho for the first time, walking alone down Old Compton Street and feeling all the eyes on me. I distinctly remember thinking, so this is what it is like to be a woman. I felt thrilled and threatened at the same time. It was exhausting. In these moments you almost step outside of yourself, see yourself in the others gaze, you become hyper aware of how you are holding yourself, your walk, the blood in your cheeks. Being self-conscious is tiring.
As someone socialised and perceived as male for the first 30 years of my life, the experience of being undressed by another’s gaze was rare, largely limited to spaces dominated by gay men. It’s interesting to me now that I immediately associated this experience with being a woman. Perhaps it was this that drew me to Werdinsel that summer.
The other end of the island is strictly no nudity. There is a cafe, changing rooms and showers, a kids’ paddling pool, lifeguards and almost no bushes. This is the normie end. Children, families, teens. The grass is cut short. It is however, much more mixed in terms of gender. The nudist section is predominantly people I would read as cis men, although certainly not exclusively. The normie end has a lot more people I would read as cis women. In fact, a lot of my cis female friends don’t feel comfortable going to the nudist end of the island, especially alone. Like a lot of cruising spots, it is not only inhabited by men who are exclusively looking for men. There are certainly some men who are there on the chance that they will see the occasional naked woman. There are also some men loitering about trying to work out why they are there. Go there on a week night evening, not during high summer and there are often clothed men who are hanging around, seemingly unsure why they are there. Pulled here by some desire they wish they didn’t have. Confused closeted men who simultaneously look and scowl at you.
The river carried me through that summer. Giving myself to its relentless flow was the only escape from my restless mind, the shock of the cold plunge the only remedy to return me back to my body. The prospect of starting hormones loomed large. I spent those summer weeks trying to suppress the excitement about what oestrogen was going to do to my body. On good days I would lie in the sun and look at the other bodies around me, imagining what mine could become. I could close my eyes and picture my body softening and shifting. On bad days I was full of dread. I couldn’t allow myself to dream because I was still so scared it somehow would not work for me. What if nothing happened? What if the hormones drove me too crazy and I had to stop? What if I began to see the changes and hated them? That last possibility seemed unlikely but all the doubts and fear I carried would not allow me to rule it out. Starting hormones had taken me years, now I had dared to dream I had to face the fear that I might somehow fail. My current body felt like a waiting room. Despite the casual sex that surrounded me at Werdinsel I couldn’t indulge.
It was late August, the days were drawing in. Hot days were becoming rarer and when they did occur I would desperately try and shift my plans to allow myself as much time at the river as possible. I constantly carried a towel in my handbag on the off chance I would find a moment in the day to throw myself into the river. Late summer rain meant the water was high and fast and often parts of Werdinsel were flooded. The summer was coming to an end and my original date for freezing my sperm was drawing closer.
Then, in the last week of August, I got the call—there was an earlier available appointment and I was next in line. The appointment was in a few days and I was not to ejaculate for at least 24 hours before.
I remember turning up to the appointment and the woman handing me a cup, leading me to a small narrow room and showing me how to leave the sample in a deposit box in the wall that could be accessed from the room next door. I wandered if she knew I wasn’t a man. I wandered what percentage of people who came to freeze their sperm weren’t men. At this point I still identified as non-binary but in every interaction I had had with the hospital they had addressed me as a man. There was an obvious presumption about their service users.
The woman left me alone in the room. There was a sink, a doctor’s examination table covered in paper towel, a magazine rack with two dated copies of Playboy magazine and a small TV mounted on the wall with a built in DVD player. I flicked through the magazines and turned on the TV. The DVD began to play, high heeled sex goddesses. I wandered which member of hospital staff had been assigned the job of selecting the pornography. The scene began to play, a threesome with a sort of foot fetish emphasis. It was from the early 2000s, probably shot on digicam. The guy was white and was wearing shades, a jazzy shirt and pinstriped trousers—a sort of third-wave ska, pop punk, rude boy look. He was fucking two white women with platinum blonde hair and surgically enhanced tits that were strung up in lingerie—the titular high heeled sex goddesses. For some reason the scene was playing out on what looked like the stark white staircase of an LA villa. The women were clearly struggling to find positions that didn’t result in them either tumbling down the stairs or breaking their backs against the steps.
I wondered how many children had already been conceived in vitro from samples of sperm ejaculated to this very DVD. Would this moment, in this sterile room watching this ridiculous porn, eventually result in my own biological offspring? In Switzerland you can keep your sperm frozen for up to ten years. I would be 41 then. I would be 10 years into my transition. I had no idea if I wanted to be a mum. I knew I didn’t want to be a dad.
