Somebody was moving my shoulders. “I’m sorry, I think I fell asleep.” I said and opened my eyes. I was in the recovery room and still quite groggy. I was shivering or started to shiver and then got a warm air blower and put the pipe of it under my blanket. It seemed to work instantly.
it seemed like a flurry of activity around me, but it’s also possible that i slept between spread out things. Also i had a blood pressure cuff that did measurements every 5 minutes. I can’t remember many details, but the nurses were very good.
The room haf 9 gurney bays and there was one nurse for every 3 gurneys plus 1 or 2 extras to spell them on breaks or help for 2 person jobs. My nurse was named Helen. When she got her tea break a nurse named Joan filled in. They were both brilliant. Capable and caring. They were lovely.
Not long after I became alert, my left drain started filling quickly, such that it was nearly half a litre of blood. They asked what to do and were told to sit me more upright. That worked.
they gave me morphine in a drip, but not enough to make me loopy. Then they gave me some water. Then tea! Such lovely tea. It soothed my sore throat, and was one of the most satisfying cups of tea ever. Then a sandwich. Then a pain pill.
I looked down at my bandaged chest and was filled with a profound sense of relief. I was fine. I made it. It worked! It was amazing. Somethingthat for years I was afraid to even want and it was done and I was ok.
However, because of the drain issue, They thought they might need to send me back to the theatre, so I was in the recovery room for a long time, so I chatted w Helen and had more tea. Eventually, a surgeon that I didn’t recognise said it would be fine and i got sent to a ward.
A gurney pusher and two nurses, one of them a student at Kings College, came to move me. They asked an elevator full of people to clear out for me. “Sorry,” i said to a woman who got off. “You must be very important,” she joked. “Everywhere I go, the paparazi!” I said. The gurney didn’t take up the whole elevator, so the nurses were telling people to squeeze in. “Come on, get in there. Ok, now climb on top!” “He’s a bit too young for me” the woman said.
We got to the ward and Paula was there.
Tag: celesteh
Top surgery part 1
I woke up before 5 this morning, took what i knew would be my last shower for a while, gave myself a T shot, packed my bags and got on the tube. My appointment letter was for 7 but I arrived almost 20 minutes early and waited for the surgical admissions lounge to open. That was the same place I had gone for my previous appointment, at which they had collected vital signs and data. A sign by the door said they open at 7, but it closer to 10 minutes after that.
The head nurse gave a speech about the admissions process. He then called us by name one at a time and asked us if we wanted to give them a phone number for a visitor. I gave them Paula’s number and later they called her and told her what ward i was in.
at the same time, other nurses were calling people one at a time and taking temperature, blood pressure, weight and allergy information. Shortly after I talked to the nurse, I got called by the anesthesiologist who explained a bit about the drugs she would give me to kill pain, knock me out, keep me from feeling ill, etc. She (or the nurse before, i can’t remember now) game me two red id badges- one for each arm. They’re red to indicate that i have allergies. Which are to two different antiobiotics. She told me they do my op around 10.
i went to wait again and then the surgeon called me in. She drew on my chest in permanent marker. “You’re quite wonky, aren’t you?” She said. Apparently my spine is curved which she said was the reason my moobs were very assymetric. I felt guilty about my bad posture and tried to blame playing sousaphone in school, but she said it was likely genetic. I told her that a piercer had said i had weird nipples and she sympathised with the piercer! The lack of social skills made me more confident in her surgical skills.
She explained how the op would work: they cut away tissue around my nipples, while keeping the nerves and blood vessels attached to them. Then the would sew that to what was left. She explained that an insufficient blood suplly could cause a nipple to fall off, but told me should build a very comvincing new one and tattoo on an areola and it would like fine, so i shouldn’t worry. Sensataion in my nipples will be decreased. Then, she went through a consent form and asked me to sign it.
i went back out to the lounge and checked my email and then started to read a book. They called me up again and said it was time to get changed. I was extremely nervous. I took off all of my clothes and put on a hospital gown, a bathrobe, anti-bloodclot socks and foam slippers. The the nurse took me downstairs to another nurse who double checked everything. Yet another nurse took me to the anesthesiologist’s room. In it was a gurney, which i lied down on. They put electrodes on me and a needle into my hand. There was a large numbers of ampoukes laid out.
The doctor chatted about her honeymoon in california as the she gave me a shot of pain killer and the nurse gave me an oxygen mask. Then the doctore hooked up a huge vial of milky white stuff she said would know me out. She warned me it would sting.
