Clarity
So today I am looking at a complicated question head-on. It’s one I’ve meant to tackle for a while now: explaining, or at least trying to explain, exactly why it is that I’m choosing to make an actual, medical, physical transition from female to male.
Not all Transfolk do. And when I first came out as being Trans, I wasn’t even remotely thinking about this issue; I knew it was a question that would come up sooner or later, but hey, later felt just fine to me! I was still busy wrestling with far simpler questions: Whether I wanted to ask my community to make a change-of-pronoun for me (a hard thing to ask, since pronouns are so ingrained). Whether I was comfortable continuing to use the gender-neutral short form of my given name. Whether, for God’s sake, I owned a single piece of clothing that I could comfortably wear, now that I had stopped pointedly ignoring this acute internal/external clash. Arrghhh!
There was still a lot of static on my radio station, so to speak.
So I put the whole transition question on a back burner - WAY back - figuring it could just continue to simmer along there quietly until I felt ready to look at it. I expected that it might take a long time and I wasn’t going to rush it.
(Sorry, I know we’re mixing metaphors here... just go with the flow, okay? Life doesn't always happen in well-constructed sentences...)
Simmer it did - but far more quickly than I’d anticipated. Over the next few months, amidst many powerful moments of confirmation that I’d uncovered a true and right sense of myself that day, there were also some that clearly pointed to a needful next stage - profound encounters with my own physical being, with myself as an embodied person and how I felt about it, that stirred up all of the issues above, cut through the mental static, and said, LISTEN.
In large part, of course, gender dysphoria is about the body - not what it looks like to anyone else, but what it feels like to its owner. The degree of bodily dysphoria (disjunction or “wrongness”) felt by any Trans individual depends on a complicated mixture of things, such as where on the gender spectrum your identity lies, and how your life experience has shaped your sense of body-consciousness.
I identify on the spectrum as male, and I basically “turned off” my body when the gods of puberty (who seriosuly do have a twisted sense of humor) decided to try and force me to be female. I went from being a kid who was unusually tuned in to the physical - touch, smell, my own energy levels and kinesthetic sense - to being an adult who had trouble being aware if I was tired, hungry, hot or cold, ill or in pain. I pretty much just blocked out everything below the neck. Disjunction? You bet.
That may sound bad enough. But in gender dysphoria there can also be a severe sense of social disjunction, because all of the spaces you’re offered to live in feel like the wrong shape, too. And your responses to the standard social cues are constantly misread, because they are the wrong cues for you.
This aspect is one that I felt long before puberty. I was never really comfortable in predominantly female spaces, and was constantly misconstrued as stuck-up or rude. This left me so isolated throughout most of my youth that I had essentially no social skills, and came off as being painfully shy, severely introverted. (It took me literally half a lifetime to discover that I’m actually an extrovert, that I thrive on doing things out in the world among people. Who knew?)
As an adult, I worked hard at pushing past this problem and living my life anyway. I more or less learned to work around it - but nonetheless continued to feel it acutely. Social spaces where I could feel really comfortable and happy - like “one of the guys” - have been extremely few and far between. (I can think of two, both short-lived, within the last 20 years.)
It’s my guess, from reading and hearing the accounts of others, that not all Transfolk experience both of these problems - or at least, not all experience them both this strongly. Without that double whammy, things might feel different to me - but the two together are a pretty devastating combo. So one reason for choosing to transition is that it will ease both of these long-standing issues considerably. Probably not perfectly, but to a significant and meaningful degree.
(And how do Trans individuals deal with this stuff before coming out? We cover it with static. Feelings? What feelings? Sorry, I think we have a bad connection...)
For me, though, it’s also partly about finally having a clear sense of my own body actually belonging to me, and what that means. The decision to physically transition is an act of taking ownership of myself - of knowing, at long last, that this thing I live in, this physical self, is MINE, and that I have a right to make it fit me in whatever way seems best, as a vehicle for living my one-and-only life.
