GenderBendy

Almost had a date

[NOTE: I've rewritten this several times, paring down the self-pity each time until now there's none left. Yay for me. :-)]

A month or so back I dropped in on my OKCupid profile after months away, and while I was there a text box popped up. “Walt” wanted to chat. He had sent me a message some time before but it looked generic, so I hadn’t answered. I felt flattered that he was interested enough to try again, and we had a pleasant text-exchange. Further chats and messages followed.

Walt seemed nice - engaging, funny, full of compliments. There was this thing where if he didn’t want to answer a question he just ignored it, but whatever. He wanted to meet. We arranged drinks at the Great Lost Bear. The day of, he postponed. We were communicating about a second try, and then all of a sudden I stopped hearing from him.

The cutoff came after I left him a voice mail message for the first time, and I still often sound male to people on the phone, so was that why? Anyway, I spent a few days compulsively checking my messages, then weathered a day of feeling worthless and unloveable, and then it was past.

I never outright asked Walt if he understood that I’m trans, but I figured he knew because he said he had read my whole profile. Also it turned out he had just finished working at USM, so it seemed unlikely he had missed my recent public transition. Plus he said he had seen me a few times and liked what he saw.

The more I think about love, the less it seems to me to have anything to do with gender. I’m looking for a sympatico someone who might be interested in a mutual opening-toward. There’s no gender in that. As for bodies, well, what matters most to me is cuddling, and everybody has warm skin. Beyond that, if my someone wants sex, I have hardly any libido myself, but I’m comfy in my own body finally, and willing to go along with whatever.

That theory espoused, I will admit to ongoing curiousity about the possibility of a male-bodied lover. I mean, it would be a shame to never try out the new parts, right? Evidently, though, I'm not open to something casual, so...hm. Lisa the enigmasexual.

Hey Walt, no hard feelings, but you could at least have sent a last “Sorry not interested after all” message, y’know? You had me hoping, and then you left me hanging.

I never even met the guy face to face. Fucking impulsive overeager puppydog heart. No restraint whatsoever.

Four years and counting

No post in ten weeks. Bad blogger! Bad bad blogger!

Yes, I know, I'm so sorry. There can be no excuse, so I won't mention how NaNoWriMo ate my November. Nor will I note that after a point there is so much to tell that one starts feeling overwhelmed. Nor will I bring in my still-evolving ideas about where the fact of being trans fits into my life. No, I won't say any of those things.

I've had an anniversary since my last post. It was just this time of year four years ago that I finally figured out that, my whole life long, I had been getting my gender wrong. I have often quoted a line from the life-changing journal entry I wrote back in November of '08: "I just want to be a girl." It was one of the most curious moments of my life, writing that, because I realized it was true even as the pen moved over the paper. But, it is not actually the first gender-laden sentence on that journal page. A couple of paragraphs before, I wrote this:

What about the writing part? Does that come out of a feminine place in me? Is my inner child a dreamy girl? Could be.

Looking back I see now that my desire to write, which I've had since I learned to read, contributed to my gender self-repression. I remember early on feeling captivated both by the floaty self-sufficient internality of making up stories, and by the idea of being a purely detached observing eye. No wonder I was able to just hang out inside myself for so long.

Speaking of writing, in November I participated in National Novel Writing Month. Along with hundreds of thousands of other people all over the world, I wrote a 50k-word rough draft of a novel in 30 days.

All my life I have had this idea that writing had to be a solitary act, and I failed and failed as a writer. NaNoWriMo was a revelation of communal creativity. I joined a facebook group of other participants in Maine, and we encouraged and challenged each other. We had writing sprints every evening. It was glorious. I finished, and I think I have the beginning of a good saleable book which I will try to sell when I have finished rewriting. I could not have done it without my total stranger writing buddies. Yay for teamwork and community!

On a writing-related note, I'm also planning to do standup again. I had an initial good experience back in summer of 2011 performing in the Femme Show for a boisterous audience of young queers, and then got to experience what it's like to bomb at an open mic for straight people. Bombing was no fun, so I withdrew and regrouped. Now I've worked up an all new routine and am looking around for the right room to try it out in.

I think I might be good at comedy. I had an insight: it's like classical music. You carefully craft your set, practice long hours, tweak and adjust and refine...and then you step up into the light and have one chance to make it seem like you just spontaneously thought of all these jokes. I grasp this intuitively. It feels comfortable and safe to me. So, this could be fun.

