For the past few years, I lived under the name Astrid Belle: a girl in New York with an affection for lace lingerie and a habit of returning, almost ritually, to The Met. In early 2024, I decided to begin again. I started hormones, and in doing so, I let Astrid go and made room for Julian Carver.

The transition from girl to boy is, in practice, a strange and ongoing negotiation. Long conversations that double back on themselves, the slow surrender of clothes I once loved, and an unfamiliar ease in the way I now meet my clients. There were anxieties, of course, most of them small and recognizable. Whether my friends would still know me without the reddish-purple lipstick I had worn like a thesis statement. Whether the men on Tinder would feel they had been quietly misled.

What I have come to understand, somewhere between the upheaval and the strange new appetites of a body on hormones, is something almost banal in its clarity. Not everyone is going to follow you into the next version of yourself, and the ones who do are, quietly, the only ones who ever really mattered.

So here I am. A transgender boy, more or less publicly, with a face that has settled into something Evan Peters adjacent, a drawer of sex toys that saw me through the year, and a vague but persistent curiosity about what comes next. Much has changed. And still, I find myself drawn to The Met on slow afternoons, and to the particular pleasure of a well-cut coat.

More soon.