Of course, none of this explains how I actually got there... how the decision emerged from all that simmering. Because it’s not the kind of decision where you sit down and list the pros and cons - at least it wasn’t for me. It’s about getting to the place where the deep emotions dwell, not just the surface wants and wishes and hopes and fears. It’s about uncovering a certain kind of gut-level knowledge. And for me, that knowledge tends to reveal itself in the form of a decision so clear that it’s essentially already made, requiring only conscious acceptance of what I already know to be my right path.
It’s like that moment when, as you try to find your radio station, the static finally clears.
I could offer you a lovely abstract analysis of all the stages by which this recognition proceeded for me... but in keeping with this blog’s title and purpose, I’d rather tell you stories. So I’ll share with you a couple of those deep encounters with my physicality that said so strongly, LISTEN...
At one point, shortly after coming out, I decided to allow myself to daydream what it might feel like to accomplish one particular aspect of physical transition: so-called “top surgery,” which in my case would mean double mastectomy and chest reconstruction. (I have always dealt with having breasts by pointedly ignoring their existence - chalk one up for static! Luckily mine are fairly small and can be more or less reasonably hidden by layers of clothing - lucky indeed, because with my breathing problems, there’s no way I could possibly wear a chest binder, as most pre-op Transmen do.)
Anyway, I closed my eyes and envisioned the whole scenario, just to see what it would feel like - the decision, the consultation, the hospital trip, the surgery, the post-surgery awakening, the moment when the bandages would come off, the imagined touch of a hand on my chest, which for the first time since puberty felt like MINE again... MY body, MY chest, not someone else’s that I’ve been forced to wear all these years...
... and suddenly in real life I was crying, hard. Not a few dignified tears, oh, no. We’re talking about gut-wrenching sobs of deep release and longing.
Okay, chalk up one likely YES vote for transition...
And several more as time went on. Here was the last one, the one that opened the door fully - and it’s a quite comedic little tale, so please try not to laugh ~too~ hard!
As some of you know, I have always been a bit hirsute, and have been long accustomed to shaving at least every few days so as not to panic the neighbors. After coming out, I simply stopped; what emerged was pretty much an actual beard, quite thin but nicely symmetrical, and light enough in color to make its sparseness not immediately obvious. I instantly loved the silly little thing... watched it grow, mentally encouraged it to fill in, cherished a huge feeling of rightness in it.
I didn’t realize how very attached I was to it until I went for the sleep study my doctor had been urging me to have, and the kindly technician - who in all other ways was laboring to make me extremely comfortable - decided to yank off the industrial-strength adhesive holding the oxygen-measuring apparatus in place under my nostrils, taking approximately half of my slow-growing teenage-boy moustache with it, from the roots. (It hurt like hell and it still hasn’t grown back in properly.)
And suddenly I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. Disproportionately angry, from some unexpectedly deep place that had nothing to do with the temporary physical pain and frustration, and everything to do with core issues of identity.
I didn’t know how to explain any of this to the kindly, well-meaning attendant whom I now rather wanted to strangle, but there was no way in hell that I was going to be able to sleep again at that moment. (When I did manage to explain it to him later, his response was sympathetic and apologetic.) I told him I just needed to sit up for a little while, and when he left the room, I grabbed my little compact netbook, which had accompanied me that night, and did the one thing that I instinctively knew would calm me: I started googling the use of testosterone in the first stage of female-to-male transitioning - its effects, dosages, delivery methods, costs, everything.
That was the moment at which I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I needed to take seriously the idea of making an actual physical transition. That experiencing my body as male wasn’t just a fun little experiment, but something that felt incredibly, deeply real and important to me. That week I made an appointment with my doctor and managed to choke out the words, “I am Transgender, and I identify as male, and I want to talk about whether there is any possibility of my being able to begin taking testosterone.” There was an profound sense of rightness and peace to that step. It was like the static had finally cleared.
It continues to feel that way, as I mentally prepare to enter that first stage. I’m happy, scared, impatient, eager, feeling alive as I haven’t felt for most of my adult life.
And when it comes down to it, THAT is why I’m choosing to transition: because the decision to become more ME is intimately connected to that spark within, the part of me that wants to LIVE instead of merely existing. Because this is about making a choice, not just for surcease of pain, but also to claim joy.
