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[Content warning: This blog post contains non-graphic mention of gender-affirming surgeries, with links to resources about same.]

One evening back in the dark days of early 2020, when I was just starting my transition, my wife and I had a conversation while making dinner in which we discussed what, if any, medical interventions I might want to pursue as part of my transition. I wanted to move slowly, in part because I try to be a careful girl, and in part because I wanted to learn as much as I could before I made any irrevocable choices. I already knew I wanted to explore hormone replacement therapy (HRT), but I found anything that involved scalpels to be, frankly, kind of terrifying. “I don’t know that I’ll ever want to get surgery,” I said.

So, it turns out I was entirely wrong.

This past May, I had a bilateral orchiectomy, which is a procedure where… you know what? I’ll just let Wikipedia explain it. Go read that, then come back.

Back now? Okay. So, yeah, I had one of those, and I am not exaggerating when I say that the procedure was easily one of the happiest, most affirming things I’ve ever done for myself. I observed at the time that both my excitement leading up to the orchi and my delight and satisfaction in the days following both stand as pretty strong indicators that, yes indeed, I really am a trans girl. After all, no cis man reads about an orchi and thinks, “Hey, that sounds like fun!” Quite the contrary: any cis men who’ve made it as far as this sentence, even the progressive and open-minded ones, are likely to have winced somewhere in the course of this paragraph. That’s called empathy, “the ability to relate to another person’s feelings by imagining yourself in their situation” (Scribbr), and we like to encourage that kind of thing around here.

The thing is, residual soreness and discomfort notwithstanding, my overriding feeling was one of intense, joyful relief. I felt lighter[1], happier, more myself than I ever had. In casting this part of myself into the fire—literally, since it likely went into a medical waste incinerator—I had taken a step towards affirming, not only my gender, but my bodily autonomy. I was asserting that I truly belonged to myself, not to some archaic set of assumptions about who I was “supposed to be,” or what any part of my body was supposed to mean.

And let’s be honest, as symbolic repudiations of masculinity go, that one’s pretty baller.[2]

But I didn’t ask you here tonight to talk about my subsidiary divestment in May, as funny as that may (or may not) be. Rather, I came to talk about my face.

And to talk about my face, I have to talk about growing up in the ’70s and ’80s as a girl who didn’t know she was a girl.

Back to that conversation in early 2020: my wife asked what medical interventions I’d be interested in, and I denied wanting any kind of surgery… but then I qualified it:

“Okay, I could maybe see myself wanting to get facial feminization surgery.”

I’ve always had a fraught relationship with my own body (quelle surprise!), and that is nowhere more apparent than in my feelings about and towards my face. I’ve always shied away from compliments, but most especially compliments about my appearance. I’ve never had a face one could call “handsome,” not even when I was doing my best inept impersonation of an untraumatized, reasonably together male human being. Instead, I was called “adorable,” “cute,” or, well, “pretty.” I was a “pretty boy” back in the mid-to-late 1980s, when being a “pretty boy” without the concomitant rakish “bad boy” attitude or aesthetic got you immediately branded as gay. It didn’t help any that, far from being a “bad boy,” I was very much a nerd. I liked fantasy and SF novels, I played D&D, I listened to weird “alternative” and “progressive” music, and rather than trying out for sports or taking wood shop as an elective, I mostly hid in my bedroom and skipped P.E. as often as possible, as far away from “other boys” as possible.[3]

The hilarious thing is, I wasn’t even cool enough to do any of that with the other outcasts. I was too nerdy and awkward to hang out with the “progressives”[4], I was too wispy and queer to hang out with the nerds who liked computers and SF novels and D&D, and I was too broadly-interested and socially inept to hang out with the artsy queer kids. I had a small handful of surface-level friendly acquaintances at school, and that was that. Mostly, I stuck to myself, indulged in my weird little life, and did the weird little things that made me happy, or at least less miserable.

That whole time, though, I was profoundly unhappy. A large part of that was being one of the school’s designated “acceptable targets” for abuse, but a lot of it was also the profound sense of disjunction I felt in every waking moment of my life. I could feel my body changing all around me, the obvious outcome of a testosterone-driven puberty, and I found it utterly, unspeakably revolting. The oily skin, the voice change, the broadening and bulking in places I had been slender, and the hair… oh, gods, the hair, wiry and coarse, growing everywhere, like an unwelcome new housemate’s belongings spreading out of their room to overtake every corner of what used to be your home.

Most of all, there was my face. I’d never really thought much about my face up to that point. It was just where I kept my eyes, nose, and mouth. Look out the one, sniff with the other, and use the third to talk and eat. Simple. It took up no more of my thoughts than did my left elbow… until adolescence, that is. Puberty hit like a cluster bomb, and suddenly my face was a greasy constellation of inflamed skin and clogged pores, topped with a bushy unibrow and terminating in a nonstop wave of spiky, wiry stubble, springing like Spartoi from the fertile ground of my cheeks and chin.

