Fundraising for surgeries

It makes me so sad that trans people have to beg for money from friends and strangers in order to have live saving treatments for gender dysphoria. And that we have to have our identities pathologized and our daily existence diagnosed in order to get access to insurance coverage. But this is the reality that we live in.

Transition is a very expensive process with exorbitant costs everywhere you turn. If you want to change your name, you have to pay $400 and spend most of a day in government offices getting a judge to approve it and other offices to accept it. If you want to treat dysphoria around body hair and have any hope of being seen as a trans woman, you need to spend thousands of dollars on hair removal that most people consider a luxury and insurance won’t pay for. And if you want surgery, you often have to travel out of state like I am doing to find someone trained in what you need which means the expenses snowball with housing, airfare, meals in a strange place, etc.

It is absolutely terrifying to be looking at my budget for surgery next summer and realize that I need to come up with $6,000-$9,000 for my out of pocket costs. And as much as I hate asking for money, that’s what I’m doing now. I’ve launched a GoFundMe campaign to start saving up.

So if you have ever benefited from my writing and how openly I share about my path to self actualization, please consider donating. Every little bit will make a difference in making this life saving surgery a reality. https://www.gofundme.com/f/haven-gender-confirmation-treatments

Micah Rajunov and Scott Duan, eds. ‘Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity’ (Columbia University Press, 2019) Expanded Review

An excellent review of the book I’m published in!

lejhouston's avatarDr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston

In late June I reviewed the anthology, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, for the Times Literary Supplement. For reasons of space, I had to cut much of what I wanted to say about the collection, so I thought I would post the extended review here to give a fuller sense of why I believe it is such an important resource not just for gender-non-conforming people, but for anyone seeking to understand gender more fully.

If you’re interested in the topic and want to learn more, I’ve also included some useful links relating to non-binary identities and trans issues more broadly at the end of the piece.

Micah Rajunov and Scott Duan, eds. Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 304

Few fields of identity are as widely misrepresented or wilfully misunderstood as those gathered under the label ‘transgender’ – the umbrella…

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Gender Euphoria

I write a lot about the work I’m doing to transition but sometimes I forget to talk about how amazing the results are. So here are some things that are giving me gender euphoria right now.

I finally found the perfect haircut for me that blends the curly femme with the aggressively queer. And I love looking in the mirror because of it.

Every once in awhile I catch a wiff of how amazing I smell. I still haven’t gotten over how nice it is to smell like a girl and not like a gross sweaty boy.

I’ve reached the point in facial hair removal that I only have a couple of small patches to shave every other day and I can’t stop touching my nice, smooth face.

And have I mentioned how awesome it is to have boobs? Because there is nothing that makes me happier. My body is finally starting to feel right and filling out my dresses properly without help is a big part of that.

I’m planning on starting lessons next week to feminize my voice but I’ve had a lot of people tell me recently how androgynous it already is. When I heard myself on the recording from my surgical consult I was honestly amazed myself because I apparently have been slowly and subconsciously changing my inflection over the last few years and my friends are right, it is much higher than I perceive it. It’s fun to see how surprised people are when I tell them I sing second bass (the lowest part) in choir.

And speaking of choir, having a place where I can sing and not having that be gendered is a glorious thing. I love my choir family and I couldn’t ask for a more supportive group of people.

I’m sure there’s more but I’ve probably rambled enough.

The costs of being trans

Being trans is so damn expensive! Who in their right mind seriously thinks we do this just for kicks?

I just budgeted my out of pocket costs for bottom surgery and I’m looking at between $6,200 to $8,800 since there are no surgeons near Seattle and I have to travel to San Francisco to do it. I also just spent $400 on my name and gender change documents. And I’ve already spent $3,000 on hair removal with at least another $600 to go.

If you would like to help contribute, please donate to my transition fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/haven-gender-confirmation-treatments 

The Bathroom Dilemma

I know this has been written about ad nauseam, but I hate binary bathrooms. It is so stressful to need to pee and have to make that choice. Do I go in the men’s room and risk potential physical violence and awkwardness, or do I go in the women’s restroom and risk verbal harassment and awkwardness?

Up until recently, I had been going with the men’s room as the safer choice. My experience of the men’s room is that men tend to keep their heads down and avoid eye contact and conversation. And especially when I had my beard, I didn’t feel like I could safely go in the women’s room without creating a ruckus.

But now that I’m starting to be read more consistently as a trans woman, I am feeling increasingly awkward about going into the men’s room. I’ve only been brave enough to go into the women’s room a few times so far though. I’m scared that my voice, which I haven’t trained to be feminine yet, will make people upset.

That is part of why I am planning on going to to all the government offices tomorrow and changing my gender marker on my ID. I will feel slightly more like I have a right to be there if I can prove with my ID that I belong. Which I know is ridiculous.

The problem is the worst at work where we have 2 gender neutral restrooms on my floor (the only ones on campus) but they have been increasingly full when I go to use them which is very frustrating. We don’t have that many trans people here so I know that it is mostly cis people using them because they like the privacy. And since I work at a company that is mostly women, I know that I’m much more likely to run into people in the women’s room than in the men’s room and I don’t know how people are likely to react to that, even in my department where most people have a working knowledge of trans people from a research perspective.

