The What

Annoyances

The closer I get to surgery, the more little things about my current parts annoy me. Like the way my balls stick to the side of my leg and how I have to aim to pee.

I seriously can’t wait to just sit to pee hands free. I don’t care that it will require maintenance like dilation and douching. I will gladly do that to have the parts I want.

3 days left…

Remembering Childhood

I’m thinking a lot today about how much better life was before puberty and I started being aggressively gendered by society. I was so carefree and I miss that feeling.

I wish I knew that trans people existed, I wish I had been able to talk about my gender feelings, and I wish I had access to puberty hormone blockers.

Please take this as a reminder to protect and trust trans kids when they vocalize their needs.

Lets talk about Intersections of Privilege

As a white writer, I don’t spend a lot of time writing about race which is a major flaw. I have the privilege of living in a world where my experience are considered to be the default for whatever other identities I have so I get to choose whether or not to think about my race. But a lot of people don’t have that privilege.

So let’s take a few minutes and talk about race. I think one of the first steps is examining and acknowledging which privileges and blind spots I have. This is literally the bare minimum I can do and I want to be clear I don’t deserve accolades for basic steps that all of humanity should be doing on a daily basis.

My privileges

  • I am white and I have the option to not think about race whenever I want. I’m also not discriminated against or at risk of police violence based on my race.
  • I am a citizen and I was born in a country with global power so I rarely have to worry about a war at home.
  • I grew up solidly middle class and never lived in poverty. I never had to worry about where my basic necessities would come from or whether my housing was secure. And I had ample luxuries in life to make me comfortable.
  • I am big and tall and rarely have to worry about my physical safety or invasions of my personal space.
  • I am relatively able bodied and don’t need accessibility devices for my disabilities most of the time.
  • I live in a state where cannabis is legal and easily accessible to self medicate my disabilities without barriers.
  • I grew up without disabilities and experienced most of my early life without physical barriers.
  • I am neurotypical for the most part and even with my ADD I grew up in a schooling environment where my difference was never pathologized with ADD relatives who normalized that experience.
  • I have a job where my ADD is an asset and have never been discriminated against due to my disabilities.
  • I had a good primary education and a private college degree that prepared me well for the economy and society we live in.
  • I have a full time job and have never been under-employed or laid off. I make enough money to be able to afford to live in an expensive city where I can find community.
  • I have a supportive spouse (even if it took a divorce to achieve that) and have never had a lack of dating partners.
  • I can easily find communities of people who look like me.
  • Even though I am fat, I still have size privilege by being able to shop off the rack.
  • I come from a religion that has always been the majority in my country and culture and never experienced discrimination because of my beliefs.

My intersections of marginalization

  • I am transgender in a country that is actively hostile towards me.
  • I will never “pass” as cisgender and will always be visibly trans.
  • I have large feet and cannot find feminine shoes my size in stores.
  • I am queer and have to be wary of people who want to date me because they either view me as a feminine straight man or a gay man in a biphobic, transphobic culture.
  • I am disabled and cannot do a lot of activities that I would like due to my asthma and the condition of my back.

Notice how short that list of marginalization is compared to my privileges? I may spend a lot of time writing about those intersections but what I don’t do is acknowledge my privilege and blind spots enough. There are dozens of reasons that my life could be harder due to things completely out of my control. And my life has never been made harder because of the color of my skin.

That is why we say Black Lives Matter. That is why we need to be conscious of what areas we don’t struggle with. Because otherwise those things are blind spots to us and can lead us to subconsciously discriminate against people who do have those issues. Because in our culture we are always taught to view life as a zero sum game which requires haves and have nots to function. So if I am not fighting for people of color, disabled people, immigrants, religious minorities, and people without class privilege, my work is for naught.

What are you doing to become more aware of your privileges and unconscious biases?

What if I had come out as a child?

I just woke up from a nightmare about coming out as trans as a child. In my dream I was going to a private Christian school and having to fight for basic human decency among classmates and school administrators who didn’t believe me. Who didn’t believe that trans people were real.

But as scary as that dream was, it is probably nothing compared to what would have happened if I had come out as trans in my actual childhood.

