Dear Caitlyn,

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you should have spoken to more 65-year-old women before investing all that time and money on your transformation from male to female. You may look like a 30-something woman now, but big changes are coming your way. Let me fill you in on a few.

Those perfect boobs you have now?   They will be heading south soon and, in a few years, they will catch up with your waistline – if you have any waistline left. All those curves you have now will spread out and fill in to blend into one amorphous shape, similar to that of a sack of potatoes. It won’t happen overnight. It happens so slowly that you won’t even notice it at first.

One day, you will pull out a pair of vintage pants from the back of your closet and you won’t be able to button them. You’ll swear that they shrunk in the closet because they will be two inches too short, and when you try to pull up the zipper, you’ll get a wedgie so deep you might have to call a proctologist to access the damage.

That beautiful mane of hair on your head will start to thin out soon. And the funny thing is that while the hair on our head is thinning, the hairs on our upper lip and jaw line are multiplying rapidly. Soon your face will resemble a giant fuzzy peach.

I understand that, despite your fabulous feminine appearance, you’re still bothered by the voice thing. When you open your mouth, you still have a man’s voice that isn’t quite right – now that you look like a woman, that is. I don’t think you should trouble yourself about that. Most women in their sixties start to sound like men anyway. It’s a hormonal thing – like the hair – so that’s the one area where you’ll fit in perfectly with the rest of us gals.

How do we explain these curious metamorphoses? It’s nature’s ironic joke: As men age, their testosterone levels decrease and their estrogen levels increase. In aging women, it’s the opposite: their estrogen levels decrease and their testosterone levels increase. So men become more feminine as they age and women become more masculine.

Now you know what’s coming down the pike – as far as the bodily changes go. What I failed to mention is that by the time most women reach your age we are wizened enough to know that looks do not define what it means to be a woman. And hopefully, in the natural process of ageing – losing our youth, our radiant beauty our sex appeal, and all the things that we have grown up believing are the essence of a woman – we learn something about our inner selves and what really matters.

So, forget the estrogen shots, the plastic surgery, the airbrushed photo shoots. If you really want to know what it’s like to be an authentic 65-year old woman, join the rest of us who wear elastic waist pants, have short-layered haircuts and trim the peach fuzz off our faces every month.