And because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that when the static finally clears - you LISTEN!
Not all Transfolk do. And when I first came out as being Trans, I wasn’t even remotely thinking about this issue; I knew it was a question that would come up sooner or later, but hey, later felt just fine to me! I was still busy wrestling with far simpler questions: Whether I wanted to ask my community to make a change-of-pronoun for me (a hard thing to ask, since pronouns are so ingrained). Whether I was comfortable continuing to use the gender-neutral short form of my given name. Whether, for God’s sake, I owned a single piece of clothing that I could comfortably wear, now that I had stopped pointedly ignoring this acute internal/external clash. Arrghhh!
There was still a lot of static on my radio station, so to speak.
So I put the whole transition question on a back burner - WAY back - figuring it could just continue to simmer along there quietly until I felt ready to look at it. I expected that it might take a long time and I wasn’t going to rush it.
(Sorry, I know we’re mixing metaphors here... just go with the flow, okay? Life doesn't always happen in well-constructed sentences...)
Simmer it did - but far more quickly than I’d anticipated. Over the next few months, amidst many powerful moments of confirmation that I’d uncovered a true and right sense of myself that day, there were also some that clearly pointed to a needful next stage - profound encounters with my own physical being, with myself as an embodied person and how I felt about it, that stirred up all of the issues above, cut through the mental static, and said, LISTEN.
In large part, of course, gender dysphoria is about the body - not what it looks like to anyone else, but what it feels like to its owner. The degree of bodily dysphoria (disjunction or “wrongness”) felt by any Trans individual depends on a complicated mixture of things, such as where on the gender spectrum your identity lies, and how your life experience has shaped your sense of body-consciousness.
I identify on the spectrum as male, and I basically “turned off” my body when the gods of puberty (who seriosuly do have a twisted sense of humor) decided to try and force me to be female. I went from being a kid who was unusually tuned in to the physical - touch, smell, my own energy levels and kinesthetic sense - to being an adult who had trouble being aware if I was tired, hungry, hot or cold, ill or in pain. I pretty much just blocked out everything below the neck. Disjunction? You bet.
That may sound bad enough. But in gender dysphoria there can also be a severe sense of social disjunction, because all of the spaces you’re offered to live in feel like the wrong shape, too. And your responses to the standard social cues are constantly misread, because they are the wrong cues for you.
This aspect is one that I felt long before puberty. I was never really comfortable in predominantly female spaces, and was constantly misconstrued as stuck-up or rude. This left me so isolated throughout most of my youth that I had essentially no social skills, and came off as being painfully shy, severely introverted. (It took me literally half a lifetime to discover that I’m actually an extrovert, that I thrive on doing things out in the world among people. Who knew?)
As an adult, I worked hard at pushing past this problem and living my life anyway. I more or less learned to work around it - but nonetheless continued to feel it acutely. Social spaces where I could feel really comfortable and happy - like “one of the guys” - have been extremely few and far between. (I can think of two, both short-lived, within the last 20 years.)
It’s my guess, from reading and hearing the accounts of others, that not all Transfolk experience both of these problems - or at least, not all experience them both this strongly. Without that double whammy, things might feel different to me - but the two together are a pretty devastating combo. So one reason for choosing to transition is that it will ease both of these long-standing issues considerably. Probably not perfectly, but to a significant and meaningful degree.
(And how do Trans individuals deal with this stuff before coming out? We cover it with static. Feelings? What feelings? Sorry, I think we have a bad connection...)
For me, though, it’s also partly about finally having a clear sense of my own body actually belonging to me, and what that means. The decision to physically transition is an act of taking ownership of myself - of knowing, at long last, that this thing I live in, this physical self, is MINE, and that I have a right to make it fit me in whatever way seems best, as a vehicle for living my one-and-only life.
Of course, none of this explains how I actually got there... how the decision emerged from all that simmering. Because it’s not the kind of decision where you sit down and list the pros and cons - at least it wasn’t for me. It’s about getting to the place where the deep emotions dwell, not just the surface wants and wishes and hopes and fears. It’s about uncovering a certain kind of gut-level knowledge. And for me, that knowledge tends to reveal itself in the form of a decision so clear that it’s essentially already made, requiring only conscious acceptance of what I already know to be my right path.