Let me be clear. My parents have grown a lot in the intervening years since I left home and they genuinely seem to be trying to understanding my experience right now. But I shudder to think what would have happened if I had come out as trans or even queer as a child while they were still in the grasp of the cult. I am fairly confident that I would have been sent to life-threatening conversion therapy that would have made my depression a lot worse and possibly led to suicide.

It was bad enough growing up as a child, confused and afraid because I didn’t know why I was different. Knowing that I had a girl’s brain but not knowing what that meant. Feeling like I was alone in my experience because I didn’t know that transgender people even existed until college.

But it would have been so much worse if I had voiced those feelings as a child and not been believed. If I had been placed into “therapy” to “cure” me from this sin. If I had been told on a daily basis that my lived experience wasn’t real and spiritually beaten over the head because I felt that way.

My heart goes out to all the kids who are still in that situation. Who live among parents, educators, and peers who don’t believe them. Who have to hide who they are because of the explicitly transphobic messages they hear on a daily basis.

When we say “protect trans kids,” we say that because even in a day and age where awareness of transgender people is at an all time high, trans kids have a one in three chance of attempting suicide.

We live in a country where hard won trans rights that we fought for decades to achieve are being taken away from us on a daily basis. Just this week, the protections that we gained in the Affordable Care Act were stripped away. And that wears on trans people mentally and kills us daily through denials of care and service. That permeates our culture and compounds with racism to make trans women of color the most marginalized and murdered group in America. Already this year, 14 trans people have been brutally murdered; the majority of them women of color.

As a white trans adult, my nightmare was largely just that. My life is rarely at risk of anything other than my own depression and suicidal thoughts. But I am one of the lucky ones. I have a supportive spouse and partners, I have a large community of trans people and advocates who stand with me, and I have a low risk of murder because of the color of my skin and where I live.

So when you fight for Black Lives, when you fight for queer lives, when you fight for trans youth, please make sure that your fight is intersectional and intentionally includes the lives of those who bear the burden of all of our collective societal sins. Fight for Black Trans Lives because they matter. And until we stop these murders, we can’t truly mean that Black Lives Matter.

Bottom Surgery is still a Go!

I’ve been on edge ever since this pandemic started because I have been so worried that my bottom surgery this summer would be postponed. But today I got confirmation that I can re-start laser hair removal to prep the area this weekend. And based on what the surgeon’s office has said, I think I should still be able to get enough of it in by July 29th to head down to San Francisco for my August 3rd gender confirmation surgery.

I’ve changed my plans and instead of staying with a friend-of-a-friend, I will be staying in an Airbnb so that we can maintain social isolation. My spouse and I will also be driving down instead of flying because as asthmatics, airports are a pretty big risk. And I don’t know what the visitors policies will be like at the hospital during my 3 days there after surgery. But damn am I glad that it is still happening.

Lately all the little things have been bothering me because my body just can’t wait to get this finally resolved. I am grumpy about having to use my hands to pee. And I hate everything about my balls. But it is only 68 days away now! I am almost there.

Selfie of the day

I didn’t expect how good it would feel to put on jewelry. Also, my hair is finally at my goal length!

Insurance delays

Medical and insurance gatekeeping of essential gender affirming treatments is exhausting!

It has taken me 3 months to get all the approvals from my insurance lined up so that I can get genital hair removal, an essential step before bottom surgery. This is despite them claiming in their own documentation that these procedures are covered for trans people. And before I could even begin that approval process, I had to get 2 letters from psychiatrists, one of whom had to be PhD level.

Because of this nonsense, I’m not going to be in ideal shape for surgery by August. Hopefully my surgeon can successfully remove the rest with follicle scraping while I’m under.

Oh, and the only way I even got insurance to finally respond was by having my HR person at work badger the insurance company on my behalf.

My decade in review

I started this decade still thinking I was mostly a man and mostly straight. I had just gotten married in what I could already tell was a terrible relationship and I stuck with it for 6 years because I thought that I would never be loved for who I actually was. And because of that, I put all my gender and sexuality questions on the back burner for over 5 years.
 
