I’ve been trying to think of the right metaphor to describe this experience -- the way I can and can’t see real, tangible changes in my body, my mood, my place in the world; the way I have faith in the process and am exasperated by it, because from where I’m standing it will never end. The word transition implies that I started out as one thing and am becoming another, and that at the…

I first considered the possibility that I might be transgender during a foggy church morning in 2014. Somewhere between the third and sixth time I had to sit down during services, an idea sparked into my head – what if I’m actually a woman? Like most trans women, I grappled with that question at the time. I was slowly distancing myself from my LGBT community, fearing that the movement was incapable of addressing serious questions…

Elizabeth Mills' previous work for The Toast can be found here.

When I was eighteen years old, after a year of happiness and firsts and fumbles and pain , I broke up with my girlfriend. That moment was a catalyst – the lit match to the gasoline, the first pebble of the avalanche, the final crack in a foundation poured out wrong to begin with. Over the course of the next eight years,

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The Toast's previous coverage of trans* issues can be found here. This installment was brought to you by a reader. At the time of this writing, I have been transitioning for three years almost to the day. I say “transitioning” as though I mean it in the active sense, but there definitely came a point along the way when I stopped trying to conform to the ideal of womanhood and just started living…