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Three Years
3 Years on Testosterone
voice clip : 3 years
It’s hard to believe how much my life has changed in the past four years. Then, I could barely leave my house sometimes because of my anxiety and depression. I couldn’t seem to keep a job, and I was losing hope that I would ever find a way to finish my education. I hated my body and was struggling with the realization that I needed to transition.
While I still struggle with anxiety and depression, it is nothing like it once was for me. I am able to get out of bed and function in society pretty much every day. Just as importantly, I’m about to bounce back from the brief periods where I do have trouble functioning. I have had the same job for almost three years. I’ve been accepted into my college’s highly competitive nursing program, and will start the curriculum in about a week. I still struggle with body dysphoria and the knowledge that there are still steps I need to take to correct it. While I am not completely at peace with my body, I can honestly say that I love it, and myself as a whole.
My body hasn’t changed much in the past year. It’s a bit furrier all over, and that’s the biggest change. I’ve got a good bit on my back, and my tummy fur is darker, thicker, and a bit longer, though I think it looks better and less random than it did before. I keep most of my body hair clippered. The backs of my hands have a little bit of hair on them now, but it’s hardly noticeable–my arms aren’t very hairy.
facial hair after 3-ish years HRT
My facial hair continues to do its thing. It’s getting thicker and fuller, and filling in the blanks. It’s going slowly, but it is happening. I still keep a short beard, though lately I’ve been less meticulous about shaving the hair around my mouth, even though it’s not really “there” yet. Since I’ve been so lax, though, I do have a picture to show you my facial hair development at this point.
Before testosterone, I could grow patchy sideburns and two thick patches on my chin. I knew some guys who envied me for being fairly hairy pre-testosterone. It might have been some consolation for them had they known that it doesn’t seem to have given me much more than a short-term advantage. I have more hair than many cissexual men my age, and less than some who have been on HRT a much shorter time. Fortunately, I am still young enough that my facial hair pattern is pretty typical, and it’s acceptable (if not exactly stylish) for twentysomethings to grow shitty proto-beards in my area.
Most of what I talked about here remains true for me. I still haven’t disclosed to anybody at school, and I still have no plans to. When trying on uniforms, I’ve been shirtless with other men in my program, and my chest either went unnoticed or unmentioned. A few times, it’s come up that I give myself shots to maintain a normal testosterone level. I’ve never needed to lie or contort the truth; I don’t have to fabricate stories. I just don’t say “I was assigned female at birth.” and it’s that simple.
Unless something major changes, I absolutely intend to live an increasingly “stealth” life. I feel more at-ease and friendly with acquaintances who don’t know I’m trans than with those who do. I feel like I have a more professional relationship with those coworkers with whom I’ve never discussed it.
Basing a community around the assumption that I naturally belong in a category or community with other people who are trans/have transitioned is not only longer useful for me, but it actually seems to hold me back. Having an area of my life in which I am completely “stealth” has made it easier for me to focus on other things. I withdrew from spaces where the only uniting force among participants was the idea of transness. I’ve funneled that extra free time into my hobbies, mainly reading and riding my bicycle. Besides, most of my time and energy will soon be spent studying and working.
I’ve also become fairly confident that my future holds a hysterectomy (with the removal of one ovary, if not both of them) and radial forearm free flap phalloplasty, but that is the subject of another post.
March 2010
June 2010
Stealth
Two years ago, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be “stealth” in any part of my life. Being trans occupied a lot of my time and energy, and it was a really important part of my identity. Neither of those things are true now.
Back then, though, I couldn’t escape it. Every time I got dressed, or answered the phone, or introduced myself, I had to think about it. Whenever I met someone new, I had to weigh the pros and cons of telling them. If they knew, then there was a chance that they might respect my name and pronouns. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t have to worry about being on the receiving end of transphobia, or suddenly being asked to do Trans 101. That’s a lot to deal with when you really just wanted to do some local volunteering.
