Joni Mitchell sang, “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” and I’m really feeling that lately.

I’ve spent the last four years with essentially no testosterone in my body, and it’s made me extra aware of the behavior of people who are full of testosterone (I didn’t say “men who are full of testosterone” because “men” and “women” are just assignments or roles or fantasies, right? Don’t report me to the thought police, please; we don’t need to involve them in our business).

Anyway, I’ll hear some dude say something annoying, and I’ll think, “Oh yeah, they always need to be right,” or, “Of course, they believe they know the answer to everything, even things they don’t know anything about,” or, “Oh, right, I forgot that they assume everyone is captivated by everything they think, say, or do.”

I recognize those attitudes because I had those attitudes. No, I embodied those attitudes. Even though I’ve felt that I was a woman for most of my life, that identification sometimes felt abstract because I didn’t behave like a woman. I couldn’t; I was lousy with testosterone. The invisible force that rules our lives.

Have you ever seen late-night commercials or YouTube ads screaming at men that if they take a nap, drink liquor that isn’t brown, or find something to be “pretty,” they might be “SUFFERING FROM LOW T”? Apparently, insecurity crops up after a certain age and some men live in constant fear and dread of losing their precious “T” (we dare not speak its name!) and, therefore, becoming less of a man.

I have no idea if it’s common for men to lose enough testosterone later in life to rip their manliness from their increasingly weak fingers, but that doesn’t stop them from worrying. And you know what, I can relate to that. Because I know that taking away my testosterone blocker or my estrogen would be an awful thing for me and who I am now. So, I understand why some men may live in fear for their “T.”

Hormones are powerful things; they shape our experience of ourselves (and our experience of others, which, I think, is my point here; I’m not sure yet, bear with me) and, as a result, shape how and where we fit into our world. Which kind of reinforces the idea that our sense of gender is fragile and even kind of illusory. If we took hormones out of the picture, would we even have any use for gender binaries? They might not make sense.

But I suppose you could also say shoes wouldn’t make sense if we didn’t have feet. But most of us do have feet, and they’ve designed most of our shoes for one or the other gender. We’re stuck with the gender binary, and honestly, as someone who bases their identity on that binary, would I even want to get rid of it? What is a woman if there are no men?

Before hormone replacement therapy, I didn’t have these kinds of thoughts, trust me, which (finally) brings me to my point (I think). I said before that I’ve felt myself to be a woman for most of my life, and that’s true. But I couldn’t feel myself being a woman until HRT. And I’ve come to believe that the change in my brain, in my thinking and perception and emotions, was what I’d always been missing. The phantom limb of my being. And that only became possible—and clear to me—through HRT.

Which means what? Maybe the woman I feel I am lives in my head, not my body. And now that I’ve gone through testosterone removal, so to speak, I know that whatever bits of me felt like a man were also in my head because they’re gone now. When trans people say they’ve seen life from both sides, that’s what we’re talking about. You don’t get to the other side by putting on a dress or trading your dress for a pair of pants. The other side is your consciousness, your being. And HRT changes that.

But humans are amazing. Because many of us, despite the effect of hormones, don’t live in the binary consciousness. I tip my hat to the brave pioneers who identify as nonbinary. It’s one thing to say you don’t fit into your preassigned gender (cisgender people get pretty wound up about that because it’s a poke in the eye of their perception of the world), but it’s quite another thing to say you don’t fit into either gender. That leaves the cis world baffled, which is part of its beauty.

People who don’t understand transgender people, which is just about everyone who isn’t trans, predominantly focus on our bodies. Is your body female or male? Do you still have the body parts you were born with? You must tell us so we know which bathroom to ban you from entering.

I think they do that because the consciousness thing is hard to explain (we’re 900 words into this, and I still don’t know if I’ve even begun to explain it). But the penis doesn’t make the man. Nor the vagina the woman.

Don’t get me wrong; penises and vaginas are important to most trans people because so many of us have some kind of dysphoria or body issues; that stuff is as real as real can be. But maybe we’ll talk about that another time.

Two Mormon boys, on a mission, I suppose, came to the door yesterday. I’ve seen those poor kids on the street in the past pedaling their bikes in the summer heat, but I don’t think I’ve ever opened the door to find them standing before me in the blindingly white flesh.

The testosterone version of me would have said or done something to make them miserable because the testosterone version of me was an insufferable asshole. But today, when I saw the Latter Day Saints badges, I just smiled and said, “Not today, my friends,” so they took off to absorb more rejection from our neighbors.

Unbeknownst to them (and probably to their horror if they knew), my HRT saved them from an awful encounter with a creep. But seriously, in these little experiences, I see myself and finally feel able to be myself. And that’s a pretty amazing thing in an already amazing world.

Speaking of neighbors—and missionaries—I recently learned that our neighbor’s family converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses many years ago (when our neighbor was a child) because Witnesses knocked on their door. Seriously. Her mother invited them in, bought their story, and signed up or did whatever mystic ritual you must do to join.

When she told me that story, I said, “They probably still talk about your mother down at Witness headquarters: ‘Remember that one time it worked?'”

So it goes.

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN