ninaherenorthere.com

My Final Hurrah 

Last Monday, I went into the women’s locker-room at my gym. I did my typical head down, hair in my face, wrap my towel around my neck for extra coverage thing, and perhaps this finally made me look suspicious because everyone stared at me. Everyone.

I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, or rather I’d come up with a response to the “What are you doing in here?” question. I even practiced my answer. In my sweetest voice I’d say,”I’m transgender and I feel more comfortable in here.” But that was months ago, before my sweet voice had gone baritone, before the hard angles had settled into my jaw. Never did I think I would last so long in there. I lasted so long, I may have convinced myself I could stay forever.

There was one woman in particular who must have stared at me for a full five minutes. She was quiet a bit older, and as I waited for her to question my presence, I knew I would never utter my practiced line. In my head, it had actually mutated into a whine, complete with some fist banging on my thighs, an “I don’t wanna use the men’s locker-room, goddamnit! I just don’t wanna.” I almost stopped going to the gym entirely, but the only thing worse than acting like a victim of my situation is acting like a big old baby.

Have I mentioned this thing I have at work I like to call “tranny privilege”?

You see, I have my own private bathroom with shower. Well, it’s two private bathrooms actually, ever since I asked HR to replace the “men’s” and “women’s” shower signs with “unisex” since both rooms are the same. When I changed my name and pronouns at work, to save everyone some discomfort, I’d requested use of these bathrooms, even though they’re only supposed to be used when showering. Recently, a co-worker asked me if she could use them, because no one wants to take a dump in the stall next to their boss, and I said, “Nope. There’s a sign inside that says ‘no exceptions.’ Unless you’re me. Sucker.” So yeah, I can shit, jerk off and shower in privacy at work–tranny privilege.

Back to the big baby thing. With the shower at work, I didn’t even actually need to shower at the gym. It’s just that I didn’t want to be there all sweaty, have to change into street clothes, walk back to work, then shower there, especially since I liked to pretend nobody knows I disappear from my cube to run at lunch, even though my co-workers often ask how my run was? Yeah, I know, woe is me. I didn’t want to change my routine. I was scared of the uncertainty. Who knew what I’d find behind the men’s locker-room door.

A New Beginning

Last Thursday, I decided to check it the men’s side, starting slow with a simple investigation in the late afternoon, an uncrowded time. It turned out the “gang” showers that intimidated me weren’t of the “drop your soap and get nailed by an offensive lineman (WR or RB if it’s a fantasy) kind. They were just shower stalls without doors; one even appeared to be in a corner. And though I kept my head down inside, it wasn’t for my previous reasons–fear of being caught–it was more like don’t invite what you can’t deliver (though I’m told this gym location isn’t known for “activity.”)

Overall, it was a bit uneventful, though I will say there’s a huge difference between a men’s restroom and men’s lockerroom. One has urinals, the other has naked men. Everywhere. It was the closest I’d ever been to such pervasive male nudity and although most of the guys needed some extra time on the treadmill, while I was washing my hands, I noticed the ridiculously ripped super sexy guy standing next to me in a towel. I’m pretty sure that switching to this locker-room immediately made me gay-ish-er.

I showered back at work that day, a rather pleasant experience, but the next time I went into the men’s lockerroom, I showered in one of the doorless stalls, just how I sometimes did on the other side when the lines for the private ones were too long. From the backside, I could be any gender with a hairy ass, and I figure if anyone catches a glance at my front, my dilemma is obvious—I only have two choices.

The locker-room I use doesn’t define my gender. It’s just a locker-room. And using the men’s side doesn’t make me a man. I could say I made the switch because it was time to accept a responsibility for what I look like, to respect the widespread system of binary categories even if don’t believe in it. And maybe that is what I’m saying, but I’d rather phrase it differently. I’d rather say it’s because I’m a person, and I just don’t want to be the kind of person who scares little old ladies in the locker-room.

I knew that once I made the switch, I wouldn’t be able to go back to the women’s side. I’d used every toilet, showered in every stall, had probably used half the lockers in there. I kinda wish I could’ve weighed myself one last time, or looked at my reflection in the mirror against a backdrop of female flesh. It may have only been a smelly, nasty locker-room, but I can’t help but think something inside deserved a proper goodbye.