Last night I planned a community event and I purposefully chose Optimism Brewery because they are renowned for their gender neutral restroom design. They have a row of floor length stalls with urinals and toilets marked instead of genders in an open room layout. Ideally they would also have a separate family size restroom for people who have cultural requirements for more privacy but it is still better than 99% of the places around here. It was refreshing to not have to make that binary choice, especially after I had a couple drinks.

Gender neutral single stall restrooms are great but we aren’t going to be truly accessible as a society until we do away with binary restrooms altogether. Until then, I’ll continue being uncomfortable almost everywhere I go.

PS – Did you know that you can report where there are gender neutral restrooms and search them on a database through the Refuge app and website? You can even mark if you need to pay to use them and if they are accessible to wheelchairs. So please contribute to map so that people like me know where we can safely go.

Surgical Consults

I have a date for gender confirmation surgery! August 3rd, 2020.

I’ve decided to go with Dr. Heidi Wittenberg for my vaginoplasty. She is who I have been researching for the past year and my consultation with her last week confirmed that she is everything I had been hoping for. Her staff were all wonderful and friendly. And she was very approachable with a great bedside manner and excellent at explaining the process and answering questions. She seems very factual and will be straightforward with the risks and complications. She also has the training in alternate techniques such as peritoneal pull through that would allow her to perform a revision surgery with the latest technology if that was needed. More importantly, she feels like someone I can trust completely and it makes sense to me to have a woman with a background in gynecology and urology doing my care.

I did do a second consultation while I was in San Francisco with Dr. Thomas Satterwhite who trained with Dr. Wittenberg at Brownstein and Crane. He comes highly recommended from friends but I didn’t have the greatest experience with him. In both his intro video and in person he was very fixated on BMI (Body Mass Index) and treated it as medical fact, despite the vast body of evidence that it is wildly inaccurate, scientifically useless, and never intended by the creator to be used on an individual basis. He brought it up multiple times in my 20 minute consult to warn me that if I gained 10 lbs before next summer, I would be ineligible for the surgery. And yes, I have what many people would consider excess fat around my belly, but I am not objectively that fat of a person. I am tall and large and I am built that way naturally. In fact, I am pretty average in build for a white American.

If I, who have quite a bit of relative privilege, am receiving this much fat phobia from him, how much more pronounced would that be for the many trans people who are larger than me? And if he puts stock in pseudoscience like the BMI, what other areas does he make inaccurate conclusions in? To me, this is the kind of thing I would expect from a plastic surgeon that makes money off of fatphobia. And maybe that’s his background, but I’m not giving him money to support that. Even if he was the best surgeon around. Luckily, I have choices.

Now I’m not saying other people haven’t had wonderful experiences with Satterwhite, but I loved Wittenberg and I’m excited to be having her do my surgery. Next up, I am submitting documentation to get laser hair removal done on my genitals to prepare the area for surgery. Then I need to get 3 letters from my physician, therapist, and a PhD level psychiatrist because my insurance still goes by the outdated WPATH standards of medical gatekeeping.

In the meantime, I’m starting my countdown now for surgery. 377 days!

If you would like to contribute to my transition fund, you can donate at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/haven-gender-confirmation-treatments

Lesbian Gender Aesthetic

The other day I was on a panel for a sex therapist class and I described my ideal gender presentation as “lesbian.” Now I know that lesbian is a sexuality, not a gender, and that lesbians have a very broad range of gender expressions from high femme to hard butch. But as a kid, I was always drawn to lesbians because of how often those were the people I saw in society breaking down gender norms. Where “tomboy” wasn’t just a phase as a kid but something you could be every day throughout your life. Where you could have short hair and wear plaid shirts and still be feminine. Where the people you slept with wasn’t dependent on how you dressed but it could still be a way of expressing your sexuality through clothing.

The closer I get to being a lesbian, the happier I am. Even though I know both my gender and sexuality are more complicated than that, it’s the person I always wanted to be as a kid.

Some updates

There’s a lot going on in my life right now so here’s a little update.

This week I’m headed down to San Francisco to do consults with 2 possible surgeons for vaginoplasty (bottom surgery). I’m seeing Dr. Heidi Wittenberg and Dr. Thomas Satterwhite, the two surgeons I know of who specialize in nonbinary surgical procedures. Ironically, now that the procedure I always thought I wanted, penile preservation vaginoplasty, is possible, I’ve realized that I most likely want a standard penile inversion technique. Especially now that I’ve been on estrogen, my desire to use my penis has disappeared and my dysphoria around it has increased. I’ve also realized that I enjoy using a harness a lot more than my own parts and having a vagina with full depth for penetration is more important. I still want to talk with these surgeons specifically because they are specialists in a variety of techniques and can talk to me about my options in a way that isn’t focused on a binary transition path or assumption. I’ll post an update about what I learned when I get back.

