This week, I experienced the extraordinary.

After many days of hard work and a long day of rest, I woke up needing a shave. Now, facial hair is not the extraordinary part of this story. That's simple biology (as some people feel they need to educate me about).

After laser hair removal, a stint with electrolysis, and even a few attempts at waxing, I don't have a lot of facial hair. But that day, there was enough that I likely wouldn't have left my house without doing something about more facial hair than I'm comfortable giving residence on my face.

Again, none of that is extraordinary. What was extraordinary is that I didn't feel all that fussed about it.

Not that I intended to leave it! Good Goddess, no!

I shaved - with a straight razor, no less - but I experienced far less dysphoria than I expected given the circumstances. And honestly, I expected a lot. I've made an almost pathological study of and attempt to integrate the perfect expression of feminine social norms.

So I noted my lack of dysphoria casually in the Purplepaw Discord server. Yes, I was a bit shaggy, but no, I wasn't too distressed by it.

And despite four years of writing about my own transgender experience, I received an explanation that was extraordinary in its ordinariness:

I no longer need to think about my gender transition.

The screen is us and we're TV

"You exist on the other side of that threshold now," LookNotSeek mused in the Discord server. What she meant is that I already know myself as enough of a woman that adding just a bit of the masculine was no longer the issue it used to be.

By itself, the statement doesn't sound all that earth-shattering. Normal people (whatever the hell that means) probably do this all the time.

I fully expect cisgender men aren't too concerned about using their grandmother's rose-scented soap. Cisgender women aren't too concerned about a bit of body odor after a tough workout at the gym.

No - in my mind, cisgender people are secure enough in who they are that a bit of outside-social-norm expression doesn't dissuade them from it.

(And yes, I've seen cisgender people who are clearly laser focused on far exceeding any social norm they can find. I'm looking at you, Pete Hegseth and your creepy fevered passion for only the manliest of men.)

But overall, humanity doesn't seem to mind blurring the lines - at least occasionally. As long as those lines aren't blurred all the time. And as long as people say they don't like it like it when they bend social norms.

Those minor bends are just temporary aberrations of gender expression. Truly no big deal in the grand scheme of humanity.

If it's no big deal, why was my behavior - so similar to the normies above - befuddling to me?

A successful gender transition

Four years ago - right at the very beginning of my gender transition journey - I wrote an article. In it, I summed up my success criterion in one line:

I will be content when I look in the mirror and see enough of myself to accept the rest of myself.

At the time, this was a novel idea - for me, I mean. And looking back, that line describes the cisgender experience I observed above: a close-enough approach to the person we choose to show the world.

In the article, I assumed this is what normies do all the time. They always see enough of the person they know themselves to be to excuse any temporary aberrations of gender expression.

But what seemed revelatory four years ago was more prescient than I knew it could be. Not only did I describe the feeling I had chased my entire life pre-transition - a feeling of easy comfort in who I am - I described how I would feel now, today.

And that was extraordinary.

That my contentment was so easy, so obvious, so clear - that's what surprised me. I didn't believe I would ever or could ever become familiar with the feeling.

After four years, I've stopped thinking about what it means to transition gender. What is genuinely extraordinary is that I don't know when it became ordinary.

The extraordinary becomes ordinary

Today - years after completing both social and medical gender transition - I've reached a state where expressing who I've always known myself to be is...well...ordinary.

Maybe you won't understand my confusion. If you've never wondered about What Could Be, if you've never had Unfulfilled Aspirations, if your dreams fell into place without social disapproval, contemplating "normal" may not make much sense.

But at the time of writing these words, I am 56 years old, and that's one really long fucking time to wait to feel completely normal. In fact, my state of "normal" today is so abnormal for gender-diverse people that feeling "normal" is noticeable.

I look in the mirror, I hear my voice, I see my handwriting, I observe my behavior, and I know unmistakably in my head who I am: I am Amethysta and I Am A Woman.

What a phenomenal observation so casually observed!

And this is exactly how I get to feel for the rest of my life? The possibilities boggle the mind, frankly.

Almost unwittingly, I wrote a remarkably useful definition of success because it didn't depend on passing, appearance, surgery, or anyone else's judgment. It depended on changing my relationship with myself.

And that's a pretty successful gender transition, if I may be so bold.

Beyond facial hair

Since that article four years ago, I fleshed out the aspects of identity and gender I observe in humanity into my original theory. I distilled it all down (like any good chemist) into a simple statement of identity.

Today, right now, I see enough of myself to accept the rest of myself. And as Al Jolson sang, "you ain't heard nothin' yet."

In some ways, I vindicated a success criterion I made up when I was barely aware enough of who I am to express it. But more than that...I demonstrated who I am.

Not to the people who disbelieve I could understand who I am within their dogma, no. But they never mattered much to me, anyway. Someone else's dream is not mine to fulfill.

I demonstrated who I am to the one person who never should have been confused about who I am, except for that social dogma forced upon us today. I built enough confidence in who I am that any remaining incongruities no longer have the power to define me.

The facial hair is still there. My preferences haven't changed. I still shaved.

What changed was that the presence of facial hair no longer calls my identity into question.

Finally, I've demonstrated who I am to myself.

Welcome to the world, Amethysta. You ain't heard nothin' yet.