Trans day of vulnerability
I write this at 4am on March 31st, what is internationally known as Trans Day of Visibility.
It is 12 hours after I emerged from my second gender-affirming surgery. Like a lot of people, my impulse to accelerate transition goals has escalated over the past year as a growing unease fills my body every day that one day, my body and the care it needs, will soon be outlawed.
The past month has seen an uptick in some of the most vile language around bodies like mine. From Donald Trump to Matt Walsh and Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and the entire staff of the Federalist referring to gender-affirming care as “sexual mutilation”, it’s hard to hold onto the fundamental truth that trans bodies are actually stunningly beautiful. But they are.
As Aster Olsen described in her extraordinary zine “My Body, My Self”, I used to walk around in my body as if it was a mechanical suit I was piloting. It felt small, limiting, and fragile. I felt as if the only part of me that was actually me was some small collection of neurons sitting in a pilot’s cabin in the cockpit of my brain.
I would sometimes move my hands and my fingers and imagine the impulses it took to get from me— wherever or whatever I actually was— to these foreign implements that I used to navigate the world. The first time I saw the walkers in Return of the Jedi, with their tall legs and tiny driver perched inside silly little head-like bodies, I thought it was just an artists’ rendering of what it’s like to be a human being.
In my early twenties I did as so many trans women do— I desperately tried to build myself not into the body I wanted, but into an ideal that if achieved would at least provide me with a reasonable assurance that while it wasn’t mine, it was one I looked good wearing. I wanted the suit to fit, I wanted to explore the possibility that perhaps I hadn’t tried masculinity with open enough arms.
In one month, I spent over a thousand dollars on protein powders, branched chain amino acids and two different types of creatine. I could feel my kidneys wince. I went into a GNC looking to get taken advantage of by capitalism’s promise of store-bought confidence and they drained me like greedy mosquitoes at a bottomless feast. For a time it almost worked?
I was impressed with the way I was able to make muscle. This mechanical suit I was wearing was doing what I was telling it to do. I would look in the mirror and utter a barely inaudible, myrthless laugh at how strange it was to wear this thing. I had this vague notion that it was getting closer to the kind of body others had always told me I would be happy if I had. The kind of body that feels confident with a shirt off at the beach.
I have a vague memory of being in the office of a famous endocrinologist at roughly age 14. I was short and slightly built. While today I am a towering 5’3’’, at the time most of my peers were at least a foot taller than me. The doctor was worried about the psychological effect my height would have on my life. I was, in the words of medicine — underdeveloped. He suspected there was a way to fix it.
He was truthfully quite kind and thoughtful— he seemed genuinely worried about the direction my life was taking; I had fewer friends than many kids my age, and I was wildly insecure about my body. I never felt at home. I was fearful of other kids. As I would later read in my medical record from the time, I “subsisted entirely on caffeine and nicotine. [she] has bounced from school to school, although there’s some hope this one will stick.” (spoiler: it didn’t)
He saw in the promise of modern endocrinology the possibility of righting a wrong that he perceived was likely contributing to my isolation. Perhaps you can see why this moment sticks with me as a gender-affirming care provider.
All my life I had been insecure about my height. I’d learned to memorize the things around me that could be used as weapons, as if I was walking through a perpetual parking lot with my keys between my fingers. To make up for it, I was outspoken and belligerent. I wore chains and all black, and lived in my nine inch nails t-shirt, with the words to The Becoming on repeat down the back. He wasn’t wrong; I was abjectly miserable.
But many days that year I had gone to bed thinking about a different possible solution, one that while it would subject me to vastly greater amounts of ridicule than my height ever had, would help ameliorate this grinding feeling I had that my body was just simply wrong. When I saw myself in my head, the person I actually knew myself to be, I wasn’t taller. Sure, my body was different, but it wasn’t height or muscle mass. It was Jessica.
This is the pre-op photo from my first surgery. I love it because I'm not pretending to be fearless— I'm anxious as hell, but most of all I'm happy because my body is mine.
Faced with this choice, I declined the offer, and said that it had taken me a lifetime (or as much of a lifetime as someone at 14 has lived) to become comfortable with who I was, and it felt like they were telling me that that wasn’t okay. I told them I wasn’t interested in being a “normal height for a boy”, that I didn’t see how this could possibly improve my life. But in my head, I had one brief thought that haunts me every single day because three years later in the same city, kids like me would have a chance to try GnRHa — you know them as puberty blockers. If someone had simply said to me “you can be the person you actually are” so much might have changed. The thought had been: “I wonder if…” and then I bit my tongue and pushed it out of my mind.
But no one did, and it didn’t. And had someone suggested that still, I might have rejected it outright regardless as I had seen how people like me were treated on Jerry Springer. I learned from a young age that there’s nothing worse than being me. But another part of the reason it didn’t change, aside from the lack of availability of the option to hormonally transition was simple: I’d already been told by the old gods of gender medicine why I believed in my heart I was supposed to be female and that maleness was all wrong for me — and it’s taken decades to unlearn it. But slowly I am.
I’d learned it the first and only time I told my psychoanalyst psychiatrist about this at 12. In turn, he told me about how fantasies are a normal part of adolescence, and how we desire these things for many reasons— but while the desires are real, the fantasy is not. In other words, I was sick. Having been in and out of the hospital for what can most generously be described as a mild allergy to being alive, I was familiar with sickness. Psychiatry had given me ample reason to locate sickness within myself, and “gender identity disorder” didn’t seem much different than the names which had already been foisted upon me.
But it wasn’t a fantasy — as a narrative therapist today, I have been able to see that it was hope.
Like so many trans people who transitioned in our adulthood, nearly all of my surgical pursuits have been on correcting things that would have been completely different if I’d had the option to transition as a teenager, and had I known this was not only an okay thing to do, but a wonderful, beautiful, and sacred thing that I could do for me, I would have done it in a heartbeat. And no amount of political navel-gazing would have been able to take that away from me.
Today I am learning to love my trans body, slowly, but assuredly. As I collect scars and tattoos, as the magic of estrogen and progesterone work their way through my body, I heal from the trauma of so many years of trying to be someone I simply wasn’t.
