GenderBendy

One more email to the Plain Dealer about Cemia Dove

Dear Ted [Diadiun, Cleveland Plain Dealer Reader Representative],

One more thought with regard to the PD's coverage of Cemia Dove. At least one other news service is getting right:

Connor Kiesel's report

I refer to the short printed article, not the accompanying video.

OK, I've said my piece, and will pester you no further. I hope I've helped you see trans people not as freaks, jokes, crazies, or villains, but as people simply trying to live authentic lives after having been dealt a tough genetic hand at birth. It's hard having a body out of synch with who you know yourself to be, even before you encounter the world's prejudice, ignorance, and fear.

Regards,

~Lisa~

The Plain Dealer just can't get it right about Cemia Dove

I have been following the The Cleveland Plain Dealer's coverage of the murder of trans girl Cemia Dove with increasing dismay. The transadvocate has a good in-depth analysis of the original coverage here. A PD article yesterday, reporting an arrest in the case, which continues to mis-gender Ms. Dove and deny her any name but her birth name is here (update - as of 4p ET on 5/5/13, this article has apparently been taken off the PD website). And a column today by PD reader representative Ted Diadiun is here.

Here is the e-mail I have just sent to Mr. Diadiun:

Dear Mr. Diadiun,

I have just read both Mark Holan's 5/4 article on an arrest in the Cemia Dove case and your column today about the PD's coverage of Ms. Dove's murder. I am sorry that some of the response the paper got to its coverage was vitriolic - there's never any call for that. On the other hand, I feel compelled to suggest, in a most respectful way, that everyone at the PD involved in this coverage still just doesn't get it. 

I am once again appalled, as I was when I saw the original and edited versions of the articles about the discovery of Ms. Dove's body, that the paper continues to use only her male birth name. True, it is probably still her legal name - I doubt she had enough privilege or support in her life to change it - but it only took me a couple of minutes of internet searching, based on the information in the first versions of the story in your paper, to find a couple of other names she clearly preferred. Even if you felt compelled to mention her birth name, you could have mentioned her female name(s) too - in the great majority of the article, ideally.

I am also deeply saddened that you re-used the same awful photos from the original coverage. Again, a few minutes on the internet would have led your reporter to Ms. Dove's facebook presence or to her youtube channel, where you would have found plenty of kinder pictures. The pictures you persist in using rob her of her dignity, or worse - they make her a laughingstock.

And, although you even say in your column how the pronoun issue could be resolved in future by setting up the use of "she" with an explanatory note, you don't do this yourself. Avoiding pronouns altogether, as you do in your column, ducks the issue and is not an adequate response to the problems in your coverage.

The simple truth of the transgender experience is that people are the gender they say they are, period. Until your coverage, and your coverage of your coverage, of the murder of Cemia Dove acknowledges the truth that she was a female person, you continue to tacitly condone and perpetuate the prejudice which led to this horrific crime against a disenfranchised and helpless girl.

Please, dig deeper. Do some more research. Question your prejudices. Try harder to understand. Because, so far, up to and including your column, The PD's coverage of this tragic story is truly shameful. 

Respectfully,

~Lisa~

p.s., send the same evening:

Hello again. Upon reflection, and having calmed down a bit, I'd like to tone down a few words and phrases in my last few paragraphs:

Until your coverage, and your coverage of your coverage, of the murder of Cemia Dove acknowledges the truth that she was a female person, you continue to tacitly condone and perpetuate the same sorts of prejudice which no doubt contributed to this horrific crime.

Please, dig deeper. Do some more research. Question your assumptions. Try harder to understand. I have already asked the same of your reporter and editors. Ms. Dove was evidently murdered simply for trying to be who she was. The least you can do in your coverage is afford her some of the basic dignity and respect in death that she was denied in life. 

~L~

 

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. 

Job hunting, and a night on the town

I haven’t posted much since the surgery because I have a willful literal part of my brain which tries to make something so because something else is so, as in, I’ve had the surgery, so I'm not trans any more - I’m just another ordinary woman now, dammit. These kinds of simplistic formulations can help with motivation and focus, but they don’t turn out to be exactly true, which leads to stress. The trans thing just keeps coming up again.

For example, I’m job hunting. I like my current job, but after eleven years I itch for a new challenge. Also, as a practical matter, I need to start making a little more money if I can. So the question is, do I mention that I am trans in my applications?

It shouldn’t matter, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. There is definitely a lot of transphobia in the world, and in my experience even many enlightened liberal folks still have some work to do to get comfortable with a trans person. On the other hand, bringing the trans thing up early might actually make me a more attractive candidate for some positions. A trans woman might trump a cis woman in some people’s diversity tallies.

So far I have mentioned it (with a brief factual note at the head of my resume - experience before 2011 under the name...), because I did a lot of the stuff on my resume under my old male name, and I figure they might go looking online for, say, those articles I wrote back in the early 00’s. I might stop mentioning it though, if none of my current apps pan out, so they can think about me first, at least for a little while, as just as a woman who’s interested in their job.

