I love writing this blog. I love writing period. It is very fulfilling. When I am not posting and writing every day, I miss it terribly. I am not “busy” in the conventional sense, as I am not working at the moment and really can’t with my looming surgery and for several months thereafter. But there is an awful lot going on.
When I was four I saw a vagina for the first time. I’ve wanted one ever since. Vagina envy is real. Castration anxiety is male fantasy. A lust for up-cycling my boy bits into a vagina is something I share with many trans gals. When I was about seven years old I somehow found myself in the public library looking at a medical textbook from John’s Hopkins with very graphic images of surgeries. There was a sex change operation shown in there in detail. How on earth I found my way to that book is lost in the mists of time, but there it was. I didn’t know it was possible before then, but it gave me hope.
Looking at those graphical surgical images I knew I would do it someday. I wanted to wait until it was safe, and nobody could tell me ‘no’. Is it ironic that this time is now, when we are seeing a surge of anti-trans legislation, increase in hate crime? My response, my feelings, are instructive.
I’ve been on a women’s retreat recently, learning about my body, my changing body, the changing symphony of emotions that I feel now, the complexity of thought. It is almost impossible to convey the added nuance of having a female brain. Everything is easier to feel, to intuit, but linear thought is increasingly something that has to be worked for.
There was a lot of emotional sharing as one might expect. When it was my turn, even though I didn’t feel like speaking about being trans, of having that define me, I gravitated towards it, so that they might know me better. And speaking my truth out loud helped me to see it as my truth. It’s funny how sometimes it takes voicing or writing our thoughts to know they are even there.
This is what I said. “I kept putting off my transition until I couldn’t take it anymore.” I don’t want to dwell on what it is like to have gender dysphoria, but it isn’t something I would wish on anyone. One day I came to a fork in the road, which was to transition or to cease to exist. I realised I couldn’t go on much longer. [Readers of this blog will know much of this]. I hired four therapists to get me over a crisis, worked with a dominatrix to help me access deep body feeling, and finally sat Ayahuasca when I was ready to articulate my need: it was time to let her out.
The most significant moment was on an Ayahuasca retreat where I decided to come out. More fundamentally, I decided that the “she” in me was going to be my life going forward. That henceforth I would become the woman I had always wanted to be. Transition is a process. A long process. It takes many years, many surgeries, speech therapy, painful prep, challenging social re-adjustments, and stepping into a fetid swamp of prejudice, and being confronted with male privilege turned against me. There are plenty of other difficult and bad things too.
But none of these bad things matter. If anything, they are validating. Women have to put up with so much nonsense in life, and very often succeed despite all of the adversity. I want to be that kind of woman. Even though my surgery might make me incontinent, lose sexual function, give me ongoing health issues, I am leaning into it. Even though my wife is now trying to stop me from having surgery, basically so she can have more money in our settlement (both now and in the future). Even though I have had two wonderful jobs snatched from me for coming out—and yes, I am afraid for the future—none of it matters.
There is nothing that is going to stop me from becoming the best woman this trans woman could ever be, of being a relentlessly curious and supportive ally of women, of becoming the sex witch I was born to be. The harder that things become, the stronger I become, the more determined.
When my bestie spoke TERF words to me, when I hear them from others, or am told “you couldn’t possibly understand the female experience, you’ve only been on this team for a little while,” I think many things…I think, ‘true in parts’. But I also think that gender dysphoria creates its own hardship. That being seen as being male was worse than actually being male-bodied…it made me want to self-harm, to loathe myself. The idea of being seen as something I utterly rejected simply because that is what I looked like…I think anyone who has ever experienced racism or been shamed for their bodies for one reason or another will know what that feels like.
Yes, I can never give birth. But that also hurts me, hurts most of my trans sisters. And for those of us who undertake the painful surgery that is SRS, the recovery time is even longer. To me it is an equivalent rite of passage, and this is how I am treating it. I may be giving birth to myself, but I am giving birth nonetheless.
When people make unkind comments or accost me, something which seems to be an increasingly common thing—including drunk men on the street or in bars who want to ask me inappropriate questions—I think, “this is a pain in the ass,” sure, but I also think that these “obstacles” in my way serve to increase my determination, serve to enlighten me.
I guess that what all of this points to is that I am finding so much growing comfort in my skin that I don’t hesitate to occupy space as a trans woman. If I am gendered male, I have begun correcting people. After a certain point you have to say it is wilful to call me a man when I am more and more clearly not.
2024 will be a year of surgery and speech therapy. I have SRS in 40 days now. I hope to have facial surgery by the end of the year, and that will leave only minor things in 2025. What better way to convalesce than re-learning how to talk.
The best advice I’ve had so far? “Find a couple of women whose voices you really love, and start mimicking them,” said my vocal surgeon. He wants me doing 6 months of vocal training before we contemplate surgery, and this was the least scientific part of his advice, but the best. The other was “stop torturing her,” which he said to the technician who was jamming the camera on the long metal rod down my throat and getting me to choke/sing a variety of notes. It was not fun.