Because it was such a big part of my life, and because cis people couldn’t really relate to most of the things I was going through, finding community with other trans people was a huge priority. It was really affirming to go someplace and be asked what pronouns I use, or to not have people assume they heard me wrong when I introduced myself (“Kayla?”).
At the time, the most ideal situation I could imagine was to have somebody know that I was trans, and respect my identity anyway. Today, things are completely different. When I’m getting dressed, I don’t have to squeeze myself into a binder; I don’t think about whether the pattern of my shirts minimizes the size of my chest. People automatically assign me the correct pronouns, and no one is surprised by my name when I introduce myself.
At first, it felt like I was getting away with something when people respected my identity. I felt like I was “passing” as male. Once the novelty wore off, though, I was simply left feeling comfortable. Much of my social anxiety disappeared. I still let most people I met socially know that I was trans, but it was primarily just out of habit.
I’ve gotten really used to being treated simply as male, without any scarequotes or footnotes. And the longer I live this way, the more right it feels for me. My transition is over for the foreseeable future, and my body dysphoria has lessened significantly since my chest surgery. At this point, my trans-ness exists as a treatable medical condition that is essentially no different from male hypogonadism.
Eventually, disclosing my trans status (or having my trans status disclosed) to acquaintances started feeling less comfortable. I began noticing that I was treated differently by folks who knew my medical history–and not in a way that made me feel more understood and respected. I started to feel like it actually limited people’s ability to understand me. For example, most folks (who don’t know I’m trans) attribute my femininity to my queerness. So do I. I look, speak, and act like an effeminate queer man because I am one. Instead of taking my gender expression for what it is, many people who know my trans status assume that it’s really some sort of residual femaleness.
In actuality, I don’t feel that I ever was female, and I don’t think that most things have anything whatsoever to do with my transness. But as soon as most cis people are made aware that my birth assignment isn’t what they had expected, they relate pretty much everything back to my being trans. Learning “the truth” tends to bring them further away from really understanding and respecting me than they would’ve been had they not found out.
When I enrolled in school back in September, I enrolled without disclosing my history to anyone. It hasn’t come up, and it hasn’t felt relevant to bring it up. Sure, there are lots of opportunities to tell people. I just don’t see a reason to. I get plenty of chances to talk about being a survivor of family violence, too, but that’s hardly ever relevant, either. People can get to know me professionally and personally without ever knowing many intimate details of my life. They might be surprised if they learn some of those things later on, but people are always finding out what happens when they make assumptions about other people’s experiences.
Not so very long ago, I thought that it’d be dishonest for me to interact closely with someone and not disclose–that I’d be hiding something, or lying about my past or present. Instead, I feel like I’m being seen for who I am, without other people’s misconceptions about gender or transition getting in my way, for the first time in my life. It feels great.
As my life has gotten busier, my involvement in local and online trans community is taking a backseat to other considerations. I don’t know to what extent I’ll be “out” or “stealth” in the future, but I suspect I will always keep my medical history private at work in school. At this point, most of my close friends know my history, but I can’t even remember the last time I disclosed to a cis person outside of an activism setting (actually, it was probably when I corrected my Social Security information). If this trend continues, I might eventually find myself almost completely stealth. It’s still not something I’m particularly looking for, but I’m certainly not opposed.
Genderqueer Cissexism
I’m fairly comfortable and confident these days about my negotiation/navigation of my genderqueer identity and my transsexual experience. Also, I’m beginning to see the reason that I am so much more distressed by genderqueer ignorance than I am by transsexual ignorance:
Transsexual people have exactly one thing in common, the way I see it–our birth-assignation (usually based on external genitals) does not match our brain sex. A trans person saying some fucked up bullshit is annoying, but I can separate myself from it without much effort, in much the same way as I approach individual linguists’ failures.
I’ve always seen a genderqueer identity as one that arises after a period of self-examination–of cultural gender norms, of sexism, of the gendered meanings placed on bodies based on anatomy and/or presentation. I feel that I share a lot more in common with genderqueer people–values, perceptions, ideals.
