Typical hospital admission: ID, credit card, paying even more money, wristband.

I went to another wing of the hospital and had some blood drawn for some labs.  I sat there for what felt like hours, all alone, wondering when someone would remember me.  It was only twenty minutes.  The phlebotomist pinched me as the needle went in– the most painless experience I’ve ever had with a needle, though I did get a big bruise from it later.

After the blood draw, we went upstairs to a waiting room, and after about five minutes, a nurse brought us back to a pre-op prep area.  I took off my clothes, put on the gown, the socks with the grippy stuff on the bottom, a bathrobe.  We waited for at least an hour while the morning surgery finished up. To keep me occupied, my friend Melynda and I watched Nom nom nom nom babies for about the eightieth time. It’s not a work of musical genius, but it made me laugh and helped keep my mind from jumping into the deep end of anxiety.

Shortly after 12, the nurse came in. The morning surgery had been finished and now it was my turn. She took me to the surgical prep area: I got a bed, they started my IV, gave me an anti-coagulant and put compression stockings on my legs. There were all the usual consent forms, the one from the surgeon I signed before she even finished reading it to me. I wasn’t about to back out at this point. After all the busy work, I was just waiting to get wheeled into the OR and I started tearing up. I’ll be honest– I was scared. I was afraid of how much things would hurt after, afraid that I’d wake up in the middle of the fucking thing, and well, just afraid. This was a big step and I was laying there, all alone. One of the OR nurses came over to me and asked how I was, handed me a tissue and talked and joked with me to help keep my mind off it. I can’t, for the life of me, remember his name, but that had to have been one of the most valuable services I think I’ve ever received from a nurse and words fail me in trying to express my gratitude for his kindness.

After a couple more minutes, around 1:15, the anesthesiologist came back, pushed something into my IV, and that’s all I remember.

I woke up around 5:15 (the only reason I remember the times is that there was a clock facing me) in a recovery room. I couldn’t really feel anything, the way it always is when you wake up after sleeping– nerves slowly start waking back up and you can start moving your hands and arms and head. The surgeon was there, and she told me not to move my legs, or even try. Based on the kind of surgery, they didn’t want the area to get compressed or squished by my thighs, nor any stress placed on any of the muscles or stitched incisions. So I laid there. I had a vague feeling of cold around my crotch– ice packs, but not much else. I was there for maybe 15 or 30 minutes, just long enough to fully wake up, and they wheeled me to my room.

Christine and Melynda were there, a nurse hooked up my IV, and I got my morphine drip. I had an Ensure milkshake-thing, those protein drinks that keep you alive when you can’t really eat solid food. I tried watching movies– I actually felt pretty decent, but then pain would creep up, I’d press the button, and the morphine would knock me right out.

I had the morphine until Wednesday, and I remember very little of that time. I’m pretty sure I talked to Christine about several things, including getting a puppy, but I think I hallucinated most or all of that conversation. I was on twitter, too, but I have no idea whether any of what I said over those days was even intelligible.

In the periods of lucidity, despite the pain medication, despite the bandages, despite the packing in my vagina, despite the not hardly moving at all, I could feel that things were different. I couldn’t tell exactly how different, but I did know that there wasn’t a penis attached to my body anymore. A few nerves woke up, nerves that used to be on the outside and were now on the inside of my body. It was weird, but not necessarily in a bad way.

On Wednesday, I was able to get up and walk around the floor of the hospital where my room was– one turn around the perimiter of the nurses’ station, what would take a person about 30 seconds, took me nearly ten minutes on a walker. But I was up, walking and feeling mostly good.

I was reluctant to take the Vicodin they were giving me due to my history with it. I can’t really explain, other than to say that the thought of taking Vicodin again was about as unpalatable to me as chewing Tylenol. I started having problems with nausea, which I think, was at least partly due to the pain– not taking any pain medication at all made it very hard to keep food down.

By the time I was discharged Friday afternoon, I’d not had any solid food for a week, but at least the nausea was starting to subside. I managed to get into a wheelechair, and from the wheelchair to the car without too much pain, but the car ride back to the hotel was pure agony. It was very uncomfortable to sit (I’m sure you can imagine), and those inflatable donut cushions didn’t really provide support in the places I needed it, so I balanced, somewhat precariously on several pillows. When we made it to the turnpike, I found myself in the worst traffic jam I’ve ever seen– parts of it were shut down for construction.