1. I can’t grow a full beard, nor proper sandpaper stubble, but when my laziness reaches the week mark, I do rock a full face of pubescent fuzz. A few weeks ago, before I went to the doctor, I made it a point to shave. I was going to the gynecologist; it just seemed like a respectful thing to do.




2. For the past month, between travel documents and medical records, labs, and doctors I had to use my old name a lot, which meant I was constantly alternating between “Nina” and “Nick.” (I’m physically fine, though I did have an anal probe to determine, again, that I have a chronic and mild case of JewBowel, or GI conditions common to those of Eastern European descent.) I got the to the point where I couldn’t remember what name, boy or girl, to use.




3. Although there are VIP locker-rooms at 24hr Fitness, none have a stick figure sign for “boy band member”–my gender identity of the week. In these VIP locker-rooms, just like the regular ones, the men’s side has open gang showers and the women’s side has doors on at least some showers. Despite being recognized as a guy all the time, I STILL use the women’s locker-room (to shower before returning to work) AND nobody has commented yet, even when I don’t shave. I know, I know, but what am I to do? I don’t take hormones to acquire “male privilege” any more than I take hormones to spend my lunch break naked in gang showers with large, smelly, hairy men.




4. I am addicted to gay dude porn. I watch it regularly, obsessively, without any forethought. I can be checking my bank statement and find myself on Xtube before I’ve even noticed. I had to upgrade my Macbook several months ago because it was too old for good streaming video software and I couldn’t handle watching one more glitchy blowjob. Now I have a small collection of DVDs, made up entirely of gifts from exes, women. Because here’s the thing, I only date and pursue sex with women. I love women. But I cannot stand watching women in porn, so instead I fill my head with dick and balls.




5. Sometimes, I think I’ve broken down sex into poles, holes, erogenous zones and positions, and that I can see through sexual orientation entirely. Sometimes, I think I’ve deconstructed gender, isolating the pieces–names, body parts, hormones, locker-room used–all of which may have something gendered associated with them, but from which there is no sum, no gendered whole. Sometimes I think I’ve transcended it all, and then I realize I’m only one paradox away from a full-on identity crisis.

*NOTE: I’ve shared certain things above that I may not be willing acknowledge again and wouldn’t want others to bring up about me. Also some of those topics are not comfortable for all trans folk. Being a paradox is funny until a doctor won’t provide you with service, someone purposely ignores your preferred name, or security is called while you’re in the “wrong” bathroom.

I know they were all out because it was, or certainly felt like, the first weekend of spring. They were everywhere in the Castro and Mission, and all over Dolores Park. Every street and corner, every bar and cafe. I’m sure they were always there. The dykes and lesbians that is. I’d just never seen them so clearly before, never noticed them from the outside.

Some trans guys talk about feeling or becoming “invisible” once they transition, mostly surrounding the  loss of lesbian community and the loss of blatant queerness. I’ve been waiting for this to strike me now that the physical differences between me and women have widened.

I sat in front of Harvest on Market St, eating sweet potato soup and thinking about this late yesterday, just watching all the dykes go by. I saw ponytails and dreadlocks and short styley hair, basketball jerseys and soccer shorts and softball uniforms. I saw women who certainly didn’t need and most likely didn’t want boobs as large as they had, and super boyish looking women who were probably pretty stoked about this. I felt like I was watching my entire twenties walk by. I didn’t feel invisible. I felt old. When I got up to leave, I caught my reflection in the glass. It surprised me a little, the young man staring back at me. How goddamn handsome you are, I thought. Then the loneliness hit. For the loss of what once was.

“I just tell people they’re shark bites,” he said.

My first response, a testament to either my ridiculousness or literalness, was that my chest scars are too symmetrical to be shark bites. Or, maybe it was a testament to how ignorant (and I mean that in a mostly friendly way) I believe most people are about trans folk. But headed to Guatemala on a yoga retreat at the end of next week, I realized I may want to have a story or two in my back pocket, whether it’s about precancerous tissue removed from chest, or my passport.

Because I didn’t want to start the long arduous process of changing my name/gender, especially when I’m not sure I ever want to change my gender (mostly for health insurance fears but also because M and F as designations are beyond meaningless to me), I’ll be traveling under a passport with an “F” and the name “Nina.” My picture is pre-testosterone, but it looks enough like me now that I figure most people won’t notice my name or gender. However, I am having some awkward moment worst case scenarios like having to acknowledge that the F is a mistake and that Nina is a boy’s name in Russian–both almost as believable as the shark bite thing.