I looked in the mirror, and what I saw disgusted me. I was gross. I was ugly. I was male.

I was also adrift in the mid-to-late 1980s, when no one knew what “dysphoria” meant, “gender identity” hadn’t been coined as a phrase, “transgender” only just barely existed as a word, and “transsexuals” only existed in fiction, old news stories, and hushed whispers. I’d seen The World According to Garp, the Walter Hill adaptation of John Irving’s novel, so I knew that transsexuals existed—John Lithgow’s portrayal of Roberta Muldoon made her easily the most likeable and sympathetic character in the story—but that was fiction, you understand. That wasn’t real. That wasn’t an image in which I could see myself, not something to which I could aspire. After all, even though Roberta was a woman, the actor playing her was a man, what we’d call a cisgender man today. As amazing as Roberta Muldoon was, and as sensitive a performance as Lithgow gave, this was still just a man, dressed up as a woman. And that was, hands down, the best representation of a transgender woman I’d seen.

If I were going through adolescence today, I likely would’ve already figured out that I was a girl. I might’ve already socially transitioned, and would quite possibly be on puberty blockers. This was the ’80s, though, so instead of transitioning as a teen, I flailed. I grew my hair out in a classic ’80s mullet, à la Bon Jovi, only without any basic knowledge of hair care or styling products. I got my ear pierced—the “gay ear,” no less!—at the Claire’s Boutique in the mall. I tried to wear clothes that wouldn’t stand out: graphic t-shirts or untucked button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up, jeans with the knees blown out, sweatshirts. I became compulsive about showering, washing my hair, and shaving off every shred of facial hair, every single morning. I had no idea why I felt so strongly about these choices, only that I did. I was surrounded by boys with short hair, boys with facial hair, boys who wore Polo shirts and Dockers, boys who fit perfectly into the mould of Southern masculinity, and I didn’t know much, but I knew for damn certain I didn’t want that. Store clerks would mistake me and my girlfriend for two ladies (just gals being pals, amirite?) and I found it thrilling, but I didn’t know why, so I masked my delight as amusement. Dudes would call me homophobic slurs, and I’d just smirk or sneer and go on about my day.

I didn’t know what was going on with me, but I knew that whatever it was, it was something real. I just wished everyone would leave me alone long enough to figure it out.

That’s the thing about normative culture: it has a vested interest in not leaving you alone long enough to figure it out, especially if what you figure out is directly counter to its plans for you. So much of what passes for “culture” is just a system of social control: mechanisms for imposing and reinforcing norms, rewarding compliance, and punishing divergence. In many ways, that’s what culture is for: it binds a group together, establishes rules and expectations, and provides an identity. However, that only works to the extent that everybody involved is willing to be told who they are and what they should be doing, and that only works when each person is subjected to an essentially constant surveillance of their identity and behavior.

This principle can be appropriately illustrated by looking at the dramatic rise in the self-realization of transgender people following the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in early 2020.[5] Suddenly, everyone was spending a lot more time at home, feeding sourdough starters or learning to crochet, away from that constant scrutiny and reinforcement of their public persona. It only makes sense that some of those folks, freed from the constraint of society’s gaze, learned a few things about themselves… like, for instance, that their gender wasn’t what they’d been told their whole lives it was.

Back in the ’80s, though, there was no conveniently-timed global trauma event to force me into the kind of introspection which leads to name changes and growing boobs. There was just me, alone on a Thursday evening, staring at my face in the mirror and hating it, or “joking” with my friends about wanting to draw lines on it with an X-Acto knife.

A funny thing happened, though: the ’80s ended, as did my tenure in high school. The ’90s got under way, I got into (and ran away from) college, I aged into my twenties, and I realized that being a skinny queer “boy” with elfin features and a vocabulary inherited from nerdy authors was, in certain circles, actually kind of attractive, even sexy. I went from having virtually no friends to having several, spread out across multiple social groups, with girlfriends and lovers and occasional one-night stands amongst them. I was a hot mess, mind you, but for some folks, the emphasis was definitely on hot. I remained uncomfortable being seen as “a guy,” but the social circles in which I moved were made up of queer and queer-adjacent folks, so “masculinity” was understood with at least some degree of fluidity. It was fine. This was fine. I was fine.

As night follows day, the ’90s led to the ’00s. I settled into marriage with someone I was pretty sure I loved and worked on having something like a career and a life. I still wasn’t super thrilled about being gendered as a male, but mostly it didn’t impinge on my life too hard… at least, not superficially. If I were to look too closely at the mechanisms of the life I’d found myself in, though, I could see the machinery of gendered expectations working away beneath the surface: be a man, be a father, be strong, be the thing you least want to be in this life. What I was seeing, albeit dimly, was the mechanistic system of social control I described earlier, which the Wachowski sisters famously identified in 1999 as “the Matrix.”

