Death metal has never had much interest in putting things back the way it found them. Bodies split open, bones break, skin tears, worlds end, and whatever crawls out of the wreckage is expected to deal with the consequences. That makes it a surprisingly useful language for talking about transition, because some realizations do not arrive with the gentleness you’ve been led to expect. You can avoid them for years, patch over them, bury them under work and family and whatever else is loud enough to drown them out, but once something structural gives way you do not get to pretend the damage is cosmetic anymore.
Trans people on the internet have a much cuter word for this. We talk about “the egg.” An egg is somebody who is probably trans but has not realized it yet, or somebody who has realized enough to be circling the question while still finding ways not to answer it. When the realization finally becomes too obvious to ignore, the egg cracks. It is deliberately silly language, which is probably part of why it survives, but underneath the joke is something I understand a lot better now than I did when I started this journey: once the shell breaks, you can decide what you want to do next, but you cannot become the person who never saw what was inside it.
I spent decades trying anyway. There were times when I got close enough to the question that, looking back, I am amazed I managed to talk myself out of it again. I would wonder whether there was something to the fact that being a boy seemed harder for me than it appeared to be for other boys. I would notice envy I could not comfortably explain, fantasies I would not let myself examine too closely, or a recurring sense that some part of my life was slightly out of alignment. Then the implications would get too large, and I would find another explanation. Maybe I was depressed. Maybe I was curious. Maybe everybody thought about this sometimes. Maybe I was just unhappy with something else and attaching the feeling to gender because it was easier than figuring out what the real problem was. Maybe later would be a better time to think about it. A good friend joked that my egg was made of titanium, and “later” becomes one of the most useful words in the language when you are scared of yourself.
I was not spending those years consciously lying to myself, or waking up every morning with the knowledge that I was a woman and then choosing to pretend otherwise. It was messier than that. I had enough doubt to keep the question alive and enough fear to keep certainty at a distance and as long as I could maintain that middle ground, I did not have to do anything dramatic. I could keep the life I understood, keep the relationships I depended on, and keep telling myself that if this really mattered I would know for sure someday.
When I finally started transition, I still did not have that kind of certainty. I did not feel as though I had solved gender once and for all. I had simply reached the point where another decade of thinking about it seemed less useful than trying something and seeing what happened. The sentence that made starting possible was simple: if I am not trans, I can stop.
That was not self-deception. I meant it. I needed the decision to remain reversible because reversibility made it safe enough to begin. Starting HRT did not have to be a declaration carved into stone. It could be an experiment. I could take the medication, pay attention to what it did to my body and my mind, and decide whether I wanted to continue. If it felt wrong, I could stop and reassess. For someone who approaches almost everything like an engineering problem, this was a much more tolerable proposition than demanding absolute certainty before gathering any actual data.
Knowing there was an exit was important because it gave me enough room to step forward without feeling like there was no way out when I had. What I did not expect was how quickly the exit would stop feeling important to me.
At first the change was subtle enough that I did not have to call it anything. Estrogen felt good in ways I was still learning to describe. The background static I had lived with for years started to quiet down. My emotions became more immediate. My body began, very slowly, to move in a direction that felt more like mine. I did not suddenly become a different person and I did not wake up one morning thinking every outstanding question had been answered. I simply started to notice that the possibility of stopping felt less like a useful safety valve and more like something I theoretically could do but had no particular reason to want.
Then the patches became hard to get.
The shortage itself was not dramatic. Pharmacies run out of medication. Supply chains fail. Products get backordered. Normally I am good at this kind of problem because it is concrete. Find another pharmacy. Ask who has stock. Call around. Check alternatives. Treat it like any other logistics problem and keep moving. What surprised me was not the practical problem. It was the way my body reacted when there was suddenly a real possibility that I might not be able to get estrogen for a while.
I had a fucking panic attack.
That reaction told me more than any amount of pre-transition analysis had managed to tell me because it was not an argument. I had spent months reminding myself that I could stop if I wanted to, and then the universe briefly threatened to make the choice for me. The response was immediate. I did not want to stop. I did not want a break. I did not want to go back to the hormonal state I had lived in for decades just because it was familiar. The option was still there, but somewhere along the way the desire to use it had quietly disappeared.