Then there’s the retreat itself, which I imagine will consist of a handful of people from San Francisco, as well as people who work there, and of course, all of the people who fall into the “unforseen” circumstances category. I am expecting/hoping I feel safe enough to be trans without any explanation for my scars, and walk around in just shorts, because, well, I’ve waited fifteen fucking years to be comfortable in a bathing suit.

As far as my testosterone, I’m on a ten-day shot cycle and my trip is about ten days. When I booked the trip, I looked at a calendar and realized that if, leading up to my departure, I pushed off a few of my shot cycles by one day, then I could line up my trip and a cycle perfectly. It wasn’t entirely necessary; I could bring my vial, a syringe and needles, but I’d prefer not to. I’d prefer not to deal with any of these things, I guess, but these things are my life as I know it.

There was a time, about a few years, when I spent most of my mental energy trying to reconcile what seemed to be a whole lot of no-win choices. Breasts or scars. My happiness or the happiness of others. Traveling as a woman or never traveling again as a trans person. I wondered how much I’d have to give up for what in the end felt less like decisions and more like instinctual mandates.

So, here I am, about to go on first trip abroad as a transboy. And the truth is, I haven’t been too worried about it. Sometimes I forget that for being so neurotic and anxious, traveling calms me down. I’m good at planning, managing situations. I fixed this trip as sort of a training wheels, a place to test how comfortable I feel with my “F” passport and how safe I feel alone for a couple days at the beginning and end of the retreat. Part of my decision to go on a destination specific trip as opposed to a backpacking  trip, even stay someplace “resorty”–something I’ve never done before–was so that I could settle into being myself around the same people, build them into a comfort zone.

And I’d be an idiot to think traveling as a trans person is any more dangerous than half the shit I pulled traveling alone as a woman. I’m also crazy if I think being trans is going be the hardest part of my trip. Because it’s entirely clear to me that the yoga is what is going to kill me.

We were in one of my favorite neighborhood bars, a mixed-crowd gay bar, late on Saturday night. Heated in conversation, gossip actually, my friend, a woman, followed me into the men’s room. We were standing in front of the door to the stall, leaving both the trough and urinal open and available, when a dude entered. He literally tried to push his way through us while telling us not so kindly to get out of his way.

My friend started to argue, yelling at him to calm down as she took a step to the side, forced out of the way. I did the opposite, shut my mouth and stepped directly in front of him, prompted by I don’t know what, the confidence that comes from having a new tree-trunk neck or an extra few inches of thickness around my chest.

I stood my ground, until he turned, then I used the stall. When I returned to the bar, my friend was still fuming, prattling on about the asshole. I had nothing to say. I was a jumble of emotions, at the axis of so much conflict, angry at the boy for his bullying and frustrated with the girl for following me in, stripping me of everything I fought for daily.

I’d made a territorial move. I was protecting my right to be in the men’s room, and especially my right to the stall. I was protecting my right to be transgender, my hard-earned identity. Had my friend not been there talking to me, I knew the altercation wouldn’t have happened. But had she not been physically present, her body sort of in the way, I also knew something that scared me, that is still scaring me, that I hadn’t ever thought myself capable of until that moment. I would’ve punched him, of that I’m sure, and I would’ve done it before I’d even had the chance to stop myself.

James Earl Jones

My voice is deep. Like super deep. It’s all anyone can say despite knowing that this is exactly what was supposed to happen. Last week, a trans guy asked me if the men in my family had especially deep voices, like I might be genetically predisposed to a bass. If I call my bank, or my cable company, they’ll start the conversation using my legal (account-holding) name, only to fall into Mr. Krieger within seconds. Unlike muscles and the tiny weeny, a deep voice wasn’t one of the things that I was especially looking forward to, so I’m surprised by how much pleasure I’m taking in it. I call people I could easily email, and I sing aloud to songs, privately of course. But the best is hearing myself “Om” in yoga. The vibration is finally primordial, eternal, resonant.

