I just my hands on some pictures from the tutor-learner recognition event I emceed with my adult learner through Project Read. (I call him “Jim” in my first post and “S.” in my second post about our relationship and what we do together.)
How cute are we?
His cell phone rang at the podium because he NEVER turns it off.
Sometimes he makes fun of me too.
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.