U-Turn: a UU transman ponders sex, spirituality, and the power of stories

The other day I accidentally admitted, in the presence of both our minister and our RE committee chair, that persistent nagging is a technique that has sometimes worked if you want something from me. Oops! Of course they both immediately made “Hmmmm!” noises and pronounced this a VERY INTERESTING revelation... which presumably they intend to make good use of at some future time. I laughingly protested that they shouldn’t assume it’ll continue to work... after all, I’m a rapidly changing personality right now! Our minister just grinned and reminded me that he has been through this before (a close friend of his having transitioned some years back) and knows better... He’s right, of course. Transition changes many things, but not the basic essence of who you are. No matter how much I change, the person who comes out the other end will still be ME, with all of my strengths and weaknesses, gifts and faults and personality quirks. He’ll be long-winded, extroverted, and introspective, j...

Sorry, couldn’t resist. Well, okay, yeah, I  could have resisted, but it’s just not in my personality to deny a good Star Trek reference. In a previous entry (titled Clarity, back in, um, December, I think) I talked a little about gendered social spaces. One friend requested that I say a bit more about that. Now, I’m not talking about formally gendered spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, mens’ clubs or womens’ colleges. (Though of course there’s lot to be said, discussed, and argued about those!) No, I mean the subtler kind of spaces, the ones that aren’t officially defined in any way, but exist nonetheless. For instance: you’re at a family gathering, and after a while, you suddenly realize that all of the women have congregated in one room (maybe the kitchen, or a craft room) and all of the men are hanging out in another room (probably the workshop or garage). It didn’t happen on purpose... no one consciously said, hey, for God’s sake, let’s slip away from the menfo...

This is a hard post to write. I’m a little nervous about how certain friends of mine might take it - especially my female friends. And yet, for honesty’s sake, it’s a topic that needs to be opened up and looked at. There is always a danger, in choosing to make a gender transition, that those friends of the same apparent gender as you (i.e., the one you are leaving behind) will feel somehow insulted, or even abandoned... like you’re somehow letting the team down. You’re defecting, as it were, to the other side - at best, a deserter; at worst, a traitor to the cause... whether the cause is preserving traditional masculinity in a confused world, or fighting for the rights of women against a powerful patriarchy. Leaving the gender of your birth sometimes feels, to others, like an intentional and possibly insulting dissociation: “I’m not one of THEM.” This seems to happen especially with transguys, particularly those who were who were active in the Lesbian community prior to transitioni...

For the past few months, each day that I drive to work and back, I’ve been playing a game with the toll collectors on the Everett Turnpike. They don’t know, of course; the game is purely in my head. (I’d gladly let them in on it, but then it wouldn’t work anymore.) The game is this: Will you assume, O Thou Taker Of Tolls - in the five seconds or so that our paths intersect - that I’m a guy or a gal? And - even more interesting - will I be able to tell which assumption you’re making if you don’t use any obvious verbal cues (sir’s or ma’am’s) to give it away? Two things fascinate me about this game. One is that, yes, it turns out I can generally tell the answer to that question, even without obvious verbal cues. And the other is that I’ve pretty much been getting the “right” gender assumptions from these folks for a solid three months or so now. (Yeah!) I’ll never forget the first time one of these guys handed me change (yeah, I’m an EZPass holdout) with a cheery “Here ya go, budd...

I once attended an odd little theatrical poetry-reading affair - the brainchild of an advanced English class - in which one of the performers, a tall, bearded youth, ascended the stage to nobly declaim a piece about Being A Man. In sweeping, over-the-top, glib hack-poetic phrases, he expounded the many virtues of Masculinity... until, with a cat-that-ate-the-canary-grin, he delivered the ending line (“For society has given me permission/ To have hairy pits!”) while proudly baring a well-furred underarm to the audience, then madly dashed offstage to thunderous applause. It was terrific. (As a side note: I’d really like to find that poem, so if anyone can identify it, please pass it on!) That memory floats by as I ponder what it will be like to really own the word man. You see, I don’t really consider myself a man - not yet. Male, certainly, yes, but not a man. And that has nothing to do with my body, appearance, or abilities... with anything I have or don’t have. It’s just that ...

Well, now that I’ve gotten the deep thinking out of the way (only temporarily - trust me!), I’m going to actually toss up this second post (two in one week, is that even legal?) just to catch up anyone who’s curious on what’s been happening in my transition process (rather than just in my head) during this unexpected break in communications. Because my big news, transition-wise, is that in mid-January I finally, finally, FINALLY started on testosterone. (!!!!!!!!) When the moment actually came, after SO many setbacks and false starts, I found that I was suddenly reluctant to immediately share that information with too many people. To be honest, I was still sure that SOMETHING would find a way to go wrong. I’d end up being horribly allergic to the preparation that had been prescribed, or I’d have some dreadful side effect - or, heavens forfend, cardiac symptom - that would force a re-evaluation, and start the whole roller-coaster all over again... But no. I have never been so grat...

As a lover of words, I’m quite fond of the phrase, from a Robert Burns poem: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men aft gang agley.” There’s just something about its compactness of metaphor, succinctly implying the highs and lows of ambition, as well as its old, foreign wording... “oft go askew” just wouldn’t feel the same. At the moment, I’m wondering how I let things go so far agley - er, I mean askew - that I haven’t posted to this blog in... ye gods, has it been THAT many weeks?? Of course, it’s easily blamed on the many unexpected challenges Life has recently gifted me - from a highly persistent respiratory infection that’s had me more or less laid up for nearly a month, to this insane run of quasi-crippling Antarctic East-Coast weather and an ever-so-slightly problematic home internet connection... but hey, if you don’t like any of those excuses, I’m sure I can come up with a few more! But in the meantime, I’m busy recalling some of the other paths and promises of my life, th...