GenderBendy

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.

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?" 

 

Summer idyll

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

Two weeks since surgery, fifth day home, and I inhabit a profound placidity new to my experience. I feel languorous, fundamentally undriven, deeply calm. Post-surgery energy deficit? The (at last) natural plunging of my testosterone level to near zero? The end of decades of the unrelenting tension of projecting masculinity into the world? Perhaps all three. And of course it is summer and I am home alone, drifting through silent recuperative days. For the first time in my life, in a way, I am at rest. How odd.

When and how and why will I move again? I'm not sure. I feel that I am waiting to see who I am; from that will follow what I will do...when I feel a little stronger again.

* * *

Sunday, July 15th, 2012

I am not yet friends with my new parts. They still feel variously numb, itchy, prickly, tender and sore. They are still bruised and swollen, and still full of stitches, some of which will take up to two months to disolve. Also, my labia minora still look like an untreated wound. It's gory in there. Ew. I sent a couple of anxious phone-pictures to the clinic the other day and got back a reassuring e-mail: looks normal, you're healing on schedule; keep yourself very clean, keep dilating four times a day, and be patient.

OK. OK, I can do that. But I'll tell you what: I am *working* for this. Whatever good comes of it will be hard-won and well-earned. Fuck yeah.

There is one astonishing thing so far about my new parts: the endlessly renewable marvel of standing and looking at myself naked in the mirror. No more need to cover up. The man parts are gone! In their place, an incomprehensible miracle: the gentle bifurcated pubic swell, curving back and away. Every time I look, still, my brows contract in the middle. Really? I mean, *really*? It can't be. But it is...look again. *Really*? Better look again... Fifty years is a long time - it is going to take a while longer to believe this is true.

Then there is the joy of being testicle-free. No more testosterone! I did not fully realize, before, how much I was stoically enduring on account of that potent molecule. I have experienced, post-surgery, a sudden advance in the feminization of my whole body. My muscles have lost mass and gotten softer. My skin feels softer too. The body hair I shaved off right before surgery is growing back so fine as to be in most places effectively invisible. My little A-cup cuties have gotten noticeably fuller. Yes, yes, yes, to all these lovely changes.

Yesterday, looking at myself at various angles in two mirrors, I saw myself more completely as a woman than ever before: a tall, big-boned, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, thin-haired quirky-faced woman, but a woman nonetheless, and honey, not half-bad looking either. Chances of further surgery are diminishing...maybe just hairline and Adam's apple, my two most significantly masculine facial features, and no particular rush. I may not need even that, because I feel my femininity shining out of me more strongly all the time. It is in the limber grace my body continues to discover; it is in the way I can feel the animation of my face more fully reflecting the quicksilver dapple of my mood and mind; it is in the new softer music my voice has of late been finding. As I continue to open to the light, how can I fail to express "woman" more and more fully? I *am* a woman, and at last I am free to be. My joyful flowering continues. :-)

 

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. :-)

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.

First look

Sweet moment: this morning after my dressing was removed (about which more farther down) I went out into the hedge-encircled garden of the residence to get some air and sun. It was very warm today in Montréal, though not as warm, I gather, as down in the States. Anyway, while I was making up fake yoga and Tai Chi moves on the lawn a gust of wind came along and plastered my nightgown against my front, and I did something I now realize I've been doing a lot for the past couple of years without really thinking about it: an uncomfortable little hitch back of pelvis and spine, to the end of keeping the unsightly bulge from showing. And then I realized: it's gone! I can wear whatever I want - a bikini, 17 artfully interwoven silk scarves, whatever, and that bulge is never going to interfere with my style or the flow of my body ever again. Fucking wow. I'm grinning again as I describe it. It's an all caps moment: IT'S GONE! IT'S GONE! IT'S GONE FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!! :-D

My plan was to avoid graphic clinical detail in this SRS blogging project, but I've changed my mind about that, at least for this post, because having my dressing removed was gobsmacking, and how as a writer can I pass up the opportunity to do a first-person description of such a rare and surreal and emotionally powerful experience? If you'd rather not go there with me, by all means please stop reading now.

The first step to prepare for the dressing to come off was a hot shower. Bliss! I hadn't had a shower in nearly a week. In the bathroom I took a last look in the mirror at the thick red-infused pack of cotton wadding humped between my legs, then got the water running and exulted in the hot stream. After a bit I glanced down and boggled at the amount of blood washing off me. It just kept coming. After a minute of anxiety I decided it was all right or they would have said something, and so went back to enjoying shampooing and conditioning.

Once out of the tub, following my detailed post-shower instructions, I towel-patted dry, cupped one of those blue-and-white mess-catching absorbent pads under me like a diaper, waddled into the room, lay down on the bed, and then called Manon, the nurse, on the phone, to tell her I was ready. She came bustling in with her kit and gloves, pulled the curtains around my bed, and set to work.

The first step was to snip the stitches holding the dressing down. They were pulled very tight, so each one parted with a snap that sent tingling jolts through the skin where they were anchored. Once that was done - six or seven stitches - she used forceps to pull the separated bits of suture out of the skin on either side of the dressing. Some of them had been passed under a good inch of skin, but they came out slick and clean, with only a curious sliding sensation. Next she used the forceps to begin peeling away the layers of gauze. Her face had an expression of intense concentration, and she breathed slowly and evenly as she worked. I watched here pare away the mutant crayfish until all I could see was a smooth pubic swell curving away out of sight, conspicuously devoid of any sign of the old appendage. I could not believe how wide and empty the space between my thighs was. 

Manon couldn't remove quite all the dressing - the last little bit, she said, was stuck to a blood clot and would need to be soaked off over time  - but at length she said I could reach for my hand-mirror and look for the first time at Dr. Brassard's handiwork.

On my stomach and thighs, a rainbow of bruising ran from yellow through green to a dark purple-blue. In the area where the dressing had been pressing so hard there was more normal-colored skin, crossed by the puckered lines of the two main surgery incisions, each about five inches long. The incisions, one on each side, make a large V joining at the opening of my new vagina, at this point still stitched shut. All visible skin was stubbly-nude from the knees-to-bellybutton pre-surgery shave. And, in a line from top to bottom down the center of my crotch, I saw the inner wrapper on my still mostly-concealed new parts: the blood-soaked tuft of unremoved cotton; a short stretch of as yet tightly-sutured incision (those stitches will be snipped tomorrow); the orange rubber tube of the urinary catheter; and just below that and above my anus, the marvelously incongruous detail of the end of the stent, the cotton-crammed condom which is still inside me as I type. Just the end projected out, looking for all the world like a the tied off neck of a balloon. I am the inflatable transsexual.

I've done some more crying today, and some cautious dancing in the grass, and a lot of deep breathing and stretching...and from time to time I go into the bathroom and marvel again at my completely penis-free, scrotum-free, testicle-free body. 

Tomorrow the stent comes out, and I begin my dilation regimen. Tonight (if I sleep) four high-tech color-coded size-gradated designer dildoes will lurk and loom through my dreams.

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.

Night thoughts

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