The porn wasn’t hot but I found the scenario a turn on—locking myself in a small room in a public building and jerking off. It felt sordid and a little shameful—feelings that us enlightened queers are not meant to have about masturbation but feelings that nonetheless throw me back to when I first started to explore my body as a young teenager and still conjure the excitement of that time. Masturbating in this hospital room also meant I could finally start hormones and the thought of that turned me on. I was about to do puberty all over again but this time I would do it right. My body was going to change and people would consume it in new and exciting ways. I was going to be a high heeled sex goddess.
It is hard to write about desire as a trans woman. Our desire is policed two fold, as women and as transexuals. As trans women we cannot turn in any direction. We are perverted men who get off on dressing up in women’s clothing. We are parodies of feminine sexuality, fetish objects created for other men. We are confused porn addicts. We are testosterone suppressed estrogenated limp useless cocks. We are dangerous predators that want to groom children. We are sensational surgeries to be consumed in tabloid newspapers. We are gay men full of internalised homophobia. If we identify as lesbians we are horny men invading women’s spaces and trapping them into sex through gender ideology rhetoric. If we top we should never have transitioned. If we bottom we are sissy inverts. If we have any active desire we are predators, if we have none we cease to exist. We are always traps.
I placed the warm cup in the deposit and left the room.
As I scurried out the ward the receptionist informed me she would call once they had assessed the sample’s virility. My heart sank. The wait wasn’t over yet. I left the hospital in a heavy cloud. In my disappointment I forgot to ask how long the assessment could take. I cycled home. It was just gone midday. The whole appointment had taken less than an hour. How much more time would I have to kill before I could start the rest of my life?
Three hours later they called. The sample was good. My future fertility banked I was free to fuck with my body. I grabbed a bottle of Oestrogel and headed to Werdinsel.
The river was higher than I had ever seen it before. The past few days had brought with them heavy rain. Whole areas of the island were flooded, with trees sticking out of the water. It was late afternoon on a Wednesday. August 30th. There was still some hours of light left. The place was quiet, only a few people still lay about in the grass, dotted about the meadow, mostly lone figures, regulars. I picked a spot towards the end of the island, laid down my towel and stripped off before walking to the river bank. I steadied myself before diving head first into the water.
The river instantly swept me away and with it the heat and tension of the day. I floated on my back, stretching out my limbs and surrendering myself to current. The trees passed rapidly above me. When I decided to start hormones the part of me that had fought so hard to be recognised as non-binary tried to downplay the significance of medical transition. I was already trans without taking hormones, I liked to earnestly remind others. In retrospect that was also the part of me that still feared it would never work, the part that tried to dampen my own expectations and diminish my hope. The part that still didn’t dare confess I wanted to be a woman. I reached the end of the island and clambered out, dripping wet in the low afternoon sunshine.
I headed back to my towel, stretched out in the sun and closed my eyes, water gradually evaporating from my skin. I had occasionally heard trans women speaking in hushed tones of their first dose of oestrogen bringing a sense of oneness and calm to their body. Most other girls were quick to roll their eyes at such stories. I didn’t expect to feel anything so direct but I was aware of the significance of the moment. I opened my eyes and sat up, looking about me, towelling off the last of the river water from my skin. There was just one other person in my vicinity, an older man, some metres from me. I took the bottle from my bag and pumped out the first blob of gel. It was translucent and smelt of alcohol. I rubbed it into my inner thigh before applying two more pumps. I lay back and felt the cool gel soak into my skin.
The man lying near me stood and wandered down towards the river bank. He glanced back and we caught eyes. He was maybe in his late 50s. He wore nothing but a small pair of round spectacles. He was grey and balding but his body was lean and in good shape and his skin was tanned from a summer by the river. He smiled. He had a kind face. He looked out towards the river, his back to me. I saw his hand move towards his cock and he gently pulled on it before letting go. He headed back towards his towel revealing his now semi hard cock. I felt a twinge in my own. He lay down on his towel and snuck another glance towards me. I blushed and he smiled again, his hand once again moving towards his cock. He began to play with himself and I could feel my own cock growing hard. I pulled my knees towards me to try and hide it. I looked left and right. We were alone. I lay back and started to touch myself as I stared up at the blue sky above me. I turned to him and we both began to masturbate in earnest. He was several metres away. I hoped he wouldn’t approach me. I was happy with the distance. He remained on his towel, I on mine. After a while we both came in unison, looking across the stretch of dried grass at one another. He smiled again and gently mouthed the words thank you. I laid back and closed my eyes. Moments later I heard him leave.
I lay there for a while longer until eventually it was getting cool. I dressed and fetched my bike. I cycled home as the sun began to set. It was a full moon.