GenderBendy

Time to go home

Last night in the garden there was a barbecue for the staff, because the patients who had their surgeries this week are the last batch before the clinic closes for a long summer break. The surgeons and nurses and housekeepers and other support staff laughed and drank wine and sang karaoke. Someone did a really good cover of CCR's "Rollin' on the River." In the early part of the evening, while it was still light, I was rubbernecking from the porch and saw that Dr. Bélanger, who was wearing a sun-dress and flip-flops, has a biohazard symbol tattooed in the middle of her back. 

I finally got to see my new parts completely yesterday when the last impediment - and my last remaining anxiety - was removed: a small wad of gauze stuck to a (perfectly common, normal) blood clot in the minutely-sutured clitoral area. I had been warned that as long as the wad was there, there was danger of threads from it ending up inside me during dilation, which could lead to infection. Patsy, the head nurse, worked patiently with a squeeze bottle of saline and a pair of tweezers, and finally succeeded in removing it. It was a pleasure to watch her work. Without exception, everyone who works here is really good at their jobs.

It transpires that I have had successful SRS at one of the best clinics for the procedure in the world. My results are amazing. In a few months, when the swelling and bruising are gone, the hair has grown out again, and the end of the douching regimen has allowed the development of natural flora, I will have a vagina which appears to all five senses so much like a natural-born one that not one of my hundreds of lovers will be able to tell the difference. I will be orgasmic - maybe even significantly more so than most natural-born women, it has been whispered -  and at least a little self-lubricating. I have a work of art between my legs.

I'm being driven back to Maine today by my dear friend Jessica, and my brother Brian is flying out and will be there when I arrive to stay the first few days home with me, just in case I get light-headed or need help digging a swimming pool. After he goes home I'll have the house to myself for several days; I have a couple of writing projects lined up and a new piano piece to practice, and various friends who have promised visits.  The next week my dear spawn return in the usual childcare rotation. Mad's girlfriend Annu, whom I adore, is visiting from Finland. No school, few stressors...summer in Maine with company! I'm back to work on August 6th.

All of which will need to be fit in between lots and lots of surgical after-care; the routine consumes several hours a day in the first few months.

In the fall and beyond, besides work, I'm looking forward to engaging with son Sam's senior year in high school, moving those writing projects forward, helping with the fight to win marriage equality in Maine in November, and playing more music. I'm trying to decide whether I have the time and the courage to sign up as an accompanist for the student-recitalists at the USM music schools. Oh, joy, something else to feel anxious excitement and anticipation about...and it has nothing to do with gender! :-)

With regards to transition, I'm still not done, but I have new ideas about how much more I am going to do. Electrolysis will definitely continue until my beard is gone, and I'm not done working on voice. Also, I get to resume hormones when I get home tonight, which, with the natural testosterone now gone, may still have further desirable effects. The remaining open questions are FFS, facial feminization surgery, and breast enhancement. I've spend a lot of time this week with women who have had both, and at the moment of this writing, I'm still 50-50 on FFS and only ten percent probable on breasts. In both cases, a really natural outcome is just so hard to achieve. At some point, more homework will begin.

The question is different. What I have done here in Montreal is fix a fundamental problem: I had a penis I hated, and now I have a vagina I love. I already have a face and breasts, so there is no absolute - only a tangle of conflicting desires and ideas around concepts of beauty and femininity. This much I know: as I have all along, I will be doing my homework, taking it slow, and only moving ahead on steps I feel I must take in order to live as myself in the world.

I will end this part of my SRS blogging project with a random funny moment from my time at Asclépiade: the routine for dilation involves fishing the phallic utensil of the moment out of its bath of antibiotic solution, then holding it over the container so that the solution can drip. There's always one drop that won't fall, and when the dilator is too wet the lube slides off. So, innovating the other day, I came up with the technique of gripping the priapus firmly at the base and shaking it to air-dry it faster. "Pardon me whilst I waggle my dildo at you," I thought, and burst out laughing in the empty room.