I know that it’s more complicated than that, and much of the time neither of those statements are true, but that’s my subconscious view.
Lately, I’ve been especially uncomfortable when cissexual gender-variant folks conflate transsexuality with gender variance. Obviously there are a lot of people who do consider their own transsexuality a gender-variant experience (valid, of course); the communities share several experiences and issues (because it’s all the same to cissexist/transphobic society). But I think that the size and shape of my genitals at birth is irrelevant to my current gender identity/expression unless I specifically say so. I don’t want to have meanings projected onto my body/identity by anybody else, and I guess I thought that might go without saying in a genderqueer community.
I feel like there’s an expectation, spoken and unspoken, for transsexuals to disclose in discussions about gender, even in genderqueer spaces. The recent posts in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
genderqueer are great examples of that. The poster seemed to want to compare how students gendered [photographed] subjects to the actual gender identities of the subjects. People of all genders (including non-gender-variant identities) would be included; I think is a pretty valid exercise if you’re wanting to start a conversation about gender and gendering.
But the poster also mentioned that they’d also reveal the subject’s birth assignation, if it differed from a person’s gender presentation. They flat-out refused to see that this could ever possibly be perceived as problematic/fetishistic/cissexist/transphobic–or irrelevant. Honestly, I’d have considered sending a photo their way if they’d gone about it differently (and not been a complete ass). If I’d have been shown in the slideshow, I’d be gendered as male and my gender identity would then be revealed as genderqueer femme. If I had the option of not disclosing my trans status if I didn’t want to, then I wouldn’t find that problematic at all.
As far as I’m concerned, I’d even consider it relevant if at the end of the slideshow she mentioned that some of the subjects were transsexual without disclosing anyone’s birth-assignation. Inevitably, folks would try to “spot the tr***y”, and another kind of conversation could be started that could be really productive. Namely that, when you’re looking, you’ll see tr***ies everywhere. Phantom tr***ies where no tr***ies exist. Under that kind of microscope, nobody passes. But it’s rare that a cissexual person is put under that microscope. A cissexual woman with a big nose just has a big nose; a transsexual woman “looks like a man”. A short guy is just short unless he’s “really a woman”.
A lot of bullshit happened around those particular posts, and the moderators handled it surprisingly well. But it just served to remind me that, to many folks in the genderqueer community, my transsexuality is always relevant to any discussion about gender. I am expected to disclose. That’d be the “genderqueer” thing to do. I should want to “educate” people about gender variance, using my transsexuality.
The shitty thing about all this is that I’m neither interested in being stealth at this point in my life, nor ashamed of my transsexuality (contrary to popular belief, “stealth” and “shame” are not the same thing). But I’d like to be able to disclose without completely derailing what I’m saying by having the person I’m speaking with completely rearrange their conception of me. It’s similar to how frustrated I get when I disclose to cissexual gender-conforming folks and suddenly my feminism makes sense; I’m speaking as a man, not as a former woman. In some situations, I want to be able to speak as a genderqueer person, not as a transsexual. An angry transsexual who’s quibbling over such unimportant things and making really important allies and great people feel bad… but not really, because for every person who calls out an “ally” for something, there are three people stroking their ego and telling them not to listen to what those mean cisphobes are saying.
This is why every time I enter a conversation with other genderqueer people, I have to carefully decide whether or not to disclose. And it’s never easy. And my internalized cissexism really rears its head, because I feel guilty for not wanting to diclose. I feel like they truly do have a right to know, and I really should be endlessly patient with well-meaning(?) bullshit–or, better yet, I should just be quiet, because I’m really hurting The Cause.
And that’s what’s really fucked up.
I know that I’ve said some really stupid shit in the past few years I’ve been a part of the trans community. I’ve said transphobic shit, cissexist shit, and I’m owning it. I still do sometimes, and I have a lot more internalized transphobia/cissexism than I had at first realized. And, I’m sure, much more than I know now.
