Content warning: This article briefly discusses family violence.

Imagine you’ve found yourself standing in front of the fridge at 3am, craving a rare steak, growing hair in strange places, and wanting to jump the bones of maidens in flowing nightdresses like you’re starring in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

If this has happened to you, you’re either going through puberty or turning into a werewolf.

Image by: Johann Siemens

On 31 May 2012, my life changed overnight. After years of therapy, and two GPs, a psychiatrist and an endocrinologist all signing on the dotted line, I received my first gender-affirming treatment: testosterone injections.

I wasn’t sure how quickly I would start to change.

A full moon didn’t rise and transmute my body in an instant. Weeks dragged by when I was waiting, then the cravings started to kick in. Salt, red meat, fat.

Does my arm hair look thicker? I wondered. Alright, I like this!

Back then, I lived in Brisbane with someone I loved. She had recently begun to use a wheelchair full-time, and after a month on ‘super serum’, I had ten kilos of new muscle to put to use.

One day, we were coming back from a rheumatologist appointment at the hospital. The bus pulled up, the ramp came down, and we boarded. I looked at the accessible seating and made eye contact with an elderly woman on one side with a full trolley’s worth of shopping.

I looked to the other side and saw a young woman sitting in the centre seat of three. The surrounding chairs were empty. She had her sunhat in her hands. She looked at us. Then she looked at her hat. Then she looked at us again, checking. And then back at her hat.

No words had formed in my brain before I was overcome with a feeling that made my muscles swell with newfound strength. I didn’t say anything aloud, but internally, I had a visceral response to this rudeness: If you acknowledge us one more time and don’t move, I’m going to put your head through that window.

She changed seats when the bus driver noticed the tension and asked her to move. I can’t remember what he said, but I sat in silence on that bus ride home.

We got home, I sat on my bed, and I cried. I had never wanted to hurt a stranger, even a rude one, in my entire life until that moment.

In a naturally occurring puberty, testosterone levels build slowly. By contrast, an adult’s dose injected into your thigh hits hard. You have to adjust: increased anger, hunger and libido are common effects. My doctors told me that this would happen.

I lay awake the night after the bus incident. The next day, I bought steak to eat for dinner, but it was so keenly on my mind that I ate it by lunchtime.

Weeks turned to months. My partner and I had a lot of sex. I got so angry at small things that I wanted to slam doors and shout. I ran my mouth without care for the words or the effect they may have had on others. I needed calling out sometimes, and thank goodness I got it.

Imagine if no one cared how I behaved? If they normalised it?

These feelings were all-encompassing, they muscled through almost all rational thought. I had a newfound understanding of every teenage boy I had disparaged in the past.

I come from a long line of angry, alcoholic men who all died alone.

My paternal granddad stopped beating his children when my dad – freshly enrolled in the army – knocked him on his backside. Likewise, Granddad’s father had stopped hitting him when he grew to six-foot-six.

My mum’s father was the same; he wasn’t invited to my parents’ wedding, and he never met his grandchildren.

Good G-d (please excuse my Jewishness), would this legacy fade?

Being hairy was fine (some more on my face would have been great), but I didn’t want to be hungry, angry and horny forever, feeling like an animal.

My transitioned body came with dread. I hated that this newfound strength and gender affirmation seemingly echoed the possibility of becoming a monster.

Experiencing anger is natural, but I never want to hurt people. There’s something inside me that can; there’s a werewolf that needs no full moon to show its face.

Do I become a werewolf? Worse, do I become the next werewolf in a long line of sad, lonely, angry werewolves?

Absolutely fucking not. I have a choice.

In ancient Ireland, the wolf and the warrior existed on the same plane, sharing ferocity, sexual potency and a fighter’s spirit.

Warriors were depicted with lupine attributes, even wearing wolf skins to channel the energy of the wolf, leading to the name luchthonn (wolf-skins) and the phrase “to go wolfing”, meaning raiding.

In the tales of the Shetland Isles, the wulver – another lupine legend – is a kind soul. He is a man with a wolf’s head, who fishes and ponders while sitting on rocks in the shallows. Only violent if provoked, the wulver eats his fill and leaves the remainder of his catch on the windowsill of a hungry home.

I like the wulver a lot. I am a serviceable cook, and though I don’t have the patience for fishing, I love to feed people good food. Growing up, I was taught that people can put up with a lot of small discomforts, but being hungry is not one of them – I am certainly familiar with being ‘hangry’.

It takes time to settle into a new skin. You wait, you practice, you learn. You don’t always get it right. You apologise. You become better.

It took years, but eventually, my monster starved. It begged to be fed, but when I refused, it waned into a sliver of its former self like the moon. Shrunken, I could see its face. Toothless, with empty hands and pleading eyes, like poet José Olivarez said of his own monsters.

I made a room for my werewolf in the basement of my mind – not a prison cell, not death row. Killing it wasn’t the point. I want the werewolf to be rehabilitated. Anger isn’t a redundant emotion. Anger has kept me alive. It’s the violence that needs to die.

The werewolves of my father, my grandfathers, of all our forefathers, can finally put down their arms and rest.

If I must be a werewolf, I choose to be a wulver instead of a luchthonn. My strength can lift others; it can forge a safe place to exist. No amount of family history or testosterone will dictate who I can be.

The curse can end. I have a choice.