ninaherenorthere.com

I rarely read books twice, but I recently picked up a copy of Augusten Burrough’s, Dry, from the library for a second go around.

“Why would pick that one again? My friend, a voracious re-reader of high quality literature, asked.

“Because I want to figure out how to write mass-market best-selling page-turning crap.” I said. “I’m looking for inspiration”

My MFA cost too much money for an answer like that, but it was the truth. By page 70, I wanted to chuck the book out the window. It reads like a skeletal screenplay with some decent one-liners. I did learn how much a good joke can mask a bad description and how much a tight narrative can mask pages and pages of generic dialogue. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve read bad, yet totally competent writing. And the book couldn’t have been that awful. I cried around page 175, although it should be known I also cry during Lifetime movies.

Sadly, the book was an inspiration to me. I don’t remember the last time I put down a book and felt capable of writing my own publishable book. I can do what he does; I really can; I may even be able to do it better.

Today is the 10th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. It is to memorialize and mourn transgender and gender-variant people killed by hatred and prejudice. It began in 1998 to honor Rita Hester, whose murder started Remembering Our Dead, a web project that holds the names, and occasionally pictures and gruesome murder stories, of those killed by anti-transgender violence. In the past decade, at least one transgender person per month has been killed by transphobic violence.

While reading through the memorial pages, trying to spark a deep thought or moving passage, I came across this quote from Gwendolyn Ann Smith:

“There is no “safe way” to be transgendered: as you look at the many names collected here, note that some of these people may have identified as drag queens, some as heterosexual crossdressers, and some as transsexuals. Some were living very out lives, and some were living fully “stealth” lives. Some were identifying as male, and some, as female. Some lived in small towns, and some in major metropolitan areas.”

I looked at many of the collected names. I don’t know these people, I thought. And yet I do. Maybe you don’t think you know these people either. But you do.

“It’s fucked up,” my therapist said when she handed me the letter. I read the first few lines, “I am writing in support of Nina in her pursuit of chest surgery. Born female, Nina meets the DSM IV criteria for Gender Identity Disorder.” The letter went on to say that I’ve been meeting with my therapist for over three years (which made me feel very well-balanced and dedicated to my personal development), that I understand the physical and psychological ramifications of top surgery, and that I have no “psychological disturbance” that would contraindicate my “pursuit of treatment.”

I had in my hands the infamous Therapist Letter, the permission, as recommended in the WPATH ethical guidelines (last updated in 2001), for those pursuing a cosmetic procedure that falls under the heading of gender reassignment surgery. I had already put up a half-assed fight against the letter, aware that my surgeon prefers these letters, but doesn’t require them. He assured me that the letter would sit in a folder in a drawer in the bottom of a cabinet never to be looked at again. I asked him if it was sufficient to say that I’m of sound mind to make a decision about my body. He said yes. I guess I’d hoped that the letter would say that and nothing else. When I expressed some disappointment at my offical letter, my therapist said she was filling out a template, but that I could re-write the letter if I wanted to, and she’d sign it. Although I cared about the issue on principle, being dianosed with something I don’t believe is a condition or a disorder that I need “treatment” for, I didn’t care about a piece of paper that is going to do nothing but yellow.

Rather than reiterate the problems of pathologizing trans people, or the problem of equated top surgery with a nose job or breast augmentation, I thought I’d just mess around with my own version of a somewhat typical transgender narrative therapist letter.

Dear Dr. Surgeon,

As a small child, N’s toys included My Little Ponies (with a stable) and a Barbie, the shower time version. She doesn’t remember actually playing with these toys, certainly not aggressively or in a rough-n-tumble fashion, but she remembers a picture of herself topless, washing a naked Barbie. It is the only picture she remembers in which she is without a shirt during that prepubescent phase when boys and girls chests look the same. She remembers that picture fondly.

