Month: October 2018

radiance

So, somewhat affected, impacted, altered mood. Still no coffee, I will have it. Still multistressed, multi-affected, alive, much to do. Going to travel tomorrow, going to travel so so much and so much happens and so many meaningful touche in my life and I want to scream because I juggle so much of it.

But this is a blessing. I just need to wield it, channel it. This is magic. When I walked from the U-bahn to the electrologist, seeing beautiful street art and brutalism on the way, then I recognized that the right hand path magic application of the ankh in some regards may be the use of all three moons joined together in combination, whereas the left hand path magic of the moons has them applied distinctly and separately. This is only one true description, incompatible ones exist I am sure. I need focus now and I need symbols for that focus. I need the gratification of progress under fear, must not reward too much with creature comforts.

The recommendation made by Chettawut is perianal hair removal only. Electrolysis seems safest and permanent. The electrologist came recommended. I’m looking at an hour every other week for about six months, with two days after each during which things get cumbersome due to even water washing, let alone soap, not being recommended. It may cost up to 1K in total, which is about for times my projected remaining laser expenses. I presented, practicing my crappy Local Language of Babylon, it worked fine enough I suppose. I undressed and was photographed. Tiny tendency to tumescence under the awkwardness, despite by near-total testosterone suppression. Irritating but getting beyond awkward. I feel power within me of really ceasing to give fucks except deliberately. This is willpower exercise. I grow stronger still.

Then we tried it, without any anaesthesia. I’ll probably apply EMLA cream next time. It hurts, not from the needle sting, but from the separate heat and electricity applications. Nothing intolerable but if it goes on for a full hour the buildup likely will be significant, so I’ll go for the cream anyway. Some of the operations felt similar to blood draws or dental anaesthesic application in pain intensity, perhaps because they were gradual. I can deal with it but I will happily chemically cheat here. This now was just for ten minutes or so, a trial run.

Booked for next Friday. Of course I’ll go ahead. Everything about this is counter to comfort, every single aspect, but that’s precisely the point. Agency. Witchcraft. I move. I was moved, feeling tears every now and then going away from there, now on the train out to my office. This girl is beyond giving any fucks. And I needed precisely that insight when I woke this morning and everything felt challenging and hard.

The cumbersomeness fascinates me. In particular the hygiene aspects, the limitations, the likely healing challenges with that area, the scheduling challenges applying anaesthesia beforehand and afterwards. I’ll get to make use of my office ensuite bidet. For the second day after healing, when the aloe vera wears off, she recommends using an actual menstrual pad. It will be the first time I wear one, the first time I’d feel legitimate doing so even under an off-label use, and that feels stupidly, ridiculously validating just to think of. I will buy some later today (before, have done so only so as to have them available for guests as a courtesy thing). It’s good my use of own parts for sex is so limited and optional now, because that too will be a limitation. And for six months.

All of this is exactly what I need – complications, challenges, awkwardness, limitation, communicating using a third language at best with a care provider, all linked to the most awkward parts of my body. By ceasing to give any fucks here, I step one step closer to what it seems very much that I want. I step into myself, spread my vulnerabilities and exist. I prepare. I hold back tears on the S-bahn without knowing what emotion they correspond to. Relief, I think. Empathy with some part of myself that has been hurting for very long.

I am the witch.

escape

Lots of people tweet a cool talk about X-inactivation and genes escaping from it. The thought makes me dysphoric; those would be genes with potentially karyotype-based dosage effects regardless of sex hormones. It’s only about 1% of human genes, but still. And many of them may still be hormone regulated etc. I wish I was a calico though. I am dysphoric about my non-mosaic status, and that is hard to fix. Meh.