BTW, if you're thinking, she just said she's getting all teamworky and communal and now she's talking about being a solo performer...what's up with that? Well, I'll tell you: the big payoff of comedy for me, I project, will not be laughs and applause, but the feeling, when it goes well, of synergy and collaboration with the audience. Comedy (like radio, my life's work) is a conversation, not a performance. Communal, social. So there.

Yes, yes, of course I want to get laughs too. :-p

What else? Oh, yeah, surgery-recovery. Not much to report, which I know must be disappointing to those among my acquaintance who seem so fascinated by the topic. It's going fine. I'm still not orgasmic, but haven't given up hope...though I'm also reconciled to the possibility of never getting that back. And I'm still a revirgin, and may remain so for quite a while, the way dating has been going, which is, it hasn't. A lot of my new comedy routine, actually, is about how uncomfortable I still seem to make most men. "Look," I'm going to say to them, "This is really simple. There's nothing to worry about. Just look at it this way: now that you know I'm trans, if you laugh at any more of my jokes, it *does* mean you're gay." 

Four years gone by, and if I had to sum up I would say, I made the right choices, and it's going well. What then will the fifth year bring? Continued transformation. These days I feel this physically as still more previously undreamed-of unclenching. For example, I have discovered that I can move my legs apart from each other right where the big femur-balls lock into the pelvis-sockets, opening up down there in a way I never have before. I have been clenched so hard my whole life I've been clenching my bones.

Same thing emotionally too. That still feels more perilous, though. Another reason besides being a writer that I repressed for so long was that I got the message early on that nobody wanted who I really was, nor the love I had to offer from within who I really was. I have a lifetime of rejection to overcome. Most days I do feel confident and strong, but deep down the insecurity still throbs, and I still feel tentative and vulnerable as I turn toward the possibility of intimacy. Tra la, here we go - life.

Oh, and the novel? It's a fantasy story for young adults about Felix Yz, a 15-year old boy who, at the age of four, because of a science experiment gone horribly wrong, was fused at the atomic level with a hyper-intelligent fourth dimensional being. The alien, whom they call Zyx, communicates with Felix by using his fingers to type. The novel takes the form of Felix's journal entries in the last few weeks before a risky (and amusingly high-tech) procedure which will either separate them again, or kill them both. It has a couple of trans characters in it, but the fact that they are trans is incidental to the story.

Which matches where I am now in my life. If I'm going to keep writing this blog, which I do want to do, I think I'm going to have to think of it not so much as a blog about being trans, but as a blog by a fascinating exciting creative sexy intensely alive woman who incidentally happens to be trans. 

I can do that. Works for me...aaand, that's my set. I'm Lisa, and you've been a fabulous audience. Good night!

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.

How to make love to a trans person

I am waaaay overdue for an update here...it has been a complicated stretch of time. I'll post soon. In the meantime, I simply *had* to instantly reblog this amazing poetry performance.

 

Fame!

Six weeks post-surgery now. Healing is going fine, I guess. No complications. I can tell that the new parts and I are going to get along all right, but they’re still no fun. The sutures over the clitoral area and the labia minora are taking forever to dissolve, the long incisions itch, I’m still too swollen to sit without a donut, my back hurts from all the awkward sitting, and the aftercare is still a lot of work: three dilations a day until the end of September, when I will be permitted to drop to two. At least in a couple weeks I get to stop douching and taking sitz baths.

I still tire easily. I returned to work full time this past week and had to take a couple of short days, as well as going next door from time to time to the Women’s and Gender Studies house ('MPG has no unencumbered horizontal space) to lie on the couch. Healing is long hard work. I hope my energy will improve soon.

Also, I still have no sexual feeling. The nerves work, but even when it's not just annoying, stimulation fails to build to anything. I may never have an orgasm again. It's funny though: when you have no desire, you don't desire desire. I *have* experienced a couple of moments of tender yearning with both male- and female-bodied acquaintances - emotional instead of physical arousal. God, I am such a girl. And sexy may still come back. I haven’t given up hope yet.

But anyway, on to the really important question: how do I *FEEL*?!

Uh. Befuddled.

