April 8th, 2025
I left home that day with very little that could honestly be called hope. Hope had become a foreign language, one I’d stopped practicing.
A train. A crossing into a part of the city politely governed by the organized crime. A clinic that allegedly offered hormonal therapy… allegedly, because after four years, allegedly was the only tense I still believed in.
By then, expectation had already become a formality. I knew the ritual too well: crowded waiting rooms, distracted professionals, the same tired questions repeated with bureaucratic patience, and at the end of it all, the familiar sentence: blood tests, come back in a year, try not to die in the meantime.
I had been performing that choreography for four years. Four years of rotting in line, waiting for indulgences that never came.
I sat across from her.
A doctor with an easy smile, a calm voice, and two interns orbiting her authority with the quiet attentiveness of those who still believe the profession can save someone.
— So, what brings you here, darling?
I— I’ve been trying hormone therapy… for four years.
— And do you have a name?
Vera, I thought.
But Vera, at that moment, did not yet exist in any way that mattered. She was a ghost in a body that hadn’t learned to host her. A promise the flesh hadn’t kept.
— No. People call me Felix.
What followed was predictable.
Questions I could answer by reflex. The same clinical script. The same sterile progression. I had memorized this liturgy years ago.
Until, at the end, she handed me a prescription.
I read it once. Then again. It made no sense. The words wouldn’t arrange themselves into meaning.
— What is this?
— Well, dear, as you leave, go to the pharmacy, get your dose, and head to injections.
— Dose of what?
— Your hormones.
There was no elegance in what followed. I cried. Openly, inelegantly, without restraint. The kind of crying that empties rooms and fills bodies with shame. She held me while something in me, something that had remained tightly contained for years, something I’d named resilience but was really just fear wearing a belt, finally gave way.
I left with my body aching from the injection and something dangerously close to relief settling beneath it like a bruise.
And now, a year later, I find myself looking back at that moment with a kind of reluctant reverence. Such a small gesture. Almost administrative in nature. A pen on paper. A signature. And yet it marked the beginning of a quiet, relentless reorganization of my body, my mind, and whatever fragile structure I still call a life.
Little Machina, finally given the right fuel.
The first changes were unremarkable, almost unworthy of note. A rapid loss of weight, not through discipline, not through the grinding machinery of trying, but through release. Retained fluid, long accumulated, simply abandoned me.
Three kilograms dissolved into absence. The body, it seemed, was already beginning to discard what had never properly belonged to it. What had been forced upon it.
Then came the heat.
Sudden, intrusive, without warning. Sweat, flushes, as though my skin were rehearsing a new language, stumbling over unfamiliar vowels.
Soon after, something subtler emerged. My mood lifted. Energy returned. A clarity I did not immediately recognize as my own settled in, like a tenant who forgot to knock. Even persistent, mundane afflictions, the kind one stops noticing after years of just coping, quietly disappeared. The body sighed. The brain followed.
Certain functions… Ejaculation… They simply vanished. Although… Erectios, curse them, erections continued.
And then, earlier than expected, came the breasts.
Their development was swift enough to draw attention. I was no longer routine. The doctor began to watch more closely. I had become, in some small way, an anomaly worth observing. A curiosity. A case study with a pulse.
Luckshit, the word would come later. But for now, just interesting.
The fourth month disrupted any illusion of continuity.
I woke before dawn in pain, sharp, invasive, impossible to negotiate with. The kind of pain that doesn’t ask permission, just takes. The hospital followed. Tests. Exposure. A ureteral stone. Surgery.
I remember, with unsettling clarity, the moment before the anesthesia fully claimed me. Voices floating in the chemical haze. Casual observations about my body. About my chest.
That’s developing nicely.
Yes, quite.
That was how I learned. Not through revelation, but through commentary.
Through the offhand remarks of strangers while I drifted between waking and nothing.
The aftermath was less tangible, but far more destabilizing.
Flashbacks. Nightmares. A creeping, persistent fear that lived in my throat like a second tongue.