Funny story: my then-wife would occasionally ask why I never grew out my facial hair. I had a set array of responses: I hated how it felt, it was too much work to keep up, or it made me look like the Master‘s annoying kid brother.[6] Those were mostly true, as far as they went; I did hate how it felt, and the idea of regularly maintaining a lawn in front of my house was enough of a drag, much less maintaining one on my face. Really, though, it was because facial hair was a step too far, the line I wouldn’t cross. I couldn’t quite bring myself to shave off all the body hair that made me feel ill to contemplate[7], because I knew doing so would Raise Some Questions, both externally and (gulp!) internally. Shaving my face, though? Totally normal. Lots of people shave their faces! Definitely not a sign of gender weirdness!

Right around this time, I would also start occasionally plucking my eyebrows. I’d already gone ham on my unibrow in the early ’90s, with blessedly successful results, so it wasn’t a threatening concept, and the occasional tweezing made me feel better. Cleaner, somehow, and less… something I couldn’t identify—or didn’t want to identify—as “masculine.”

The early ’00s were also when the Internet first became a part of my everyday life in a big way. I’d been online for well over a decade, on local dial-up BBSes, but 2001 was when I first got involved with anything approaching “social media,” by way of LiveJournal. It’s difficult to explain just how earthshaking LiveJournal was for those of us who used it, but I’ll summarize it like this: without LJ, I wouldn’t know many of the people I now consider my closest friends and family members. I wouldn’t have been a gigging musician in the local scene. I might not have reconnected with the person I met on the BBSes in the ’90s and dated for two months… and who would later become my second (and current) wife, my partner in life, love, magic, and adventures.

And it would’ve taken me a lot longer to learn that “transgender” was A Thing People Could Be.

I came close to transitioning in 2002 as a result of LiveJournal and the Internet. Not through some sort of “social contagion” bullshit, mind you, just through learning that trans people existed, and that there were actually paths between point A (living as a cisgender person) and point B (living as a transgender person). Of course, it was 2002, so the information I found about trans issues was Not Great. I was reading an article about “male-to-female sex reassignment surgery,” illustrated with extensive photos of the process, when I came to the realization that I didn’t really want to go through that. Huh, I thought, I guess I’m not transgender. Oh, well. Maybe there’s another word for… whatever I am. This thought was accompanied by what I can only describe as a pervasive feeling of disappointment and loss.[8]

And on through my thirties, with the birth of my daughter dropping a bright and joyful exclamation point midway through the decade, accompanied by an intense relief that she’d been born a girl… and, more to the point, not a boy, because what the hell did I know about raising a boy?[9]

Life went on, through the ’00s and into the ’10s. We moved to Seattle, my first marriage ended, and my now-wife and I married. All the while, my genderfeels were percolating there in the background: not gone, not raging, just… dormant. About a year after our wedding, I came to realize that, whatever I might be, I wasn’t a man, a boy, a guy, a male. I first latched onto the label genderqueer, which was a revelation unto itself—did you know you could queer gender? Amazing!—and then onto nonbinary, a marvelously open-ended concept that, far from imposing any constraints or limitations, seemed to completely blow the walls out. Embracing myself as nonbinary felt like a way of freeing myself not only from the expectations of masculinity, which had never once felt like they actually fit me, but from the entire binary structure of gender as expressed in Anglophone culture.

It felt like taking the red pill and escaping the Matrix.

Midway through the ’10s, I went back to school, initially for Computer Science (insert your preferred joke about trans people in STEM here), then switching to a multidisciplinary degree in Society, Ethics, and Human Behavior when I entered the University of Washington Bothell. This lasted all of a single quarter, until I learned of a new degree program being instituted at the University, whereupon I became the first person at the school to declare my major in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies.

This action, as Life is Strange so beautifully puts it, would have consequences.

In the GWSS program, I was exposed to an array of theories and philosophies of gender, sexuality, and feminism, and learned the histories of women and people of other marginalized genders from all over the world. I was utterly enthralled. This, at long last, was the academic wellspring from which I’d longed to draw water. I found myself involved in research projects, working with professors and staff members to preserve archival materials and present data about issues of social justice, gender equity, and—most pertinently to the topic here—transgender rights and safety. I immersed myself in works by Judith Butler, bell hooks, Gayle Rubin, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, and so many more, brought to my attention by fabulous professors who had such a genuine passion for the material that I couldn’t help but respond in kind.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I had an idea, one that hit my brain like a shower of sparks across a pile of dry kindling, which led to my spending the next couple of years writing the blog posts and essays which would ultimately become my first published book, Outside the Charmed Circle: Exploring Gender & Sexuality in Magical Practice.

