Comments (8)

By Rebecca, February 2, 2012 2:49 pm

Here’s what I’d like you to do:

1. Cut open my penis.
2. Remove the spongey erectile tissue. Make sure to leave the nerves and blood supply intact! We’ll need those!
3. Invert all that stuff up into my pelvic cavity.
4. Use that tissue and blood supply to make me a brand new clit.
5. Shorten my urethra – won’t be standing up to pee anymore!
6. Take the extra scrotal tissue and shape me a good labia.

Perfect! Now that’s what I want to see when I look in the mirror. Continue reading 'Cut it open. Push it up.'»

Comments (4)

By Rebecca, January 31, 2012 3:32 pm

This past week I was at Butler University in Indianapolis, performing Uncovering the Mirrors and leading a workshop around trans issues. Everything went really well, and I met some great people. All in all a very good trip.

During the workshop, however, something came up that I had not previously considered. Specifically, someone asked about how trans youth are (medically) treated. I said that it varies, but that there’s an increasing use of hormone blockers to delay puberty. This allows a twelve or thirteen year old to age a few years and – hopefully – be able to make a more informed decision about transitioning. In my I-am-not-a-doctor opinion, it’s a good compromise: simply doing nothing can result in spending thousands of dollars to undo puberty, but launching fully into hormone replacement therapy opens the door to a twelve year old realizing they weren’t really trans at thirteen or fourteen.

Ultimately, I said to the questioner, there isn’t a perfect solution. Once a child realizes they’re trans, it’s a matter of picking the best choice from some bad options. Which, to be very clear, doesn’t mean that being trans condemns an individual to a life of misery. But it does, as far as I can see, necessitate some tough decisions and a difficult journey.

The questioner then posed something that has been bouncing around my brain this past week: Could allowing fifteen and sixteen year olds to be making informed consent decisions about their healthcare lead to the criminal justice system saying they were able to make informed decisions about crimes, and should thus be tried as adults?

Continue reading 'Trans youth and informed consent'»

Comments (7)

By Rebecca, January 30, 2012 1:48 pm

With help from the peanut gallery. This is a mix of FTM, MTF, and general silliness, so don’t try to overthinkg ‘em. Feel free to suggest more in the comments!

I really transitioned to get into bars for free, without having to pay cover.

I really transitioned because I heard there weren’t enough women in science, and I wanted to do my part.

I really transitioned so I could drink sweet pink drinks at bars without being judged.

I really transitioned because when I paint my toes pink, I want to be a boy with pink toenails!

I really transitioned so I could wear tight pants all the time without looking like a member of an 80′s rock band.

I really transitioned because I wanted to save on car insurance.

I really transitioned because the clothes are *way* better (so i still wear BDUs and t-shirts most of the time)

I really transitioned because I was born on Stonewall Day.

Comments (0)

By Rebecca, January 13, 2012 12:52 pm

Exclusions. Covered expenses of the Plan shall not include … procedures, treatments, equipment, transplants, or implants, any of which are … for, or resulting from, a gender transformation operation. – 215 Illinois Compiled Statutes 105 – Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan Act

It’s unclear whether the State of Illinois has defined – through statute or the courts – what specifically “gender transformation operation” means. But it seems pretty safe to assume that the surgery I’m currently considering would fall under its purview. Surgery in which the “spongiform erectile tissue of the penis is removed, and the skin, with its nerves and vascular system (blood supply) still attached, is used to create a vestibule area and labia minora, which then are inverted into the neovaginal cavity created in the pelvic tissue.” That seems pretty gender transformative to me.

What’s interesting about the Illinois Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan Act (or the ICHIP Act) is what other injuries, procedures, and categories of coverage are excluded.  Gender transformation operations (item 14.iv on the list of exclusions) is lumped in with cosmetic surgery (item 1), anything which exceeds “reasonable or customary” cost (item 4), injury due to war (item 9) , services that are “not provided in accord with generally accepted standards of current medical practice” (item 14), contraceptives (item 19), weight loss programs (item 21), acupuncture (22). Interestingly enough, the act itself does not, as best as I could find, mention abortion or early termination of a pregnancy, but the ICHIP website stil says such services are excluded.

Continue reading 'Some exclusions may apply'»

Comments (2)

By Rebecca, September 28, 2011 1:41 pm

First, an update on my firing from last October. I had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency who makes sure employers are being all equal and such. I just got a letter from them saying that, because Neal Math and Science Academy hadn’t responded to the EEOC’s inquiry, the EEOC would be investigating the complaint themselves.

I talked to my lawyer, who said this isn’t great news – that would be if Neal decided to cooperate with the EEOC from the beginning. But it does mean that the EEOC hasn’t forgotten about my complaint, and hasn’t (yet) said it’s not under their jurrisdiction.

In other news, my dad sent me a Chicago Tribune article about Dr Schechter, a plastic surgeon in the Chicago suburbs who does gender reassignment surgery. This is very interesting to me, since the only folks I’d found doing surgery were decidedly not in the Chicago area. At the same time, the fact that I haven’t heard of this guy makes me hesitant – all the doctors I’ve been researching are well-established, with reviews online over at this site. The article also says Schecther works with the Drs Etner, who I’m not fans of.