During childhood, N occasionally tortured her brother. One of her favorite games involved sticking a broomstick between his legs. Her friend Alexis would grab the other side and the two older girls would jerk the stick up, launching N’s poor brother into the air. He would usually fly off one side with a burst of self-conscious, traumatized laughter. Because he laughed, N would then shout in his face that he had no balls. Once she asked me to hypnotize her. She was hoping to uncover a repressed memory, like maybe after her castration attempt, she’d said, “You can’t have one if I can’t have one.” But after the hypnosis, N only cried, hugged a pillow and apologized profusely to her brother.

N told me that she didn’t always urinate sitting down. She said she could go anywhere: trough, sink, in between two cars, potted plant, middle of a ski run, the side of the road, Snapple bottle. She told me that she didn’t care much for toilet paper. “Is that because men don’t wipe after peeing?” I asked. “No,” she screamed. “Urine is clean. Like water. Gandhi drank it.” She was very disappointed when I refused to label any of these behaviors as cross-gender practices.

I always got the sense N was looking for evidence or proof, some rational explanation for why she couldn’t stop fantasizing about a painful, expensive procedure that would push her even farther into the outskirts of society. She inquired into possible medical explanations, but doctors never could find any undescended testes in the obvious places below the waist. So, she had them check her ear canal and nasal pathway. One doctor refused to treat her after she chased him around with her mouth open and tongue out, positive that in the place of tonsils she had gonads. She thought everything would be okay if she could just have an oral gonadectomy.

N appeared to have a completely normal puberty. She responded to menstruation as if she’d sprung a leak, plugging it up like she was a plumber. She eagerly requested a training bra before she needed one, and in eight grade, she began showing off her breasts in skin tight shirts. There appears to be some sort of inner turmoil going on at this time, because she also bought a carving knife to school and ended up in some serious trouble. I’m not sure if it was a plea for help, but her actions seemed to say, “Look at my tits! Look at my tits, and I’ll knife you.”

While N displayed no obvious signs of gender identity disorder throughout childhood, she did begin to show late onset gender development. Around the age of twenty-six, she saw a toddler playing in a sandbox. He was wobbling about in a pair of corduroys. His Keds looked small enough to fit in her hand, and he was wearing a perfect red dress shirt. “I need that outfit,” N said to herself in what felt like a grand epiphany. Shortly thereafter, N began window shopping for herself on the boys’ side of the Baby Gap.

As N grew closer and closer to age thirty, she began to look younger and younger. It didn’t matter if she was wine tasting with her parents or at a private catered briss, a bartender or guest would inevitably crack a joke about underage drinking. At bars, the quizzing over the validity of her driver’s license began: What color are your eyes? How tall are you? What’s your zip code? On two occasions, N had to provide backup identification. At one corner store, a cashier looked at her license and said, “Holy Shit.”

While I have no concerns over N’s late onset gender development, I am slightly concerned with her workout regimen. For awhile N thought she could exercise off her hips and breasts. Last week, she confided in me that she knows this is a lost cause, that the only way to lose her chest is surgery. And thank god. Her face was starting to disappear.

So, Doctor, there you have it. I am writing in support of N in her pursuit of chest surgery. Born female, resembling a girl and then a woman and then a boy, and on her way to looking like a pear-shaped skeleton with the face of a Jewish monkey, Nina meets the DSM IV criteria for workout manorexia. I recommend surgery as the best treatment option for her.

Sincerely,

Therapist

I felt guilty going to my trans group on election night. I could be refreshing my computer screen as the returns come in, or tapping my knee surrounded by people biting their nails, I thought. The fate of the country is at stake and all I can think of is me. When the big one hits, I’ll probably climb over the rubble, hand my apple to a trapped kid, and still make it to therapy on time for the full 50 minutes.

