Tales of Medical Woe

I went to see a doctor yesterday, for an issue entirely unrelated to my transition. I signed up for the University health service, because I felt it was quite urgent. They don’t bulk bill staff, only students, so I was forced to pay $50 for the appointment, which sucks arse, but what can you do?

Anyway, I go in, and explain to the doctor what happened, that I’m not too concerned but that I would like to rule out any serious issues, cos I wouldn’t want it to happen again. She took my medical history, and asked what ‘FTM’ means (cos I had crossed out ‘M’ and ‘F’ on my form, and written ‘FTM’ since I figure its about as medically accurate as it gets). So then she checked my temperature, my ears and throat while bombarding me with questions. I told her I was on testosterone treatments, and the medication is called ‘Sustanon’.
While she was looking up Sustanon 100 to see if there is any connection between it and my problem, she was nattering on about how men that want to be women are so much more common than… what did I call myself again? FTM’s, thats right.

I was like ‘Thats just what people THINK, there are about the same number of each.’ However, she is clearly one of the few medical professionals in Canberra who has read True Selves, and she clearly, being a medical professional, is much better informed than me, a lowly trannie, and so she told me that FTM’s are extremely rare compared to MTF’s.

She checked my heart then, and noted that it was going extremely fast, (which its done for my entire life), so she took my blood pressure, which was high (which it has been since I was 17), and so she took it again. (Doctors always do that, apparently I am too young for hypertension… HA). While she was taking it again, she started asking me about my breasts, and then when I said I would be having top surgery, she asked me why I would bother having a mastectomy, cos don’t the androgens make my breasts disappear?
Then she was like ‘Oh my your blood pressure is through the roof now! Does talking about *your condition* make you anxious?’

Which made me grit my teeth and say ‘Not generally.’
At the end of the appointment I had quite a heated argument with her about gatekeeperism, and she was clearly unimpressed by my concept of autonomy, and other such high falootin’ ideas, that are so unbecoming of a trans person.

Anyway, she ordered me a bunch of blood tests, which I get the results for next week. I suspect that she tested my hormone levels as well as other things relevant to the issue I had.

No impressed. Also, sick of educating every doctor I see. Its not like I can just leave out my transition unless the issue is a head cold, or something similar.

Crossing a Gender Line

I got a haircut on Monday night. I was charged half way between the mens price, and the ladies price. I presume that this is because the hairdresser was unable to determine my gender, and was too shy to ask.
It had been over two months since my last hair cut, and my hair had been getting unruly and my fringe was acting to feminize my face more than strictly necessary in my opinion. I was very impressed by the results of the haircut, and I’ve just taken a new picture of myself in photo booth.

Here are two pictures of me… one taken today, and one taken exactly one month ago.

A picture of Ryan, taken on the 23rd of June 2008

A picture of Ryan taken today, 23rd of July, 2008

Ignore for a moment how sick I look, and check out how much the shape of my face has changed in one month! Isn’t that remarkable?
I’m quite shocked to tell the truth, about how much I have changed in a single month.

The only place that I consistently don’t pass is at work. I’ve been around, people have seen me around, my email address ‘outs me’, my domain admin access rights are still in my girl name… its a recipe for major stealth-angst if I wanted to make it so.
As it is, I am not too stressed about it. I gently correct people if I’m in the mood, ignore it the rest of the time, unless its someone I’ve already ‘come out’ to. (Like my boss. Grr.)
That said, I’m used to being referred to with female pronouns at work, its just how it is.

However, this afternoon I went across to building 22, which is rather removed from the rest of the university. I was helping a gentleman with a software installation, and then consulted with the cute admin girl about the scanner problem he’s been having. I thanked her for her time, and said a cheerful goodbye.
As I was going, I heard one of the other girls come to her desk and say “Ooh, what was that about?” and the cute girl say “Oh, he just had some questions about how the scanner’s set up over here.”