Cry Baby

I can still cry. The first time I cried, a month or so ago, I wondered if it was a fluke. But these past couple weeks, I’ve been getting it out, a few trickles and one big bawl. About ninety percent of the trans guys I know say they have a hard time crying, or can’t at all, even when they need to. Sure, I’m not crying nearly as much as I was before T, but I feel significantly more in touch with my emotions. I trust them. And I don’t necessarily think it’s a man/woman thing. It’s more like I feel solid now, whereas before I was fuzzy—my shadow kinda askew, my doppelganger trailing me by a millisecond, something slightly off. I’m not entirely sure how this ties into crying, but I think I’m trying to debunk the myth of the “no crying, unemotional, irritable, aggressive T-infused trans guy.” The reality is I’m peaceful and softer inside, a more emotional version of myself. I’m coalescing in such a way that when I cry, it’s not just something my body is doing. It’s an experience that I actually feel deeply connected to.

The Pleasures of Gay Porn for a Pansexual Who Still, Thankfully, Loves Women

I have to admit that my ability to cry sometimes makes me think I’m not taking enough testosterone. (Although there’s significant debate on the subject of dosing, I take three-quarters of what some consider a “full dose.”) But then I pull something out from my expanding gay porn collection, and I know there’s plenty of T in my system. It’s simple–I used to *like* dude-on-dude action, and now I watch more of it than I ever thought was humanly possible. This is somewhat standard for trans guys, so I won’t go too much into my obsession. It’s also somewhat standard, or at least a possibility, that trans dudes on T go full-on gay. When I started T, there was a lot of speculation from those close to me, and a certain level of concern on my part, that I might no longer be attracted to women. At this point, I think I’m in the clear on this one; I’m still very very much into women, even if I’d prefer not to see them in porn.

When I was in high school, I was a sex educator with this group called HITOPS and one day we had the GLBT council from the local Jersey universities come talk to us. I remember the “bi” girl talking about how cool her sexual orientation was because it meant she had twice the chance of getting a date. Straight at the time, I was jealous; I held onto her comment, kinda dreamed of being like her some day. Now I am. Going out is just so much more interesting when I know there’s the chance that I’ll find anyone and everyone attractive. That said, I know enough to keep my head down and avoid eye-contact when I walk home through the Castro.

Growing Up

I recently saw a trans friend who left San Francisco about a year ago, around the time he started T. I’d bumped into him six months ago, and he definitely looked different, but when I saw him a couple weeks ago, I didn’t recognize him at first. It was partially the complete beard, the button down shirt and vest, the chic glasses. It was also his calmness, a confidence and ease I’d never before seen in him. And it was all wrapped up in his maturity, the movement from child to adult, from boy to man.

When I saw him, I saw the reason I started taking T, or the instinct I had the awareness to follow, a desire to grow up. It  used to frustrate me that I couldn’t see my future. Now I realize it was that, from where I was before, I didn’t have a future. I was aging in a holding pattern. I think there are a million ways to mature, a plethora of experiences that can shape and inform us, teach us how to take care of ourselves, take care of others, but until recently, I’d never had the opportunity to witness my own physical maturity in my reflection, to be proud of the little boy who’s finally growing up.

Confession

I’m still occasionally, absentmindedly, doodling my old name.

Carded Anew

I’m carded almost anytime I get near alcohol. Once I pass over my driver’s license–the photo is over a decade old–the bartender, bouncer, whoever will inevitably quiz me on my zip code or date of birth, or will say, “There’s really no way you’re 5′7″.” Explaining that I used to play basketball, thus padding a few inches, doesn’t always help and backup ID is required. But the other day I got a new test. The bartender held up my ID and said, “Let me see you smile.” I laughed, knew exactly what he wanted, and busted out a smile that nearly revealed my wisdom teeth. “You can’t fake that,” he said, before pouring my drink. I’ve always held onto my eyes as the one physical trait that won’t change on T, and I point this out to those fearful that I may stop being familiar to them. Until I was carded at the bar, I hadn’t thought of the smile, how little that changes. I carry a picture of my brother from around age 4 in my wallet. He has a blond bowl cut; now he has a brown Jewfro. He looks nothing like that childhood picture, except for that crooked lady-killer smirk, and I’m pretty sure that’s why I carry it around. Because some things never change.

Passing vs. Being Seen

I was explaining to a new queer friend that I was “passing” more often lately, using the word “passing” out of laziness, knowing that in our shared lexicon she’d understand this to mean I was being recognized as a guy. “But do you feel like you’re being seen?” she asked. I often tire of identity discussions, of queer polemics that have become their own thoughtless cliches, like “nobody passes.” But my response to her question felt new.