Having not been on any pain medications, and not being terribly comfortable to start with, sitting in stop and go traffic for thirty minutes was horrible. And we’d only gone about one mile. We had about six more to go. I started crying. My pain levels had gone up and thinking of sitting in the car for several hours was enough to make me lose my shit. Christine, completely out of ideas, started driving down the shoulder of the highway, cutting back into traffic as necessary. All told, the drive back to the hotel, which should have taken about 16 minutes, took over an hour and a half.

We got to the hotel and despite all my reservations against it, I took a Vicodin and drank another protein shake. And of course, I was completely fine. The medication didn’t make me sick, and I had an easier time keeping food down now that I wasn’t feeling so horrible the entire time. We stayed in Trevose for a couple nights– me laying in bed, taking Vicodin every few hours, drinking protein shakes, watching movies and trying not to laugh at anything funny because it hurt to laugh. I had to empty my catheter every few hours as they’d capped it before I left the hospital. So I still had to “pee”, for some definition of the word that didn’t actually involve getting out of bed.

On Sunday the 11th, we transferred to a hotel in New Hope, closer to my doctor’s office where I’d be having my followup appointments. That ride, thankfully, was completely uneventful.

On Tuesday the 13th I had my first followup visit with the doctor. They removed the last of the bandages, removed the packing from my vagina and I got to see… what looked like someone had detonated a stick of dynamite in my underwear. Lest you think I’m unhappy with the results, that’s not the case, not in the slightest. One week after that kind of surgery, though, well, nothing is going to look pretty, no matter how good your doctor might be. The incisions had skin glue on them (which is a blackish color) to keep them from tearing open, some areas had turned black from a lack of adequate blood flow post surgery. Everyone is different, blood vessels are in different places, and sometimes you just don’t get adequate flow. It happens, and the doctor assured me that everything would heal up and even the areas where some of the tissue had died would eventually grow over. She said it wouldn’t look the same in several months and not to worry prematurely– while there is a chance the cosmetic appearance would be a little assymetrical, I didn’t have much to worry about functionally speaking and any problems could always be addressed later on.

So, here I am, typing this about six weeks after that doctor visit and she was right– most of it has healed up. There’s one section I’m a little concerned about– that small assymetry, but honestly, it’s not horrible. Depending on how it heals, in six or nine months, I’ll consider whether it’s going to require a revision, but it needs at least that long to heal, for all the swelling to dissipate and for us to really know what we’re dealing with.

Functionally speaking, everything works– I can pee properly, or as properly as any woman can pee– one thing I didn’t know until I had my consult is that urinating with a vulva can be messy– it’s not unusual for it to get on your buttocks or part of your thigh. I don’t mean that peeing is analogous to a whirlygig lawn sprinkler, but it’s not like you can write your name in the snow, either.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve had the typical ups and downs– my surgeon warned me that a post-op depression is common and so I’ve been taking my medication, but there are times where mutilated is exactly the word I want to describe how I’m feeling. It’s an odd thing to have absent parts of my body that I’ve lived with for more than 30 years.  And now they’re gone. I’m happy they’re gone, and I like how my clothes fit, and I like… well, I like how things turned out. But there’s still a bit of residual sadness, a mourning, a final mourning, for what I left in that OR– those last vestiges of that person I was.

I don’t mean that I want to go back to the way things were, or that I’d undo my surgery, I just mean that sometimes, in the dark, when everyone else is asleep, I cry a little for the way things had to go in order for me to get here. I think Dolly put it best: “Redmeption comes in many shapes with many kinds of pain.” It definitely does. I feel better, life feels better, but it hurt me, a lot, to get here.

Now, lest this seem misleading, I don’t know that surgery made everything better, but I am sort of… happy.  Not happy exactly, not the way some people use the word, especially since I know there’s still a substantial amount of self-loathing in there, but, well, things are different.  And that’s what I was counting on.  Things are different.  This tipped my life upside down and that’s all I really expected it to do.  It’s a different matter whether I’ll be able to set things upright and be happy with the end result.  I’m hoping I will, since that was kind of the point of doing this. It’s a bit like re-modeling a house– you knock down a lot of what you had and hope that what you can rebuild will be worth living in when you’re all finished.

