One day in 2023, I was scrutinising my body in a full-length mirror.

I did this a lot, this tearful ritual of self-flagellation – but this time, I noticed something that had never been there before.

Cellulite, dappled along the backs of my thighs.

The tears started flowing, as they often did. I wasn’t crying with horror, though, but with happiness.

Two years before, I had come out as transgender. Ever since starting Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), I’d been experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions trying to reconcile my outer appearance with my inner sense of self – but seeing the cellulite on my thighs was a moment of sheer catharsis.

I finally felt at home in my body.

I knew all the messages sold to women and girls: that cellulite is unattractive and undesirable, that it should be eliminated. And yet, standing in front of the mirror, I didn’t feel any of the shame women are taught to feel.

Instead, I felt overjoyed and proud to be experiencing something that so many women experience.

In short, I felt gender euphoria.

But I certainly haven’t always felt this way – far from it.

My relationship with my body has always been complicated. As a child, I struggled with comfort eating and ended up overweight. Since then, I’ve dealt with persistent issues of body image.

Growing up, the mirror was my great enemy; it was the cudgel I used to punish myself for my (imagined) inadequacies.

This is an experience I share with lots of women – except that I first spent years of my life as a man.

I had always felt a sense of dissonance between how the world perceived me and how I perceived myself, and in puberty those issues only worsened. With each change I experienced – every new hair that sprouted on my body, every inch my shoulders grew – the gulf between the burgeoning woman I felt myself to be and the reality of my reflection widened.

Looking in the mirror felt like staring at a stranger.

Over the years, gender dysphoria manifested itself subtly in me, as a nebulous feeling of absence. I didn’t have any exposure to the trans experience so I didn’t have language that would help me describe that painful feeling of something missing.

But I felt disconnected from myself, and for years I couldn’t understand why.

When I interacted with the world outside my room, I struggled to understand the expectations ascribed to boys and men. When strangers called me ‘Sir’, I often asked myself who they could be talking to.

I spent years as a passive observer in my own life – and, consequently, spent decades dealing with persistent depression.

I truly felt as though nothing mattered. I had no investment in my own life.

Even when I came out as transgender in February 2021, aged 30, I remained in front of the mirror – because coming out only served to further complicate my relationship with my reflection.

I’d always been prone to negative self-comparison; but, while I was transitioning, this grew to include the impossible standards of feminine beauty levied upon women. ‘Your waist must be small, but not too small.’ ‘You must not have visible body hair.’ ‘You must sound, look, and act a certain way.’

I spent countless hours studying all the ways my body failed to meet the ideals of feminine beauty. I was ‘too fat’, ‘too broad’, ‘too masculine’.

It all left me feeling emotionally exhausted, depleted, and hopeless, and the irony – that comparing yourself unfavourably to other women is a common experience of womanhood – was lost on me.

I started HRT in June 2021 with the aim of raising my progesterone and oestrogen levels, and reducing my testosterone. Over the next few years, HRT slowly began to change my body in a myriad of ways – some expected, and others less so.

The redistribution of body fat, the softening of my features, the thickening of my hair.

These things came too slowly to notice any change from one day to the next, and I still contended with my reflection daily, continuing to find ways to compare myself negatively to others.

It was on one of these days, years into my treatment, that I first noticed the cellulite rippling down the backs of my thighs and cried.

I’d spent my life in a prison; now here I was, crying with joy over something many women have been taught to hate about themselves.

To me, the appearance of cellulite wasn’t some omen of undesirability. It was evidence that I was moving closer to a body I felt at home in.

And in that moment, I recognised the beauty in my experience as a trans person.

I may have lost the ease of navigating the world as the gender I was assigned at birth – but I had also gained so much. I’d been afforded the chance to know myself intimately, to become who I always was; and I could experience the feeling of watching my body slowly change into something that didn’t hurt so much to see.

I didn’t always know when I was suffering through gender dysphoria, but I certainly knew when I’d found relief from it. It was like I’d cast off a weight, and in place of that weight was gender euphoria. A storm of butterflies in my stomach. A smile that nearly broke my jaw.

Happiness. Bliss. Relief.

It’s been two and a half years since that day, and I cannot say my gender dysphoria is cured. If you’ve lived with body dysmorphia, you understand that your self-image can fluctuate from day to day.

I’ve heard it said by cis women over and over again – both on social media and in my day to day discussions with friends – that their trans sisters give them new perspectives on womanhood. 

That knowing and loving trans women helps them find new ways to appreciate the many joys of their gender, to divorce themselves from the insecurities packaged and sold to them as products.

And so my hope is that, in hearing my joy, in knowing my freedom, you can experience it for yourself. 

Perhaps the next time you look in the mirror and see the cellulite on your thighs, you’ll remember my story and the elation I felt; my hope is that you can learn to see it not as a burden but a bounty, and a reminder that it is a beautiful reflection of your womanhood staring unapologetically back at you.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jessica.aureli@metro.co.uk. 

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