If only I was Klinefelter. But there is some solace in the fact that in terms of X-inactivation escape, I am no less a woman than a Turner girl is. That does help.

stone butch purples

NSFW: sex sex sex sex sex sex

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while and not finding the time. The last month I’ve gotten more sexual again, I think stressors went down enough to let me. I feel desire for desire on some level, and am casually enjoying playfully aiming for it. I think I was even a little disappointed when a date did not end with me getting laid, where I had thought I would. I’m crushing (surprisingly strongly) and I want to be explored and touched and observed, I want to be held and handled and I want to be smiling and cheeky and full of feeling as I tease and torture. I updated my fetlife profile even.

At the same time it is really really unappealing to think of anyone seeing directly the malformed parts between my legs. I can’t even name them comfortably, not on myself. There are exceptions for some people but I remain in high vigilance mode as it happens, when I was recently licked for example, I enjoyed and wanted it, but I couldn’t stop being watchful. Through clothes is OK, I enjoyed pressing myself against someone, or having a vibrator against me.

I want to come, I want that release. But there’s still fluid when I do. Transparent, yellow-reddish, sticky. Not so much, but still there. I can hope it would get less. I’d be happy being wet like a cis girl, even squirt like some, but I cannot reparse my fluids to that, and I deeply loathe the point at which receiving turns into cleanup. I learned I can come when tucked, with a magic wand against me; it was harder than I thought (though this was mostly experimentation to check I still could, so not in super sexy mode – I scrambled for fantasies and ended up thinking of how it would be like to have my vagina penetrated, that worked finally).

I fetishize cum in itself, I would want it on me and on those I make sex happen to, but I don’t want it to be mine. I hope (and believe) if my genitals had the right shape and lack of tumescence, I wouldn’t mind this fluid. It could drip from the hands of someone who had just fingered me and it would be fine, I’d be fine with wet panties and a wet spot if I felt the right shape of my parts against it, I’d be fine being seen with the right parts. I’d love to be licked like that.

I want this so much, I realize. And despite the longing, trying for it where I am now remains a matter of careful workarounds and ersatzes. I’d feel unsafe otherwise. This state, then, makes me feel some sort of affinity to stone butches (some of whom presumably are trans men), who have sex but do not want to be genitally touched. I no longer feel I appropriate by saying so, though I do acknowledge their direction as opposite to mine.

I should get SRS, shouldn’t I? I still have troubles wrapping my head around the want. I feel like I am deciding, like I know that I have decided somehow, that the timer is already counting down. It was two years from when I first decided (?), less now. I want a healed and functional vagina before I am 40. It feels scary and weird to type it. I’m preparing for it, a lot of things I do seem to be work towards it. I need to get the money – saving up something like 18K if I want to go for Chettawut and have extensive margins; not yet sure how I will do that. I’ll schedule and undergo electrolysis with that explicitly for that purpose. These things I know. I’ll continue to sculpt away bodily masculinity traces, reshape myself more, and I’ll get my legal sex change and voice work done within this time span also. I sense I will do these things.

I can also sense me going through with it, stepping into the flow of events for surgery and recovery. That sense has a shocked numbness from fear too, of pain, of complications, of not knowing how to get all the aftercare right. It’s the fear of wounds, of having surfaces where it is possible for me to do wrong, or for things to go wrong. But I feel also some sort of headiness when imaging it. I am beginning to imagine the feel of rush of will, of agency. I can somehow feel how I would feel in the moments of acting on the decision. I think I can feel how I would react, contain and mindful away the fear, be still and scared and still acting as normal despite the fear. I am familiar with how that feels for me. I’ve practiced a long time now.

So what else can I feel? The tucking project worked, I now know what it is like not to protrude. It feels right, it feels safe, it feels contained. I want that. I feel now the shape of my crotch as it would be, mounded but otherwise flat. It’s numb though, I have no lips yet, no insides, no knowledge of that. It’s like I have only the sketch, the draft, and it still goes stiff where it should not. Could I change that? That’s the point, I guess. Can I already now work up to feeling insides? Maybe. I’d need to try inguinal canal sex, maybe other sorts of touch in between what my outer labia would be. Still incomplete, but I hope maybe some of my loved ones will end up doing me like that. I think perhaps I’ll ask them to.