*OMG! GENDER WIN*

I feel like it was a rather momentous incident. Especially cos I don’t even TRY to pass at work. I just kinda show up, do my thing, leave. Fag it up a little if I’m hanging with my queer academic types. So fab. Totally love it.

Curing Depression with Hormones

I have been getting more and more depressed since I have failed to get my second shot of T. After the events of yesterday, work was almost more than I could face today. I did shit all, and sulked pretty much all day. I was grumpy, unpleasant, and incommunicative.
I felt like I wasn’t passing at all, and everytime I saw my reflection I thought that my curves were hopelessly apparent. My binder wasn’t working, my layers weren’t hiding my hips or my chest. I felt like my voice was high and whiney, and I didn’t want to talk cos it reminded me of my femininity.
Admittedly I did acknowledge my blessings when I called a client and was immediately aware that I was speaking to a trans woman. At least my voice will get deeper over time. Hers will never get higher.

The thing is, having a 5 week gap between shots was probably not physically great for me, but the psychological reinforcement of my powerlessness in the face of the medical establishment is enough to send anyone a bit loopy. I mean, I have passed all the gatekeepers, only to find that receptionists and pharmacists feel entitled to give me shit.

This evening though, I went in fiercely brandishing my script. I pointed to the line where it says ‘As directed by your doctor’ and pointed out that means I can self-inject. The Pharmacist told me that they don’t have any needles in the right size, but I told her that I know someone else that gets the needles and syringes of that size from her, and that I didn’t mind if she was out of stock if she would order them in for me.
She coughed them up then because I was getting a little loud and grumpy in front of people.

Seriously, not impressed at all.

Anyway, I got the needles home, and looked up how to open the ampoule. I realised that I probably should have gotten 3ml syringes not 1ml, (last time i take a pharmacists advice…). Anyway, the injection went without a hitch. I felt very empowered by doing it myself.

I felt instantly better, and more optimistic. I did it nice and slow, and I hope that it doesn’t hurt as much tomorrow as the one my doctor did.

In Which I am Declared Normal

I’ve not really been in the mood to blog recently, and then I went to Melbourne. So its been a bit quiet around here. My trip to Melbourne was fun. I met Nixwilliams and ForsakenDaemon in person, and hung out in queer book stores and such.

It was a pleasant trip. I’ve felt a bit under the weather since getting back, but I am sure that is mostly to do with being home from a nice holiday.

This afternoon though, something happened. We found out that one of the people that used to work here with my colleagues has come out as transsexual, and is transitioning.
My colleagues are a nice bunch of guys… not malicious, just clueless. However, I got upset when my boss said that I was ‘normal’ but this person was ‘creepy’. I got even more upset when he suggested that they post this persons transition pictures on Whirlpool, an Australian IT forum because ‘the guys on there really hated him’.

I kinda freaked out a little and pointed out that trans women get KILLED cos of being trans, and that he wouldn’t seriously want to have the destruction of someone’s career, or their very life on his hands would he?

He didn’t post them, he clearly hadn’t thought it through. I left for some air after that. When I got back to the office, Matej and my boss apologised to me. They seemed to feel the need to make it clear that they weren’t talking about me… but I pointed out to them that its not about me, its about the safety of a human being that they were compromising for ’shits and giggles’.

Its a cold comfort to know that even though they can accept me as a human being, and a ‘normal guy’, they can’t extend that to some poor MTF that they have also all met and gotten to know. Their pale excuses that ‘he’ was always ‘weird’ and ‘creepy’ and ‘bizarre’ sounded hollow to my ears.

I think that this person is brave. I checked their professional profile on LinkedIn, and there they are, with their male name, but their photo is of them in girl-mode. I was impressed. So impressed. But my colleagues didn’t see the ballsy, gutsy bravery it takes to do such a thing, to out ones self in the professional arena, to risk their career, their marriage, their everything to be themselves.

