GenderBendy

That lady moving on the face

Today during a walk on Mackworth Island I overtook a grandfatherly-looking man pushing a toddler in a stroller. They were walking the same direction I was but had stopped to look at something. The kid was probably two, just old enough to start narrating the world. I waved and smiled, and the kid said "That lady is walking." Then as I continued on they followed me and the kid kept talking about me, each time starting with "That lady..."

My goodness, don't we start young gendering each other. But on the other hand, how satisfying to be instantly and correctly gendered by such a guileless morsel of humanity.

Moments like this notwithstanding, last week I engaged seriously for the the first time with the possibility of facial feminization surgery. I don't mean that I've decided to do it, just that I've started deciding whether to do it. Specifically, I have hired a professional photographer to take six pictures of my face according to the exact specifications of a person in England who does virtual FFS with Photoshop. This person has taken great pains to learn exactly what is possible, so the pics I get back will give me a detailed and realistic idea of what I might be able to accomplish.

I haven't moved on the face before because I am afraid of how hard those pics might set me aching again, but with SRS successfully accomplished I guess I'm ready to take that chance. Sweet friends tell me I'm beautiful, and I'm passing passing passing, but I can still see man-face in the mirror, and I hate it. Regardless of what anyone else says or thinks, I have made myself a simple promise: after the long hard gender-road I've travelled, if I decide I really want this, I get to have it. 

If I decide to move ahead it will mean surgeon-research, deciding what combination of procedures to have done, and wrestling with the money issue. Could be some years off still, or could happen quickly, depending on circumstances.

I'll post the pics when I get them - early June maybe. Until then that lady will be counting the days, trying not to check her e-mail too absurdly often, and bracing for the possibility of a further bout of severe dysphoria. Que sera sera. 

Ex-trans?

Sooo...am I trans any more? I've been wondering, because I haven't been thinking about it nearly as much as I did before the surgery. My brain is full of work and parenting and the puzzle and gift of the future. My heart has been processing "Goodbye soon, youngest offspring," and "Hey I'm getting older what the fuck?" Meanwhile, I'm a middle-aged woman who helps run a community radio station. I have begun to feel unremarkable in a way I have never felt before, or at least no more remarkable than anyone else. By this age we've all been through some strange trials, and being trans has been one of mine. Has been? Is? Which tense should I use?

The big difference since the surgery is that the dysphoria's gone. The surgery worked. Yes, including in the sense of, now I have workable female genitalia, but that's not the main point. The main point was to get rid of the squirmy outrage every time I stood naked in front of the mirror. Now when I stand naked in front of the mirror I see a body I can work with, a body that fits. Yes. Good. Thank you. At last. And, hey, was that mole there before? I better watch that.

This mirror-relief feels most solid from the neck down. From the neck up is still more complicated. Sometimes I see a face I can work with, and sometimes old man-face pops back in, and I get a jolt of the old squirmy outrage. Only a jolt, though, and it's going to take sustained and violent squirminess to get me under the knife again. We'll see.

The other day at work I was updating my planner and suddenly burst into a laugh. "What?", asked a couple of pledge drive volunteers who happened to be there. "Um, it's private," I said. "But now we'll be wondering," they said, so I read aloud the notation I had forgotten I had made back when I was mapping out the stages of recovery from surgery: "Sex if I want." Yep, I'm cleared for active duty.

So, do I want?

Well, not with any of these guys who send me one-sentence e-mails on OKCupid. The most eye-roll inducing line: "I've never had sex with a tran before." But, sure, I would like to start keeping company with a nice masculine person, if I can find one who would enjoy that too, and fucking could certainly be part of that, even though I'm still not orgasmic post-surgery. I long to be skin-to-skin with someone again. It has been too long, and too seldom all my life long, and never when I was at home in my own body. I badly need some skin time.

"If I can find one." There's the rub. I have joined the great eternal chorus of lonely middle-aged women looking for love, which is tough even when you didn't used to have a penis. So, it could be a long wait. 

Perhaps over the years my transness will slowly fade into deep background, become a thing to have slip out accidentally and without import several months into new friendships...oh, yeah, didn't you know? I used to have a male body. Really? Huh. Anyway, as I was saying... I hope so. In the meantime, when I turn out toward the world my transness is still in my mind, and still evidently in the minds of people I interact with. So, yeah, I might be close to done transitioning, but I am still trans.