So… yeah. The trajectory is here. I’m working towards it. Steps on that route will also involve documentation, preparing my family, ensuring competence is in place for when I will be on leave, ensuring my house has an elevator by then. Getting in the best shape I can. In every one of these regards I act in a motivated manner to make it happen. Looks like I plan for having non-penile inversion vaginoplasty by latest 2020.

pathfind

I am more confident this year, and my language more direct often. I am confident making statements without being positively certain sometimes. I believe this is agency/self-appreciation largely. As noted, this is me channeling more of my big sister. She too can be blunt when no reason not to.

More interesting, I am reaching something which is either honesty, daring, or both. I am habitualizing not delaying things. I used to delay, to save things for some unspecified later. I trust things will just keep getting better. And if so, no need to ration exploration or evolution or progress, no need to hold back. I’ve been reaching out against social fear more, I’ve talked about things more when uncertain of how wise it was, in some name of fundamental honesty.

I want a life of fundamental honesty, and not to waste time unless when doing so feels good or productive.

On time, this also impacts some my thoughts on SRS. I want some youth at least in the right body. I have some time left, but I need to use it then.

terms

For many years before acknowledging I was trans I had word triggers. Using any male coded word for myself would feel very very painful and I avoided it, including terms for anatomy. That is still there. I was always fine using them for others. This does mean now I have challenges talking about my body because I lack words to use, I need to claim versions of the female ones. Also, notable that I had this type of linguistic dysphoria and still did not consider myself trans enough to transition. And really, the last years before, I think it was like that – I recognized as I met trans people that I could fall within that spectrum, but felt that I didn’t have to because it wasn’t bad enough. Eventually that changed. Interesting to note, in regards to whether there were signs or not.

infosecks

So I was born in 1980. My Scandinavian public school system probably had “progressive“ sex-ed, we had those classes maybe age 13-15. It covered contraceptives, pregnancy, and some stuff about consent without using that word, basically “it’s OK to wait until you want to“ but the assumption was implicitly that in a few years a lot of us would be having straight sex with each other. I felt that was shallow and stupid and determined to wait until university or marriage or whatever. Some anatomy, some menstruation, some baby development and nurturing. Not much of communication or relationship, but stuff on planning economy together. Lots of STD protection details. Token mention of there being gay people and that is OK, one visited school at some point to talk (he was an HIV positive gay man I think). I remember nothing about trans and nothing else more complicated.

Other sources was a magazine for teenagers of all sexes, which was basically similar in scope, what little I sneaked from my sisters’ girl magazines, and what books my parents had around from their psychologist schooling in the 70s. Pre-google internet on a shared computer, webrings etc. Nothing there.

So I really did not have an idea of anything trans related until… sometime? Apocryphic references here and there. Some TV mention of transvestite prostitutes having gotten breasts from unethical plastic surgeons, that was what I remembered. The idea of “traps”, probably. I got into second- and third wave feminism (because I identified with women as a group) and learned about gender roles as socially constructed and of the patriarchy. That was it until at university, in my much queerer circles, I encountered queerness and genderqueerness and like one or two actual trans people a few steps away from me. I was curious and scared, because the idea of gender identity was anathema to my life raft of all aspect of gender as socially constructed and about to be dismantled by the queer revolution.

Even then, I had no idea about hormonal transition. I thought as a trans woman, you had your genitals cut off so you’d stay with a sore and raw muscle surface and never feel arousal again, that you had breast implants and otherwise used heavy makeup and stereotyped clothing to try to pass. It seemed to be about being allowed to be a stereotype socially at a high cost physically.

I wonder how it would have been if I grew up now? What information could I have gotten as a teenager? Crucially:

– Yes, gender roles are constructed and harmful to all. But not all of gender is socially constructed, no matter what you hope. Some follows from body one way or another. I don’t think I could have accepted that. I would have struggled until overproven, and at that point, I would have sought transition. Which is essentially what now happened in my thirties instead.

