99 days of transition—a spiritual path through a sex change

Some very dear humans have come into my life over the past few years.  People I might have never met.  Many of them from walks of life I do not know or would have never come across had my own life not taken a turn for the richer.

Over a hastily arranged and hastily consumed cocktail meet up with just such a person, together, we entered the twilight zone.  And it all happened fast.  I had been at a dinner, and when I walked out I texted her and asked what she was up to. She was just off work, but was exhausted and was already on her way home.

“Quick, decide, should I get off the subway now?”

“Yes,” I shot back.  “I’ll come to wherever you are.”

She got off, went into a bar and texted me the location.  I was with her via taxi in no time flat.  As ever, and despite her exhaustion, she was radiant.  Beautiful people on the inside radiate out no matter what.

I am not really drinking alcohol right now as it is inconsistent with my weight goals, body goals, use of time, need, and it is also not the best for someone recovering from surgery.  It will take roughly a year for my body to fully heal from surgery.  But she was having a stiff drink.  We spoke privately at the bar, but some guy came up, a random dude—fellas please don’t do this.

“I feel like I know you,” he said to me, checking us both out, “are you a musician?”  He is not the first to ask.  Insert name of crazy-ass rocker and it could be me.  I get all kinds.  “Are you a movie star?”  That’s a favourite.  Especially when they insist.  My kids classmates parents often wondered just this—“is your father a movie star.  I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere.”  We all just joked that it was because I often did the school run still in my pyjamas and a bathrobe.  

Or.  If you count porn films.  Maybe…but I was only ever in one and that was a long time ago.  It sounds funny, but I had a speaking part!  And it wasn’t “ooh, ahh, yeah, stick it in baby.”

My favourite response has been that I’m in fashion.  It can be fun to wear a fake persona.  I would have loved that to be true, and as a model, I suppose it was true.  In a way.

I kept trying to shake the guy at the bar loose with denials…”you’re mistaken, you don’t recognise me,” a kind of bar-room version of a Jedi mind trick, only it wasn’t working.  Not only that, but he kept coming back.  My friend told him in a polite but firm way that we were two friends just wanting to catch up and were not looking to meet strangers.  I love being around people who have boundaries, know what they are, and communicate them.  When I say that so many women who are half my age have so much to teach me in this regard, it is an understatement.  I have a world full of big sisters.

The fashion persona works well because I generally look like it…and a man-woman or woman-man, which I seem to occupy, have occupied, in the public consciousness, seems to ring most true.  But now, I just want to say banker, or some highly incongruous profession, nuclear scientist, something, anything, to burst the sexist bubble.  Why is some guy chatting me up?

Anyway.  My friend listened to me speak about how instead of hiring a nurse to care for me 24/7 for the 3-week period when I was to be out of the hospital and given the all-clear, I had a group of women friends and family to come and take care of me.  Specifically, I told her about how I had asked them to support me…I asked each of them to bring me a book that contained lessons in it that they felt were particularly meaningful to them as women.  Things they felt I needed to know.

Well, blow me down.  The books they chose for me, and each read for me, were beautiful, powerful, delicious.  And not one of them was easy.

• The Den Mother brought me a book about women in private equity, my industry, and how the cards are stacked against us, how it is the most discriminatory sector, how it has the worst female participation rates as employees and as investees.  It was very troubling reading.  When I told her how hard it was to hear these messages, but also good and motivating, she went to a lesbian bookstore and bought me a hilarious book about women doing very naughty things.  “You can read this one to yourself,” she said, and kept on reading about the kind of discrimination I was likely to face.  Ouch.
• The Lover brought me a novel about discrimination and sexual harassment at work, sexual assault.  It was a really tough slog, but she read to me a lot, and we got quite far.  I kept going once she had gone.  This book was rough for me to read about…
• One of my sisters brought me a book about sex and the life of dating…It was about straight girls.  We didn’t even open it.  Instead, she chose a book about lesbian love and coming of age and read that to me instead.  That was more in keeping with my personal zeitgeist.
• Another sister brought me a book on discrimination, and also sent ahead a reading list to me of books she wanted me to buy about trans issues and how hard it can be to be trans in society.  She was as interested as I was in reading about them.  She is simultaneously the smartest and most tone deaf person in the family; it is always a challenge to engage with her intellectually, emotionally.
• The Whore [please don’t judge me, that is her choice of how to be referred to] directed me to two cookbooks about healing and curing the body.  I was really grateful for these.  They were/are an inspiration for a book of my own.
• And of course there is the daughter, me, and OMG I forgot the mother, an on-purpose lacuna that I won’t be able to get over.
• And of course there is the Witch, both me and many others who are in my life, but I don’t write so often about them.  I have many, many witches in my life.

There were/are others, but I find the selection stark and quite dramatic.  The female experience is completely bound up with men behaving badly.  My time at the bar with my friend showed me that I am not immune to this, even as a pre-op woman.  And you wonder, ‘how much has he had to drink?’  Or, ‘how careful do I need to be?  Is he likely to become violent?’  Is this even something I need to face now?  And now, I can’t help but think the presence of a vulva between my legs has changed things in the minds of a great many men…and I am also acutely aware that I am much more slight than I was two years ago…the male solidity has left my body.  It is a physical reality of being female, even if my bone structure is big.

But what really mattered about this conversation was my friend’s suggestion that I be more intentional about the sex change process.  She likened what I was going through to a birthing process, both as mother and child, to growing up, to being a baby (she does not know how this sits in me), to becoming a teenager, and then finally an adult.  She described me at a critical moment, a blossoming, a coming out.  A quinzanera.  Coming of age.

