I am a clockwork woman, wound up by pills each morning, rundown and empty by the end of each day. I feel nothing but rough textures of transitioning, nothing passes my lips but bitter tastes of transitioning, my sight is filled only with desolate views of transitioning, my ears echo with discordant sounds of transitioning. My movements only mimic those of laughter and life.
I am stuck in myself, trapped between a history I don’t want and a future I can’t see.
Life branches out in front of me, and every opportunity must be taken. None can be missed. Every missed opportunity is a mark against me, of weakness and laziness and lack of strength. Because I am still chasing down the opportunity I did miss: a chance at transitioning younger, quicker, more gracefully.
And so I chase and I chase and I chase. And so I try to catch something lost forever. And so I wind myself up, let myself loose, and fail. Again. I hold myself up to standards impossible to meet.
No opportunity satisfies, because I could have should have would have done it better. I should have committed more fully. I should have given it more of my time. I should have started earlier, procrastinated less, given more of myself. I should have. I should have. I should have. Whatever ‘it’ is, it’s always the same.
Every day is doomed to failure, from the start.
I. Can’t. Win.
Continue reading 'Composed of clockwork'»
A friend shot me an article from sfgate.com earlier this week: Gender Identity and Phantom Genitalia:
V.S. Ramachandran, a neurologist and psychologist at UC San Diego and a leading authority on phantom limb sensations, says it has long been known that some people who are born without arms have vivid phantom arms. They can swing them around, wave goodbye and make complicated gestures.
This suggests that an intact body image – the maps of the body laid down in the brain before and after birth – can develop without actual limbs. So-called mirror neurons that map the actions and intentions of others into one’s own brain may help bring the phantoms to life, Ramachandran says.
…
This got Ramachandran wondering whether the phantoms applied to transsexuality. To find out, he surveyed 20 male-to-female transsexual women and 29 female-to-male transsexual men.
The first finding was intriguing. Only 6 out of 20, or 30 percent, of the transsexual women who had had their penises removed reported feeling a phantom phallus. But 58 percent of “normal” men have such sensations after the surgery.
The second finding was surprising. A third to a half of “normal” women experience phantom breasts after a mastectomy, as opposed to only 3 out of the 29 transgender men. The third finding was downright astounding. Among the transsexual men, 18 out of 29, or 62 percent, said they had experienced a phantom penis long before their surgery.
Continue reading '“The Phantom Genitalia” would be a great band name'»
I have a complicated relationship with Judaism, at best. I don’t need to get into my whole life experience . . . but (briefly) I really enjoy the cultural aspects of Judaism and appreciate its long history, yet have serious problems with Judaism as a religion and integrating the less-positive parts of Jewish history into the modern functioning of the religion.
Expanding on that, slightly, I have moved from being ambivalent to how I feel about Israel to being specifically anti-Israel. To wit, the ends don’t (shouldn’t) justify the means: The (sort of) peaceful (mostly) democratic State of Israel as a beacon of Western Civilization to the rest of the Middle East can’t, to me, excuse its horribly colonialist founding or head-in-the-sand attitude toward the idea of a Palestinian state. (I know things are much more complicated than that, and the obvious fact that Israel does exist today means grumblings over how things came to be this way are somewhat moot. Nevertheless…)
All of which means I’m not sure how I feel about Birthright Israel.
Continue reading 'Any experiences with Birthright?'»
Went back to the dentist this week, even though I wasn’t very excited to have my cavities filled after my last visit. Fortunately, I got some better news – one of the cavities was super easy and not at all painful to fill, and the other one might not be a cavity at all! Basically, it looked like a really bad cavity from one angle on the x-ray, but not the other. And, if it was as bad of a cavity as it seemed, it should have been visible from both angles. So, rather than go digging and possibly not find anything, we’re going to wait a few months and I’ll come back to get another set of x-rays. If the ‘cavity’ hasn’t changed, that means the x-ray is really just showing my teeth (slightly odd teeth, apparently). If the ‘cavity’ has changed, that means it’s actually a cavity and I need to get it drilled. Ouch! (This is part of the reason I like my dentist – he’s willing to not do a procedure if he doesn’t think it’s the right decision.)
Meanwhile, in the parking lot, I saw this and it made me laugh:
(For anyone who doesn’t get it, OMG means ‘Oh my god!’ in text-speak. As in “OMG WTF! u nevaz did dat, like, dats like, fkin gay! if i did dat id be like, wowz!!!!”
So all that anger I’ve been talking about? Turns out my mom has been thinking about it, too.
I went to my mom’s on Sunday night for dinner, and was trying to figure out if I wanted to bring up the anger toward her that I’ve been thinking about. I knew I wanted to bring it up eventually, but it had been a difficult weekend and I wasn’t sure I had the energy to go there.
After dinner, though, my mom said that she’d been thinking a lot about the example she and my dad set for me. See, I never saw them fight. And, in recent talks with my mom, apparently they never really did fight. Part of the reason I have trouble with anger, I’m coming to realize, is because I have no framework for it in my life. My experience has been: everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, my parents are getting divorced.
And, apparently, that wasn’t because my parents were going to great lengths to hide their anger from me. They just suppressed and repressed it to the point where they barely were able to acknowledge it themselves, let alone express it to each other or show it to my brother and I.
Which leaves me really not knowing how to deal with anger. I don’t know how to express it, and I don’t know how to handle anger directed at me.
Continue reading 'My mom is awesome'»
As of this weekend, I’m on the dating market for the first time in almost four years.*
That’s terrifying.
Continue reading 'The terrifying market'»
Saw Laura, my therapist, tonight and talked a lot about the anger issues I spoke about earlier this week. I was saying that my anger – at my mom, at my dad, at the universe – feels profoundly useless. Addressing it doesn’t seem productive, it won’t change anything about the past, and I just don’t see the point.
Laura said that the “point” of addressing anger is that is you can’t get past it unless you do. Addressing anger won’t change the past, but it can change the anger itself. (At this point, I accused her of a circular argument: Addressing anger is useful because you can’t address it unless you do. She laughed, but said rephrasing it to sound silly doesn’t make it not true.)
Continue reading 'Anger is stupid and bad and I don’t like it'»
I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous post, about the This American Life piece which discussed two eight-year-old trans girls. Because, at some point over the last few days, I realized that I’m still angry about being trans. That things I thought I’d gotten over are still bothering me.
But I’m feeling rather clueless and impotent as to where I should direct the anger; how I can diffuse it. What ceremony can I perform? What ritual can I undergo? What right of passage is there for trans people who see their transition as a slow journey, not one marked by specific milestones?
Continue reading 'Where should the anger go?'»
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