Has anyone heard anything about him? Positive or negative?

Comments (2)

By Rebecca, September 27, 2011 5:55 pm

Hopefully won't end up in police custody like she did, tho.

I talked with my therapist recently about ‘the rest’ of transitioning. I don’t mean The Surgery, although that’s something which is still on my mind, I mean moving from actively transitioning – changing my name, going on hormones, fretting about levels, watching my boobs grow, constant hair removal – to simply living as a woman. (As if living were ever simple, for anyone.)

More specifically, I said I’d been having trouble getting motivated lately. Sure, I could spend extra time doing my makeup, extra energy wearing a skirt, extra effort walking in heels. But I’m never going to look like Mexico’s beauty queen over on the right (using her as an example simply because she came up when I did a Google Image Search for ‘beauty’) so why not just throw on jeans and a t-shirt?

Laura, my therapist, smiled and said that’s part of what being a woman is all about.

Except I’ve become very used to the idea of transition as moving toward something: getting hair removed, growing breasts, buying a new wardrobe. The idea that I’ve arrived (or am close to arriving) at status quo, at whatever ‘normal’ is going to be for me for the foreseeable future, is battling it out with internalized transphobia and, more simply, internalized desire for the unobtainable female ideal.

On good days, I’m able to remind myself that I’m not only attractive “for a trans woman” (whatever that loaded statement means) but simply attractive as a woman. Touring this summer demonstrated that; it may not be that all the girls wanted me, but enough did to be a boost to my confidence.

On bad days, however, I feel stuck. As if I’ve reached my asymptotic height. And while convincing myself that transitioning was possible has helped keep me sane for so many years, I now need to put the breaks on that line of thinking: there is a limit to how I’ll look, determined by genetics and biology. I’m never going to be 5’6″ and 120 lbs, or have a 36-26-36 figure.

But that’s OK. I’m working on it being OK.

Comments (0)

By Rebecca, June 30, 2011 8:53 pm

Latest hormone updates. At 4 mg/day, my estrogen is at 1676, down from 4626. So I’m going down to 2 mg/day. Hopefully this magic dose will cause my anxiety and depression to fly away, like a 2-year-long bout of PMS…

Comments (14)

By Rebecca, June 5, 2011 12:11 pm

A generic surgery

Yesterday I schlepped out to Be All Chicago for a brief consult with Dr Meltzer, a surgeon from Arizona. (Side note: I didn’t actually register for or attend Be All for a few reasons. First, while it claims to be a “Chicago” conference, it’s actually in Downers Grove. Second, it caters to a significantly older audience, which isn’t a bad thing by any means, but doesn’t make me feel a huge desire to attend.)

Back on track, Dr Meltzer is on my Short List of doctors I’ve researched and would now like to actually meet, or at the very least speak with. Others on the list include Dr Bowers, Dr Reed, Dr Alter, and Dr McGinn. If you’ve heard anything about any of these doctors – positive or negative – please let me know.

I liked Dr Meltzer from our first introduction. A big part of why I want to meet with doctors, perhaps the biggest part, is to see if we ‘click.’ All the doctors I’m looking at have a large enough history and enough reviews that I know they’re not simply back-alley charlatans. But a lesson from having my gallbladder our – where I had no choice of doctors, cuz it was emergency surgery – is that clicking with a doctor can make you feel safer and more comfortable.

Continue reading 'Meeting about THE SURGERY'»

Comments (1)

By Rebecca, May 11, 2011 5:15 pm

I heard back from my doc, and apparently my estrogen levels were 4626. Eek! Here’s what he said about estrogen versus estradiol levels:

Serum estrogen levels measures all estrogens in your blood whether given as an Rx, or produced naturally. Estradiol measure a single type of estrogen that is made naturally in a genetic female. So, for our purposes estrogen is what we measure.

In the meantime, I’m down to 3 pills (6 mg) a day, from the original 10. Hopefully I won’t start sprouting gorilla hair.

Comments (2)

By Rebecca, May 6, 2011 3:55 pm

This morning I went to a panel at Howard Brown Health Center on a more complete and helpful picture of trans health issues. The conversation didn’t contain any revolutionary insights (yes, trans (and cis!) folks should be able to access medical health under an informed consent model, yes, there’s an overlap between LGBT health and reproductive health, and so on) but it did raise some interesting questions for me.

First, and something I’ve thought a lot about in the past, is the question of how to handle trans minors. As an educator and a trans person, I have a very conflicted view of this. On the one hand, as a trans person, I absolutely believe it’s possible to ‘know’ that one is trans before hitting 18. Access to medical care and hormones prior to 18 can make a huge difference in the ease and emotional success of transitioning. At the same time, as an educator, the idea of allowing teenagers to make such fundamental choices about their bodies worries me. I feel super hypocritical expressing that worry, since I would have been offended had someone questioned my trans identity (and, indeed, was offended when I had mediocre therapy support from folks who did question my identity). But what should the guidelines be for handling people who are not necessarily in a legal position to make their own decisions?

More broadly, the discussion got me thinking about whether or not healthcare is a fundamental right.

Continue reading 'Trans Health Panel at Howard Brown'»