– No, gender and sexual orientation are not linked. Also it really is OK to like anyone. When I told my mother boys in school said I was gay, she told me they feared their own sexuality and that I showed no sign of being gay. Having another form of acceptance more widely might have changed how I relate to that part.

– There really are people feeling much better anchored if they transition, either suffering if they do not, or gaining better happiness if they successfully do. Transition works, involves triggering another puberty track, and changes your body and mind; this prepares you for later surgeries if you want them. You won’t have more problems as a trans person than you already do for being a complete and utter outsider. The last may or may not have been true then in the small town, but true enough. I have no idea if I would have wanted to transition as a teenager. I was alienated but it was so hard to separate bullying, outsidership and other factors from each other. I don’t know if my dysphoria was that strong then.

There does exist a possible scenario wherein during my teens I would have wanted to transition based on euphoria. That is, I would have linked transition to agency and to coming out of my social shell. The close friends I made were largely girls and there was a homosocial component (though also with nerd boys, granted). If I had believed – through support from the world – that I could become a girl then, then I would have experienced potential social gender euphoria, and if I thought I could be accepted by at least the parts of society I care about – my parents, my outsider friends, counterculture, academia – then I probably would have wanted to transition. Most likely first via nonbinarity, and then girlhood as I felt I could. So again, honestly mirroring what I did in my thirties.

Writing this was an experiment to check, would I have wanted to transition if I grew up with the information available? I still cannot be sure, but from typing down the thought experiment, then it seems like I would have done surprisingly much the same thing as I ended up doing now. Where I was then the reluctantly male soft person nerd poet hacker progressive, I would be the same but embracing my girlhood with much sturm und drang. I probably would be about the same degree of weird that I ended up being, but my body would have been cis-passing. Oh, well…

magos

My decadent lifestyle takes a toll, cold symptoms and lack of sleep in parallel with stress. Will work it out, and worth it. But noticing I get super worried about everything in some moments, especially in chats. Absent explicit responses or emojis, whenever I write something, part of my brain often is convinced the other does not respond because I wrote or did something horrible that finally convinced them of how boring and useless and unkind I am, how it is not worth it to communicate with me, and that they will leave me. Part of me does fear that. But I know on some level this is irrational, it will be false 999999 times in a million. I keep worrying the present is the exception. This is one of my social anxiety tendencies, and I have had it for a long time, and it makes chat communication with me, especially within relationships, and especially in the evenings, difficult. It probably stems from having had such a low self-image for so long, the fears from which have stuck (and does this mean I have abandonment issues?).

It is why I generally prefer voice where I have so much more information to go on, but it can also be avoided if the other basically confirms we are still OK on an emotional level after I write something, easier with microsymbol languages like smileys. My overuse of these probably comes from me assuming other people will react like I do, which of course they actually don’t, they don’t need these confirmations but I always act as if they do.

But it also does not make sense others should have to help me manage my issues like that. I cannot dump it on my loved ones. I need to get a new therapist and ask specifically for help with this. And it is the central thing where I know both from meta-communication and from inner work that the Crone is needed. She can cut the threads of OCD spirals, she can decide that no, this is not something to worry about, what will be will be, they probably won’t stop loving you, you probably didn’t break anything that cannot be mended, it probably will be OK, and even if this is the one case in a million, you must stay sane and do what you are supposed to, not raise drama because you are afraid you hurt someone just because they did not respond.

The Crone for me is often about remembering that. I still can’t do it as well as I want, the fear is still there, and it’s still there because something within me still really really fears and worries I will be proven unworthy of my relationships and left alone, but my remembering her as symbol, perhaps I can learn to better cope and not dump that fear onto my loved ones to contain, which presumably hurts the relationships much more.

That said, when this came up tonight, biology perhaps played a part too. Changed my estrogen patches and feel a little calmer from that, it was past the end of the 3-day period so might have started to slump. Should get back to work.