Investigations began— not only of the body, but of the mind that inhabited it. They opened doors I had locked for a reason. They found things inside.
It was then that the intersex diagnosis arrived. My body produces testosterone, but fails to make proper use of it. A lifetime of quiet dysfunction, suddenly given structure and a name. Estrogen, by contrast, proved… agreeable, efficient As if the body had been waiting for the correct instruction manual all along.
I became healthier. Sharper. And, paradoxically, more fragile.
The nightmares deepened. The mind, it seems, does not accept transformation without resistance. It holds onto its ghosts. It replays its traumas like a scratched record.
I began to be read as female more often, though I still lacked the courage to fully abandon what remained of my previous presentation. Boymoding out of habit. Boymoding out of fear. Boymoding because the alternative—being seen—still felt like an invitation to violence.
My skin softened. My waist, hesitantly, began to emerge from hiding.
Around this time, I was also sent for psychiatric observation. Routine, they said.
The word has always struck me as optimistic.
Months passed, and with them came small, disorienting shifts in how I was perceived. A night out. A bar. Being addressed, repeatedly, as girl, as young lady, with a naturalness that felt almost misplaced. As if they knew something I hadn’t yet told myself.
Then the market. Then other spaces. Vera existed… internally, insistently, even if she had yet to fully claim her voice.
Until, eventually, she did.
The seventh month was not graceful.
It was rupture.
Complete dissociation.
A collapse so total it manifested physically. I cut my face. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically.
Thoroughly. Methodically. The way you destroy something that has betrayed you.
Memories returned. Fragments at first, then something more coherent. A prior transition. Violence. A past that had not been erased, merely deferred to a later date. The body keeps score, even when the mind stops counting.
I attempted to die.
I failed.
The body, it seems, had become stubborn. It wanted to live, even when I didn’t.
After that, things became official. A team of doctors. Regular observation. Weekly visits. A file that grew thicker with each appointment. Fluoxetine, Alprazolam, Risperidone, every day, don’t forget.
And, somewhere in the midst of that, a shift: what had once been girlmode ceased to be a mode at all.
It simply became.
When asked my name, I answered: Vera.
As though it had always been inevitable. As though I had just been waiting for permission to stop lying.
What followed was a peculiar coexistence of ruin and emergence. Firsts accumulated with an almost ironic persistence: first salon, first shaped brows, first time entering a women’s restroom with my heart in my throat. Small rites of passage, each one both trivial and immense. Each one a small death and a small resurrection.
There was also harassment. Of course there was. An older man, a bus, an unwanted touch disguised as admiration.
And then hands started to appear on my waist without me noticing. Soft words, lascivious smiles directed at me… It became a constant.
Nothing is easy.
Further diagnoses arrived. Dissociative Identity Disorder ceased to be suspicion and became structure. Names for the chorus inside. Jota, Rafaela, the others—all of them given a clinical home.
And still, life continued.
A formal dress. A wedding. Reunions. Acceptance, a word deceptively light for something so difficult to obtain, so easy to lose.
Carnaval. The beach. A bikini. I, somewhere, smiling.
Gradually, less observation. Less intervention. Work. Routine. A fragile imitation of normality.
And now, in the twelfth month, I find myself here.
Yesterday, something new occurred. A small, almost technical shift, yet deeply significant: an orgasm without erection. A body learning, at last, to respond differently. To speak a new language without stumbling.
It feels, in a way, like a fitting conclusion to this year. A series of reorganizations.
Some violent
Some subtle.
None reversible.
The old machinery is being replaced. Little Machina, still running, still clicking, still here.
I do not know what the next year will bring. Hope still feels like an excessive word… too heavy, too bright, too much like something I can’t afford. But I allow myself something smaller, more contained:
the possibility that Vera’s next year may be… less hostile.
And perhaps, by its end, there will remain a body that no longer argues quite so insistently with the life that inhabits it.
A body that finally recognizes itself in the mirror. A body that doesn’t flinch when someone says she. A body that has stopped trying to be anything other than what it is:
mine.
that was a lovely read :)