Translated from the German original, «Was ich dir gerne gesagt hätte».

It’s past midnight and you’re sitting in front of the screen. Fake nails are glued to your fingernails. You’re wearing a skirt no one but you has ever seen. Your things are hidden everywhere. The shoes at the very bottom of the wardrobe, underneath the men’s clothes on their hangers. The rest at the very back of a drawer in the sideboard, where no one would think to open it. Most of it you ordered from somewhere in China, in a moment when you were braver than usual.

Your father is at his girlfriend’s place. He’s there a lot. That’s the only reason you can do this at all.

One day you’ll lose one of the nails. You’ll search all evening and you won’t find it. For weeks you’ll be afraid it will turn up somewhere. Thankfully, it never does.

On the screen is Reddit. Before-and-after pictures of strangers who have already gone down this road. You look at them and don’t know what you’re feeling. Envy? Longing? Do you even belong there? And if you do, how far is it, and what does the end look like?

I’m writing to you because I know how it goes.

You’re afraid of losing everything. It isn’t much. Your family, the gymnastics club now and then, a childhood friend, otherwise the computer. But it’s yours, and you want to keep it.

And you’re afraid of the mirror. You’re tall and broad, your hair has been thinning since you were twenty-three. The question you ask yourself a hundred times is always the same. Will anyone ever see me as a woman?

Hiding is something you’ve known for half your life. You were told early on to be more like a boy. Brave, strong, fight back. You wondered why it didn’t bother you when they shoved you into the girls’ toilet to humiliate you. Why you were afraid of the ball. Why you were different from the others.

The school psychiatrist said you should act more like a man. That other things were running in your head too, ADHD, autism, no one will recognise until much later. All those years, you weren’t wrong. You were just unrecognised, in more ways than one.

So you hid. For years, around the clock. And right now you’re in the middle of the time without work. Two years, in the end, in which you spend a lot of time in bed and a lot of time in a game, because it’s easier to be yourself there. They will be the hardest.

After that, you move out. You’ll look forward to your own flat and then discover how quiet it is. No cats yet. At some point you’ll be sitting there not knowing how to go on. Not how, not where to. Then you dial a number and ask for an appointment, at the crisis intervention centre in Zurich. That is not failure. That is the most sensible call you make.

I won’t lie to you, so let’s take it in order.

Your hair doesn’t come back on its own. You’ll be waiting for surgery, and after that maybe a transplant. Your beard hairs are too light for the laser, so you’ll sit through needle epilation and pay for it yourself. You pay for a lot of it yourself, no one tells you beforehand how expensive it gets and how little the insurance covers. Patience here isn’t a virtue. It’s a requirement. Information is scarce, you piece everything together yourself, form by form, office by office. For long stretches, you walk this road alone.

The community doesn’t automatically become your home either. You’ll sit in chats where someone writes that she would have been trans anyway, no matter what body she’d been born in, and you’ll realise you can’t relate to that. You just want to live as a woman, an ordinary life, only you were born into the wrong body. There are queer bars with little room for trans women, or for women at all, that’s how male-dominated they are. You’ll often wonder whether you’re in the wrong place. Finding your people is hard when you don’t recognise yourself in the group.

Then the thing you don’t expect.

Your family. You’ll write them a letter because you can’t say it out loud. They respond better than you fear. Not perfectly. Someone asks you not to become a parrot, because when they think of trans women they think of drag queens, because those are the images that make it into the media. Your sister needs more time than the others. That’s all right. You still love her very much. But on the whole, you’re closer to your family today than you were before. Thank you for standing by me and staying with me. That isn’t something to take for granted. I’m very glad about it.

The childhood friend stays. The gymnastics club doesn’t. It’s conservative, and there’s no place there for a trans woman. So you write your resignation. Sport becomes difficult terrain, you should know that. That one fear was justified. Most of the others weren’t. The audience you hid from all those years isn’t really watching. People think about you far less than you believe. That sounds cold. It’s a relief.

Hiding never protected you. They bullied you anyway. And it’s not about being brave. It’s about doing it anyway. And waiting doesn’t make it easier.

A lot of this was harder than it needed to be, and not because of the people around you. They were mostly fine. It was hard because there’s so little information, because no one feels responsible, because you have to find the way yourself. That’s exactly why I’m writing this down.

I’m writing to you from the TGV to Paris. At the other end, my boyfriend is waiting. You’ll meet him in a game, on one of those evenings when you believe nothing will ever happen in your life again.

I regret almost nothing. I would tell the family in person instead of in a letter, that’s all.

There are still hard days. But I don’t hide anymore, and I live as who I am.

You’re sitting there with your glued-on nails, in a top and a skirt, looking for an answer someone else can give you. I can’t give it to you.

Everything has a beginning. This has no end. Go anyway.