“I would like you to celebrate this rebirth of yours for the holy process that it is.  You are joining the sisterhood, and I know what it means to you.  Why not mark it with the solemnity I know you know it merits.”  Bless her.  What a great idea.

We spoke at length about this, how it was so much more than an operation.  And she was right.  She was excited that I was surrounding myself with women I loved and admired.  She was excited that I was asking them to teach me the ways that it was important to them to be a woman.  But her suggestion that I vest this process with more ritual and ceremony was nothing short of profound.

My friend had planted more than a seed.  She had planted an orchard in my psyche.  It grew fast, and I ate the fruit of it for the coming months.  I still am.

From that moment on I began to work with a posse of witches and mediums to help me mark this period with all the symbolism it should have.  It became a true process of ritual and magic.

I worked with a medium.  She spoke to the spirit world and came back with a collection of animals, living and dead souls that were supporting me, spirit guides, and three Goddesses.  She had a vision of a peacock, feathers splayed, at the foot of my hospital bed.  A grizzly bear and a polar bear at my shoulders…and a male lion came slinking in, climbed up on the bed, and stood guard over me.  Powerful creatures. 

I have written about my spiritual connection to Tara, the female Buddha, as well as the bizarre coincidenes that have seen her manifest in my life.  Also Guan Yin, a Goddess of love and compassion.  But the medium also introduced Kali and underlined that Kali for me was to be the most important one of all and that I should embrace her and learn about her.  Kali had never figured in my pantheon.  She suggested that Kali is in pole position, that Kali is my guiding spirit.  How novel.  Something new to learn about.

I wear a Kali necklace now.  I also have a little statue that I keep in a shrine.  I asked one of my children to go to a particular shop.  I had done my homework on the phone and on the internet, and I had already been in, bought a sari there and the owner had bound me into it…you know how it is.  Any chance to bound into my clothing!

She noted my child, and months later, lavished me with compliments.  All of my children are pretty amazing.  Pretty. And amazing.  Proud Daddy.  But I do love it when another adult says how great they are.  And that sure feels good.  My wife was a good mother.  We know how I feel about mothers.  I was/am only ever the Daddy…it isn’t the same, as great as it is.  We have all acknowledged that I am a bit of both…and anyway, despite the demarcations of home life, I was firmly across the line as a trad wife in many ways.  

You show me a trans girl with kids who hasn’t been able to come out and I’ll show you the thousand ways she’s already out.  It may not be a monument, something obvious, but its surely a field of wildflowers.

I worked with a tarot card reader who pulled cards for me.  Another witch.  She is unbelievably good at this, and we had a very enriching series of conversations.  She asked me to take on some rituals.  To fashion a vulva out of clay, to let it dry, and then to paint it black.  By accident, the day I painted it black was the day of the total eclipse.  40 days later I painted it gold.

Do you know what else?  The tarot card reader is hella sexy.  Seriously.  When she pulled a card and told me that I was to explore my dominance as a woman, I told her that I was going to become a dominatrix…in any event, that was what the cards were already saying, only she wasn’t quite ready to just say something like that until I blurted it out…her response?  “Me too,” and then told me that she was certain that this was absolutely my path, and placed a marker for us to get together.  I hope I am in trouble.  A girl can dream.

The medium directed me to build altars.  One to my ancestors…and in particular, the ancestors who had given me their names.  She taught me about altar building

She spoke to them about my use of their names and got their blessing and support.  

The second altar was to my vulva.  The third altar was to my body, and its healing process.  I have no doubt that these rocks will and have delivered the goods.  I have no doubt that my wife breaking into my home to help herself to random and trivial belongings was heavily influenced by magic.  

I don’t really see how her action of profound self-harm can be seen any other way.  She has stretched the boundaries of how her children see her.  And I can’t help but think that it isn’t going to look good in court.

I worked with a shaman who led me in a guided meditation to meet myself as a fully embodied light being who was the essence of my name.  It was an incredible experience.  She is the shaman who worked with me as I took the medicine of Ayahuasca and found the resolve to come out.  She was the midwife to my female self.  She was the one who was there for me in ceremony when I understood the consequences of becoming a woman, and finally, she was the shaman who welcomed me into the sisterhood.

I worked with another shaman to remove demons and bad spirits from my space, my home, and on my person, to keep the baddies from me as I healed, and to protect me while I was vulnerable.  She gave me ritual.  She gave me visions, lessons, a context of intention.

My reiki master worked with me before, during, and after surgery, and conducted a session to guide my surgeon while she was operating on me.  You decide what you believe, but my surgeon told me the other day, “I’ve never seen scars heal so quickly.  Your vulva looks like it is one-year post-op, and you’re not even three months.”

This witch helped herself too.  I think of myself as a white witch, which has spiritual connections.  But most of my practice is what is known as green witchcraft.  Healing potions, healing lotions.  My “client” base is growing, but increasingly swear by the products I make for them.  The words of my Reiki Master ring true—the more we practice our magic the more powerful it becomes.

I’m not fxxking around.  My vulva is a slice right into my fundament.  My magic flows from my pussy.  I know it.  It is like a firehose, something I am learning to control.  And today, as I blasted from one city to another, from one means of transport to another, from one continent to another, I could feel her with me, silently reassuring.  Today, she felt oh-so different…and for the first time, really-really, I felt all woman.

She’s healing, and with that comes so many beautiful things.

My doctor told me she was comfortable with me starting to exercise.  Three months early.  And something else too.  You can guess what that might be.

“Can you feel this, what I’m doing here?”

“Doctor!”

“I want you to do this when you are dilating.  It’s not just about keeping things open now.  It’s about finding the joy in your new body.  I want you to play.”

OMG, I love my doctor.