Sometimes even really big important things go right. :-)

The Lobster

I have become nocturnal. Last night's adventure in gritty overnight verismo blogging led to napping all day today, and now it's 11pm and I am as awake as I have been all day. That's fine, because the computer is free! Ten-finger typing! This blog post is going to be airy and light because it is being typed about twenty times faster than the last two. And just to give a complete picture: I am dressed in a nightgown and bathrobe, and am kneeling on a folded towel in front of a nice little hardwood desk in a well-appointed living room. One of the many cool things about this aftercare residence is everyone's complete acceptance of all sorts of dress, walking, sitting, and doing, at all hours of the day and night.

I have a new room and a new roommate, named Cat. She's cool - a tattooed ex-musician DJ with three kids, two of whom are just about the age of mine. I finally busted through the weird calm I have been feeling and cried listening to her tell her daughter on the phone what a great kid she is and how much she loves her...and I am totally tearing up again as I type this. Tomorrow - talk to the children. We've fb'ed, but it's not the same as voice to voice, and I *am* going to blub like a baby. Mad, Sam, if you read this before we talk, brace yourselves. I am so incredibly proud of you, and your response to my turning out to be a woman. Hell of a curve ball, as I've said before, to toss into anyone's adolescence, and we've had a few bumpy patches, but that was mostly me. You have behaved with consumate grace and aplomb, and taught me important teachings, and I am more happy to be your father/parent/mother/whatever than anything else in my whole life ever. I love you with all my heart, and that's for always.

OK. Pause to blow nose...

I think the vibe here must change each week with the comings and goings of new batches of patients. The current batch, as a group, has a lot of humor and attitude...meals are raucous, with multiple conversations going on in French and English. Some quieter people seem to be choosing to eat around the corner at the little wicker tables in the foyer. The staff seem sometimes harried, but in all good-humored and alive to their patients. It's a happier, more communal feel than the hospital. Other things which are better: the food, cooked fresh each meal; the beds, with remote controls on long cords; and (I think I've got the name right) Yvonne, a former patient become semi-official den mother to the house. In ten minutes of confiding and cheerfully bossy chat she taught me and Cat more about what the rest of this is *really* going to be like than all the official prep.

One thing I could do without: two loudly ticking clocks in the bedroom. Ah well.

I'm getting sore, and so must wrap. The key point I wanted to get across: this surgery turns out to be a huge tease. I have *not* seen my new parts yet, and will not for several more days. They will be revealed in slow (and often uncomfortable) stages, the first of which I will encounter on Sunday: the removal of the surgical dressing. Yvonne told us the proper name for it. It's The Lobster, because that's exactly what it looks like - this red ribbed thing crouching in all our crotches. Ew and incredibly cool at the same time. There's a whole other new life under that...I am getting eager to see.

Countdown, contra, pool hall encounter

So I’ve gotten all fancy with my entries and have forgotten to simply document. Here are some things which have been happening.

Surgery countdown continues. It’s 56 days away as of this typing - June 27th. As you can see, I am counting the days. I’m eager and scared and determined and curious, all at once. There has been a long wrangle about how to pay for it without impacting my children’s college funding, but I think I’ve figured that out. I’m getting pre-surgery tests soon, and arranging for various kinds of assistance I’ll need before, during, and after - a ride up, a ride back, a ride back to the airport for one of my rides. It’s complicated, but just the sort of detailed planning I’m good at. I’ll be taking five or six weeks off from work...and then life will go on.

I can’t imagine the outcome. I mean, really, I can’t. I move forward based on my fervent desire to get rid of the present accoutrements. It is enduringly unpleasant to feel estranged from parts of your own body.

I went contra dancing a few weeks ago, my first time approaching this particular gendered activity from the female side. I was anxious and it was hot, so after the first dance I began to sweat. The hormones have made it so that I don’t stink the way I used to, but still, it was embarrassing - my bangs plastered to my forehead. In the ladies’ room I poked at them in the mirror, and, forgetting myself for a moment, made a vexed remark in more or less my old male voice. A woman just coming out of a stall gave me a second look, but then went on her way. Aside from that moment, I didn’t see any of the double-takes or knitted brows or eyebrow-jumps or face-freezes I have learned to recognize as being read.

