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.

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.

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.

Time to go

The last three weeks have been a sustained orgy of organization and preparation, and at last I am ready. As of this typing, Monday morning, surgery is about 48 hours away. Sus and I drive up to Montreal starting as soon as I post this.

So, how do I feel? Excited, scared, curious, determined, eager, sad, on tenterhooks.

Actually, I’m two different kinds of scared. One is scared of the surgery, the pain, the possibility of a bad outcome. The other is, still, scared that something will happen to prevent me from doing this.  I have had so much can’t in my life - the city of my mind is laid out in the shape of the word can’t - that I will not be free of that fear until I wake up with the act accomplished.

It was an up and down week with the children - we were all at pains, I think, to establish our neediness, which was a little rough for a bit...but there were also many lovely moments. Sam had friends over for a LOTR movie marathon, and I fed them mac and cheese. Mad goosed Sam while he was holding a klaxon horn and made him beep it involuntarily - one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I gave them I’ll-be-thinking-of-you gifts and chocolate, and they’re at their other parents’ house for three weeks.

Other bits: so wonderful to have Sis Sus here...she brought me a book of Maya Angelou poems, with a bookmark at one about being a phenomenal woman...some nice well-wishes at work, and one or two awkward conversations with male acquaintances whose answer to the awkwardness they feel is to make crude jokes...a special order of enough lube (for the aftercare regime) for two people to get trapped in a bathtub.

There’s more, but it’s time to go. I plan to blog through the experience, but with an emphasis on social/psychological/whimsical rather than graphic detail. I will be reachable by e-mail, fb, and phone (207) 985-2053, and the aftercare address is:

908 Boulevard Gouin Ouest
Montreal, QC H3L 1K8, Canada

OK. Here I go.

 

Naked ambition!

The symptoms are clear: I’m preparing once again to ask the world to love me. Danger danger *sirens* whoop whoop whoop...

To wit:

• Yesterday I stopped at Starbird Music and tried out some of their pianos by playing on them various of the pieces I have been working up for the past couple of years. A normal thing for some people to do, no doubt, but for me, a rare and perilous foray into public performance.
• I’ve thought again in the past few days about sending out the book proposal. Except for a few tweaks it has been ready for months, and I have been sitting on it, inventing excuses, but really just avoiding the next step out of terror of the inevitable rejections.
• Last night I Noticed Someone, and I think perhaps vo noticed me too, and today I’ve been thinking of actually doing something about it...you know, like asking ven out...with trepidatious pulse, breath caught in throat, etc. 

I roll my eyes at myself.

So what the fuck? Why does any act which involves the least risk of rejection feel so life-and-death? Hyperdeveloped ego? Or just sen-si-tive?

No doubt both. But there is also this: back in the old days, gender was my safety buffer. When I got rejected it still hurt, but I could always think in my secret heart, “I’m still OK, because they rejected Male Self, not me.”

Another thing happened last night: a person I had never met before said “How’s your book?” I gaped at ven. “Didn’t you write a book?” Ves face was intent.

“Um...I’ve written two books, but neither is published.”

“Oh. Well, I’m psychic. You’re going to be very famous.”

“I won’t let it ruin me,” I said with fervor.

Do I want to be famous? Really? Well...yeah, actually, I do. I want to write a bestseller. I feel like I should be ashamed about that, or that it’s delusional or weak or doomed to failure, but you know what? Fuck all that. Ambition? Check.

And really truly, if I do hit the big time, I won’t let it ruin me. That’s important to say, because, as impossible as it seems at the moment in my absurdly vulnerable squirming, I might actually succeed.

One other symptom of resurgent ambition: a higher than usual rate of blog posting. Can’t you see I’m on my knees, begging you with all my heart, read me, please? Love me, please? Please please pleeeeeeeze?

More soon, no doubt. I’m insatiable!

Oh, and, I love you too. :-)

 

Hide and seek

In my dream I was a tender vulnerable girl in love with a pretty boy. We lived together in a big house, and nobody knew we were there. He was gentle and sweet with me, and we played kissing-each-other-all-over-our-bodies games. I knew something about him though. I knew that he wanted to hurt and kill not me, but other women. In our house though, it didn’t matter. That was someplace else. We were safe together.

Except at the time of the dream there was only one other woman besides me left, and then I knew he had killed her too...right there in our house. I knew she was in the next room, and if I looked up I could see her. I started to look, but whatever it was was so horrible that my mind blanked out my eyes when I pointed them toward it. He was holding me, murmuring sweetness to me, but I knew I was no longer safe.

So, I hid. I knew a little secret space behind a wall in the attic of our house. I had found the door long before, and had furnished the place with fun and comforting things. It was my secret clubhouse of one. I loved to go there, shut the door, and then listen to the rumor of other people vibrating up through the bones of the house -  their footfalls, the rumble of their voices - knowing they could not find me. A little hot coal of pleasure glowed in my solar plexus when I hid there. It was my secret, and I was safe.

As I shut the door behind me I thought, waking: and there was no one left to dream. Because the pretty boy from whom I had hidden was also me.

Was I traumatized as a child? Did someone hurt me in a way too horrible to remember? Did I hurt someone else in a way too horrible to remember? There are therapists who would help me answer these questions “yes,” whether or not it was actually true.

But, I don’t think so. I think I was just such a sensitive little thing that I experienced the regular trauma of being a young human - of first feeling desire, fear, anger - as glaring menace and imminent death, and fled.

And, I was shy and secret by nature. That little hot coal of pleasure in hiding was real, whatever else did or didn’t happen.

So maybe it took me so long to say who I am because I decided to play hide and seek, but nobody knew I existed, so nobody sought. Then I forgot I was hiding, and before I knew it 45 years had gone by. Oops! Too bad, honey. That time is gone.