That was the part I had not understood when I started. “I can stop” and “I want to stop” had never been the same statement. The first one was important because it let me begin without pretending I knew the future. The second one became less and less true as I discovered what life felt like when I was no longer trying to force myself into a configuration that had always felt slightly wrong.
This is where the egg metaphor becomes useful to me. People sometimes talk about an egg cracking as if it is one dramatic event, but mine was never that tidy. I had been putting fractures in the shell for years. I would get close to the truth, see the damage, decide it was probably superficial, and cover it over again. I became very good at maintenance. There was always another explanation available, another reason to wait, another layer of duct tape to hold things together long enough that I could keep functioning.
Starting estrogen was the point where I finally stopped repairing the shell long enough to find out what happened if I let the crack spread, and once I did that, I could not restore the old state. I could have stopped HRT the next day and the knowledge would still have been there. I would still know what estrogen felt like in my body. I would still know how it felt when the static got quieter. I would still know what it was like to stop treating Natasha as a hypothetical person and start letting her exist in the same physical world as everything else in my life. I could choose not to transition, choose not to come out, choose not to take another dose, or choose to wait until circumstances were safer. What I could not choose was to genuinely not know anymore.
That distinction is important because the egg metaphor can become obnoxious when people use it on somebody else. Questioning your gender does not obligate you to reach a particular conclusion, and nobody gets to point at another person and announce that they know what is inside that person’s head better than they do. I am using the language about myself, looking backward at a process I now understand differently. I am not interested in turning it into a rule that says every uncertain person is secretly trans and just waiting to admit it, because what cracked for me was not free will, it was plausible deniability.
The patch shortage did not prove that I was trans. I do not think one panic attack can prove something that personal, and by then I had already done plenty of things that would have looked like much stronger evidence from the outside. What the shortage did was expose the gap between how reversible I needed transition to feel before I started and how little I wanted to reverse it once I had actually experienced it. I had started estrogen because I wanted enough freedom to find out. When access was threatened, I realized I had already learned something important: going forward felt better than going back. In fact the idea of going back itself was the impetus for the panic attack.
There is a kind of grief attached to that realization, because once the shell is broken you can also see all the earlier cracks. I think about the boy I thought I was, carrying anxiety and depression without understanding why ordinary life seemed to require so much effort. I think about all the times I got close to asking the right question and then backed away because the answer felt too dangerous. I do not look at those versions of myself and feel contempt. They were doing exactly what people do when they are trying to protect a life they understand from a future they cannot yet imagine. The shell was not only a prison. For a long time, it was shelter. That is probably why I resisted allowing it to break apart completely.
It is easy, once you are safely on the other side of a decision, to rewrite the past as if you were always marching toward the conclusion you eventually reached. I do not remember it that way. I remember uncertainty. I remember fear. I remember thinking that maybe there was something to this and then finding a way to bury it again. I remember needing the possibility of stopping estrogen because I was not ready to give up every exit before I knew what was on the other side.
I am grateful that I gave myself that exit, even though I never wanted to use it. Without it, I might have spent another decade demanding certainty from myself that I was never going to achieve from inside the shell. The fact that I could stop made it possible to start. Starting made it possible to learn. Learning made it impossible to return to ignorance.
That is the part of the egg metaphor I keep coming back to. Once the shell breaks, you are not magically transformed into somebody else. You are still carrying the same history, the same interests, the same relationships, the same stupid jokes, the same bad habits, the same taste in music, and the same pile of questionable decisions that got you there. The shell breaking did not kill the person I had been. It changed what I understood about that person. In effect, I did not become a stranger to myself. If anything, I became harder to avoid.
That is why the shortage was revelatory. It arrived at exactly the wrong moment, before I felt completely certain and after I had learned enough that going backward no longer felt neutral. It forced me to notice that the old shell was not somewhere I wanted to live anymore. I could still pick it up, understand why I had needed it, and even feel tenderness for the person who had hidden inside it for so long. What I could not do was climb back in and honestly pretend it had never broken. The door behind me was never locked, I simply stopped wanting to use it.
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