I think that’s part of why I’m wanting to become more active as a genderqueer trans person. At this point in my life, I seem to be in the peculiarly awkward place of being both transsexual and genderqueer, so I’m in a fairly good place to attempt to educate people who are transsexual or genderqueer. In the online communities I’m part of, that tends to take more place on the genderqueer end, because cissexist bullshit seems to get called out much, much less in genderqueer spaces, compared to cisgenderist bullshit in the transsexual communities. To be fair, that’s probably because there seem to be [understandably?] more genderqueer folks in trans spaces than transsexual folks in genderqueer spaces.
But saying something feels so much fucking better than just getting mad. It’s so much more satisfying than being embarrassed to be genderqueer.
I’ve been thinking lately that the fails seem to happen around certain subjects–the “ethics” of disclosure/non-disclosure, socialization, women’s spaces, and third-gendering trans people, etc. It might be worth my time and effort to start compiling a post/zine/epically long book for cissexual genderqueers about being better allies to transsexual people.
I wonder who would bother reading it.
Gender Chat
I went to the university’s “Gender Chat” on Tuesday. Not to process gender issues of my own, but to think about gender issues in general, and because it’s comforting to me to hear other folks’ gender-related thoughts.
When K and I first showed up, I think I was quickly introduced to the new LGBT director, and that made me think about K and his relationship to my gender and my transition. I’ve always made it really clear that, at this point in my life and in our relationship, it’s important to me that K feel able to disclose my trans status when/if he wants to, to whomever he wants to. And I think he believes me. I’m pretty sure, anyway. But, I’ve definitely noticed that he’s become as ambivalent about when/how/if to disclose as I have. I worry some that it’s more about making me comfortable than making himself comfortable, but K of course is capable of meeting his own needs in this regard. Still, I wonder about our visibility/invisibility.
It’s pretty straightforward outside of queer spaces–it all depends on how K is being perceived. We’re either gay men, or a kinda funny looking straight couple. People usually seem to think we’re pretty precious, either way. But inside queer space, we’re looked at for longer. People who assume K is a lesbian are baffled, and once they see how gay I am, usually just end up confused and fascinated. People who know K’s a trans guy focus directly and pointedly on me. I think it’s to figure out if I’m a cissexual gay man who’s actually okay with dating pre/no-ho pre-non/op guys (you know, a PINK unicorn, even more rare than the regular unicorns who will date post-transition trans men), or a trans man, or what. That annoys me slightly. I guess I could interpret that as “I’m okay with however we’re perceived, so long as my trans status isn’t brought up”.
So, I wonder how the director perceived me. She’ll know eventually, probably, if I hang around. But figuring out when to disclose is weird and new, and I don’t want to look like an ass, like “Hi, I’m Caleb–would you like to hear about my genital configuration?” And, of course, there’s the fact that I don’t really like talking about it all that much anyway. It was especially strange because I wasn’t sure if the person I was actually talking to (who is a newly-out trans woman) knew, and I definitely wanted to give her the secret handshake or whatever, so she’d know there was a community here. Even if it is a bit of a sausage party… sort of.
In introductions, I didn’t think to continue the “name + pronoun” intro that K had tried to start, although I really should’ve thought to; I’m not really interested in othering people whose gender reception and pronoun preference don’t match just so I can enjoy my new privilege. I was just too engrossed in thought, I guess. Oh, and then I didn’t come out at first, because there were three people there (two facilitators and a student) I wanted to feel out first.
It’s almost like being drunk on power. I have the power to have someone I just met never, ever know that I am not a cissexual man. And it’s hard coming out sometimes, even in a situation in which I want to, like gender chat. I’m not sure if I’ve written about it here, or just spoken about it in private conversations, but disclosing is different than coming out, by miles and miles. Coming out as trans meant seeking respect for my identity. It meant giving someone to whom I’m disclosing to know more about me, to get a more complete and accurate idea of who I am as a person. It was a lot like coming out as queer. It was kind of empowering in a way.
