When you race in a pool, the finish is not where the effort stops. It's the moment your hand hits the wall while the rest of your body is still going. Your lungs haven't caught up. Your legs are still kicking. You look up at the board before you know how you feel.
That's where I am right now. Most of my life touched the wall in the space of a few weeks, and I'm still looking up at the board.
It's also been a while since I've written here. That wasn't a plan. I was overwhelmed. There was too much happening at once to stop and make sense of any of it, and every time I sat down to write, something more urgent pulled me away. This post is me coming back up for air.
At the end of October I finished my social work degree. Completely. No more placements, no more assessments, no more readings at midnight. Three days later I was in a hospital bed in Thailand, waking up from facial feminisation surgery. It's the second surgery of my transition and, I expect, the last.
In the same stretch, I finished renovating my bathroom, a job I did myself. I finished up at the charity I was hired to clean up and build. And a month before all of that, I resigned as vice president of Gold Coast Pride Collective, an organisation I dreamed would do so much good for the city I live in.
Written down like that, it looks like a list. It didn't feel like one. Each of those things had been sitting on my shoulders for years. Then, almost at once, they were gone, and I had to learn what my body feels like without the weight.
Start with the degree. I studied while working two part-time jobs, running a coffee business, and showing up for my community. I won't pretend it was graceful. Some semesters I finished on stubbornness alone. But the degree gave me words for things I'd been doing for twenty years without names. It showed me that so many of the walls I kept hitting weren't personal failures. They were built that way. That changed how I work, and it changed how I write here.
Then the surgery. My first one was in 2023, in between trimesters, and I worked from the hospital bed while I recovered. That one was deeply personal, and in my experience it was one of the best things I could have done. The second took more courage, because facial surgery for trans women still gets talked about as vanity, or a luxury. The research tells a different story. A 2016 systematic review in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery covered 1,121 patients and found the procedures safe, with high satisfaction, while noting that most studies hadn't yet used validated measures. Consensus guidelines from the International Facial Gender Symposium, published in 2022, reached the same view: most studies point to high satisfaction and better quality of life, and the evidence still needs to grow.
Your face is the first thing the world reads. Strangers use it to decide who you are before you've said a word. For years, mine started arguments I never agreed to have. I'm still swollen. I'm still healing. I won't see the real result for months. But I already know who I did this for. Not for anyone in the room. For the woman who has to walk into it.
I spent my whole degree working and looking for a better job. I applied for more than 600 jobs I was fully qualified for. Not one interview.
I can't prove why. Nobody writes "too trans" in a rejection email. But 600 isn't bad luck. And it isn't only mine. In 2020, Swedish researchers sent 2,224 fake job applications to real employers. The only hint that an applicant was trans was a line in the cover letter about a name change. Trans applicants still got fewer positive replies, and in male-dominated jobs the gap was large. Those employers never saw a face. If a name change in a cover letter is enough, I can only guess what a photo, a voice on a phone screen or a quick search does. Closer to home, a national survey of trans Australians found almost half held tertiary qualifications, yet the unemployment rate was 19 per cent, and a third reported discrimination in employment.
I didn't have this surgery to appease them. I would never hand my face over to people who wouldn't give me an interview. But I'd be lying if I said I'm not hoping it helps. I hate that I'm hoping.
The bathroom sounds small next to that. It isn't. I did every part of it with my own hands. There's a pride in standing in a room you built, knowing every hidden fault is yours and so is every clean line. Advocacy rarely gives you that. You push for years and the wall barely moves. The bathroom moved. I could see it change every day.
The charity is harder to write about. I was brought in to clean it up and build it, and I did. I still care about the people it was for. But that chapter is closed.
And Gold Coast Pride Collective. I helped build it from the ground up, including the constitution and the goals we set around safety and belonging. I stepped down as vice president in September. I won't go into why. Whether it succeeds or fails isn't mine to control any more, so I've put it down.
Here's what I've noticed since. When everything ends at once, you expect relief. Relief comes, but it brings company. There's a strange grief in finishing things, even good things, maybe especially good things. For years I've known who I was by what I was carrying. Take the load away and you're left asking what's actually you.
I don't say this out loud very often. I haven't had a partner to share any of this with. No one to ring when my final results came through. No one to hold my hand when I woke up from surgery. No one to stand in the finished bathroom with me and say, look what you did. The big moments land, and then they just sit there, with nowhere to go.
So I'm trying to do something I've never been very good at. I'm trying to rest. I'm sitting with swelling and ice and short walks. My dad is doing the coffee deliveries back home, while I take the orders and send the invoices from here.
After a race, you don't just stop. You swim to the side and climb out, then you get straight into the warm-down pool. Slow, easy laps, until your heart rate settles and your legs stop burning, so your body can recover before it has to race again.
Life doesn't give you a warm-down pool. The bills don't wait until you're ready. I'm out of the water with the stitches still in, and I'm already looking for work, already wondering what comes next.
So I don't have a neat ending for this. I don't know yet if I'll find a job in a sector that seems to shrink every week. I don't know how people will react to my new face. I don't know who I am without everything I was carrying. What I do know is that I've touched the wall before. Every time, eventually, I've got back in the water.
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Sources
Holmes, T. H., & Rahe, R. H. (1967). The Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11(2), 213–218.
Morrison, S. D., et al. (2016). Facial feminization: Systematic review of the literature. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 137(6), 1759–1770. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27219232/
Facial gender surgery: Systematic review and evidence-based consensus guidelines from the International Facial Gender Symposium (2022). Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 149(1), 212.
Granberg, M., Andersson, P. A., & Ahmed, A. (2020). Hiring discrimination against transgender people: Evidence from a field experiment. Labour Economics, 65, 101860. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2020.101860
Bretherton, I., Thrower, E., Zwickl, S., et al. (2021). The health and well-being of transgender Australians: A national community survey. LGBT Health, 8(1), 42–49. https://doi.org/10.1089/lgbt.2020.0178