Night thoughts

10p
"Bonne nuit," l'infirmière a dit. "Good night," said the nurse, making it a gentle teasing command as well as a courtesy, and she turned off all the lights and closed the door. The orderly tiptoed in five minutes later to empty the bulging catheter bag, as Lisa had expressed carefully light anxiety about its fullness to the nurse. She had learned fast to grab her chances to ask for what she needed and to do it in ways least likely to piss anyone off. The art of being a proactive patient...tonight it had also earned her oatmeal cookies for a bedtime snack, the time to brush and floss and have the kidney tray of spit be emptied after, a third pillow, and the hand-cranking of the old-fashioned hospital bed back to flat.
Lisa had also made the split-second decision to answer the "any pain?" question with a no, trading comfort for clarity of mind. Time for more one-finger typing - her chosen coping mechanism. But then, feeling sleep come on, she set the phone aside, confident that she would be awake again before daylight, and in fine condition to do justice to her chosen title.
***
1130p
Stent, dressing, drain, catheter, ice packs: like being fucked by a frozen robot. Lisa gave in and called for pills. Oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opioid with a moderate to high risk of dependency. So be it. The hard stuff while she could get it. Waiting for the warm wash of the drug she tried an experiment: nipples still wired to anything down there? They had been before, especially the right one...future lovers take note. Hmm...hard to tell so early, but not nothing. Definitely not nothing. Who said being fucked by a frozen robot couldn't be hot?
***
330a
Morphine dreams...Lisa jerked awake when she heard the patient in the next bed bark "house!", whatever sound she actually made. And she thought: so, I guess I'm really a woman now, huh?
No. Not in any way I was not before, anyway. In fact, since the operation I have been feeling more mannish than I have in years. I feel like Dave again. What the fuck is up with that?
Partly circumstance...the lack of opportunities, weirdly, to see myself in a mirror...unisex gown and the difficulty of shaving...being with a sister whom I see rarely enough that this is the first time I have felt that we were sisters together. But, also, now that it is absolutely clear that I am not and can never again be physically male, I feel free to act more male again. I was groping for this idea in my last post when I wrote about turning to the world with love in a new way.
I still plan to get the perm and second ear-piercings I planned for the weeks of recovery, both as treats and as visible signs of change to give folks something else to talk about besides my genitals. I'm not done playing with femme yet; but there may yet be stone-butch daddy times ahead too, or who knows what.
What I have done this week, it turns out, is engage in a radical gender-active form of body modification. The penis and testicles had to go. The new parts could turn out to be lots of fun, but they do *not* define me. Rather, they position me at a safe and natural starting place for further gender inquiry. If I am genderqueer, which is entirely possible, maybe the only reason I couldn't say so until now is because I needed to approach it from a fundamentally femme stance.
I am still so not done.

Genderqueer conversations

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with three fascinating people who identify outside the gender binary. Jules, Lyndon, and Taffy challenged my preconceptions and broadened my perspectives about gender in the same way that I hope my transsexualism challenges and broadens my cisgendered friends' and relatives' preconceptions and perspectives. Our conversations resulted in an article in the summer 2012 edition of Out In Maine, which can be viewed here. (Note this link takes you to a browsable on-line mockup of the magazine; the article starts on page 24.) Happy reading! :-)

In suspense

...to go until surgery, and I hang suspended between an old unsustainable life and a new unguessable one. It’s a squirmy time, seldom comfortable, but I feel a deep sense of rightness. Yes, it is drastic what I am about to do, but it is the right choice for me. Or the right gamble: there is no way to know what it will be like until it is done, and once it’s done there’s no turning back.

I also hang suspended between two fundamental modes of sexuality - yang and yin, out and in. I have to stop taking hormones next week, so the accoutrement, which the estrogen has rendered more or less inert for the past two years, will be once again serviceable, and I could, if I wanted, try to find someone to help me take it for one last spin. Last chance to be the one with the phallus. I’ve thought of it more than once...but, nah. The last several times I tried it felt awful, and once I thought I was going to die. I’m already *so* done with that.

Then there is the other half: soon I will have a vagina. By fall sometime I will be allowed to seek a moment, if I want, where the other person is the one with the phallus, and I am the one with the yielding inwardness. I haven’t the least clue what that will be like. I think it might be wonderful, but I can’t imagine. I will own to a slow-waking but powerful curiosity.

What I’m mostly looking forward to is the end of certain ongoing outrages. I look forward to the eradication of the unsightly bulge. I look forward to arousal without tumescence. I look forward to the permanent decrease in testosterone level: my body may become softer still, curvier still; more body hair may melt away; my face may become a bit more feminine. Oh, yes please, to all of these.