“so this is the last ting i’m going to remember.” I said and then verified that it does sting. I thought about how it was very odd to have an experience knowing it was going to be erased. I could already be past the point of where i would forget, but right now it was all real and i felt very present. I don’t know what I felt after that.
My Fantastic Weekend
I awoke Saturday morning to a text message in which Paula, my closest friend here and neighbour, said that her cat had drowned in the local pond. Indy was sweet and lovely and has spent many evenings curled up in my lap purring, or lolling about hoping for a belly rub. Oh no! I said I would walk my dog and head right over.
My normal dog walking route goes right past the pond where the cat had died, and I was looking at it sadly, thinking of Indy when, with some distress, I noticed that Indy’s body was still in the pond.
I went around to get a closer look, in case there had been confusion, hoping it was some other cat. I couldn’t see his most distinctive marking, but I was convinced it was him.
I went around to Paula’s and we tried to figure out who to ring to remove poor Indy from the pond. The RSPCA is only involved with living animals. I found the non-emergency number for the police and called them, apologising for ringing the wrong number, but explaining that I thought the cat’s body constituted a public health hazard. The police woman was annoyed at first, but then sympathetic and gave me the number for animal control and the department of environmental health, both of whom were closed until Monday.
Desperate for distraction, I shaved Paula’s head. However, Jara, Paula’s flatmate, was distraught about the thought of the poor cat bobbing in the pond until Monday, so we went back with a long pole, hoping to get him. And we tried a longer pole. And we tried tying two poles together, which succeeded in reaching him, despite being incredibly heavy, but not in bringing him closer to the edge. It started to rain.
Some of the neighbours came by and said their porter could get him out on Monday. Somebody else suggested that we just wade out and get him. I went and got my toe shoes and some latex gloves, rolled up my trouser legs and jumped down into the steep-walled pond.
It was choked with algae, which wrapped around my legs. The bottom was squishy and weird. I waded over to where poor indy was, and pulled him from the algae and walked back to the side with his stiff body. I could see his markings then, and it was definitely him. I put him into a sack and then noticed that my gloves had somehow gotten torn.
Jara pulled me up the very steep sides of the pond. I went home and took a long shower and then tried to reach my girlfriend, but couldn’t.
Instead, I went to check my email and found a conversation on an email list that had been annoying me. The thread had grown. One guy organises a lot of events around here and makes a serious and thoughtful effort to be open and inclusive and does a lot of good things for the community. However, he was going on about innate and immutable gender differences, which rubbed me the wrong way and seemed quite othering. It contained a slur, clearly used without recognising it as such. Instead of explaining why I found this troubling, I flounced from the list.
Then I went to sleep and dreamt of Indy and being hit in the head by fourbytwos (known to Americans as 2x4s).
This morning, Sunday, I put on a shirt that my gf gave me, as I thought I would see her in the evening. But first, I went with Paula and Jara and Paula’s friend to the anti-EDL march. The EDL is a fascist organisation, which had been planning on holding an anti-muslim march in the same area, targeting the East London Mosque, which is very near where I live. The EDL had chickened out at the last second, so the rally and march were peaceful and fun. I met a lovely anarc named Hal, who works at the Freedom bookshop. We all went with Joey and another woman to get a fry up afterwards. Hal may come to Wotever next Tuesday. It was all really good, although there were signs that unrest might be brewing among some other people who had been involved with the demo.
Incidentally, while we are at the pre-march rally, my phone rang and it was a friend asking if I wanted to come along to something. This is significant, because it was the first time that anybody that I’ve met in London (but not dated) has called me with impromptu plans. I’ve lived here for two years. I couldn’t go, because I was already at the rally, but it was very nice to be invited.
I went home and checked my email again and found out that I had very deeply offended the guy to whom I had posted my flouncing and that he had said some unkind things in return. I was distressed to find burned bridges, as this guy has gotten me gigs and getting involved in a row on a public email list connected to my section of the local arts scene is really not wise, especially as I’ll be looking for a job soon. Somebody said the whole group may have imploded in the aftermath, but I really hope this is not the case.
[EDIT: Um, I seem to have gotten this guy confused with somebody else, which is also embarrassing. He hasn’t gotten me gigs, but he is active. (25 June)]
Feeling dejected, I tried again to reach my girlfriend, who said that we neeeded to talk. Uhoh.
