his year, I accepted that I am a trans woman. As early as at the age of five years old, I knew that something wasn’t right and I never felt completely whole. In my 20s, I resolved to figure out what these feelings meant, and so began a journey of self-exploration and self-denial, obsessively visiting online transgender support groups to find an answer. In my heart, I was hoping for a way out, any explanation that didn’t involve actually being trans. None came. This year finally brought clarity: I am not, and have never been, a man. My name is Sophie. While lockdown gave me the space to address these feelings, it also put obstacles in my way. I am transitioning in secret while I live with my socially conservative parents who I know will not approve: last year my mother boycotted a reality TV show for including a trans woman. At the beginning of 2020, I believed I wouldn’t see the end of it. I’d finished a long stint in higher education, and career plans a decade in the making refused to come to fruition. I suffered the ignominy of moving back in with my parents, while all of my peers settled into careers and homes of their own. The combined effect of depression and gender dysphoria – a fundamental incongruence between the gender I was assigned at birth and the gender I actually was – meant that I stopped being able to imagine a future at all. I visited my GP as a promise to a friend. The same day, I started taking antidepressants and was referred to a counsellor. It didn’t exactly fix me, but it did give me just enough clarity of mind to know that there was only one way I could continue living. And so I sought out a gender therapist. I contacted him as Sophie, the name that I’d been using in online support groups for two years. It surprised me how unremarkable he found it to use this name for someone who presented as completely male. He picked up immediately on my reluctance to call myself a trans person. So he conducted a thought experiment. “If you could push a button,” he asked, “and wake up in a world where everyone knew you as female, would you push it?” There’s a reason gender therapists often ask this. It invites you to imagine a reality where you can be yourself consequence-free. Where you can transition without being rejected by friends, evicted by family or subjected to harassment. It helps to isolate doubts about your own identity from the fear of the repercussions of coming out. “Yes,” I said. Within two sessions, I could no longer avoid the conclusion that I was trans. But realising it and accepting it are two very different things. When the time came to tell my partner of seven years, I broke down trembling in her arms as I detailed all of the ways that I wasn’t the person she’d spent her 20s planning a life with. As the dust settled, I broke the silence between us with a question: “Do you think I’m odd?” She said no, immediately and unequivocally. She received me for who I am, like all the friends who accepted me more easily than I had accepted myself. I was unaware of how much I had internalised society’s transphobia. Being trans is a struggle of self-realisation against a tidal wave of invalidation and disapproval from public figures and parts of the media. I am coming out into a world that sees my existence as a matter of legitimate debate. For years it was easier to live in denial, but in 2020 I realised I had to live as myself or not at all. Being trans is not an ideology or a choice. It is an inextricable part of who I am. My partner left me in September. She accepted me unquestioningly, but I was not what she’d signed up for. Suddenly I had no attachments and no reason not to transition. And so I became intimately acquainted with the Kafkaesque bureaucracy running the UK’s transgender healthcare. The waiting list for the NHS’s backlogged gender identity clinics frequently exceeds three years, leaving trans people with no choice but to funnel money into private medical services, so that we can finally start living as ourselves. This summer I did exactly that. The scheduled hour-long consultation with a psychologist was over in 15 minutes. “I have what I need,” she said. “You know who you are.” Within 24 hours I received written confirmation that I met the criteria for gender dysphoria. A prescription for oestrogen and progesterone arrived at my door two days later. Transitioning while being at home and unable to interact with the wider world means that my journey feels incomplete. I can’t dress as I identify and have to carefully choose clothes that keep my physical changes hidden. I face the contradiction of hoping these changes happen quickly, but not so quickly that my parents will notice before I am able to move out. I have joined local support groups for trans people, but I can’t access them. All face-to-face meetings have been cancelled due to coronavirus, and anything I say over online video calls could out me to other people in the house. Right now I am Sophie in private and someone else in public. The way I present and the person I am have nothing to do with each other. Still, I’m grateful every day for the unwavering support of the many friends who now know who I am. The first time they called me by my new, real name, it dawned on me how numb I had been. I had been living in black and white, and suddenly the world appeared to me in full colour, alive with possibility. So I enter 2021 as a different person. Next year, when life begins to unfurl itself again, I will have the chance to live authentically as me.