With arrangements pretty much made for this surgery, the implacable wanting part of my mind stirs again, and I find myself at odd moments already mulling the next step - breast augmentation? Facial surgery? Which first? How soon? Want want want want.... Dysphoria: proof that something can be intensely uncomfortable and incredibly boring at the same time. No fucking fun. I'm re-instructing myself about how important it is to take it slow.

It’s odd how big this step turns out to be. Afterwards I won’t look any different clothed, which is all anyone has seen for the past few years. I won’t sound any different. My mind will be the same (I assume, mostly). My daily life should be pretty much the same. Not like changing my name and pronouns, which altered every single social interaction. So what’s the big deal?

Well, on the personal level, I will have abjured maleness forever, in a way I have not yet; and the strong sense I have had for the past few years of romance and sex being on hold will be gone. That should be interesting.

Beyond that, I wonder about further social change. It’s a running joke in trans circles how often people ask or seem to want to ask, “Have you had the surgery yet?” Let’s push past the assumption of casual nosy prurience for a minute and look harder at that: people really seem to care. I get this sense of blunt atavistic sexual dynamics moving under our civilized veneers - alpha and beta, dominance and submission, the fucking and fuckable. For better or worse I am transitioning publicly: people will know I no longer have a penis or testicles. It will be fascinating to see how I am treated and how I feel in the world when that is true.

There is a third level of change: what I will call, for lack of a better word, the spiritual. My spirituality is not God-centered; it is based rather on a vision of existence as an elusive ever-evolving mystery and joy and beauty blooming out of the tension and play between fundamental opposites: all the colors between black and white; the spiral between straight line and circle; the evanescent present between the lost past and unknowable future; mortal life between eternal being and nothingness. If I do have a concept of God it is of one single Particle of Being which traces an impossibly complex path at an impossible-to-conceive speed through the infinity of empty space, leaving behind the afterimage of all that is, including us - and then existence consists of the God-particle being both there and not there at every point at every time, in an all-encompassing dance of paradox.

In this spiritual view, masculinity and femininity can perhaps be seen as opposite sides in a human form of this cosmic dance, as a being and nothingness each of which yearns towards the other, defines the other, completes the other. I'm not sure I completely subscribe to this formulation; and I also wonder whether it matters, or even makes sense, to say which one one is. Still, it feels natural to me to approach the dance from a feeling of what I understand “yin” to mean, and I know that to do so brings me joy.

 

Five weeks to go, and a shiny new metaphor

...surgery and counting. I have just finished paying for it, taking an exchange rate hit in the process. Oh well. The pre-surgery tests are done, though there’s still the task of making sure the results have gotten to the clinic. And of course, there’s always the chance that the tests will show something wrong. I feel healthy, but I’m not going to stop worrying about some last-minute monkeywrench until the deed is done.

I’ve secured my extended leave time at work, with a sense of gratitude to my boss, Jim, who mentioned ruefully that I might need to make special arrangements in advance. If he hadn’t spoken I would have blundered into trouble when I naively tried to enter six weeks of sick time through the regular timesheet system. Thanks Jim; I think perhaps you thought you were giving me bad news, but it has turned out well.

There’s even this thing where after two weeks I can start claiming short-term disability on top of my sick pay. I’ll actually be making more staying home than when I’m working. I’ve checked twice, and it’s above board. In fact, it was my hr person who told me about it. This strikes me as very odd, but I’ll take it, thanks, as a chance to get back a little of what I’m paying out of pocket on account of the surgery not being covered by insurance.

Arrangements for coverage at work and help at home are coming together. I picked summer on purpose; no trainings to conduct. I’m teaching Ross, a wonderfully adept workstudy student, to keep things together while I’m gone. We get along well because our levels of compulsiveness about details match exactly. Just one notch shy of OCD, and so what if we are - what’s wrong with that, huh? Huh? You trying to make a point? (Um, could you please brush that one hair into place? It's bugging me...)

In a few weeks it will be time to stop hormones - there’s a three-week buffer zone because the estrogen increases the risk of blood clots. By the time my sister Sus and I start driving north, my estrogen and testosterone levels will be back to normal middle-aged male levels. One last round of male sexual response, hair growth, aggressiveness...a necessary evil. I will endure it, because it means soon I'll be rid of the detesticles forever.

The biggest task left is waiting. There are still details to track and supply shopping to do, but overall things are falling into place. (Touch wood.) For a little treat I bought myself a book of Rachmaninoff preludes so I’ll have something new to practice (sitting on my toroidal pillow) while I recuperate. And, I have re-read the descriptions of preparation, surgery, and aftercare, wanting to really understand what I’ll be going through. Some of it sounds harrowing, but it doesn’t matter. I have to avoid thinking about how badly I want this, because I need to stay sane and functional.