The last time I had seen her, she had come with me to my pre-op appointment, where nurses took my blood pressure (good), calculated my BMI (low) and asked me questions like am I a vegetarian (yes) and do I have a will? (I do now.) I found that last question to be rather alarming.
She came along to ask questions about aftercare and to encourage scheduling that would coincide with when she had time off and would be in the area. My operation will by 1 July.
Then she went to a conference in Bristol and I hadn’t seen her since and was starting to get the impression that she was avoiding me. ‘Needing to talk’ was not allying my fears and I didn’t think I had the stamina to bike across town for whatever serious conversation she wanted to have.
And that’s how I came to be dumped via chat.
There was no fight, she just decided she didn’t want to be my girlfriend anymore. Five months of that was enough, I guess. It seems rude to go into details, so I won’t, but she had been idly chatting about moving in together a couple of weeks earlier, so I don’t know.
I decided to check my email again and found out that my proposal to play at the SuperCollider symposium had been rejected.
So to summarise: thigh deep in nasty, urban pond water, holding the corpse of a beloved cat in my bare hands, followed by flouncing, followed by getting dumped over chat followed by yet another professional rejection, of which I’ve had a streak for years, now, I think.
At least the march was good and I seem to have some social stability. Which I’ll need because I won’t be staying with my exgf after my operation, obviously, but it will be a couple of weeks before I can carry anything and I’m not sure how much I should be left alone in the day or two after. I’ll be staying with Paula, which is super, but I don’t feel like it’s fair to ask her for everything, even if I cut her hair in return.
Boycotting
I can see from my facebook newsfeed that a lot of my USian friends are boycotting BP. BP ignored a lot of safety stuff, had a history of infractions and there’s been a huge disaster as a result. This kind of reminds me of the previous, then-largest spill in US history, when the Exxon Valdez crashed in Alaska. They also failed to follow safety regulations or best practices. Their filed statement about what to do in case of spill was similarly bogus (it assumed that all spills would take place in perfect weather on the summer solstice). Angry consumers also wanted to launch a boycott.
It turns out that it’s really hard to boycott oil from any particular refinery or source. Oil is fungible and the gas station closest to your house might have a particular brand on it, but they’re probably selling oil from many different refineries, including competitors. If nobody wants to buy BP gas at the BP station, the price of that gas will fall and Shell will buy it and start selling it from their own stations. You can hurt BP’s retail brand, but you can’t touch their refineries and wells unless you cut your overall gas consumption.
I’m not going to talk about car travel, because that’s too obvious. But we heat our houses with natural gas or diesel fuel, which is also a petroleum product. We heat our water with natural gas. Taking shorter or cooler showers is a way to stop throwing so much money at BP.
Also, we can be secondary consumers of petroleum. If I buy produce that’s flown on an airplane, I’m paying for the jet fuel that brought it to me. So to keep money form BP, I could try to buy more locally grown produce. I could try to get local stuff in general, or just buy less stuff, and thus give less money to BP.
Plastic is a petroleum product. Reusable shopping bags and reusable water bottles will keep money from BP.
A lot of electricity is generated from natural gas (including some which comes from plants that are supposed to be solar. They make up for cloudy days with gas), so turning stuff of at night, etc keep money from BP.
Now, obviously, because oil is fungible, these same steps keep money from other oil companies too. But, really, every oil company is up to no good someplace in the world. Shell is not currently causing problems in the US, but they’re doing all kind of bad things in Africa. Exxon (now branded Valero) hasn’t spilled anything in the US recently, but the Alaskan coast still hasn’t recovered – and neither have the workers who tried to clean up the spill without being provided proper safety equipment. Basically, there’s no such thing as a good oil company. And BP is the one that’s currently causing problems in the US, but every oil company is causing problems for somebody somewhere. Oil is dirty and toxic and often under places of great natural beauty or places where people inconveniently live (but can be removed from with armed violence). Countries that we might not want to be best buddies with sell us a lot of oil. And burning it causes stronger hurricanes and will eventually melt the world’s coral reefs.
So boycotting BP is a good start, but if we want to get serious about this and ensure real change that prevents stuff like this from happening in the future, we need to think bigger. Many countries require relief wells to be drilled at the same time as regular wells. Congress could pass a law requiring that if we ask them to. They could legislate that best practices be followed. And the US uses more petroleum per person than any other country – totalling a quarter of the world’s oil. That makes us vulnerable to spills and foreign powers. BP is just a tiny piece of a much larger problem that spans an entire industry and the way our lives are organised. If we want to fight them, we need to stop requiring so much of what they sell.