It was fun taking hands and being swung and spun by all those different men. It wasn’t sexual at all, but it was physical and gendered all the same. One guy lifted up my arm to spin me and I spun him instead. “Sorry,” he said, looking confused. Next time I go, I’ll work on letting go into following more. And I’ll dress less warmly. This time around I couldn’t resist wearing my new long-sleeve dress, to feel as femme as possible.

The other vignette I've been saving to narrate is an encounter with a man, a stranger. This was at Racks, a tavern on St. John St. in Portland, where I have started stopping some evenings on my way home from work to play pool. I had a table to myself and had worked my way through a couple games of 8-ball, playing both sides, when a male voice spoke behind me, asking if I was alone. I turned and looked. He was maybe 56 or so, tall and large-chested, tan, with coiffed white hair. He wore a sweatshirt and shorts, showing off muscular calves. His face was open and his eyes intent. He was shooting pool alone too - would I like to play? I said yes. We introduced ourselves and shook hands. The question of which of us would give up our table hung in the air. “It’s fine,” I said, not realizing until later what an eyeroller of a line it was. “I’ll turn in my balls.”

Bruce and I played two games before I had to leave to pick up the boy. He watched me in a steady searching way and complimented my better shots. He was a good player - not smashing the balls, as so many male players do, but finessing his leaves. He won both games, though we got down to the lone eight in the second. I liked his soft-spokeness and seeming gentleness. I also liked that he played for real. He didn't ease up or condescend.

Did I find him attractive? Yes. Was I in a tizzy? Only a little, and mostly because I hadn’t shaved since morning, so in strong light what remains as yet un-electrologized of my stubble would have been visible to him. I was also self-conscious about my voice, but then I'm always self-conscious about my voice. Overall I felt cautiously at ease. I’ve learned that once people have read you as one gender or the other, they tend to stick with that read. (One time last year after an hour-long workshop at a conference which I conducted in pretty much my old male vocal tones, a woman participant told me she loved my voice. “It’s so deep - you sound like Lauren Bacall.”)

Mostly I wasn’t in a tizzy because my experience from dating sites is that even decent kind thoughtful men are generally not interested once they know I’m trans, so I don’t get my hopes up. I work on the assumption that when it comes time to have that conversation (and I lean toward having it early in an acquaintance), that will be the end of any possible romance. Of course, it will take only one good man to prove I’m wrong about that, so I do hope a little. Not that it’s guaranteed that I’ll end up with a male partner, but I am definitely interested and curious.

After he sank the eight the second time I said I had to go and we shook hands. I said maybe I'd see him there again sometime, and he said he was from out of town, travelling, and only visited a few times a year. He leaned a little forward as he said this and let a silence open out and I sensed an opening, an opportunity to offer companionship. I would not have taken it even if I could - I had had enough novelty for one night. We shook hands again. There was the awkwardness which bespeaks mutual attraction. As my daughter would say, herp derp.

I was at Racks again earlier tonight and wondered if maybe he had left me a message at the bar, but apparently not. Bruce, I doubt we’ll ever meet again, but thank you for making me feel attractive and womanly. I liked you.

Other things have been going on - some expensive rejected insurance claims for hormone testing, which I’m trying to get covered, and some fruitful counseling with my son - but I don’t feel like writing about them at length right now. Maybe some other time. A sporadic irrational sense of doom aside, things are going pretty well. Half the days or maybe even more, I feel at least somewhat optimistic. Not bad.

 

Maine's Transgender Revolution video

I'm turning 50 next Tuesday. If I figure out what that means, you can be sure I'll post about it. ;-)

In the meantime, video is now available online of a panel discussion I recently helped put together about the past, present, and future of the trans experience in Maine. The panel was presented by the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine on March 21st, 2012, on the USM Portland campus, and it went really well. My fellow panelists - Margaret Cook, Jamie-Lynn Emma Kane, and Alex Roan - were all excellent, sharing personal stories and general insights in a wide-ranging conversation which was variously funny, touching, profound, and inspirational. We also had some wonderful input from the audience.