On a completely different subject, I’ve been puzzling for a long time about the best metaphor for where and who I was during the long male time. The obvious first choice was prison: a cell in the mind. I’ve used it and it’s useful, but it’s also clichéd and not quite right - I wasn’t locked away, just elusive, obscured. Exile? Kinda works, but also not right. Mask? Projection on a screen from a secret place in my inner dark? I’ve used them all, but I’ve not been satisfied...until now. I have a shiny new metaphor of which I am foolishly fond.

I was dutiful and obedient. I took a vow of silence, and then dedicated my life to service to an exalted external masculine ideal. I disappeared completely into the task, glimpsed only at rare intervals as a flicker of the selfless doer behind the good works. So, not a prisoner, not an exile. Nope. Sister Lisa. I was a gender nun.

 

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.

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 a day and counting

I recorded the following audio file on my hand-held flash recorder during my commute the morning after posting the last post. It's a rebuttal of sorts, or a next step which, in retrospect, I was still working on when I wrote that last post. 

3 years and a day

 Since I made this recording it has further occurred to me that "please yourself" can mean both "strive to reach your own standards," and simply "try to get what you really want," and I have been experiencing a curious new sense of freedom from worry about what other people think and expect of me. Perhaps a major step...the changing of a lifelong mental habit of existing in a perpetual state of anxiety to please others...hmm, we'll see.

 

Got my surgery date

There’s a notation in my planner book now, on the monthly spread for next June, in the box for Wednesday the 27th: “SRS.” In 263 days Drs. Brassard and Bélanger in Montréal will fashion, from my present redundancies, sophisticated simulacra of a vagina and clitoris.

It has been harder coming to this decision than I thought it would be. I don’t mean fear of the knife, or anxiety about money, though I’m experiencing both. I mean emotionally. Both the need I feel to do this and the loss it turns out to entail rise out of deeper places in the psyche than I was expecting.

Need. I feel like I’m over-dramatizing when I say it, but it’s true: I can’t stand to look at myself naked in the mirror any more. I either keep my panties on, or cover with a hand. It's hard to pin down the right word for how I feel now about the original accouterments. Hate is not quite right. Disgust? No, that’s not quite right either. I don’t repulse myself. Outrage? Yes, that’s closer. Fresh, each time. What, still!? No! Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong! Those have GOT to go!

Another thing: I can’t conceive of being naked with another person until I get this done. I don’t want anyone to see me, and I don’t want anyone to want me for a thing from which I feel so estranged. Until my body is closer to right, the only choice which feels safe is to hold myself apart from all others. But oh, I am so fucking lonely. I have run up a 40 years’ deficit of loving and being loved as a feminine being, and I am eons beyond sick of it. Words fail. Just...fuck.

And, loss. With every big transition step - revelation, coming out, starting hormones, name change, going full time - I find myself grieving all over again for all time I have lost, and also battling through another round of anger at the random unfairness of it all. I am so weary of “If only...” and “Why me?”, but I don’t seem able to avoid them. And don’t forget, “I want my Mommy!” At each step I also seem to have to grieve all over again for my parents. Part of it is that I ache to show them who I really am...but mostly, in the defenseless way of a hurting child, I just want them, want their love. Again: fuck.

One sort of bright spot: going through this wringer so often, I'm getting better at it. I'm becoming an emotional-processing virtuosa. Tra la, hooray for me.

Then there is the loss my transition is inflicting on my children...which, after numerous attempts, I find I cannot write about right now. What I can say: That I love them, and that I always will. That I will never stop doing my best to parent them. That I’m sorry. That I’m so incredibly proud of them. That they are my life’s greatest joy.

As usual, I have questioned, challenged, second-guessed my resolve; and as usual, the proof is in action. I’ve held steadily to my purpose through all the steps so far. I’ve done my research and chosen my surgeons. I’ve paid professionals to certify that I am in my right mind. I’ve figured out how to take the money out of my retirement account. (Another truly bright spot: it appears I will avoid the penalty for early withdrawal because I’ll have allowable medical expenses exceeding 7.5% of my income in the same year...a savings of a couple thousand.) And, I’ve made a first withdrawal for a down payment. Still to come: getting a passport, arranging to exit my life for three weeks, estate planning just in case, a battery of pre-surgery tests...waiting...and then, a ride from a friend.

I’ll still be able to change my mind up until the moment the anaesthesiologist comes to sedate me. Who knows, I might; but I don’t think so.