unstructured vents/rants/thoughts mostly or solely connected to gender
It’s weird. How can I long so much for bottom surgery?
Obvious answer being dysphoria, I guess.
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Corrected a misgendering by a flight attendant for the first time. And realizing my voice sounds OK on some recordings. I’m husky as fuck, but in many cases at least I do not sound like a straight cis man.
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Attended my first scientific conference post-transition. It went well.
Content warning: Weight and weight loss issues. What I want for myself, and to what end, is not reflective of how I see or assess or perceive others.
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Feeling a weird clarity. It’s strong, and emotional, but neither a pain nor a pleasure, nor a drive. Just a path, a fact, a trajectory. Once I manage to set aside the money, and once I get the appropriate hair cleared out, and once I lose another 15kg or so from my current state, then I can start trying to schedule SRS. This is there. It feels comforting, it feels secure, like something I can cling to. Largely a positive emotion.
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EDIT: Noting that it says something about me that I CW weight loss references and not gruesome genital surgery references. C’est la vie!
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This is not a definite decision, per se. Just a trajectory.
Weird. Contemplating “huh, maybe I really should become vegan now?“ with a similar emotional tone as “huh, maybe I really should aim for SRS in two years time?“. With the main difference is I keep returning more often to the latter, and feel like I sort of care more about the question.
I guess in some ways the former is the more important question, because if one sees it ethically and environmentally, it impacts lots and lots of lives of sentient, feeling creatures. But I am numb to that suffering, feeling it only on a detached, intellectual level. I guess my point here is, the same detachment is there for major painful surgery of my genitals and basic body configuration. Is it really like this for other people?
Wondering over how and why it is that I know I feel strong longings for some things without feeling much in the moment. It does seem dissociative, and certainly I am not all cured – social and medical transition has begun to help, but must proceed, and probably I should help it along with a therapist.
I just realized one way in which it may work here, though. Thinking a lot about bottom surgery these days. I wonder if to a reader or listener, there is a point where I suddenly started talking about it a lot, and now won’t shut up about it? It’s on my mind a lot, mostly in terms of how to work around the problems, what the challenges are, how to deal with those. Planning, almost.
What I don’t do is look at the hoped-for outcome, the result. I don’t let myself think of what I could experience if it really worked out, don’t let myself feel that. The few times I do I’ve felt weepy. I’m recognizing this as how it’s been when I’ve worked hard toward other things, like my PhD. I’m too scared of not reaching the outcome (that is, I am whelmed with the scope and challenge of the path), so to protect myself from disappointment I don’t let myself look forward to it. I veer my mental eye away from it. I know it’s there but don’t want to look at it until I know it can’t be taken away from me any longer.
This may be why I obsess with laying groundwork to allow SRS for myself, but do not feel much as I do so. I sense the longing as a sun behind clouds, and I stay away mentally because if I expected, not just hoped, I could get hurt. Thus I can’t feel how much I want it, most of the time, it’s just evident in my actions.
In a way this is challenging because one part of the preparations is that I feel I must make sure I want it, which I cannot really do unless I have an idea what my body then would feel like. I need to visualize what it could be like having a post-op body, from the context of me as a 37-40 year old woman looking and sounding and moving like I do, and this is hard when I don’t let myself dream of a successful outcome because I fear a failed one too much.
So I guess I should be rational. That means ignoring fear as a motivation, not protecting myself from disappointment by hiding longings, and go right ahead in imagining. We’ll see how hard that gets. Also should look into demo options like tucking.
Maybe this is what I feel. If I am perfectly diligent and get all the rest done. If I:
– Make my conduct empathetic and kind and non-angry, containing and open and caring, as I feel I want to be able to see myself.
– Sculpt my body further with food and exercise and whatever, alongside the hormones, so I can be understood as female by an observer having only my shape to go by.
– Learn to stop slouching and maintain a straight posture (because something about me has to be straight at least, amirite?) again impacting how I feel.
– Finish up laser fully and wholly, and laser also the parts that could cause hair issue during Thai-style SRS (e.g. perineum).
– Master voice so I can blend voice style under pressure too.
If I do all those things, so there would not be too much hanging over me otherwise, then I could finally reward myself with bottom surgery, excusing the recovery time and the costs by that being something I have paid for through effort. This all is complex and messed up and I am emotional and currently deeply longing to just have a body that neither myself nor others would question as being female.
I suppose this is a path and an interesting one at that. If I resolve this, and also set money aside, then there can come a point when the matter is simple, when I will feel confident that it is OK for me to go ahead and have surgery. This thought is becoming resident in the ecosystem of my mind. We shall see what I make of it.
Meh day. Trolls. Bothersome. Needing to work, and will. And will meet people, and deal with things. Absolutely needing to get out of bed, first.
Got surprisingly hard hit by unexpected TERF rhetorics somewhere. Will probably truncate thoughts and sleep.
At the same time, feeling increased need to be recognized. Need to take voice further. Thinking I will start correcting people until I am spoken of correctly, whether or not they are irritated. And continuing from earlier, feeling unhappy about my anatomy, for my own view of it, and because it seems like it affects how others read me. Feeling perhaps for the first time an actual longing for the end state of successful Thai-style SRS, rather than a curious interest. That is interesting but also notable as then it is not only positive but inverse negative motivation.
I’ll set aside a personal fund for this, to have the option. And perhaps some three years from now, there will be a time when my PhD students are in writeup phase and don’t need me holding their hands, and when my post-docs are experienced enough that they can hold down the fort, so that me disappearing for a month of hospitalization in Asia, then being reduced in energy and time for 3-5 months of dilation and healing, won’t make or break my research programme.
I’d still fear an unsuccessful outcome, fear failure to heal right (am I too old to heal easily?), fear the pain, fear that nerves would not reconnect, fear that I still would have a deep voice and facial features that make people think I am male, so that I somehow would have gone through all that pain and sacrifice and still not have been understood right. Fear of the sadness and pain and worry in the eyes of my parents from them knowing I was doing it, though that fear is dulled now they know I really am transitioning. Fear of being weak and alone and helpless during recovery. (To my friends and lovers and family and all who reads this: If you come to conclude you would be willing come with me and keep me company during that first month, if I made that possible for you, please let me know. Knowing I would not have to be alone would help this fear.)
Lots of fear. That said, right now that feels like the fear of something planned and anticipated. Right this moment, when I still have that TERF-fuelled dysphoria (for it is that, it is that feeling as though the world freezes and dies), then the thought of fears and physical pain and awkwardness is still not as bad. Right now my feelings of dysphoria are worse than my fear of SRS recovery. Tomorrow it might not be. But this is in some sense a first, and I find it meaningful, find it telling.
lost in transition 