Links:  Part One  Part Two

Brief personal viewing notes: I hate my voice still. I have *got* to do something about that. But, I thought I rocked the dress pretty well...panel day turned out to be the first really warm day of spring I anticipated in this post.

Anyway, if you decide to check any of the video out, happy viewing! :-)

Got the letter

There it was, at long last, in the mailbox on Monday - a big manila envelope with “Montreal” as part of the return address. I’ve been bracing for it for a couple of months now, thinking each day as I drive up to the boxes, “This could be it.” Well, this was it. Final decision time. Make the down payment and go through with the surgery, now less than four months away, or put it off.

On Tuesday I freaked. I melted down in the morning while wrangling the boy to school, then walked on Wells beach and sobbed. (I had the whole beach to myself, though it was a gorgeous spring-like morning.) The source of my anguish was a sudden powerful resurgence of a fear that going ahead with the surgery now would cause permanent psychological damage to my teenage son.

Actually, that’s understated. On Tuesday I caromed helplessly between black guilt and last-breath desperation to live. I forgot all about the possibility of a both-and outcome. Doom. Catastrophe. Dire dilemma. I felt that I had to either give up my life, or kill my child.

I cried some more in the beach parking lot, stopped to wash my splotchy face in the grocery store bathroom so I could bear to show it at Borealis when I stopped for a medicinal scone, and continued on to work. Then I made a good choice: I e-mailed Sarah, who is smart and Queer and who seems to have a greater capacity than most for the serene fielding of other people’s psychodrama. We met for coffee, and I poured out my confused jumble of hypertrophied emotion while she listened. The first words out of my mouth were “I may be projecting...” No, you think?

Here’s what I’ve figured out, talking to Sarah and pondering since: all my life I have had this powerful irrational fear that if I was ever fully myself, it would kill the people I love. I can feel the reverberations of it going back to earliest childhood. One of my pop-psych novelistic imagination theories is that when I was two or three I terrified myself into internal exile with the intensity of a murderous rage I felt toward my little brother, that...that BOY who had usurped my parents’ love.

Did I reach a little hand through the bars of his crib to cover his mouth and nose and snuff out his life? Did I then recoil in horror and self-loathing from the act I had momentarily contemplated? Was that the end of any chance I might have had to articulate my gender truth for years and years to come? Was I, in sum, a little girl too fierce, too headstrong, and too overwhelmed by her own ungoverned passions, to face living in the world? It all feels, if not literally, then psychologically true.

So Tuesday seems to have been an echo-spasm of the same complex of elemental feeling which was the source of my forty years of self-repression. Even as I talked to Sarah, the intensity of the feelings drained away. The last thing I said, in a bemused and wondering tone, was, “Can I really do this? Really?” And Sarah offered “Yes,” and hearing someone else say it like that, I knew it was right. (Sarah, thank you again for listening.)

Not that my son is thrilled about any part of my gender transition, but he’ll survive. We’ll all survive. I’ll be making that down payment, because I have finally figured out that I can be female without killing anyone. For me, that still counts as a bona fide revelation. What a fucking bizarre life.

That old male feeling

This morning I dreamed that my mother, alive again, had just survived an attack of acute appendicitis. My sister and brother and I flew to the hospital to see her. (In this dream I was a man again, as I still often am in dreams.) We found her in a wheelchair - in the gift shop, oddly - looking old and frail and grim. My sister greeted her, and my brother stood and was seen, but it was only when I knelt and she embraced me that she cried, and I knew it was because now that her eldest son was there to be strong for her, she could let go.

In this dream I again inhabited a specific psychological/emotional state which I used to experience all the time. In this state my shoulders, lower back, and jaw all clench slightly, not with anxiety, but readiness, and I feel tall and solid. Any sense of my own vulnerability or need goes away. I take a stoic breath and hold it, bracing to receive the impact of whatever hurt, my own or others’, I am about to absorb. And, I take a lofty detached pleasure in my own ability to endure. I feel noble.

