One day in 2023, Valerie Barone was scrutinising her body in a full-length mirror, a tearful ritual of self-flagellation she performed often. But this time, she noticed something new: cellulite dappled along the backs of her thighs. Instead of horror, she cried with happiness.
Two years earlier, in February 2021, Barone had come out as transgender at age 30. Since starting Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) in June 2021, she experienced a rollercoaster of emotions reconciling her outer appearance with her inner sense of self. Seeing the cellulite was a moment of sheer catharsis. 'I finally felt at home in my body,' she said.
Barone acknowledged the societal messages that cellulite is unattractive and undesirable, but standing before the mirror, she felt no shame. Instead, she felt overjoyed and proud to experience something many women share. 'I felt gender euphoria,' she explained.
A Complicated Relationship with Her Body
Barone's relationship with her body has always been complex. As a child, she struggled with comfort eating and became overweight. Growing up, the mirror was her great enemy, a tool to punish herself for imagined inadequacies. This experience she shares with many women, except she first spent years of her life as a man.
She always felt a dissonance between how the world perceived her and how she perceived herself. Puberty worsened these issues: each new hair, each inch her shoulders grew, widened the gulf between the burgeoning woman she felt herself to be and her reflection. 'Looking in the mirror felt like staring at a stranger,' she recalled.
Gender dysphoria manifested subtly as a nebulous feeling of absence. With no exposure to the trans experience, she lacked language to describe that painful feeling of something missing. She felt disconnected from herself, struggled with expectations ascribed to boys and men, and when strangers called her 'Sir', she wondered who they were talking to. She spent years as a passive observer in her own life, dealing with persistent depression.
Finding Euphoria in Cellulite
Even after coming out, Barone remained in front of the mirror, as coming out complicated her relationship with her reflection. She compared herself negatively to impossible standards of feminine beauty: '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.' She felt 'too fat', 'too broad', 'too masculine', leaving her emotionally exhausted.
Starting HRT in June 2021, she aimed to raise progesterone and oestrogen levels and reduce testosterone. Over the next few years, HRT slowly changed her body in expected and unexpected ways: redistribution of body fat, softening of features, thickening of hair. These changes came too slowly to notice day to day, and she still contended with her reflection negatively.
It was on one such day, years into treatment, that she first noticed the cellulite rippling down the backs of her 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,' she said. To her, the appearance of cellulite was evidence she was moving closer to a body she felt at home in. She recognised the beauty in her experience as a trans person.
A New Perspective on Womanhood
Barone noted that she may have lost the ease of navigating the world as her assigned gender at birth, but she gained so much: the chance to know herself intimately, to become who she always was, and to experience her body slowly changing into something that didn't hurt to see. She described gender euphoria as a storm of butterflies in her stomach, a smile that nearly broke her jaw.
Two and a half years after that day, Barone says her gender dysphoria is not cured. Self-image can fluctuate from day to day. However, she has heard cis women say that trans sisters give them new perspectives on womanhood. '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,' she explained.
Her hope is that by hearing her joy and knowing her freedom, others can experience it for themselves. '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.'