Over the last couple years I’ve become very bitter at God and life and the Universe for all of this– I spent probably $30000 out of pocket on medical expenses last year when I can’t pay pre-existing medical bills– I’m in the hole $15000 from my suicide attempt in 2010.  My wife and I have a substantial amount of credit card debt, very little money left at the end of the month and no real way to ever get anything in a savings account.  We’re thinking of selling our condo back in California just to make it easier to make ends meet here.  So all of that sucks. Everyone it seems, has money trouble these days, and while it may have been smarter to use the money to pay the pre-exisiting debt, to pay off some credit cards, I don’t think I could have survived much longer, not if I had to stay the course with the way things were.

Sometimes, at night, when I’m crying, the other thing I think of is Frodo, with Sam on the slopes of Mount Doom, after the ring’s been destroyed and the land tears itself apart all around them. “It’s done, Sam,” Frodo says. And while I’m holding a lot of conflicting thoughts in my head in those dark hours, being able to say that to myself, that it’s done, does help, even if only a little, even if it doesn’t cure every ill.

—————————–

*I stole the title of this post from a dear friend who stole it from someone else.  That makes it okay, right?

It’s been just over three weeks since my surgery, and things are going, but going slowly.  I can walk, but not easily.  I can sit, but not comfortably.  Sleep is a hard-won commodity and I end up with a lot more urine on me than I’m used to having.  These things are all going to get better– they’ve already improved a lot in the short time since all the bandages, packing and catheter were removed. I’m mostly off pain medication now, too.  I take Tylenol from time to time as I need it, but I no longer take anything like clockwork.

In other words, I’m doing well.  Or at least as well as you might expect from someone who’s had a relatively major surgery.  Things are still settling, though, physically and emotionally, so there will be another post in which I say more about everything.  Rest assured, though, it is coming.

The closest thing it reminds me of is Fred Clark’s post about Holy Saturday.  My life has been an endless period of waiting for this Monday, this turning point in my own calendar.  There were times where I thought I would never see this, as though the timer had stopped and would be stopped for years– there was none of what Fred calls “Sunday certainty.”  Only hope.  Then it started, moving, closer and closer, and December couldn’t get here fast enough, and where did all that time go?  The days have passed, the weeks, the months, and now, I’m at the cusp. It feels a bit like a dream, like I’ll wake up on Monday and realize that I dreamt all of this and that I am, of all people, most to be pitied.  I feel like I can’t speak with the certainty that this will happen because it hasn’t and my one fear, if I have a fear around surgery, is that it won’t happen.

From what I understand, I’ll be on morphine until Thursday and discharged from the hospital on Friday.  I’ll post an update here as soon as I can, but it may almost a week before you hear from me again.

Until then.

It’s good, of course, to take control of one’s life, to make one’s own decisions.  I can’t go through life letting other people tell me what to do, or who to be, or how to be.  But I hoped, I prayed for so many long long years and every day, every time I woke up or cried, another little part of me felt like it broke or died.  And finally, I gave up.  Enough was enough.  God had let me down.

Maybe, you might say, God just fixed things so I’d have all that money so I could get surgery in the first place, but, and this is what gets me– those same people claim that God has some plan for this, some plan for my life.  If my life is part of someone’s plan, then there’s going to be some explanation required.  It’s cruel to plan a person’s life around this kind of pain.  I don’t want to believe in a God that requires pain and suffering like this any more than I want to believe in a God who hates us so much that we’d be sent to hell for being as he made us.

I’ve made my own meaning out of this pain.  This isn’t the result of God’s plan, this was my own effort to make something good out of what has happened to me.  This blog is part of that– an effort to tell people about how this particular experience was for me.  It would be different for others, but maybe, just maybe, someone, somewhere, would get something from it.  Helping someone else in that same pain, or realizing that they’re not alone, or maybe helping someone understand what their loved one was going through– those were always my hopes for this place.  In that, I think, this blog has been successful.  I’ve met a few people that decided to use my Contact page and we’ve talked, exchanged stories, commiserated.  I’ve become friends with more than a few people who stumbled upon me in this corner of the internet.