Hey, the State Department Changed Their Rules
It’s now way easier for USian transgender people to get their passport corrected. The new rules are published. From now, people need only be receiving an appropriate course of treatment and do not need surgery. This is established by a doctor’s letter. And the ever-helpful National Center for Transgender Equality has a sample letter available. Only certain types of doctors can write the letter. They haven’t yet stated what they will want from foreign doctors, but I’m going to call on Monday to ask. I imagine that in the UK, it should be fairly straightforward.
Why this is good news
There are a bunch of obvious reasons why this rule change is good. People can have an identity document that matches their presentation, thus making border crossings a lot easier. People in the US who do not have the thousands of dollars it takes for surgery can now get a passport. People who, for health reasons, cannot have surgery can get a correct passport. Trans people will no longer be subject to mandatory sterilisation in order to qualify for a correct passport.
FTMs could sometimes get away with just having top surgery to meet vaguely worded rules, but after Thomas Beattie (the pregnant man), some officials were more aware that some FTMs had male ID but were still fertile, and sought to stamp that out. Also, MTF surgery is widely understood to include sterilisation.
There are a lot of trans people who do not want to stay fertile, and they shouldn’t have to. But there’s a reason that phrases like “mandated sterilisation” make one shift uncomfortably. It’s a human rights violation. Trans people should have the same rights to become parents that cis people have. Cis people are not forced legally to decide whether they can have appropriate identity documents or can produce offspring. Now, at least for passports, trans people are no longer forced to make that choice either.
Postgrad life
The Loop
Wake up late. Check email. Check facebook. Check blogs. Ponder doing work. Do something work-like (read a book on the topic or write a related blog post or make sure software platform is current or work on code library or design drum sounds or . . .), Realise it’s time to go to whatever. Feel guilty due to lack of work accomplished. Decide to show up late. Then decide it’s too late and don’t go OR show up fantatically late. Feel guilty the whole time out. Pick up laptop upon return home. Just have a little peek at the internet. Realise it’s getting light out. Go to bed late . . ..
How It’s going to be
I have about 9 months to go, which is certainly enought time. I am going to go to bed by 2. I am going to get up by 10. I will limit facebook + blogs together to no more than one hour per day. I will not start typing on my tutorial until I have done 2 hours of composing. Every thing I start programming needs to get into a piece. I will go out 3 or 4 nights a week, because I cannot be a shut-in. I will slack at least one day per week but not more than 2. Slack day means 4+ sunlight hours not looking at a computer.
I will write 10 minutes of music per month. I will finish by May.
I’m writing this on the bus, so it’s not ironic!
Changing my sex has been somewhat distracting, but I have to get on with it.
The vast emptiness of a blank page
I fire up my music software of choice, SuperCollider, and I open a new document and there’s nothing in it. It’s just a glowing rectangle of empty white, waiting for me to start typing.
Composing for SuperCollider is not like composing for a piano. First, you have to build the piano.
And you know, building a piano is hard. Maybe I don’t even want that sound. Maybe something else? Maybe anything I can think of? What should I type into that white void?
In my past, I’ve found that I actually have trouble talking about musical ideas. I mean, they’re slippery to talk about, obviously, but, I couldn’t seem to talk about them at all. People would ask me about music and I would start talking about technology. What’s my new musical idea? Well, I’ve got this P5 Glove, which I think I could use for gestural input. No, what’s my musical idea? Ah well, I have an algorithm that can compute scales based on spectra and I’m thinking of modifying it to be able to take amplitude modulation parameters like frequency, offset, amplitude and wave shape (including sine, triangle and square) or an array of partials for each wave form and thus generate scale steps that way. No but what’s my latest musical idea?
Ok, five years after discovering this disconnect, I think I can actually have musical ideas. Maybe. At least, the possibility is in my radar.
But, you know, if I’m thinking about technology, then at least it’s going to possibly suggest something musical, arising from the material possibilities it presents. And I think that might be a lot easier than staring into the hopeless void of a blank page. I think this might be why an analog synth is both easier and more fun. It’s not just the knobs, it’s the inherent limitations.
. . . Anyway, I’ve got this formula, and I think I found the formula for the spectrum of AM (and RM) and I really like the first few bars of Four Walls Act 2 Scene 4 by John Cage, so maybe a percussive attack on RM triangle waves and then I could modify the offset over time towards AM and also slide my scale mapping to reflect that . . .