I’m doing the research now on how to change my name and gender marker on my identity documents. It’s a way more complicated process than it should be with a lot of dependencies and some required letters from physicians. I thought that changing my middle name would be sufficient but I’ve realized now that in a lot of medical settings I still have to use my old name and it’s getting old fast. Now I just need to settle on a new middle name…

I’ve started trying out she/her pronouns again to see how I feel about them. Last time I tried it just felt like a painful reminder of how far I was from that ideal but I’m starting to find now that I’m pretty obviously a transfeminine person, a lot of people are defaulting to that and I think it might be easier to get people to use my pronouns if I switched, especially my parents.

I also just finished my 4th laser hair removal session for my face and I feel so much better now! I no longer constantly have stubble and I only need to shave what little I have every other day which makes my skin a lot happier too. I think I will probably only do one or two more sessions before I switch back to electrolysis to get the really stubborn hairs under my nose and under my lip.

I continue to hate my braces with a burning passion and can’t stand how my smile looks in photos right now. But with any luck, my next surgery will be in December and then I can get the braces off in June next year. I’m planning my next surgery for July next summer hopefully so this time next year I should be nearing the end of my intense phase of transition.

My libido is still abysmally low so I’m going to talk to my doctor at the end of the month about adding progesterone to see if that makes a difference. For some people it helps and others it makes it worse. The added bonus is that it might give me a boost on breast growth.

Well that ended up being longer than I thought but that’s what’s going on right now.

You might be trans

If you fall asleep every night wishing you could be a girl, you might be trans.

If you explain your ability to understand girls by saying you have a girls brain in a boys body, you might be trans.

If you often wear high heels, dresses, and wigs from the dress-up box as a kid, you might be trans. 

If your favorite games with your sister are pretending to be mermaids, fairies, or princesses, you might be trans.

If your best friends are all girls or closeted queers, you might be trans.

If you avoid locker rooms and public restrooms because they make you uncomfortable, you might be trans.

If you avoid groups where you would only be around boys, you might be trans. 

If you fantasize every night about being a lesbian so you can date all those cute queer women, you might be trans.

If all your dreams involve women with penises, you might be trans.

If you spend your unsupervised hours at the library studying academic books about women’s anatomy, you might be trans.

If you watch superhero movies and find yourself having a little too much “aesthetic appreciation” for the male lead, you might be queer.

If you find yourself spending all your energy thinking about and fighting for feminism and queer rights, you might be queer.

If you find yourself going out with “straight” friends to gay bars to watch the dancers on the bar, you might be queer.

If you attend your first pride and finally feel like you’re home, you might be queer.

Queerness and Gender intertwined

My queerness is integrally tied to my gender identity and it’s not a coincidence that I accepted both parts of myself at the same time.

As a kid, I found myself deeply attracted to lesbians as soon as I discovered them. There was a period where I was worried that I was somehow fetishizing people and being like those gross men who get off on watching lesbians kiss while simultaneously being misogynistic and homophobic. But I realize now that like most of my attraction to women, I can’t untangle my desire to BE them with my desire to date them. In my teens I desperately wished I had been born a woman so I could be a lesbian because at that point I still didn’t know that trans women existed.

For a long time I thought I couldn’t be gay because I was attracted to women and I didn’t have examples of bisexuality or transness in my life. And even when I started to realize that there were some men (like Hugh Jackman as Wolverine) that I was attracted to, I thought I couldn’t be bi because I was married to a woman. There was always some “good” reason that I couldn’t accept my whole self.

So when I finally discovered nonbinary people when I started dating again, I immediately glommed onto them for the same reason. I both wanted to be them and to date them. Now, 5 years later, I find myself dating 5 people, all of them nonbinary. Turns out I just really like people who do gender intentionally. People who have thought about it enough to make a conscious choice about how they present themselves. Which is why I like the term femme too. It means an intentional choice to present in a feminine ways as a queer person rather than just taking the role that society shoves you into.

The thing about sexuality is that there isn’t a lot of terminology that isn’t gendered. So much of homosexuality and heterosexuality is defined by “opposite sex” which doesn’t really exist. Even the term Bi on the surface can be interpreted to mean only 2 genders. So I initially defined my sexuality as pansexual because I was attracted to women, nonbinary people, and occasionally men. Now I’ve gone back to using the term bi for myself because I think there is value is showing people that being bi doesn’t mean you need to exclude nonbinary people. Most bi groups define it as attraction to more than one gender (same gender as you and a different gender). 

Early on, I also latched onto the more generalized term Queer because it kind of sums up both my gender and my sexuality. As I find myself now being more woman than not, that inner kid in me still has this strong desire to claim the term lesbian for myself too. But it’s not entirely accurate. I am too queer for a monosexual label. I’m genderqueer, I’m sexually queer, and I’m just socially queer too. There’s no single box that can hold me but to me, that’s a beautiful thing. I can find people that share some of the same labels with me by using that language and add more adjectives as necessary to fit the situation. I’m not an either/or person, I’m a both/and person. 

I’m not gay as in happy, I’m queer as in fuck your binary.