But for all the goodness that I’ve manufactured from this, there is a grief– a grief for the things I was told about God that I no longer believe, a grief for a life that I wanted to have and couldn’t, a grief for a substitute life that I tried living and couldn’t abide.  There is grief for the things I believed that I now see to be lies.  I invested so much time in that false hope, in that belief that I could be a man if I just prayed harder, or went to church one more time, or read my Bible just a bit more.  It breaks my heart to think of all the life that has been stolen from this woman who has spent most of her adult life trying to be someone she is not.

I am moving forward, I am taking a very bold step forward, but there is a wreckage behind me and I weep for the lives within it.  That is the legacy of my church.  And I grieve for it.

The first I’ve been doing, and absolutely hate.  The second, I’m not too worried about.  The third might be as bad as electrolysis.

First, let me explain how absolutely horrible genital electrolysis really is.  Imagine, if you can, having a small, very thin probe, almost like a sewing needle, slid along the hair shaft and into the skin, until the tip of the probe sits down inside the hair follicle (this doesn’t really hurt, not usually anyway).  Now imagine that there’s a jolt of electric current and heat delivered via that probe into the hair follicle (and by way of collateral damage, some of the surrounding tissue).

That hurts. In fact, it doesn’t just hurt, it fucking hurts.  There are few things in the world worse than this– I’d rather break a bone than have to go through the hours of electrolysis that I’ve already had to endure.  In fact, having this done on the genitals hurts so bad that I basically had to stop doing it.  At one point, I was terrified I wouldn’t have enough hair cleared before surgery.

Fortunately (or not) for me, my surgeon offers electrolysis through her office which can be done under a local anesthetic.  That sounds great, right?  Except it isn’t.  I’ve had locals before– a small syringe, small needle and what feels kind of like a bee sting as the lidocaine enters the tissue.  I was prepared for that.  It would hurt like a motherfucker to get stung on the crotch, but that would fade pretty quick and then electrolysis would be pain free.

Except that’s not how this works.  The first day I go to the doctor’s for electro, she’s prepping the anesthetic and I make the mistake of looking over at her as she approaches me to administer it.  She was holding a gigantic barrel syringe, probably 20 or 30 ml, and on the end of it was a spinal needle that had to be 12 inches long.  I realize that terror can mess up our perceptions, but each time I’ve been back and had the misfortune to see this, it looks the same–30 ml syringe, big ass needle.

The needle is inserted at one side of the midline, next to the penis, and pushed down towards the testes.  It’s excruciating.  I usually scream.  As the needle is slowly withdrawn, the anesthetic is injected, which adds to the sting.  And screaming.  As the end of the needle nears the insertion site, the doctor changes the angle, pushes the needle back in a few inches, and injects more anesthetic in the surrounding tissue.  I’m usually crying at this point.

Then, the doctor switches sides.  Always the right side first, then the left.  On the left side, there are three tracks for the needle, one that crosses the midline, and two that mirror the right side.  More screaming.  More crying.

The lidocaine contains a small amount of epinephrine, and so I get the shakes afterwards, my heart pounding.  I looked over at the electrologist one time after this was all over and she looked like someone just killed her puppy.  I’m not sure what that meant.  Another time, I said that it always feels like the needle was coming out through my scrotum at the other end.  She responded that sometimes it does.  The amount of blood they wipe up after the injections make me wonder if she isn’t serious.

After that’s done, though, the electrolysis is a piece of cake.  The injections last for about two and a half hours, after which time the doctor usually does a second round of injections.  More screaming and crying, but we get another two hours of electrolysis out of the day.

All told, it ends up being about five minutes of pure agony to not feel four hours of electrolysis.  I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a fair trade, but I can at least manage the injections– after a while the electrolysis becomes completely unbearable so this is probably the only way I can manage to get all of it done.

Driving home, the last of the lidocaine usually wears off, and my crotch takes on a low level itching and burning feeling for about three days.  Plus I get a series of bruises that turn almost my entire groin purple.  The bruising takes about a week to really go away, but the pain usually lasts for up to three weeks or more.  Around the time it actually stops hurting, I realize I have to go back to the doctor for more.

Once, upon realizing I had to go back in two weeks, I broke down in tears.  “It hurts so bad,” I whimpered over and over to Christine as she put her arms around me.  My psychologist likened it to post-traumatic stress.  I think that might be a bit extreme, but even the memory makes me want to cry.  He may not be too far off the mark after all.