See writing letters DOES help
today, I wrote this:
In your story, “Seattle man charged in 2nd hate-crime
case,” you have identified the victim as “a man who
was dressed as a woman.” In fact, the victim is transgender and
identifies as a woman. According to both the AP Style Guide and the New
York Times Style Guide, she should therefore by identified as a woman by
the press and female pronouns should be used. To call her a man is
incorrect and offensive and is using the same logic that her attacker
likely used.I hope you can correct this article and avoid making this mistake again
in the future.
And I got a reply:
Your message regarding the story about the bus shelter assault was
forwarded to me because I wrote the item. I used the language that was
in the charging papers without realizing it would be hurtful or
offensive. Thanks for raising my awareness. Had you not written in, I
might have made the same mistake in the future.
Oh, man, that totally helped!
See, so writing to newspapers is not just spinning your wheels! So carry forth! We will make this a better world, one reporter at a time!
Do you feel like writing a letter?
I sure do miss the old days of composing reasoned missives off to other folks. But hey, there’s a veritable cornucopia of letter-writing opportunities today!
See, a few days ago, a few MTF women were sunbathing topless. Shocking, I know. Fortunately, the police were there to get involved. They told the women to please cover their boobs. [source] Think of the children! (If a child sees a breast, they perish. It’s amazing any of us survive to the age of solid food. Anyway.) Then, cue the news media.
Where should we start? The AP, which seems to have forgotten that it has a style guide, goes with the headline, “Transgender men go topless at Delaware beach“. Or there’s USA Today, with , “Topless ban at beach doesn’t apply to transgendered men with enhanced breasts.” Or literally hundreds more, because women sunbathing topless is the most exciting thing to have happened on the east coast this summer. But, I mean, if you were going to use the phrase, “transgendered men with enhanced breasts,” well, you really shouldn’t use that phrase, but if you were in a parallell universe where that phrase was remotely acceptable, you could misguidedly direct it at me. Directing it at women? Wrong wrong wrong!
So rather than go into a long post about how this is essentially an appeal for forced sterilisation for trans women and an appalling example of genital-essentialism, I’m going to ask you to write a letter. Pick one of the news outlets at random and politely correct them. (Don’t call them fucknecks, for example.) Here’s my letter to the AP:
To: info@ap.org
Dear Sir or Madam,I recently came across your article, “Transgender men go topless at Delaware beach” ( http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwg8Mfyg6HGmXI6s1QycLqxGAU8wD9G3VVO80 ). The people in question were MTF transgender women. Referring to them as “men” violates your own style guide on dealing with transgender people and is also deeply offensive.
In the future, please consider remembering that you have a style guide that deals with these issues.
Thank you for your time,
Charles Céleste Hutchins
Ok, maybe that’s a bit snarky. But this is where you come in, Cis ally! You’re against transphobia? Write one letter! Pick one news outlet and write them a short little note! Cut and paste from this note or write your own. Then leave a comment here saying who you wrote to. You can share your note too, if you want. It doesn’t take much time and maybe the editor who gets it will realise he or she has made a mistake and might even do the right thing in the future. Or maybe it will be ignored. But it’s better to write the letter than not.
Everybody, now!
On Suffering and Bravery
Bravery
Back when I was an undergrad, in my 3rd of 4th year, I grew a benign tumor in the bone of the index finger of my dominant hand. It didn’t hurt as it grew, but it made my finger swell up, so I went to a doctor, who figured out what it was. He told me I should get it fixed within the next 6 months. For the next 5.5 months, it continued to swell and got kind of bendy – in a bad way. Finally, during the winter break, I went to see a hand surgeon. He told me that he would take bone from either my wrist or my hip to repair the bone in my finger. So I went in for an operation, not knowing if I was going to be able to walk properly at the end of it.
Fortunately, my wrist had enough extra bone. Although I couldn’t move my hand at all and my finger had shattered during the operation. It hurt like a mofo. I couldn’t write for the first few weeks of the spring term. And I had to switch to playing the trombone, because I couldn’t push a valve or actuate a string. I was also off my head on pain killers for a few weeks, and behaving in an odd way, and I had a gigantic bandage. When people asked me what happened, I would invent stories about heroics or accidents involving heavy machinery. People called me a lot of things during that time, some of which I was not pleased with.
Nobody called me brave. In fact, nobody called my dad brave when, after 50 years of wearing glasses, he got his eyeballs lasered. He had laser beams shot at his eyeballs, people! And when some of my well-endowed friends decided that their backs would hurt a lot less if they got breast reductions, I never heard anybody call them brave.