Disclosing doesn’t make me feel that way. Disclosing to people I assume are cissexual has, in general, more cons than pros. The pros are mostly that I get to know whether the person I’m coming out to is a transphobic douchebag I wouldn’t want to be friends with anyway, and that the person won’t be confused when I talk about things like my boobs, my puberty, my menopause, my uterus, my ovaries, my ex-lesbianism, my intimate familiarity with things that most guys know absolutely nothing about. That’s about where the good bits end. Someone finding out that I lived as female-ish until about a year ago causes most cissexual folks to start painting a mental picture of me that’s 1) inappropriate and 2) wrong:
My body becomes scrutinized, and if one more fucking person congratulates me on how “real” or “bio” or “genetic” or “magickal” I look for a transsexual (read: woman), I might start congratulating them on how trans they look. Especially feminine cis women–they all look like femme trans women to me, anyway. It’s so nice that they can go around looking trans to me, despite being [usually] uterus-laden imposters.
No, I haven’t had any surgeries. Yes, binding fucking hurts.
No, you had it right the first time. I’m faggy in the same way as a cis queer guy. It’s not a holdover from my “natural” womanly mcvaginaness.
No, I’m not dating K because I only date other trans people, nor am I dating him because only other trans people will date me.
No, my family doesn’t need to be praised from the rooftops for not disowning me because of my decision to transition; if you wouldn’t be supportive and understanding of a trans family member, that makes you an asshole, it doesn’t make my family angelic.
Because the male-female spectrum exists de facto, “coming out” put me more towards the male end, which felt more accurate; “disclosing” puts me more towards the female end, which feels less accurate. The way I’m perceived now is almost exactly how I perceive myself, and how I want to be perceived (fantasies of waking up one morning and having the body of my tall, thin, twinky, genderqueer fag roommate aside). It’s not as easy to convince myself to go through all that when I don’t usually get anything out of it, except someone thinking that we’re BFFs and that I’ve really opened up to them.
K and I went to The Grill late that night and talked, and I think I’m getting somewhere with my genderqueer stuff. I’ve been examining my genderqueer identity lately, because I’m the type to pick at a scab. And there’s some stuff about all this that just sits wrong with me, and I want to figure out if “genderqueer” is a vestigial identity at this point, or if it’s just evolved.
When I was living as female, before I transitioned, being genderqueer, for me, meant a freedom to express masculinity/maleness in a way that resonated with me, without invalidating or repressing my feminine qualities. Even when I knew I would transition medically, I still identified with “trans-masculine” genderqueers and lesbians/queer women. We looked alike. Our experiences were a lot alike, or so I felt.
That’s just not the case at this point in my life. My maleness is now affirmed by basically everyone I interact with. These days, my non-binary identity is more about my expressions of queer maleness and femininity. The genderqueer issues I wrestle with myself cause me to identify pretty strongly with genderqueer-identified people whose gender expressions/presentations usually align with binary maleness/masculinity.
Despite all the theory, I’ve never really seen too much breaking down of binaries, and the idea of the “spectrum” sort of looms large. I feel like “transmasculine” people and “transfeminine” people are quietly pushed to either side, according to birth-assignation. I feel like if my trans status is known, I’m pushed to the wrong sort of side–like I’m seen as the far-end of the female masculinity spectrum. And, I know that tons of guys who ID as genderqueer totally see themselves this way, which is fine. I just don’t. Maybe a part of that separation is because the genderqueer community is so heavily female-assigned and currently-or-formerly-lesbian-identified?
I think that may be the root of the anti-cissexual male sentiment that shows up/peeks out sometimes in my conversations with other genderqueers. And I’m not very comfortable with that idea. At this point in my life, the only essential difference between me and a cissexual guy is what’s under our clothes. And I’ve seen trans guys get away with so much misogyny and so much bullshit, and even if they’re called on it, they get the benefit of the doubt. The possiblity that cissexual men may make those exact same mistakes is used as the reasoning for their exclusion. I’m not interested in being a part of anything that would include me but would exclude cis men, because, as someone has pointed out, that is so literally phallocentric.