Having said all of that, it should seem pretty serious to say that going off hormones is as bad as electrolysis.  Hormones, breasts, genitals, don’t make the woman, but I’ll be honest– a part, at least, of my identity is tied up in my body and how it looks and going off hormones– I’m terrified about how it’s going to affect me.  I’m not worried about my thyroid cartilage growing back or any such thing, but I am afraid that I’ll lose some of the fullness my breasts have managed to pick up in the last year and the thought of not having all that estrogen swirling around in my brain, is well, scary. I feel a little unstable when I hit the troughs in my estrogen cycle, I imagine that being off of it for several weeks will be very stressful.

On the plus side, it will never be as bad as detransitioning– going off estrogen doesn’t mean the testosterone is coming back– there won’t be any way for my body to make it, except for some low level production by the adrenal glands.  I am a bit concerned about being stuck in PMS mode for several weeks, though.

Knowing that post-surgical depression is common, that it will probably happen, will hopefully make it easier to deal with, but I also know that I’m not always so great at handling my depression.  I have some plans in place to help, including regular appointments with my shrink, but really, I hope that having my body the way it should be, or at least as close as I’ll ever get to how it should have been, will be no small comfort.

I think smartphones are the perfect scapegoats– for when you can’t get a gps signal and get lost, it spontaneously restarts and “I never got that text message from you”, or in this case, “I don’t really need to use a computer at home anymore, and so don’t really have much time to sit, think, and blog.”  For some reason, I think best when typing with all ten fingers– blogging is too cumbersome to do on the phone, and too many times I’ve had long comments eaten whole, and so I mostly avoid writing anything too precious.  Which equates to less writing overall.

I’ve also been involved writing elsewhere– some erotica, and lately, some horror.  For some reason, fiction is coming easier to me these days and since this blog more or less took the place of my journal, there just hasn’t been anything to write.

Anyway, all my whining aside, I’ve been thinking of something else over the last few weeks– this blog was always an outlet for frustration, anger, fear, anxiety– for those things that were bothering me as I transitioned.  As I’m nearing a point in my life where most of the physical work of transition is done, I’m starting to think the place this blog has had in my life is becoming smaller and smaller.  I have a set of fears and anxieties that are more or less constant, especially around surgery, but most of my social anxieties have become a thing of the past.  Or so I think.

This blog was always a place where I could feel understood, partly because this was my universe– gender non-conformity was (and still is) the norm here.  But now I feel less and less need to retreat from others, and I find myself coming here less and less.  I expect at some point I’ll cease coming here altogether, but that time hasn’t arrived yet.  It probably will happen, though and when it does, I’ll try to give you a heads-up.

One of the other things I’ve noticed about my own writing here is that the focus evolved– I started out writing about social activism and eventually, realizing I could only ever speak for myself, started limiting myself to those experiences.  The “Trans” category is the most used, at least recently, and that has almost always meant that I was speaking from a place of my own knowledge, my own experience.

But I’m finding I need to “identify” as trans less and less, and so need that category for my writing less and less.  I seem to be sitting in a headspace now that feels female, without necessarily being trans female.  Some of my online presences elsewhere don’t refer to this blog, or even mention that I’m trans, and some of the motivation for that, I think, can be traced to my previous post– if we’re not intimate, you don’t need to know whether I’ve had surgery, hell, whether I’m even trans in the first place.  The only time it does come up is when I’m speaking from my own experiences to a new audience, a group of people who haven’t realized that not everyone in the world reacts favorably to the word “tranny” or making fun of people that don’t identify as cisgender.

In those cases, I out myself, but that doesn’t seem to overshadow the rest of me.  If anything, because it’s such an infrequently seen part of my persona, it seems that people forget as soon as the discussion is over.  I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

I know that I get clocked a lot more than I realize, I know that more people than I know have figured out that there’s something “up” with me, but most are too afraid to say anything.  They whisper, they talk, but for the most part now, I don’t care.  I know enough people who don’t care, either, and that generally makes up for any worry I have over not being perfect.

“Are you still equipped?”

“Do you still have a penis?”

I have, at one time or another, been asked those questions by near strangers. I’m going to start by saying that such questions, no matter how innocent or ignorant the askers’ intentions, are hurtful and rude. There is no excuse for behaving in such a way. If you wouldn’t walk up to a stranger and ask them about their genitalia, then it’s no more appropriate (and you’re no more entitled to an answer) just because I’m a trans woman.