People have me called me brave, however, when I came out as queer at a Catholic high school. Well, not at first. First there was harassment. Then there was just being sort of a mini-celebrity whose friends got harassed. (Alas for them.) Then, suddenly, about the time I turned 18, the same people who had been giving me grief for the last four years wanted to tell me about how they respected me. As if I still cared what they thought!
Suffering
Life is suffering. – according to the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism. I find that a bit dark (at least without any context). I mean, life is also joyous and fascinating and boring and everything else. Suffering is certainly unavoidable, though. It’s like death and taxes. Everybody’s life has rough spots.
There are some social groups that are widely perceived as having extra suffering. For example, in America, biracial people, especially those with one black parent and one white parent. There’s a whole genre of fictional representation of this – called the tragic mulato. Writers imagined this person would feel at home in neither race and live a life of misery and sorrow, accepted by nobody and unable to achieve anything of note. Shockingly, this mythology still persists and is believed as truth. You’d think the president of the US would be a good enough counter-argument, but people believe what they want to believe.
Then, gay people were also perceived to suffer terribly. Again, all that ‘outside of society,’ ‘accepted by nobody’ crap. And, I mean, life probably does suck a lot for Ted Haggard and George Reekers. But it doesn’t suck because they’re gay. It sucks because they’re too cowardly to come out of the closet and so they build a giant web of lies and denial around themselves, that ultimately doesn’t just hurt them, it also harms their wives, children and, in the case of those two, society as a whole. Because it’s not brave to come out. Even in Catholic school. It’s a survival strategy. Life in the closet is too hard; it makes you act in strange ways.
Note that in both examples of suffering, there’s nothing fundamentally painful about either state, it’s just that some other people are bigots and might conspire to make your life difficult. And the whole social propaganda model of suffering was not to discourage bigotry, but in fact, to shore it up. None of this was ever framed as, “they suffer so, because of us. We should pack it in.” It was always framed as pity, which is just a hair away from hatred. And also as a warning to try to prevent people from turning gay in the first place or from biracial people from ever being born. This notion of suffering then, served the purpose of strengthening a binary opposition in terms of race and re-enforcing compulsory heterosexuality.
People who advocate for you to get a bunch of pity are not your allies. They deny your agency. They erase anything positive about your experiences. The prescribe social abuse even as they pretend to abhor it. Anybody who describes you as “brave” for existing is tapping in to this same idea. It’s as if they’re saying: “It’s so exceptional that you dare to let us know who you are and where you live, because some of us *wink* *wink* might come after you!” It seems like the more fruitful conversation should be with their peers in privilege, reminding people that sexual orientation or mixed race parentage is a natural occurring human event.
What’s worse is that people who use words like “brave” really do mean well. They don’t stop to think about what they’re saying, because who wants to think about their privilege? If you tell a mixed-race couple that they’re brave for having kids, you’re certainly expressing racism, even as you think you’re fighting it. It’s tough out there for well-meaning, but ignorant would-be allies. Alas, they’re not brave for charging forth and putting their foot in it.
Trans People
Much like it’s uncomfortable and awful pretending to be the wrong sexual orientation, it is similarly unfun pretending to be a gender that doesn’t work for you. Discrimination and violence also suck a lot, and there’s an unfortunate amount of that about. Fortunately, at least, dysphoria is something that can be dealt with. The process of transition is something of a journey, but it’s towards a happier goal. I feel good about it and I don’t think I’m alone in that. When I see trans people talk about the steps their taking along this path, they mostly are happy and excited, if sometimes also nervous.
Some of us have had a rough time getting to where we are now. Some haven’t. Some phrases about suffering do get repeated a lot, though, even by trans people. This could be because the speaker did have a hard journey. It could be out of a misguided confusion where they imagine the road to acceptance has pity as a way point. In some cases, it’s gotten in to the public discourse because shrinks mandated it in the script that trans people had to recite to get access to treatment. Everybody learned their lines. We say what they want us to say, they give us our HRT. It’s annoying and unhelpful, but you do what you have to do.
Some trans activism really is brave. People who fought the police at Stonewall, for example. But just going to the clinic? It could be a personal milestone in the life of that person. You know, and you could congratulate them, like you would a gay person coming out. Or like you would somebody at a baby shower. Give them support appropriate to the amount of closeness you have with them. But don’t assume we suffer. Don’t call going to the doctor brave.