A photojournalist takes a daily selfie over three years to document transitioning from male to female

Siobhan McCann has shot thousands of people in her job as a photojournalist. Yet, she landed her biggest story by aiming her camera at herself.

For almost three years, McCann has been taking selfies daily, looking directly into her smartphone camera with a neutral expression.

She has used these photos to create time-lapse videos showing her transition from male to female, offering a transparent view of the journey to her millions of social media followers.

Her concise video compilations on platforms like Instagram and TikTok document visible transformations like removing facial hair and letting her short hair grow into a vibrant red mane.

They also capture subtleties like the ways hormone replacement therapy has softened her skin and rounded out her face, making it look more feminine.

Yet what is most striking isn’t the change in McCann, but rather her consistency, as if we’re directly witnessing the 25-year-old’s gender-affirming transformation which gives us a better view into what was always essential about her — a groundedness that has little to do with gender at all.

‘That was the point of going through all this in the first place,’ she told DailyMail.com.

Born in Plymouth, England, and raised in South Florida, McCann says it would have been easier to have come of age – as she says most non-trans folks assume – knowing she was a girl trapped in a boy’s body. 

Instead, as a gay teenager and young man, her image of herself was blurred by ‘a sense of detachment’ about the way she looked that for years she was unable to articulate.

Once she graduated from Florida State University and went to work as a news photographer for a South Florida TV station, she started noticing that the people whose pictures she took seemed more at ease with themselves than she ever felt.

‘I was just going about my daily life, interacting with people and realized what had been building up subconsciously – that I wasn’t comfortable with myself as a guy,’ she said.

That feeling prompted her to fish around online about males who become female. Something clicked when she came upon a series of before-and-after photos.

‘I suddenly realized, “Oh, I’m transgender,” and that I’d be happier as a woman.’

The realization came as a relief, she said, because, ‘It was something I could take action on, something that I could change.’

McCann describes going ahead with hormone replacement therapy as an ‘easy decision to make, although a difficult thing to do’. Around that time in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis had placed restrictions on adults seeking gender-affirming medical treatment.

She was so certain about her path that she started taking Estradiol, a female hormone, at age 22, only two or three weeks after realizing she was trans.

That’s when she also started taking daily selfies.

Between rising from bed and brushing her teeth each morning, she sits near a window bathed in natural light and snaps a photo of herself without makeup or primping. She wants to look completely natural so she can track her progress as accurately as possible.

McCann’s over 900 selfies, seamlessly pieced together through stabilization techniques that align her face from one image to the next, give a raw, unvarnished view of her transition. 

At one point, in 2022, she looked exhausted after Hurricane Ian slammed her family’s home in Florida. Another from 2023 showed her with red eczema all over her face. Halfway in, she looks at once completely non-gendered and also utterly herself.

There is an honesty, a rootedness in these shots, that are remarkable given that gender affirmation all too often is seen as a makeover rather than an unveiling.

McCann’s time lapses take viewers from the point when she started hormone therapy while living with her parents in Fort Myers through her move to New Hampshire for more reliable medical treatment, a better job and proximity to a man she met online in 2023, about a year into her transition.

That beau, 27-year-old sound technician Noah Vandewerf, can be seen in quick cameos in McCann’s morning selfies kissing her and making silly faces in the background.

She has not updated her montage since moving in October to Boston where she now works at the local FOX affiliate and lives even closer to Vandewerf, who says his type is ‘pretty girls’ like her.

‘I recognize that her previous self was just as genuine and crucial in realizing the person she is today,’ he told DailyMail.com.

‘Now I’m straight and normal,’ McCann added.

For her, that means opting against genital reassignment surgery and voice training that would help her speak more like a biological woman. 

Although losing an inch of height and a good bit of muscle mass has made her work hauling heavy cable reels, tripods and TV cameras more challenging, she says she has gained a sense of comfort that would not have been possible as a man.

‘I’m more confident, more sociable. I was never as outgoing as I’ve been over the last three years,’ she said.

The hormones also enable her to cry more easily and release all manner of feelings that were pent up in manhood.

‘It’s not that I’m a different person, just a more authentic version of myself.’

At first, McCann created time-lapses each month as a way to avoid what she calls the ‘doom spiral’ of worrying that hormone replacement therapy wasn’t working.

‘I’d watch them every day to see how far I’d come when I felt like I wasn’t making progress,’ she said.

Then she started playing with the process, making it look like she shaved asymmetrical portions of her mustache over a few weeks when she actually did away with it in a day. 

At one point, she framed her transformation not as a gender identity change, but as the result of ‘5 months living next to the 5G tower’. Worried male viewers in Russia and the Middle East wrote her in confusion. ‘They didn’t get it was a joke.’

Humor, she says, helps ‘defang and demystify’ the transgender process ‘for people who might be curious or skeptical about it.’

McCann doesn’t update or watch her time-lapses as frequently any more, preferring to enjoy her transformation rather than keeping track of it. Still, she hopes her montages will help raise awareness of gender-affirming care in a time when access to it is being hindered by the Trump administration. 

She also hopes it will inspire guys like the one she used to be, whom she asks not to name in order to avoid confusion.

‘A lot of people have commented over the years that they saw this and it helped influence their decision. It’s sweet,’ she said.

The input moves her not just as a trans woman, but also as a journalist: ‘As a piece of work, recording something authentic and true, I think it’s the best I’ll ever do.’