I have always thought of this state as my personal version of the essence of maleness.

I think now it was this feeling I was referring to when, in the same journal entry back in November of ‘08 in which I first wrote “I just want to be a girl,” I also wrote “I am so sick of being strong.” I now read “sick of” not only as “weary of,” but also as “ailing on account of”, which provides another entry on the ever-growing list of possible answers to the question: why break free now, after so many years? How about, because I had played the selfless noble man role for so long that I was starting to die inside?

Yes. So, for the past three years I’ve rejected this noble man feeling as a part of an old bad way of living which was killing me.

But, I’ve also missed it. It was one of a small number of things I really liked, and which I thought was valuable, about being a man. Also, I have been struggling to find a definition of femininity which doesn't involve some form of weakness; but still, consumed as I have been by the crucial business of figuring out who I am as a woman, I had to push the man-feeling away.

Just recently, though, I have started to feel safe turning back toward that old male time and selectively reclaiming parts of it, and in that spirit I have been experimenting with reclaiming some form at least of that old sense of male strength. it’s more complicated, though, than just saying, OK, I’m calling that old mode "womanly" now. It’s not. Besides, there are aspects of who I have been becoming I definitely want to include in my revamped definition of strength: my impulse to nurture, my sense of resonating to the feelings of others like a sympathetic string, the way I’ve been able to let go into life as an emotional being...the power of flirting, even. These are forms of femininity which feel natural and good to me and which I plan to keep, thank you very much.

So, can one do both?

Well, the other day I was having a meeting with a volunteer at work, and for whatever reason she had a small emotional meltdown. Her lip began to tremble and the tears came. In response I felt that old noble tension come into my shoulders, that impulse to squelch my being and take her pain onto myself, whatever it was. I took the accustomed stoic breath...but then I let it out again. I’ve been practicing not holding my breath, and unclenching all those old male muscle groups too. “It’s OK, honey, I know how it is,” I said, which, by golly, I do. I melt down routinely now, every couple of weeks - usually in decorous private, but not always. I fetched her some tissues and then sat with her, breathing and relaxed, until she felt ready to go on. 

I found a hybrid strength and helped someone - yay! And, it didn’t cost me my soul. Does that sound melodramatic? Yeah, maybe...but if you can’t feel the truth behind it, you don’t understand trans. Change or die, literally or figuratively, my friend Dar said recently. Yeah, that’s right. Change or die. 

But, maybe, you don’t have to discard everything from that old life. Both-and, darling. These days I’m all about both-and.

Daddio forever

My dear children whom I love more than anything,

In December I asked you to come up with something else to call me besides “Daddio,” and to start using female pronouns when talking to me and about me. Then I pushed you, hard. I did it because each year before Christmas for many years I have grieved all over again for my mother’s death and yearned desperately for the acceptance I will never get from her. I was feeling extremely needy, and in my need I turned to you. That was a parenting fail. It is not your job, at this stage in your lives, to parent me, nor, for that matter, to play any role for anyone, no matter how much you love them. It is your job to continue to work on figuring out who you are going to be in the world and to move toward your versions of adulthood, and it is my job to support you in your growing up. I’m back to doing that, and I’m sorry I faltered.

I withdraw my request that you stop calling me “Daddio.” That word is full of love and the history of who we have been together all through your childhood, and I don’t want to lose it or what it represents. So, I welcome “Daddio” as long as you want to keep using it...for the rest of our lives, if you want.

I do still hope that in your own time, when you feel ready, you could start using female pronouns for me, and that you will stay open to the idea of finding other new things to call me which include recognition of who I am now. I say this because while I *am* still the same dad you have always known, I am also in a real way a woman you’ve only just met. It’s like, “Um...hi. My name’s Lisa, and I’ve been lurking inside your dad all these years...actually, I *was* him, but in disguise. Now I’m standing here right in front of you as my actual self. So, anyway, um...nice to finally meet you...and, uh, I feel like baking...what kind of cookies do you want?"