One of my colleagues pointed out that they are self-medicating eostrogen using their wifes pill prescription. I said that not everyone is as lucky as me, not everyone finds a supportive doctor. Some people have to do desperate things.
Just because one doesn’t have a diagnosis it doesn’t make their actions any less valid. How many of them would want to take their wifes contraceptives in order to appear more feminine?

I feel a bit sad that they don’t understand. After 8 months of working with a transsexual, the best they can do is understand that *I* am normal, but they can’t extend that to other trannies. Its really really sad.

Name Change Difficulties

I am taking tomorrow off. I have had it *up to here* with issues with my name. I have to go in person to the shop fronts of half a dozen places, and I may as well make a day of it.

My mobile phone account has been suspended because they neglected to inform me that if the name on my account and the name on my credit card that I use to pay the account don’t match perfectly, then the account gets suspended. So even though I have been calling them every freaking month since I changed my name, because they didn’t tell me this they have finally just cancelled my goddamned account, even though I just paid a $180 bill.

Most of these companies I didn’t go to the shop front to set up my accounts with them, but will they let me change the name on the account over the phone? Nooo, can’t have that.

Fucking annoying, thats what it is.

Invisible Queerness 3

A generic white guy writes:

I left the movie and caught a glimpse of myself in some glass.
I was a generic white guy.
Painfully generic.
And wow, it really threw me for a loop.

With the ecclectic taste in fashion, the ink, the piercings- I usually have something that stands out.

But right now I have a week grown out military hair cut, and I was in brown jeans, grey and blue tee shirt, flat chest, glasses, and from face on you can’t see my ink.

It was an emotional whirlwind.
-I pass
-I pass too much
-I am no longer visably queer
-I am not visable
-I look good
-I look young
-No one notices me
-Hzah, no one notices me

I am myself planning on a new piercing, and dying my hair black this weekend. I feel really generic white guy myself. (Even though I am still being read as Butch Dyke a LOT.)

Invisible Queerness 2

Also from Susan Stryker, From Journal, ‘93

Frustration and anger soon welled up in abundance. In spite of all I’d accomplished, my identity still felt so tenuous. Every circumstance of life seemed to conspire against me in one vast, composite act of invalidation and erasure. In the body I was born with, I had been invisible as the person I considered myself to be; I had been invisible as a queer while the form of my body made my desires look straight. Now, as a dyke I am invisible among women; as a transsexual, I am invisible among dykes. As the partner of a new mother, I am often invisible as a transsexual, a woman, and a lesbian. I’ve lost track of the friends and acquaintances these past nine months who’ve asked me if I was the father. It shows so dramatically how much they simply don’t get what I’m doing with my body. The high price of whatever visible, intelligible, self-representation I have achieved makes the continuing experience of invisibility maddeningly difficult to bear.

Testosterone Update

Today seems like the day for it. Who am I to resist the trend started by Jacky and Tarald?

I started T on the 28th of May. I haven’t really felt like blogging the changes in detail like I initially planned. I am not sure why. I get excited about certain things, but mostly I’m just in ‘waiting mode’.

So anyway, the changes after two weeks are:
- Increased facial hair
- Hair spreading over my stomach. Some fine hairs appearing on my chest
- Leg hair thickening up
- New hairs are appearing along the top of my eyebrows… I’m assuming that when they darken up, they’ll make my eyebrows thicker.
- acne on my back, and some on my chest, arms, and face.
- I’m really horny.
- My skin is a little rougher, and so is my hair.
- I look more indefinably ‘boyish’.

And, this is the big one that I noticed just this morning… MUSCLE DEFINITION! I haven’t started working out or anything yet, but my biceps are *much* more defined than they were. I can flex my arms, and you can actually *see* it. I was so thrilled. There was much flexing, and squeezing, and showing off.

Endogenous Depression, or Social Oppression?