I graduated from UWB in June of 2017, and wrote the first draft of OTCC during the Summer and Autumn of 2018. I did two more drafts in the following months, and the book was published on January 8, 2020.

Ten days later, my wife asked me if I was a woman.

That simple question was the start of a lot of questions, conversations, and introspection, culminating in a realization which, as I think I’ve amply demostrated over the course of this writing, I’ve been dodging for most of my life, to wit: I’m a girl.

Or, to get technical, I’m a nonbinary transgender woman, meaning that my gender identity is centered around my experience of femininity and womanhood, operating within a non-dualistic understanding of gender as something less akin to a coin and more to a spectrum, or an amorphous cloud in which “female” and “male” can be considered as unrelated poles (as opposed to “polar opposites”), and this is precisely the kind of verbiage I went to university to learn, but which most folks probably don’t have the patience to sit through, which is why I usually shorthand it as, “I’m a girl.”

However, realizing you’re a girl is one thing. Figuring out how to move forward in your life as a girl, and what kind of girl you are (or want to be), are quite different things. Sometimes I refer to these as the problems of How to Be a Girl and How to Be Trans, and the questions those problems raise are a central part of the work I’ve done on myself in the intervening years since my wife first helped me out of my egg.

And that brings us right up to the present… by which I actually mean, back to the beginning, a perfect Ouroboros of navel-gazing. Somewhere in all of that, I touched on the issue of my face, but never quite came out and just plainly said what I came here to say, did I? That’s pretty on-brand for me, to be honest… but let’s stare that right in the face and answer it:

For as long as I can remember having thoughts about it, I’ve felt unhappy about my face, and those feelings of unhappiness have only increased as puberty and age have had their effects on me. I find myself now, a few years into my gender transition as a trans woman, in a place in my life where I can actually consider the prospect of pursuing facial gender-affirming surgery, also known as facial feminization surgery, as a viable possibility.

I’ve considered it, and after discussing it with my wife, my therapist, and more complete strangers in the healthcare and insurance fields than you would believe, I’ve decided to pursue it.

My surgery is scheduled for January 4, 2024.

I intend to write about it here: the process leading up to the surgery itself, the recovery process following the surgery, and my thoughts and feelings about everything along the way. My posts here won’t all be this long, I promise. Some days, they might just be brief notes written through a painkiller haze. Other days, I might wax prolific, as I’ve done here.

As Joan Didion wrote in the aptly-titled Why I Write,

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.

Just so. I write so I can know what I think, how I feel, and what it all means.

If you’re reading this, I invite you to follow along as I stumble through that process of self-discovery. I can’t promise profundity, deathless prose, or even basic coherence. What I discover might be self-indulgent, revelatory, mundane, magical, or all of them at once. Perhaps, like this lengthy stretch of words, I’ll wind my way through all of this verbiage only to find myself back where I started, having circled completely around the point, only to find myself looking back at myself… albeit with a slightly different face than before.

If nothing else, though, it should be amusing. I’m hilarious when I’m stoned on painkillers.

Welcome. 🖤

[1] A joke I made at least a dozen times during my recovery was that I was now exactly two stone lighter. That my wife did not divorce me for this is a testament to her love for me.

[2] I’m so sorry. (Okay, I’m not really sorry, but I feel like I should be, which must count for something.)

[3] At the time, a penchant for reading, rolling dice, and listening to The Cure was considered deeply gay… which, I mean, fair. (Just kidding! Or am I?)

[4] ’80s-to-modern translation: “goths,” “punks,” “emos,” “scene kids.”

[5] I started cracking in December 2019, and fully cracked with my wife’s assistance in January 2020, so I missed being part of the “trandemic” of 2020… or, looked at another way, some part of me anticipated the rush and got in early.

[6] At the time, I thought this response was both witty and funny. Today, I find the fact that I thought this was both witty and funny absolutely hilarious.

[7] Other than the times I did so to perform in costume as a Catholic schoolgirl and as one of Robert Palmer’s backup bandmembers… but let’s overlook that, shall we?

[8] Future!me has come to realize that past!me was kind of a dummy. She did her best, though, and we’re all still here, so I try not to be too harsh.

[9] Yes, the gender essentialism here is positively breathtaking. It was the mid-’00s, I was in my early 30s, and I didn’t know a damned thing about gender theory. For what it’s worth, my daughter has grown into a delightful young woman who shows every indication of being perfectly happy with her assigned gender. Should that change, so will my language.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2023/11/16/05-operation-polymorph-prelude-t-48/

#howToBeAGirl #howToBeTrans #noTakebacks #operationPolymorph