We gender people every minute of every day—that’s a man; that’s a woman; that person in the suit with the hat is a man; that person in the dress is a woman, no wait, it’s a man. We identify and categorize people into gender categories without needing to see what’s in their pants or under their skirts. So, if you’re capable of gendering every other human being you meet without having to grope their genitals, then you’re capable of figuring out that I’m a woman. There’s no need to ask questions— my gender presentation, like my gender identity, is unambiguous.

I’ve had people ask why I don’t put MtF on my social networking profiles under gender, or why don’t I have a, I don’t know, a disclaimer or something in my profile about being transsexual. You really want to know why? It’s because that’s not anyone’s business except for the people with whom I’m intimate. I don’t need a billboard, a private conversation with the right person will usually suffice.

You see, this would still be a point of contention for me whether I were pre-op, post-op or non-op: it is simply no one’s business unless I choose to make it otherwise. Just because I post pictures of myself in various states of undress on Twitter doesn’t mean that we’re lovers, doesn’t mean that we’re friends with benefits, and certainly doesn’t mean I’ll spread my legs for you. Even if we are friends, that still doesn’t mean I’ll let you fuck me. So, if your chances of getting me in bed are somewhere between slim and none, does it matter whether I’ve got Cthulu himself in my panties?

I hope and expect my friends would respect the dignity of every person, whether those friends or those people are cis, trans, non-binary, het, gay, queer, lesbian, bi, pan or… If you believe a person’s value lies only inside their underwear, or in who they’re attracted to, then I’m the wrong person, hell, the wrong friend for you.

That information doesn’t headline my social networking profiles because while I may be a trans woman, that is only one descriptor, one facet of my life. It is not the totality of my being. I am not a fetish or a hard limit. My gender identity is completely female, hence the capital F next to my name. I’m a woman where it counts.

The consult:
We drove to the office on May 3rd.* It’s three and a half hours away, so that felt like going on a real trip, like this was serious business, but when we got there, it was like any other doctor visit. Forms to fill out, releases to sign. The doctor talked to me about the surgery, about the health risks and complications (and yes, just like any surgery, I could die), told me a little about recovery times and post-op care. She also told me to quit smoking or else the skin graft that forms the lining of my vagina wouldn’t take and I’d lose it. I don’t think I need to make a snarky comment about how bad that would be, so I quit smoking the very next day. That’s probably snarky enough.

I paid my deposit, got a bunch of paperwork, and now starts this long haul to December; genital electrolysis every week and what feels like endless waiting. It reminds me of sitting in a doctor’s office, in the exam room, with your clothes off, in that silly paper clothing, waiting, waiting, just waiting. Five minutes feels like forever. Is it even July yet?

So while I’m anxiously awaiting this coming December, which will hopefully contain a Christmas where I will no longer sit down in the corner of the shower and cry until long after the water has run freezing cold, that excitement is tempered by several things.

I was in the front office, writing my deposit check to secure my surgery date and something felt… off. It’s hard to put it in a single word, but it felt like something had died, like the sun was less bright, like there was somehow less to the world. For the last twenty years or more, I’ve had to deal with being trans. I prayed about it, I hurt, I cried over it. I cut over it. And while I was overjoyed at getting the surgery I’d always wanted, something else occurred to me as well– there was no miracle cure. My signature on that check attested to the fact that I no longer believed in miracles, in the healing, restorative and curative power of prayer. God wasn’t going to poke his head down, apologize for not getting back to me sooner, he’d had a lot of other things to deal with, but abracadabra, you’re a girl. A real girl.

Writing that check, I realized that part of me still hoped, still prayed (however silently, however subconsciously), that there would be a miracle. One can argue that surgery, that a skilled surgeon, is a gift from God, a miracle, but honestly, the end result of surgery isn’t a fully functional vagina, is not a miracle. I may have a vulva when the doctor is all finished, but I may never be able to have an orgasm again. My body won’t be self lubricating, I won’t be able to get pregnant. I will have to use a dilator for the rest of my life. This isn’t a gift from God, it’s a human being trying to fix something that’s wrong with another human being. I do not see divinity at work.

God, as I have recently been musing, is either trying to teach me a lesson, or work out some ineffable plan (Q: How do you get two otherwise straight women to form a lesbian relationship? A: Make one a transsexual, and have her transition after they get married. Easy. Except it’s not.), or maybe this just has nothing to do with God at all.