I’m beginning this decade with a new name and a much clearer picture of who I am. I’ve finally recognized why I was always different and claimed the complicated womanhood that I always had. I have built a stronger queer community and found more love than I could have possibly imagined.
 
Transition and self exploration are hard work. But with my gender confirmation surgery coming up in 7 months, I feel like the hardest parts are almost over. If I can make it through this year, I will hopefully have some relief from the intensity of dysphoria that has been in the background since puberty.
 
There is light at the end of the tunnel and I know that I’ve made it this far because of the many people who have supported me and made this corner of the world a safer place to be myself.

The Trans “Fad”

Lately I’ve noticed more and more cisgender (non-trans) people and businesses putting up Trans Pride flags and being very vocal about trans rights. And maybe that’s my bubble because I’m in Seattle but it seems like the national dialogue has really turned to focusing on trans people. Which is great, but it also feels dangerous to me because I feel like we’re “in vogue” right now and being treated like we’re a fad. And honestly that makes me suspicious of people because I never know when I’m going to fall out of fashion and I don’t necessarily trust people in it for the novelty to actually show up for the hard work of defending us.

So let me put something to rest – there is no “gender revolution.” And trans/nonbinary people are not a new phenomenon that suddenly started popping up in the last couple decades. I’m not trans because I want to rebel against gender; I was simply born this way. The same way that gender diverse people have existed across cultures for millennia.

Our language may have evolved and trans-ness in the US and Western society naturally looks very different than in other cultures. But people like us have existed for as long as we have had a concept of gender. It is only because of modern religious puritanical ideas and colonialism that we have lost sense of that. Western culture has literally erased gender diversity from our memories across the globe. Even in the early 20th Century there was a wealth of medical research and trans culture in Europe that was all burned by the Nazis prior to WWII.

Yes, the age of the internet has changed what that looks like. Trans people can now share culture around the world in a way that allows us to quickly evolve new language to describe our experiences together. And we can find the support we need to come out even if our families and geographic communities are hostile. But this gender diversity has always been here and we have a long history of transcestors to prove it.

So you can believe our experiences or deny them but it doesn’t change reality. Take advantage of this period of cultural awareness to get a glimpse into our lives when we invite you to. But please don’t treat us as new or different. We may be relatively rare but so are redheads and left-handed people. And we don’t like being put in a fish bowl any more than they do.

And if you’re going to put Trans Pride Flags on your profile or house, please realize that you can’t substitute that the real work. If you want to make the world better for us, start looking at your workplace dress codes, bathroom policies, insurance plans, and hiring practices. Fight against gender-essentialist and binary gendered language. Advocate for trans inclusive communities and ostracize the “feminists” in wolves clothing that seek to exclude us or deny our authenticity. Donate money to help us navigate the bureaucratic systems that are still in place that prevent us from accessing accurate government IDs and gender affirming healthcare. And lift up the voices of trans people of color.

And whether you are trans or cis, remember that our language is still evolving and what is correct today or for one person may not be true for everyone or for all time. Don’t police gender non-conforming people who use terms to describe their own experience that you may find disturbing or “problematic.” I’ve seen too many marginalized people be ostracized from trans community because they don’t know the right things to say to fit in. In particular, support the straight trans women and the HIV positive trans folks around you because they face the most discrimination, both in and out of LGBTQ+ community.

We are not a fad but we are marginalized people living in a cis-centric society. The modern world is not built for us but together we can change that if you are in this for the long-haul.

 

Nonbinary vs Gender Neutral

Nonbinary or Genderqueer are not the same thing as Gender Neutral.

There are people who describe their gender as neutral but for the most part, people usually have a lot more nuance than that. Gender neutral is a good way to describe pronouns like they/them or xe/xir, but it isn’t a good way to refer to nonbinary people unless they have explicitly said that.

My gender is anything but neutral. For me, it is relatively stable and not fluid, but it lies solidly in the realm of femme with a twist of tomboy. I am both a woman and a nonbinary person because my gender is queer and defies a single category. Queerness at its heart is about breaking boundaries and holding the tension between seemingly disparate concepts.

I see your categories and reject them because they don’t reflect my reality.