When I’m amongst my friends and my community, those who have known me for years, or those who recognize the infinite possibilities within genders or perhaps recognize the transgender in all of us, I feel fully seen. When strangers or acquaintances or new hires at work recognize me as a man, I don’t feel seen in my entirety; I am actually “passing,” occasionally feeling like an impostor or a fraud, words that although partially accurate hit too close to the transphobic vitriol of the past fifty years. A tourist passing as a local is more appropriate, and the point that I’m attempting to make is that while “being seen” is liberating and allows me to connect with people in a way that had never been possible before, “passing” has its place too.

Passing is new and scary, dangerously exciting; it allows for an exploration from the inside, a cultural education, seamless learning, an induction. I don’t feel fully seen but therein lies the beauty, being in a position where I can shed my history, my baggage of womanhood, absorb all that I’m only now able to because men may look at me and think, You’re one of us–as wrong and right and complicated as that may be.

Mother and Child Reunion

I saw my mother this past weekend for the first time since she was out in San Francisco for my surgery almost a year ago. I was nervous–my chest is flatter than it ever was with a binder; I’ve gained about five pounds, almost all in the muscles in my pecs, shoulders, and arms; my face is more angular; my neck is thicker; I have zits that my friends say I cannot call acne yet; I smell different; I shave my face; my voice is definitely deeper. But then again, it’s me, so I notice everything. My mom, although conceding that my voice sounds “hoarse,” and that maybe my face is bigger, says I don’t appear different to her.

I am torn between feeling a great sense of relief that my mom finds me familiar and frustrated that she cannot see the physical changes that mean so much to me. At one point at the end of the trip, she said, “I just don’t see you as a man. I’m sorry, I don’t.” I wasn’t angry with her, because even if she couldn’t see it, she spent two days acting as if she could (barring her complete inability to remember to call me Nick), referring to me as “mister” instead of “lady,” or pointing me to the men’s room instead of the women’s room. But part of me did want to shout in my mom’s face, HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE ME AS A DUDE? What part of my body, chest, face, anything is reminiscent of female to you?

Her comment made me see that maybe she hasn’t thought of me as having a gender for years. Sure, she placed me on the woman side as a matter of procedure–my birth certificate, biology, and recognition by society said so. But my mom, much like me, sees women as being able to do all the same things men can. And maybe the physical attributes, the change in my chest and face and body don’t signify anything about gender to her. Maybe to her I am genderless. And in that respect, I will never change.

*I’m not the biggest fan of the term “transition” in gender-speak; it implies starting somewhere and arriving somewhere else, of moving from female to male. I don’t see it that way. I have made decisions, and continue to make decisions, and they are, in a sense, separate.

*I am passing as a dude more lately. All of my feelings surrounding this are complex. Sometimes, when I’m in a group, I feel a new and unusual uncertainty about what to say and not say about my history, my age, my daily experiences because I have no idea how I’m being perceived. I also know that someday, perhaps, maybe, I might pass as a guy all the time, and for me the impending loss is so profound it makes me want to stop time. But mostly I feel a swell of pride when someone acknowledges me as dude; that shit is downright euphoric. My favorite passing moment (and some version of this happens surprisingly often) is when a bouncer or voting booth attendant says, “hey man,” then looks at my uber-girly picture ID or asks for my legal name, and then says, “thanks man.”

*I shaved my face for the first time, and it was AWEsome. It turns out that men’s shaving cream smells way better on my face than it ever did on my legs. My friend Derek *taught* me how while my other friend filmed us, and turning the experience into a big event that could be shared and captured was the best part. When I consider the things I’ve dealt with in my gender journey–knives, needles, pain, sadness, discomfort, fear, the constant phobia of public bathrooms–shaving was one of the only truly fun things. Plus, I love the way my fresh face looks, and now I get peach fuzz stubble, which is more exciting than peach fuzz.

*I am feeling some unease about publishing a book, and maintaining this blog, with my former name in the title. While it means my old name will be accessible to the general public forever, something I do think I’m okay with, it also means that when I meet new people, mention and eventually promote my book, my old name is one of the first things they will learn about me. This is not upsetting as much as it feels weird. I don’t have any interest in the given names of trans guys I meet, and prefer not to know, which makes me think that others might prefer not to know mine. I once thought that having my given name on a book cover would memorialize it, but now I’m wondering if it might instead transmute ”Nina” from my former name into a title, and perhaps I should just let it rest in peace.