Surgery has changed me. I find myself more than ever before floating serendipitously through life. Specifically, my sense of ambition has gone missing. All my life I have wanted to be famous. I have wanted to have my new book at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, or to sell out my one-woman show on a big city tour, or both. Furthermore, this wanting has had a resentful muttering tone...I'll show you, world...I may be invisible now, but someday you'll see just how fabulous I am, just you wait...gn mbl fbl ntl mbl.... I had a book proposal all ready to send out before I left for Montreal, figuring during six weeks at home I would have plenty of time to start pushing it. I haven't looked at it once. I just don't feel it.

I have two theories why:

1. With my testosterone down to almost nil, I am no longer motivated by the classic male logic that  you should strive for the big time, because if you make it you can fuck whoever you want. Even when I was in its grip this idea always felt a little icky - remember, I was always a girl underneath - but it had force in my life. Needless to say, I'm *so* glad it's gone.

2. I didn't ever actually want to be famous; I just wanted to be alive, as myself, in the world. I wanted, desperately, to be *seen*, but I was self-repressing so hard that this could only come through the filters as a muddled desire for fame. And now, hey, look, I'm Lisa, all the time, for the rest of my life. I did it. I'm here. Everyone can see me.

Sooo, what about that whole GOTTA BE A STAR thing? Um...I dunno. Maybe not so much. Sounds like a lot of work and not much fun. One thing I am clear about: from now on I want to have as much fun as possible. Fun is extremely important. There must be fun.

Of course, I could possibly have fun writing a book and/or putting together a show, and maybe I could approach the work both in a more joyous and free way, and in a more mature and detached way, because my need to express my basic being in the world would no longer be tangled up in it. And, people have hit the big time with stuff they did just for fun. Richard Adams' Watership Down started out as a story he made up for his kids. Tolkien cared so little about the bestseller list that he almost wrote The Lord of the Rings in Elvish, in which case it would still be an incomprehensible manuscript lying on a shelf in the deepest dungeon of the Bodlean, waiting for some grad student to stumble across it.

Hm, what would be fun to write? This blog is fun to write, but so far it has escaped the notice of the editors over at The New Yorker. Oh well, there are other things too...but, I don’t talk about what I’m writing, or even whether I am; it sets up pernicious structures of feeling like I’ve promised something and now have to please someone.

Please yourself, is the (for me) radical, revolutionary new concept with which I have been tentatively experimenting, after a lifetime of utter self-effacement. At the tender age of fifty I am finally trying to learn how to answer the question, "What do I want?" 

 

Quasi-spousal musings

I have a fantasy which breaks taboos central to all the families and cultural circles in which I have ever lived. To indulge in this fantasy makes me feel transgressive and afraid, because it involves desires of which, from earliest childhood on, I have been taught to feel ashamed. It also makes me cry, because I've wanted it so hopelessly for so long.

My fantasy goes like this: there's a man (or otherwise masculine person) in the other room, reading the newspaper. I am in the kitchen, making a cup of coffee for him, the way I know he likes it. I bring it in and put it on the little table by his elbow. He looks up at me and smiles and gives my hand a squeeze and says, "Thank you, my dear." I smile back and lean down for a kiss. Then I go back in the kitchen and continue cooking brunch.

Whoop whoop whoop! Feminist, queer (in the man version, anyway), and anti-conventional alarms all going off! But there it is: sometimes I think I might just like to be (except for the married part, probably) somebody's wife.

Hey, it's not bad to do sweet little things for someone you care about, even if it does look like serving them. I can't believe I have to assert that, but such has been my upbringing and my romantic history to date.

Also, I will say in my defense that this imaginary perfect husband of mine is not my lord and master. He's my partner. A minute after the above scenario ends he gets up and comes in and chops veggies for the omelets I'm making for us both. Later on we'll work in the garden together - he'll heft the flagstones I can no longer heft (my hero!). Later on again we'll have friends over for a dinner we both cook. Later on again there will be, as Joni Mitchell puts it, so much sweetness in the dark. And through it all (so my fantasy goes) he cherishes me, telling me again and again in whatever ways come naturally to him that to him I am the most beautiful, most desirable woman in the world.

In short, he is a gentleman, I am his lady, and we are in love with each other. Isn't that a pretty fantasy?