In that situation, God is either weak and powerless, or he’s a sadistic fiend who deserves the exact opposite of adoring worship. Considering the degree to which I’ve presented myself as a Christian in the past, it may give a reader pause to consider how much things have changed since I started writing this blog.

While other things in my life have been changing as well, the most noticeable improvement, I think, is my emotional stability. My last suicide attempt was early March and while I’ve had some hard moments since then, I have never since been without hope.

That particular incident in March that I referred to, which I have come to think of as “The Hanging”, was as predictable as it was earth shattering. The predictable part I’m sure you can guess at. The earth shattering parts, well, maybe you can guess at those, too, but they certainly caught me by surprise.

You’ve realized by now, I expect, that I’m quite bad at actually killing myself so I’m going to skip the actual details. One night, a few days after The Hanging, Christine came down into the basement while I was sitting, crying. She told me that my parents were giving me the last of the money I needed for surgery. I looked at her with tears in my eyes and called her a spiteful bitch for lying to me like that. She told me that she wasn’t lying, that she had been on the phone with my parents and that they had said they cared more about me than a few thousand dollars. I still didn’t believe her.

A few days later, I was on the phone with my Mother. Towards the end of the call, I asked her about what Christine had said. She said they didn’t care about the money and wanted me to go get surgery. She said she loved me and both she and my Dad wanted me to be happy.

I felt two things– immense relief and an overwhelming sense of worthlessness, sort of like what I’ve heard of survivor’s guilt. I was going to be able to afford surgery. That last bit of money that was going to take us years and years and years to save up was just being dropped back into my bank account. And then I remembered my friends, some of whom have been without any kind of hope for longer than I’ve been in transition, some of whom have succeeded in killing themselves. What about any of them? Why do I get to hit this goal and some of them don’t and never will? How is that right? If I do this, how am I not just helping to perpetuate a system that is inherently unfair?

One friend of mine said that she figured I had suffered enough. That thought still makes me shudder a bit, as though we all have our dues that we must pay the universe in order to be made whole just so we can live our lives like, well, like normal people. I don’t think that’s what my friend meant– in fact I’m pretty sure she meant the exact opposite, namely that no one deserves to hurt like this, but if no one, than why any of us?

When I talked to Christine about it, she said it was because my parents loved me. But why my parents and not someone else’s? Why mine and not that girl’s parents there? Why did they throw her out of their house when she was 16? Why didn’t mine?

I refuse to believe in destiny. I refuse to believe that it’s anyone’s or anything’s master plan for some people to suffer and some people to obtain salvation. If there is such a thing as salvation, and a hell of which we’re in peril in the first place, that salvation shouldn’t be something that’s awarded based on a randomized drawing. It should be for everyone.

When I think about this kind of division of happiness, that some people get what they want and others don’t, it reminds me of that parable in St. Luke’s gospel about the beggar and the rich man. I’ve been in Lazarus’ shoes already. And now I feel like the rich man. If there is a God or destiny or karma, what’s going to be expected of me now that I’ve been given the one thing in life that I want the most?

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* I realize it’s now nearly the beginning of July. Two months may seem like a long time to sit on this, but well, I’m still trying to parse all of it. This is a very big deal, after all.

I recently inherited a small amount of money. As it turns out, it’s the last of the money I need for my own medical expenses related to transition– I have money to finish up all of my electrolysis and also to pay for surgery. In the few months since my last post, I’ve resumed electrolysis on my face, started electrolysis on my genitalia*, and booked a consultation date for surgery with Dr. Christine McGinn in Pennsylvania.

The actual surgery letter that my therapist wrote bears little resemblance to the one I put together last year. I’ll leave that up here not as a good example of what a surgery letter should look like but because it’s a good summary of who I was at that moment in time, how my gender identity had evolved and coalesced up to that point– it was, in short, a *very* good exercise for me to think about where I was and where I wanted to go.

And now, surgery looks like it may be less than 10 months away and I feel terrified. I’m excited of course, and thrilled and happy and I’ve felt better than I have in years, but still, I’m scared. Surgery is a big deal and this is, it really is, irreversible. The trach shave was, of course, but big deal, I’d be a guy without a hugely prominent adam’s apple. And I wouldn’t have a lot of hair on my body or face. But, those are hardly the kind of roadblocks one would worry about when de-transitioning, if one decided to do so.

