This is a thing that I often hear trans people saying and doing sometimes that bothers me, which is using the word “transition” as shorthand to mean “go on hormone therapy”.

Please do not use the word “transition” interchangeably with “go on hormone therapy”. Doing so I think is perpetuating misinformation about what it means to be trans or to transition. It can put pressure on people to feel like they need to go on hormones in order to be recognized as legitimately trans. I also think it can mislead both trans and cis people by not showing them how multifaceted and diverse transition actually is. I think this can harm people.

Transitioning is a broad term that means shifting from living as your assigned birth sex, to living openly as the gender(s) with which you identify. It is not an either-or process and it does not always have a clear beginning or end for all people.

Transition can involve hormone therapy, and for many trans people, it does. It also makes sense that some trans people want to start hormone therapy concurrently with other aspects of transition. But there are trans people who do not want to do hormone therapy, and among those who do, some of them may start other aspects of transition either long before, or long after they start hormones.

Trans people have also existed long before modern hormone therapy; their identities and feelings have always been valid, and, although hormones can help many trans people to more closely and fully live the lives they want to live, they have never been, and will never be necessary for trans people’s identities to be valid and for trans people to live fulfilling lives.

What are some of the many other things that transition can involve?

Telling people the gender you identify with, and updating/changing it openly, such as on forms and in records, on social media websites, or anywhere you have the ability to list it.

Asking people to use your desired pronouns and/or correcting people when they do not



Changing your name, which can range from taking on a nickname or asking a few friends to use your chosen name in private, to asking everyone to use it, to a legal name change.

Changing your outward appearance, including clothing, accessories, hairstyle, makeup, or piercings or other body modifications

Changing your voice, mannerisms, or way of speaking. For transmasculine people, hormones can play an important role in this, but for transfeminine people this is usually exclusively a function of voice training and conscious changes

Changing your body language, which can involve “relaxing into” body language that feels more natural to you but that you may have been censoring or holding back out of fear or social conditioning, or which may involve carefully observing and retraining yourself to take on new body language which may initially be less familiar to you, but which feels more natural or fulfilling in the end

Making different life choices, if there was anything you were holding back on because of your assigned birth sex and the gender roles associated with it

I’ve been transitioning over the past few months, and it is a super involved process that touches on virtually all aspects of my life. I’ve found that small changes I make often yield surprising or unexpected results, which have cascading implications for other things in life. For example, changes in clothing lead to changes in how people interact with me, changes in how I perceive my own body, and changes in how I move my body in the environment, all of which in turn yield changes in how I think and feel.

Transitioning can also involve experimenting with certain forms of expression and realizing that you don’t feel comfortable with them. People can experience this with any aspect of transition, including hormones, and because hormones can produce irreversible or very-hard-to-reverse changes in the body, such as breast growth, deepening of voice, or infertility, it is very important for people to be cautious about undertaking these things, and this is why I feel strongly about communicating to everyone that hormones≠transition and you do not necessarily need to take hormones in order to transition.

Transitioning doesn’t always have a clear beginning or end. For many it is a continuous and ongoing process.

Transitioning is not necessarily a smooth process, it can happen in fits and starts. Sometimes people change a lot all at once, like cutting off their hair. Other changes, like growing hair, or waiting for certain body changes to happen on hormones, are very slow and some are subtle and can even be hard to detect.

Transitioning doesn’t always mean a permanent distancing from one’s old identity or way of presenting. It does for many trans people, but especially for genderfluid and other nonbinary people, but even for some trans people with binary identities, people can want to keep the ability to present and/or pass as their assigned birth sex. In some cases this can be self-motivated, especially for people with identities that align somewhat or sometimes with their assigned birth sex. In other cases it can be practical, such as if a person has a body type that makes it very hard to pass as the gender they identify with, and they are living in a transphobic area where it might be safer or give them more opportunities if they are able to present as their assigned birth sex in certain situations.

Transition is really complex and what it means and how it plays out is different for each person. It may or may not involve hormones, and even when it does, it is a much bigger process than just taking hormones. Don’t let any of the rhetoric lead you to suggest that hormones are like a “magic pill” that will make you transition. They are just one of many choices or tools available to you that, for many people, can help them to more fully transition into the life that they want. They are neither necessary nor sufficient for transition for all people.