It’s like that moment when, as you try to find your radio station, the static finally clears.
I could offer you a lovely abstract analysis of all the stages by which this recognition proceeded for me... but in keeping with this blog’s title and purpose, I’d rather tell you stories. So I’ll share with you a couple of those deep encounters with my physicality that said so strongly, LISTEN...
At one point, shortly after coming out, I decided to allow myself to daydream what it might feel like to accomplish one particular aspect of physical transition: so-called “top surgery,” which in my case would mean double mastectomy and chest reconstruction. (I have always dealt with having breasts by pointedly ignoring their existence - chalk one up for static! Luckily mine are fairly small and can be more or less reasonably hidden by layers of clothing - lucky indeed, because with my breathing problems, there’s no way I could possibly wear a chest binder, as most pre-op Transmen do.)
Anyway, I closed my eyes and envisioned the whole scenario, just to see what it would feel like - the decision, the consultation, the hospital trip, the surgery, the post-surgery awakening, the moment when the bandages would come off, the imagined touch of a hand on my chest, which for the first time since puberty felt like MINE again... MY body, MY chest, not someone else’s that I’ve been forced to wear all these years...
... and suddenly in real life I was crying, hard. Not a few dignified tears, oh, no. We’re talking about gut-wrenching sobs of deep release and longing.
Okay, chalk up one likely YES vote for transition...
And several more as time went on. Here was the last one, the one that opened the door fully - and it’s a quite comedic little tale, so please try not to laugh ~too~ hard!
As some of you know, I have always been a bit hirsute, and have been long accustomed to shaving at least every few days so as not to panic the neighbors. After coming out, I simply stopped; what emerged was pretty much an actual beard, quite thin but nicely symmetrical, and light enough in color to make its sparseness not immediately obvious. I instantly loved the silly little thing... watched it grow, mentally encouraged it to fill in, cherished a huge feeling of rightness in it.
I didn’t realize how very attached I was to it until I went for the sleep study my doctor had been urging me to have, and the kindly technician - who in all other ways was laboring to make me extremely comfortable - decided to yank off the industrial-strength adhesive holding the oxygen-measuring apparatus in place under my nostrils, taking approximately half of my slow-growing teenage-boy moustache with it, from the roots. (It hurt like hell and it still hasn’t grown back in properly.)
And suddenly I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. Disproportionately angry, from some unexpectedly deep place that had nothing to do with the temporary physical pain and frustration, and everything to do with core issues of identity.
I didn’t know how to explain any of this to the kindly, well-meaning attendant whom I now rather wanted to strangle, but there was no way in hell that I was going to be able to sleep again at that moment. (When I did manage to explain it to him later, his response was sympathetic and apologetic.) I told him I just needed to sit up for a little while, and when he left the room, I grabbed my little compact netbook, which had accompanied me that night, and did the one thing that I instinctively knew would calm me: I started googling the use of testosterone in the first stage of female-to-male transitioning - its effects, dosages, delivery methods, costs, everything.
That was the moment at which I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I needed to take seriously the idea of making an actual physical transition. That experiencing my body as male wasn’t just a fun little experiment, but something that felt incredibly, deeply real and important to me. That week I made an appointment with my doctor and managed to choke out the words, “I am Transgender, and I identify as male, and I want to talk about whether there is any possibility of my being able to begin taking testosterone.” There was an profound sense of rightness and peace to that step. It was like the static had finally cleared.
It continues to feel that way, as I mentally prepare to enter that first stage. I’m happy, scared, impatient, eager, feeling alive as I haven’t felt for most of my adult life.
And when it comes down to it, THAT is why I’m choosing to transition: because the decision to become more ME is intimately connected to that spark within, the part of me that wants to LIVE instead of merely existing. Because this is about making a choice, not just for surcease of pain, but also to claim joy.
And because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that when the static finally clears - you LISTEN!
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