*Confession: I still use the women’s locker room at the gym. I often workout during the day at lunch and need to shower before I return to the office. The women’s room has single stall showers. The men’s room has open gang showers. The situation makes me alternately frustrated and enraged. And although I keep my head down, eyes focused on the floor, and do not speak to anyone in the women’s locker room, I know it’s only a matter of time before someone asks me what I’m doing in there. I don’t want to be in there. But it is easier. More comfortable for me. At least for now. When provoked, I wonder if I’ll have the balls to say that I’m transgender and this side is safer. Or if I’ll start bringing a bathing suit to the other side to hide the fact that I don’t have balls.

I started taking testosterone on July 21, 2009. There are a lot of reasons why, and none of them have to do with weighing a pro and con list, questions like “Is it worth muscles if I’m going to get acne?” or “Is it worth a few centimeters of dick if I’m going to get ass hair?” There is no picking and choosing; it is all or nothing. Of course, I always have the option to stop, or to flip it into more positive terms, to make a conscious decision to continue every time I pick up the needle.

Sometimes I mull over this unrealistic scenario: If I were to approach a 14 year old boy and tell him he could remain as he is forever, never having to shave or smell raunchy or have zits, that girls would still swoon over him, and hot ones at that, that he would never have to worry about balding, what do you think he would do, freeze time? Am I the same? I don’t know. But I can tell you how I feel.

I feel stuck, not in the antsy, anxious, American fill-the-void kind of way that makes me take an extra handful of cereal when I’m full because I want something, anything more. And I don’t feel stuck like I do in a bad job or in a bad relationship where I just need out. It’s more like a brick wall is in front of me, maybe ten feet high, and I’m standing on my tippy toes, trying to see over, wondering not if “manhood” is on the other side, but adulthood, if there is a dog, or child, or family, something or someone to care for — a future.

Let’s scrap that one, just so there’s no confusion that this is about me trying to get somewhere — it isn’t. I want the feeling of transition, or puberty, or having testosterone, more specifically exogenous testosterone, inside my body to connect me to the experience of no one thing, but the totality of being a teenage boy, a mature man, and a transguy — a person who sticks himself every couple weeks and very slowly plunges a viscous fluid into his quad, a person who carries with that dull tingly sensation nearly thirty years of life in which he was recognized as a female.

I am a writer and so I find it ironic that the words I’ve arrived at seem empty to me — “instinct,” “the wisdom of the body,” “feeling like a man.” I cannot possibly tell you what it means to feel like a man, but occasionally you will hear me utter that phrase, then cringe because I am at a loss to explain or deepen. Maybe I am too logical for something that defies ration, and although I can let philosophy and theory wash over me, I can’t quite explore myself through those lenses.

I can always turn to narrative, even though the term is so dangerous and loaded in the transgender lexicon because of the historical pain it has caused so many people, myself included. Narrative is a construction, a way of connecting dots, of linking elements whose truth is as fleeting as a millisecond tick on a stopwatch. But as Joan Didion writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”; I know I do. And the thing about these stories, about my own narrative constructions is that I’ve earned my words.

It is hard to look back at my time with breasts and call myself miserable, mostly because I didn’t feel that way at the time, or wasn’t aware that I did — we do what we do to survive. But over the three or so years that I struggled to arrive at the decision to remove them, I heard from a plethora of people a countless number of times, “Do not cut off your breasts.” I was foolish and human to listen, to keep beating down instinct with reason. By now, I’ve earned my faith in myself, to listen to the wisdom of my body even if I can’t explain where it comes from or what exactly it is.

As for “feeling like a man,” I still don’t know what that means, but I know that when people call me “he” or I hold my breath from the stench in the men’s restroom that I feel as I imagine other men might feel, and that when people call me “she,” I have no idea whom they are talking about and when I go into the women’s restroom, I feel not like a woman, nor a man, but an outsider, an invisible person. Does this mean that my entire construct of myself is based on pronouns and toilets? Please forgive me if I’m enforcing a binary that I don’t believe in, but I spend a large portion of every day using words and bathrooms.

When I first started exploring testosterone, it was for writing research almost three years ago. T was not something I was actively or even passively considering and I watched an acquaintance receive one of his first shots. I didn’t sleep for a couple weeks. It would be melodramatic or crying wolf to say I contemplated suicide, especially since people do actually kill themselves, more than are counted, for being transgender. I did, however, contemplate what my life would be like should I *have* to take the route of T. It was that fear, envisioning the insurmountable challenges, that had me wishing myself dead.