When I arrived at group, the huge TV was on and a few people were sitting on the couches, everyone nervously chatting about the early results. We started late, and as part of check in, we discussed our feelings about news TV breaks or stopping early to watch TV, allowing us to bond over shared election concerns. We never did turn on the TV. Instead we talked about the things we always talk about: our families, our bodies, our friends and co-workers, our trans-identities, and yes, I’m being intentionally vague about our private meeting. The thing that struck me most yesterday was the diversity of our group: pre-transition and post-transition; barely old enough to drink and old enough to qualify for senior citizen discounts; black and white and brown. All of us last in a long line for equal rights, ones that include using a public bathroom without fear. But nobody said that. When we left, we were all way to pumped by Obama’s growing electoral lead.

By the time I arrived at the election party, the wall map had been covered in blue with spots of red, and McCain had already delivered his concession speech. The great thing about watching Obama’s victory speech with gay guys is that they cried, and squealed, “Oh My God, who dressed Michelle? What was she thinking?” I think even a few of the straight men cried; this is San Francisco after all.

I imagine few of us in the room had voted for Obama because of his skin color, what with those issues of wars, the economy, the environment, education, health insurance, evolution, and women’s reproductive rights to consider, or character traits like eloquence, intelligence and leadership skills. But I know we all thought about race now. It was impossible not to listening to the words in his speech. It was impossible not to see it, looking at his face. I had been wholly unprepared for the impact of his win, to see a black man on stage, to envision him in the White House with his family, to transform the words “change” and “hope” from campaign slogans into a presidential symbol of all that is possible, a touchstone for the dream of progress.

The results for Prop 8 were close, but it was no good from the beginning. My friend who had spent the past week in Colorodo campaigning for Obama, occasionally ending up on the phone with a bigot who used the N-word, roamed the party, repeating both prayer and mandate, “We cannot write discrimination into our constitution.” His words moved me more than “unfair and wrong,” more than the commerical images of Japense internment camps that aimed to link all of our mistreatments. Maybe it was my friend’s soft-spoken voice or the word “constitution,” an official state document, but also the foundation, the matter of which we are made, our core, that resonated with me.

At the block party in the Castro, we celebrated one victory, and drank to forget the impending defeat of our other battle. There is no question in my mind that we won the more important of the two, although I tell you, I’m having a hard time looking people in the eye today. As buoyed as I was yesterday by Barack, I’m equally disheartened today, not that people still call me “dyke” as a slur, or that I could be denied employment as a visible trans person, but that in an organized manner, and through a legitimate voting process (or so I think), my fellow people, over 5 million of them, others like me who desire happiness and health and love and connection, wrote discrimination into our shared constitutional body.

I went to trans group last night because I needed to talk about my family. I’m in the process of coming out to them as transgender, which is like coming out to them as gay, with some aspects worse (the situation) and some better (my maturity to deal with the situation). Ten years ago, both of my parents were concerned that life would be harder for me as a lesbian. I recently asked my father what he’d done in the past decade to make the world a better place for gay people, to make my life easier. He got defensive and responded that he doesn’t discriminate. What does it say that to help these days is to not make something worse? Recently, my mother told me that she read her mother’s old yearbook and was shocked that someone had called my grandmother, “a dirty Jew.” I launched into an ineffectual spiel about the current state of gay discrimination. My mother failed or didn’t care to see the connection.

It turned out that going to my group last night was the least self-absorbed thing I could do. In sharing my latest challenges in living in a society that is not set up to accept me, I’m following in the path of thousands before me; I’m walking by the sides of thousands with me; I’m leading the path for thousands to follow. When will we see that there is no line for equal rights and basic human decency? When will we realize we’ve all been fucked in the ass one too many times without the common courtesy of lube?

Will four years change us? I’d like to believe so.

Linking to the personal essay in this week’s NY Times Sunday Styles Modern Love column saves me the struggle of coming up with something original to post. It’s written by a woman about her transgender twin brother’s desire to have biological children and the fertility challenges he faces from testosterone that has been accumulating in his body for a few years.

I had a lot of responses to this essay, none of them particularly original or insightful, and all of them rather self-absorbed. So, I deleted them and decided to just recommend that you read the essay.