It feels icky, having to calculate the when-to-tell issue, but I can't avoid it.

Then there’s dating, which so far just isn’t happening. I got feeling so antsy and fun-starved this week that I messaged Taffy, my dear outrageous drag queen friend, and arranged to share a night on the town. I wanted to get drunk, play pool, dance ecstatically, flirt, and maybe even kiss someone.

Which all happened except I didn’t kiss anyone, though someone did kiss me. I got drunk and played pool at Blackstones, and flirted with a guy at the table. In our short conversation just before Taffy and I left I saw and took an opening to include in a list of pert questions “So do you like guys?” which he answered with a careful “For the most part.” He was handsome, nearly as tall as me, and seemed quiet and kind. Hm, maybe we’ll bump into each other again.

On to Styxx, to dance ecstatically with a bunch of sweat-sheened twentysomethings. At some point I opened my eyes and a cute femme woman was dancing with me. We smiled at each other, and I enjoyed watching her dance - yep, I still like girl-bodies, especially the round softnesses. After a couple minutes she shouted something I couldn’t hear, pecked me on the cheek, and disappeared into the crowd. Later I found her on the floor again and we exchanged names. She excused herself with “I’m going to go get a drink, but I’ll find you later,” and I didn’t see her again, though I did look. Gentle brush-off? Doesn’t matter...she kissed me! :-) Hm, maybe we’ll bump into each other again.

The part I didn’t plan for was resting by the subwoofers with Taffy, our whole bodies vibrating to the pounding of the beat, and suddenly bursting into tears. Taffy held me while I cried and didn’t ask why. Such a good friend.

It’s thrilling out here in the light, and slowly I am becoming more accustomed to the feeling of constant emotional peril. The old sense of myself as a monster unfit to live among humans still intrudes from time to time, but I’m learning to weather those episodes. I guess I’m getting better at really being alive. Yay me. :-)

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.

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...

Time to go home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melanie, and femme resurgent

Blogging in the wee hours again. Why fight it? The ongoing post-operative discomforts aside, I'm feeling energized. It is, however, a little late to get clever with structure - I am already shifting on my knees even know, trying to ease the kink in my back - so straight chronological reportage and a hastily tweaked first draft is what you get, Bub.

I posted (relatively) early Friday evening but then still couldn't sleep, and ended up back downstairs again at about 3am Saturday morning (about 24 hours ago). The only other person up was Melanie, the night nurse. She was lying on one of the couches in the living room wrapped in a blanket, trying to catch a nap, but she sat up and talked with me, and we ended up having an intense hour-long conversation (both of us switching back and forth between French and English, which was cool.)

I learned that Melanie is in her thirties, has a teenage son and a 16-month-old daughter named for two different strong women in her family's history, that she just bought a house where she now lives with her boyfriend, and that in addition to working here at Asclépiade she is also back in school for further studies in nursing. If I had seen her once and you asked me to describe her ethnicity, I would have said she was black, but in fact she has a white Canadian mother and a black Haitian father, and thinks of herself (she says) as white. She believes she got the job here because she talked in her interview about the feeling she knows from her heritage and upbringing of being stuck between two worlds.

Melanie and I discussed the similaries of the false binaries and mixed-up and complicated in-betweens of race and gender in North American culture. We talked about different peoples' definitions of happiness and success. She recited a poem for me in French; I did my voice-work practice poem, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" for her in English. I have met and connected with a lot of nice people here, but I think of Melanie as a new friend. Interesting that the one person I bond most closely with is not trans.

I was back in bed about 4:30a and slept until breakast, and the rest of Saturday was boring. Kept myself busy with French reading, walking, a DVD. Achieved the very important first bowel movement after surgery just in time to avert nursing intervention - I was starting to hear my name mentioned behind closed doors. A period of intestinal discomfort has followed; overdid it with the prune juice which is available at every meal...and that's enough mundane detail.

I went to bed early this past evening in hopes of actually sleeping when it was dark, but it was not to be; so up again to stand outside for a bit in the soft warm air of a Montréal summer night - and that's when the emotional dam burst. I started sobbing. Back inside, and thank goodness for Melanie, there with tissues and a long embrace. She also fetched me my ultimate comfort food of raisin cereal with soy milk, which I have been missing. Back to bed again for more crying. Not new reasons, just the real ones from all along, showing new facets at this phase of my transition. I really really really really really don't have to be a man any more. And I finally get to be loved for who I really am. 

When I was talking with Melanie over comfort-cereal we compared emotional landscapes. I taught her the English word "rollercoaster." "I don't cry very often," she said, "but when I do..." she groped for a phrase in English. "C'est comme un orage," I said - It's like a storm. She nodded. And I thought again of Eve Ensler's marvelous monologue about what it is to be a girl.

I wrote two posts ago about the possibility of turning back toward masculinity now that I am safely on this side of the surgery, and that might still happen, but right now I feel the resurgence of my femme truth. I am an emotional creature, and this is happening. It's really happening. I get to live.

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.