I’m rambling now, getting off a track I never saw in the first place, spinning around an infinite number of ways to explain how I got from there to here, even when I know it doesn’t really matter at all. I’ll probably come back to these ideas again, revising and refining or changing my story entirely. Until then, it’s the following words that I keep coming back to. They come from a teacher, and although I cannot make complete sense of them, I find them comforting…

The asana is in the transition.

I changed my name at my job after a year. I received a new email address, a new name plate, and requested new pronouns that are still often stumbled over in meetings or conspicuously avoided. In December, I disappeared on a “staycation” for two weeks and returned less barrel-chested. Wanting to avoid advertising my blatant physical change, I eased into wearing fewer layers and less baggy shirts to work until eventually I stopped thinking twice about choosing a tight T-shirt in the morning, or even walking up a flight of stairs to use one of two private and by default only gender-neutral bathrooms. (I ignore the man and woman signs). All of my co-workers were along for the ride, watching me unfold, knowing, if not understanding, my herstory. Or so I thought everyone knew, that everyone would always know.

We were on a product group team-building adventure and a new employee ended up on my team. She and I had sat together in a room a few weeks prior for a full-day new hire orientation. (I had been a contractor for my first year and still needed to complete employee training.) During the team-building scavenger hunt, this new employee asked if my position at our company was my first job. I must have looked puzzled because she explained that she asked because I look young, which I’ve heard a good hundred times in the past few years. I told her I’m much older than she thought, and she asked how I maintained my youth. I threw out my standard, “it helps to style myself like a teenage boy.” It was her turn to look puzzled — she thought I was a teenage boy.

I am aware of how people perceive me. When I use the women’s restroom, I always hunch and use something to cover up my flat chest; When I use the men’s restroom, I never open my mouth to speak and reveal my high-pitched voice. I am no longer surprised when a jaw drops over my driver’s license, and I never care whether it is my actual age or gender that is so shocking to these convenience store clerks and bouncers. But to have a co-worker, someone I’d spent a day with, barely believe I was old enough to hold a copywriting job alarmed me.

A few days later I ended up at a not-too-fancy Mexican restaurant in Lake Tahoe. Our hostess, a young girl, exchanged a few words with me and my friend Derek and seated us. She returned several minutes later and said, “I don’t know how to say this without sounding rude, but you need to pull up your pants.” As she walked away, I blushed a shade of pink darker than the margarita before me. “What just happened?” I asked.

“She thought you were a young boy,” Derek said. “She treated you like her little brother.”

“I’m old enough to have birthed that child,” I said to cover up my plumber butt embarrassment. I respect my mother and she raised me not to show asscrack at a restaurant, no matter how divey. But disgusting the other customers aside, being spoken down to as if I were fifteen was kind of demeaning.

It happened again a few days ago, not the asscrack thing now that I’ve started wearing belts again, but the teenage thing. I met a couple of out-of-towners through a friend — I introduced myself as Nick; I was wearing a white undershirt, the kind that cannot possibly hide even A-cup breasts; of course they were confused. I didn’t find out until later that they “couldn’t determine my age or sex” so perhaps I’m employing hindsight, but I felt the weirdness, like they were trying not to use big words. Ok, I’m exaggerating, but I felt off-balanced, like we couldn’t find a common ground.

Despite my propensity for being a social recluse and lone wolf, I actually like people and have begun to pride myself on being able to find a topic of mutual interest and chat up anyone. I didn’t quite realize that this could change, that I could be so confusing to people that they might not now what to say to me, or how to engage in a mature conversation with me.

I’ve changed a lot in the past year, and this is only the beginning. I figured that people would “mistake” my gender — whatever that means — asking me for a tampon if they think I’m a girl or striking up a conversation about sports if they think I’m a boy, or “ma’amsirring” me if they are uncertain. I expect to feel odd if and when I pass as a man, even knowing that I won’t entirely understand male privilege until I experience it. I know what it’s like for people to think I look young, like a young boyish woman, and that I should take it as a compliment. But I never expected women to chide me on the bus if I pause for an eigth of a second before giving my seat up to the pregnant or elderly, for people to appear flummoxed when I mention living in San Francisco for a decade or that I’ve held adult jobs for that long. I didn’t quite realize how much it sucks to be a thirty-one year old passing as a child.