Trans *is* weird, but it's a thing that can be gotten used to, and we are all such smart people and have so much love between us, I’m sure that over time we can find creative positive ways to incorporate my true gender into our family dynamic. And regardless of what you call me or what pronouns you use, I’m here for you, and I always will be. No doubt I will falter again from time to time...I’m only human...but I’m here.

Now, go finish your homework.

Love,

Daddio/Lisa/E/Zabi...etc. etc.

Insight on the holiday gauntlet

One day as the Christmas season approached Elizabeth told her 16-year-old son that she wanted him to stop calling her “Daddio.” She told him that every time he said it it felt like being punched in the stomach. Looking uncomfortable, he reluctantly agreed. The next day, she followed up: she said she was repeating the request so he knew she was serious about it, and that she also wanted female pronouns and gender words. He listened silently and did not refuse; but as the week went on he used the same masculine gender words as before, and scowled at her when she corrected him.

A few days later, when Elizabeth picked her daughter up from college, she told her that she was asking these things of her too. Her daughter, having recently claimed Queer identity herself, was more accepting, at least to talk about it, but as the days passed she avoided pronouns rather than switching to “she,” and also still said “Daddio.”

Several days went by. Elizabeth wept often, thinking of her long-dead mother, as she often did in the weeks before Christmas each year, with grief and fury and aching need for maternal comfort all balled together in a black mass...and her will to push her children to greater acceptance faltered. She couldn't see a way to back off from having pushed them without returning to the old bad man-box, but she knew it was wrong to have turned to them in her need, so driving her son to school one morning she said, “About the gender words thing...”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, wiping at his eye.

“Wait, let me finish. I think you’re going to like what I’m going to say. You have told me you can’t deal with this right now, and I’m accepting that. I’m backing off.”

“Thank you.”

That felt right, but it didn't stop the storm of pain and sadness, which loomed just as black as ever. Elizabeth held herself together in hopes of making it to her next therapy appointment...but at the appointed hour the door did not open. She waited fifteen minutes, then knocked. There had been a scheduling snafu; her therapist was seeing another patient. “I need to see you,” Elizabeth said. Text me later, said the therapist, and Elizabeth stumbled downstairs.

In her parked car she burst into wild sobs. “I want my mother!” she screamed. And, “I deserve to exist in the world! I do! I do! I deserve to exist!”...needing to say it so vehemently because of a terrible fear that it wasn’t true. Her courage and strength had failed her, and she felt as at other times at this same nadir the crushing weight of so many years of existence with self denied, of existence only through the mask of maleness, of shadow-life. She sobbed in her car for nearly an hour, then texted and asked if she could come back in, and her therapist texted back yes.

The session was oddly strained. Even in the midst of blurting out her dilemma Elizabeth sensed her therapist groping for responses...she sensed impatience, annoyance. Her therapist defended the children’s right to process in their own time, and to be parented by Elizabeth even as she struggled with her own pain, and Elizabeth agreed. But what about her own terrible need then? With time running out, the therapist said the words which Elizabeth needed to hear: “You do deserve to exist in the world.”

In a grateful rush: “Yes, thank you...I needed to hear someone say that. Thank you so much.”

“You do. You deserve to exist as Lisa you deserve to exist as Dave...”

“What? I wish you hadn’t said that last part.”

In a vehement note-to-self whisper: “I’m never going to say that name again.”

The last few minutes of the appointment were awkward, and Elizabeth left without making another appointment.

On the way home, bumped out of her rut of self-pity by irritation, Elizabeth formulated a new thought: OK, for the past twenty years I’ve been mising the presence of a mom in my Christmases...so fuck it, I’m gonna be the mom. My children can call me what they like, but what they’re getting is mothering.

She put her thought and heart into selecting presents; she cleaned; she bought herself a mixer and baked enough not only to satisfy her household’s sweet teeth, but to take plates to neighbors too; she wrapped; she played the piano while her daughter and her daughter’s girlfriend decorated the tree. In a word, for the first time in her adult life, she committed to the holiday, not as a religious nor a commercial celebration, but as the simple family gathering it had been for her when she was growing up...and the children seemed to have a good Christmas.

