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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.

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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…

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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'»

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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.

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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'»

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By Rebecca, March 9, 2011 6:43 pm

Cross-posted at The Center for Classic Theatre Review, an online literary review of Court Theatre in Chicago.

As a transgender woman, I’ve read a lot of trans fiction. Stories about magical transformations, mutations which cause gender shifts, mind-transfer rays, nanotechnology, forced feminization, sexual domination. You name a way someone could possibly transform from a man to a woman, and some author on some website has probably beaten you to it. And I’ve probably read it: the full range of stories, from enthusiastic transitions of  willing participants to subjugation and rape.

When there is no one like you on TV, when pornography depicts “your kind” as a freak and a fetish item, when your story is absent from books and movies, you make do with what you can. Not all of the stories I’ve read were well-written. Not all of them cast trans people in a positive light, let alone a realistic one. But that hunger to find ourself in the world exists in all of us. Finding our own identity in stories certainly isn’t the only reason we read, tell stories, watch movies, see plays. But it’s a big one, the desire to find that resonance of ourself in someone else’s tale.

Continue reading 'Is ‘Orlando: A Biography’ Trans Fiction?'»

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By Rebecca, March 7, 2011 12:38 pm

Not much of a man by the light of day

One of the oddest experiences of my transition was going off hormones to deposit sperm. (Almost three years ago!) It made me feel – perhaps more than any other single situation – as if I was balanced on a knife edge between ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ I wasn’t a woman (the thinking went) since I was at a doctor’s office attempting to deposit sperm. And I wasn’t much of a man (the same train of thought concluded) since my sperm count was so frustratingly low the doctor couldn’t get a viable sample. It was an agonizing paradox, of sorts: If my sperm count was high enough for a successful deposit, the hormones weren’t reshaping my body in the way I wanted them to. If my sperm count wasn’t high enough for a successful deposit, the hormones were working but I’d have to stay off of them even longer, in hopes of getting my sperm count up.

Either way, I lost.

Since then, I’ve had many occasions where I felt uncomfortable being too ‘girly’ or to ‘manly,’ and have been unsure of how to navigate my way through. I’m reminded of a time, a year or two ago, I was bringing home groceries with a friend. I was attempting to carry way too much, and she laughed and yelled, “You’re not a man any more! You don’t have to do everything at once, so take two trips!”

Continue reading 'Not much of a man'»

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By Rebecca, February 7, 2011 10:57 pm

Over the last 48 hours, I’ve had some really good conversations with both of my roommates about the issues I brought up in my previous post. Namely, my discomfort at emphatically ‘straight’ bars (particularly ‘frat-like’ bars, more on that language in a moment), and the growing disconnect in my social life between high school friends and queer/theatre friends. (Not that there isn’t an overlap between queer and theatre. Shocking, I know.)

I said, pretty firmly, that I’m done going to frat bars, dance clubs, whatever. One of my roommates, who was in a frat in college, was sort of annoyed with my terminology. He made sure to emphasize that he was in the least ‘frat-like’ frat on campus, that they had gay members, all implying that they wouldn’t have had a problem with me. And, to be honest, I mostly believe him. My issue with frat-like bars isn’t the potential for bigotry or harassment (although I’m conscious of those things) its the emphasis on masculinity and pressured drinking. I don’t like the strict gender divides I feel at those types of bars, ranging from the mode of dress for the patrons to the way they interact. Likewise, I really don’t like what feels like a pressure to drink, Drink, DRINK! If one person is drinking, everyone must be! Drink! Shots! Beer! Booze! I don’t like it.

But that’s honestly a secondary issue to the growing gap between how and why I socialize with my high school friends and my queer/theatre friends.

Continue reading 'But…I am in the minority. You are in the majority.'»

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By Rebecca, January 26, 2011 12:26 pm

I’ve been really bad about posting lately, which usually means I’m avoiding writing about something. I’ve been trying to figure out what, though.

I’m still not used to ‘the transition’ being something that’s more in the past than the future. I’m not sure I’m “done,” whatever that would mean, but I’m forced to admit that I’m more transitioned than not. Which is weird for me, in a really unexpected way, because I’m so used to having “The Transition” as something in the future, something to plan for, an over-arching goal in my life. And now that I’m slowly moving past it, I’m struck with the unsettling experience of not knowing what comes next.

I’m having trouble getting out of the mindset that my body isn’t good enough, and needs to be improved. (I mean, in a larger ‘transition’-type way, bigger than simply losing some weight or whatever.) How do other women deal with that? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life pining over not being curvy enough, booby enough, thin enough, instead of focusing on the curves and boobs and body I do have. When someone at a bar says, “Wow, do you work out?” I want to be able to take the compliment and smile instead of  feeling like my muscles make me ‘too male.’

Continue reading 'Avoidance'»

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By Rebecca, January 13, 2011 10:13 pm

Been hunting through BigCloset TopShelf for more good trans fiction about trans characters, and found this:

It kind of strikes me. Being transgendered is a lot like having amnesia. I mean I can know things and I can self identify myself but at the same time when we all start to go through this we really don’t know a whole lot of things about who we are. It’s all Images, those lives we once led, not anything of substance really.

Kind of like our old or otherselves were a movie, one we had watched over and over until we knew it line by line and hated it. Then we start to transition and we’re given the book to read instead and it’s nothing at all like the movie. There’s similarities but it’s really not the same and we all have to start at the first of the book not really knowing what the real story of us is going to be.

http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/21191/images-4

I hadn’t heard either of these analogies before – being trans as having amnesia, and transitioning as the experience of reading a novel instead of seeing the movie – but I think they both have some value.

Continue reading 'More trans fiction – it’s like reading a book'»