Shiva, from Biodiverse Resistance is blowing my mind with new idea’s again. I have to process what he says about euthenasia and assisted suicide a bit more before I write about that, but this paragraph caught my eye:

There is a point here relating to depression and how it gets conceptualised - the prevailing view in mainstream/”establishment” discourse seems to be that depression is “endogenous”, or a result of chemical abnormalities within the individual brain, whereas a social model or “personal is political” viewpoint would argue that it is more likely to be caused by oppressive and unacceptable social conditions, whether at a home/family/immediate surroundings level or at a wider systemic level. However, like with most iterations of the “nature vs. nurture” debate, I don’t find the position held by some antipsychiatrists that all depression is social in origin useful - there is solid evidence that, in some cases, depression does have a clearly biological origin, and in some of those cases, it is treatable by biochemical means (an obvious example being gender dysphoria and the extremely high success rate of treating it with hormones and surgery, as opposed to the extremely low success rate of “treating” it with “normalisation” therapy - in fact, most attempts at the latter end in suicide).

I have nothing to add, really. Just that I think Shiva is awesome, and fabulous.

Beautiful Monster

I have been considering beauty myths recently. Since my post on Monstrous Gender actually.

As I said, I am not afraid of becoming monstrous, because my body will be closer to what it should be. My dysphoria is already decreasing, just from binding and a little practically invisible facial hair. What I was afraid of is that I might not be loved because everyone else is so repulsed by my monstrosity.

It started to occur to me a few days ago, that maybe I am looking at it all wrong. Maybe being monstrous is a beautiful thing, maybe someone will love me BECAUSE of who I am, not IN SPITE.
Maybe Belle was sad that the Beast turned into a man, and wished he’d stayed how he was for her? Maybe like Fiona, she wanted to live happily ever after with the monster she fell in love with, not some Prince Charming?
I always thought that the line at the end of Shrek, when he says ‘But you are beautiful’ was just a line… but maybe it was the point of the whole movie. Not that you can be happy and loved in spite of being ugly, but maybe that being a monster *is* beautiful!?

I thought about it, and I thought of what culture constructs as beautiful, and how my idea of beauty is vastly different to that.
I think that tattoos, and piercing, and fatness, and queerness, and hairiness and subversity are not only cool, but beautiful in and of themselves.
Sometimes when I say that I think fat women are hot, people react like I have announced that I have some kind of bizarre kink. I don’t understand that, at all.

Once I realised that the way I look at gender is largely determined by cultural factors that I have been able to transcend in other areas, I had to ask myself: what do I find disgusting about trans people? I have never thought that any of my trans friends are repulsive, so why do I assume that someone else will find me repulsive?

Blending the genders is not considered attractive. Effeminacy is a perversion, and even a sin, according to 1 Corinthians 6:9. A woman should be feminine, a man should be masculine, end of story. There is a little room for beautiful men, and no room at all for handsome masculine women.
Societies beauty is fair, and even featured, and thin. It is male or female, and not ambiguous or androgynous. It has large eyes, and shining hair, but a hairless body. Mainstream beauty relegates the blending of genders to subversity and fetish.
The extreme’s are trans people, and intersex people. Our monstrous bodies blend the binary genders into one horrifying whole. There are less extreme examples though. How many people believe that all butch dykes are ugly?

I have posted before on tranny chasers. I have some trouble with them. I get harassed online and off. I don’t label someone as chaser until they have ignored who I am, in favour of what they think a transsexual is. Usually they think that I am a sexual deviant of some kind, which I really am not. Usually they think that I have no right to privacy, and no capacity to say no.
I find them repulsive, on so many levels. I don’t like being fetishized for being transsexual, because it is not all that I am.

I like hooking up with trans people though. I like hooking up with creative, self aware, intelligent people, and it just so happens that many of the trans people I know fit these categories. I don’t mind making out with some random in a club, but when it comes to taking someone home with me, they have to be special.
I have to know that they are cool with who I am, but I don’t want them to only want to come with me out of curiosity regarding the contents of my jocks.

I have suddenly come to realise that my future wont be loveless. If I can think that these people are awesome, insightful, sexy, beautiful people, then fuck! Maybe they can think the same about me?