Even if I was done I fear my dreamboat will be hard to find, and I'm not done. Here's the really tricky part: this paragon is also going to have to be at ease with the fact that for nearly half a century I had a male body and lived as a man. He can't love me because of it, though...although I guess it will be OK if he appreciates my history and struggle - how could that not be part of it? (I honestly can't see yet how this part works.) In any case, he can't ever want me to be a man again, not even for one second. And he's going to have to have the patience, creativity, insight, and wit to figure out how to love a woman who for the first fifty years of her life has only ever had secret crushes. I am so inexperienced and so very skittish. Loving me will be a challenge, a conundrum, and a gamble.

Yeah, a gamble; because I do think there is a payoff. I happen to think that I have some truly out-of-the-ordinary, extraordinary love to offer to the right person - to a smart secure sympatico grownup with unconventional and discriminating taste. If you appreciate natural femininity, you'd have to look a long time to find a woman more on-purpose and joyful about her femininity than I am. There's also all this devotion I've been saving up in my secret girl heart for all these years: first-love intensity aged through long but undaunted adversity, then sparked to effervescent life by the miracle of midlife revelation and release. Some lucky someone is going to give me that first kiss. (Or, nearly first...first since the surgery. Too bad, Jasper dear, we turned out to be so romantically incompatible.) That and what follows could be fucking intense, for both of us.

Another thought: I probably know more than any other woman you've ever been with about the burdens and paradoxes of being a masculine person in the world. Who better to appreciate your natural masculinity than someone who inhabited masculinity herself for four decades?

Besides which, you'll never anywhere find a finah desinah vaginah. You're going to have to not get your undies in a knot, though, if you can never beat me at chess.

All together, my love is a curious and rare vintage at long last come to maturity and ready for decanting. Could be vinegar, could be transcendent. I wonder if anyone I'd like to try it with might ever like to try it with me. Here's cautiously hoping...

Sexytimes? Maybe even not just...

Back in December I drove up here to the clinic to consult with Dr. Brassard. It was an arduous trip; there and back again in a day, with snowy driving in the White Mountains. I had to leave very early, but I made it in time, and after a brief wait in an elegant waiting room I heard a soft masculine voice call my name.

Dr. B welcomed me into his office with continental courtesy. He was impeccably dressed, handsome, and charming - a man for whom the word "suave" would be apt and complimentary. He made polite chat for a minute, and then went into his spiel. I already knew most of it, being the sort of patient who does her homework, but one bit caught me a little off guard: the part where he knit his brows and explained that I might not have much sexual sensation after surgery. I knew about this, of course, but he seemed to feel the need to stress the point. "The pleasure might be mostly psychological," he said regretfully.

I had two reactions to this information. The first was the jolt of the instant memory of a couple of transcendently tender moments when I had felt my being melting into another's...mostly psychological? This is a warning? The second was more somber: an internal gesture of resignation. There in his office I took a deep breath and let it out again and accepted that I might never have another orgasm after the surgery. It would still be worth it...but oh, it was sad.

Well. No doubt what Dr. B said is sometimes true; but not for me. Only five days out from surgery, I have already had some very promising sensations. Shall I describe them to you in detail? OK, I shall. Warning/promise: this is gonna get graphic.

The first came the second night after surgery - a wee-hour insomniac moment of experimentation with nipple stimulation. Drugged, physically traumatized, and acutely uncomfortable as I was, I hardly expected the answering tickle under the dressings and ice, but there it was. Faint, yes, but undeniable.

A day or two later, waking from a nap, feeling warm and loose, I found my imagination straying into a romantic/erotic vein...earnest eyes and a first kiss from a certain someone I have noticed...that person's hands on my body...and I was startled by the rush of warm electricity within what really no longer feels much like the tip of my penis. It's in the wrong place, and the sensations are different too - more directly connected to the other nerves of my body. I experienced an only small and localized sensation of tumescence, and then a tingling thrum of pleasure pulsing up and down through my body in time to my heartbeat. Oh my.

Then there was this morning. Manon had came to remove my stent, which involved more snipping of tight sutures (see last post), an exquisite sensation of opening up in a way I have never been able to open up before, and then the bizarre slurpy excretion (at last!) of the stent, which looked like a fat white cigar wrapped in a blood-smeared baggie. After I had rested for a few minutes it was time for my first dilation. With Manon looking on dispassionately, ready if needed to correct my technique, I lay back naked on my bed, applied a dollop of lube to the top of the tip of the smallest of my four dilators - the purple one - maneuvered it awkwardly in the mirror down to the place where the sutures meet, and then slowly slid it inside myself.

