At the risk of boring people to tears with narcissistic photos, here's one that shows a triplet of views, before, during, and after transition. Its value is that it illustrates graphically the scope and pace of the change. (Click on it to enlarge)
The leftmost photo (which has appeared on the blog before) is of Alan at his graduation, in April 2004. It's a reasonable representation of what I used to look like immediately before the weirdness happened. It's what I looked like until the beginning of May 2005.
The centre photo was taken towards the end of June 2005. This was after the first mad month, where changes happened at such a inexplicably rapid pace, and with no apparent cause. It illustrates just how much my shape had changed, with dramatic weight loss and re-distribution of body fat to the hips. The thickening of head hair, and reduction of skin and hair oil content can be seen too. What can't be seen is the change in eye colour, the skin softness, the skin sensitivity, the increased nasal acuity, the psychological changes... Note that this is before I had my first laser treatment, so there's the perennial 5 O'clock shadow still there. It's about halfway from the time that the first symptoms appeared, and the time I commenced Hormone Therapy. Three weeks of rapid change, two weeks of normal hormonal change, and with another 6 weeks of hormonal change to come before any therapy or outside intervention. All my metabolism's own work.
The right photo was taken on 11th September 2005, after 5 weeks of HRT, and 6 weeks of "going fulltime" with a female appearance. Again, you've seen it all before in previous posts.
Looking at it with the benefit of hindsight... I have to wonder how I ever managed to cope. Not with the change from the middle to the right, which was over 11 weeks. But with the change from the left to the middle, which was over 5, and most of that within the first 3.
Still got an awfully long way to go, but objectively speaking, I really have come a long way.
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