This though, as I’m starting to get bald patches around the surgical site, is starting to really sink in. If I detransitioned now, it would be a weird thing to try and explain why I had almost no pubic hair.

If you’ve noticed in that last paragraph, I used the phrase ‘surgical site’, which is how I’ve come to relate to my genitalia. I used to use feminine words when talking about my body, calling each part by what it would eventually become. Now though, it’s just a surgical site. I’ve actually found that as I start thinking about surgery and what will happen to my body that it feels weird to call parts of my body by names that don’t fit yet– a caterpillar is not yet a butterfly. And so that doesn’t feel right to me anymore.

I imagine that my relationship to my body will continue to evolve in the next several months, as the date is fixed and then gets progressively closer. And that’s actually the one thing about surgery that’s most on my mind at the moment– how will my relationship to my body continue to change, especially post-surgery?

In other words, what if surgery doesn’t do anything to make me feel better? What if I’m not happy? What if, instead of feeling out of place with male genitalia, I feel out of place with female genitalia that are, for lack of a better word, artificial? What if I don’t feel like a real woman when it’s all said and done?

I’ve had this particular thought before– that part of what supports the thesis that I’m not a real woman is that without shots and electrolysis and surgery I wouldn’t be a woman. If I were trapped on a desert island, I’d eventually start looking like a man again. Consequently, my top three desert island must-haves: lifetime supply of 1.) estrogen, 2.) syringes and 3.) needles.

This view is, of course, very short sighted, but it represents a very real fear and a very real misgiving in my own psyche– it’s even evident in my “About” section on this blog– that what we feel is not the entirety of the experience. After all, my thinking goes, if all it took to be a woman was to feel like a woman, then the government wouldn’t require that we have SRS in order to change our social security accounts. Evidently, there’s something within the institutionalized ideas of gender that are based on our physical bodies and it seems I’m carrying that around with me– just because you say you’re an orange doesn’t make it so.

If I had to pin down the fear, it’s that in this process of moving from apple to orange, from fish to fowl, I’m worried that I’ll end up, not stuck in between as I feel now, but in some third place, as neither, and that the unique state of being will not be superior to either of the known points. What if I end up in a worse place than I’ve ever been, what if I feel like a person who couldn’t be a woman without a surgeon’s intervention? What if the despair at the end of the road is worse than I’ve ever plumbed?

A friend once echoed my sentiment that dysphoria is a known quantity, that it never gets worse than it is. It comes and goes, but when it’s bad, it only gets so bad. I know how lousy I can feel about the way my body is. But once the entire world is turned upside down again, what will that dysphoria look like? How lousy can I feel about the way my body will be? I’m afraid of that answer. Part of my surgical recommendation is to stay in therapy for at least a year after surgery and I fear that I won’t make it that long.

But, even with all the uncertainty, this is still going to happen. It has to. I can’t imagine having come this far and not taking the final step no matter how scared I may be of what’s on the other side. It’s not unlike being at the border of Aslan’s country– some risks have to be borne, no matter the consequences. Sometimes we have to move forward, no matter the people behind us that think it folly.

So, that’s what I’m doing with the money in the bank. I’m not saving it for a rainy day, I’m not investing it, I’m not doing anything responsible– I’m going to go blow it all once in a single place– a town in Pennsylvania called New Hope. We’ll see if it is.

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* Electrolysis in the pubic region is quite possibly one of the most painful experiences I’ve ever endured. Even with a topical anesthetic, a large quantity of alcohol and several ibuprofen tablets, I still end up crying every week. It hurts that bad. I’m convinced that if we, as a nation, really wanted to torture people, all we’d have to do is strap them down to a table and burn a few hairs off their genitalia. We’d get whatever information we wanted from even the most hardened individual within a matter of minutes. If you doubt me, try plucking a couple of hairs from down there and then multiply the pain factor about 10-fold and decide how long you could hold out against that.

re-posted from:

http://genderqueerchicago.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-make-love-to-trans-person.html#comment-form

by Gabe Moses

Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans,
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.

When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it’s highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she’s “had the surgery.”
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do,
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.

If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet itLet her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she’d lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.

Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They’re just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It’s what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That’s the important part.
Don’t worry about the bodies.
They’ve got this.