The sensations of insistent pressure and yielding glide once again activated what I am just going to have to start calling my clitoris, and that same pulsing warmth began to course up my stomach, down my thighs. It didn't last - I was concentrating too hard on the clinical - but the nerves were all definitely connected and primed to respond. And, honey, I mean, I'm still swollen and sore and bloody, and the incisions pull and bind, and the hair starting to grow back is all the time prickling...if I'm so responsive now with all that going on, what's it going to be like in three months? In six? In a year? Holy fuck.

And that's still not all. There's this other sensation I have been feeling, not precisely sexual, but definitely sensual. It's connected, I suspect/hope, with the techniques I have learned about in my dabblings with meditation and yoga, in which spine and breath become conduits of energy and life. It happens at random moments: a pixilated tingling which suddenly appears in the lower part of my back and then, if I relax into it and breathe from way down, flashes quickly all over my body before fading away. I've had it all my life, but *never* this frequent or intense - and again, I'm only five days post op. The most intense one, earlier today, had a concerned nurse asking me why I was leaning against a table and gasping. "I think I sort of might be having an orgasm," I said. She blinked, then laughed and said, "Oh? Well, have fun!"

A dominant theme of my transition from the beginning has been *unclenching*. In the past three and a half years I have uncurled myriad decades-stony fists, releasing a tremendous amount of physical, mental, psychological, and emotional tension. But that may have only been the prelude, because for all the sexy moments I've had this week, still the most intense sensation by far has been that feeling of previously unimaginable opening when Manon cut that last suture this morning. It was as if the two sides of my pelvis had been freed to sigh minutely away from each other; as if, at that mystic spot where the spine roots to the pelvis, a lock fell away and an iron sphere opened and after a lifetime of narrow constraint my lowest chakra began to glow and spin, throwing out spiral tendrils of divine essence.

As soon as I can I do believe I am going to restart meditation and yoga. It could be very interesting in itself, and it could be even more interesting if the sexy feelings and the stirrings-of-spirit feelings turn out, as it feels they might, to be connectable. Oh my.

Serenity

Elizabeth woke, slept, and woke again through the wee hours. Her last shot of Dilaudid had been at 10pm, and by 5:30 the next morning she could feel it had worn off, but she did not immediately call Chantal, the night nurse, to ask for more. Dawn crept through the louvers, a muted green-gold luminosity.
There was no sharp pain, only many discomforts: a sore lower back, various itches and tickles, and between her legs, the sensation of the old accoutrements oddly squashed and pinched. The phantom scrotum, she and Sus had both said last evening, simultaneously finding the aptest and funniest phrase. Elizabeth particularly welcomed the clear feeling of a pinch at the tip of her departed penis - her clitoris, now - because one rare but possible bad outcome had been the loss of sexual sensation.
Then there was the growing feeling of something rocklike in a spot for which she had no word to fill in the blank of "...where my _______ used to be." Chantal, not knowing the English word for what was causing the feeling, called it "la moule," pronouncing it like the English word for a tunneling rodent, which was good for a laugh. A quick check on the Android (and, oh, how Elizabeth loved her new phone) provided the translation "mussel," but also "mold," i.e., something in the line of a condom crammed hard with cotton balls, maintaining the vault of her new vagina.
By 630a, pain meds seemed called for again - sensations becoming more raw - and soon Elizabeth floated warm and sleepy...she set the phone aside to finish her laborious yet meditative one-finger typing later...
***
After a delicious hour of nap, Lisa resumed her typing, gently stoned. Breakfast would be soon, then a first try at walking. At her request the nurse opened the louvers, which led to an impromptu duet with Danielle in the next bed on "Here Comes the Sun." Danielle, a garrulous Québécoise paper deliverer with an incomprehensible rural accent and little English, made surreal company.
And what of the expected emotions? The tears, the euphoria? Absent. In their place an enduring calm. The drugs perhaps, but also the release from long tension and suspense. The deed was done. No going back. No desire to go back. No regret. And perhaps, theoretical for the time being, the first inkling of a new freedom to turn toward the world with love in a way which had always until now felt unsafe.
Sitting up for breakfast brought on a sharp bout of nausea and dizziness. Much healing yet to done...time to post, then close her eyes as the nurse had ordered. There would be time for more of the therapy of one-finger typing later.

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.