And, what about Elizabeth? Well, she survived. The amount of hurt she felt running the seasonal gauntlet was not less than in previous years; but in trying to make a real warm holiday happen in her own home she felt more joy in the day than ever before since her mother’s death, and she figured that counted as a victory.

Three years and counting

December is my darkest month. That was true before any of this gender business surfaced, and it’s still true. I always feel sad in December because my parents are dead and gone, and this year I’ve made a quick hard start to the annual holiday blues.
     
Besides just missing them, I want to show my parents me. I want to say to each of them: all that time, you had a daughter instead of a son, and neither of us knew it. Can you love me? It would have been the hardest question I would ever have had to ask in my whole life, but I still want to ask it. I never get to do that. Never.

A dark phrase recurs in my life: “No love for you.” I find myself saying it when I miss my parents, when I review my tragicomic romantic history, after each rejection on match.com, and when I look in the mirror and fail to imagine a masculine person I could love who might be able to see past the leftover bits of my physical maleness and love me back.

Does this purported possible partner have to be a masculine person? No...but I can’t see how to love another feminine person, because I fear her wanting me to be the masculine one, which is what I did for all those years, to my enduring pain. I don’t know if I can ever go back there. But, on the other hand, why not? Wouldn’t it be better if someone loved and wanted the whole me, including the 45 years of life as a man, which will always be part of who I am?

I. DON’T. KNOW.

I’m fucking confused, because I don’t feel any different. I feel like I felt when everyone in the world including me saw me as a man. So how am I not still a man? Or is self in essence genderless, and gender a cloak we put on when we turn to face the world?

I’m in another patch of wishing this had never happened. Not doubting...there’s no doubt. But I’m fucking sick of it. I want to stop being trans now. I want to not have to work so hard at just presenting myself to the world every day. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKF CUKF CUFKUCKUF CFKUCK UCDFKU CFKU CKLFU CLKFU XCKFU DXKFU XDLFKUS  DLFKSDUFLKLkdf get the idea?

Anyway, guess what? I’ve been self-aware as trans for three years. It was at this dark time of year in 2008 I wrote “I just want to be a girl” in my journal, from which all else has followed. I was going to work up a peppy and clever summing-up post about that, but the above is what came out instead.

There *have* been some positive developments recently. After some bureaucratic hassle I got my new passport the other day, with my new legal name and an “F” for gender. That means I can keep my consultation appointment in a couple of weeks in Montreal, in preparation for SRS this coming summer.

Also, my daughter, home from college for the holiday, told me she has started calling me her mom when she’s talking to people about me. That’s so lovely...but on the other hand, she also still calls me “Daddio.” The “Daddio” issue just sucks. It’s what both my children have always called me, and it is a word full of history and love, so I can hardly blame them for hanging onto it, but every time they say it I feel shoved back into an old bad wrong box, and it makes me wretched.

Here’s my big three-years-and-counting insight: I’m not done yet. With day-to-day living going well and my surgery scheduled, I’ve been feeling like I’ve completed something, or at least arranged for the completion...but really, everything is still in process. Helping my children come to terms, the search for love, hormonal changes, the search for a voice I can stand, electrolysis, the question of whether to get facial surgery (which I’ve been aching for again)... all still incomplete, all still happening.

I’m so fucking tired...but, here I still am, surviving a day at a time, writing, working, persevering...enduring. There is joy. I know, because I remember feeling it. I can’t access it now, but I feel pretty confident that it will be back. Meanwhile, I endure. Happy fucking December.

The Trans Explosion

The article I wrote recently for Out in Maine, the LGBT quarterly supplement to the Portland Phoenix, has been posted on line. In the article I assert that trans really seems to be *happening* right now in crucial ways, and, using local examples in Maine, explore how personal trans narratives are driving this change and vice versa. If I have piqued your interest, you can check it out here...