[Note: Some of my thoughts here were influenced by three conversations: one at home with my wife, one by video call with my therapist, and one by phone with my friend timberwraith while I was walking around Terminal 3 of Chicago O’Hare International Airport, waiting to board a flight home.]

Previously on re:imagined girl, I announced that I was done documenting Operation: Polymorph as its own topic. After all, I do have other things in my life than facial feminization surgery. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not still incredibly relevant to my everyday life. “Gone from the charts, but not from our hearts,” as they used to say.[1]

During my essentially enforced downtime while recovering from surgery, one of the things I spent a lot of time contemplating was what my life would look like afterwards: once the swelling goes down, once I’m no longer “recovering from surgery,” once I’m just, y’know, some girl named Tamsin. Now, as I move steadily away from Operation: Polymorph and into the post-surgery phase of my life—which, really, is just the rest of my life—this question has moved to the forefront of my beehive of a brain.

It’s common to hear people say that transition is a marathon, not a race, but I think that metaphor gets us a little wrong-footed (ha! get it?) if taken too literally. As I understand it from my transfeminine senpai, there comes a point when you’ve done all of the “Big Things” that are part of your transition—medically, socially, legally, whatever—and then, finally, you transition (ha! get it?) from being a woman in transition to just being, y’know, a woman.[2]

In her audiobook M to (WT)F, Samantha Allen sums up this phenomenon with a succinct question: “So, now what?” She goes on to write,

I think I forgot that there is life after transition—indeed, most of my life, knock on wood. Inch by inch, I’ve tried to figure out who I am now. Years ago, I was able to wonder for the for the first time, not if I could be a woman, but what kind of woman I would become. Now, I have to start answering that question, instead of asking it.

Barring any unforeseen changes or events, I’ve finished most of my biomedical transition, including all of the Big Things I had planned.[3] Does this mean I’m… done? Have I finished transitioning? Is that all there is?

Well, let’s think about that.

When my egg first cracked in January of 2020, it set in motion a whole host of thoughts, feelings, events, decisions, and transformations. I don’t just mean the obvious things like getting my face remixed; I mean the internal work of processing the mental and emotional changes this new piece of information initiated.

There exists in some segments of the trans community a narrative in which a trans person started as one person, then had the realization that they were trans and became another person. I know that many trans folks find that narrative resonant or useful, and maybe even comforting. I hope it won’t come across as in any way critical, then, when I say that this was absolutely not my experience. In a sense, I didn’t change at all; I was simply able to (or was forced to) acknowledge who I actually was. I didn’t suddenly realize I was actually a different person, and that person happened to be female. Rather, I realized I was still the person I always had been and that “the person I always had been” was a woman… and had been one my whole life.

This realization recontextualized literally everything I thought I knew about myself. I spent the first several months after this realization repeating the same pattern a few times a week:

It’s not as frequent nowadays, but it still happens from time to time, and it’s always accompanied by the same mixture of delight and bemusement. Like, seriously, how did I not know?

The answer is that I am very, very good at hiding things from myself, including uncomfortable truths about myself which my subconscious mind believes might place me in danger of harm if I openly acknowledged them. This “talent” is a childhood survival mechanism which still complicates my life from time to time, but has also resulted in some hilarious moments of realization. One was the conversation I had with the ex-girlfriend who would later become my wife in which we realized we were still in love with each other, and had been for a long time.

Another was my initial “holy shit I’m a girl” realization.

My transition began in January 2020, but was largely invisible to most people. Part of that was the whole pandemic lockdown, of course, but part of it was that I moved slowly and deliberately. The early part of my transition mostly involved a lot of talking: with my wife, my therapist, and eventually with a few friends here and there. I experimented with my presentation, I tried to build relationships with other trans people (especially other transfeminine people), and—because words are how I understand the world—I read a lot. I read books, articles, essays, blogs, social media, and more, all to try to get a handle on this weird thing that was going on with me.

In short, the beginning of my transition was a boring ordinary life change made up of boring, ordinary choices and decisions, rather than a dramatic magical-girl transformation sequence.

And honestly? The rest of my transition has been pretty quotidian, too. Yes, I’m on HRT, and yes, I’ve had gender-affirming surgeries, and both of those things have been among the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself. However, I want to point out that even those aren’t particularly esoteric, nor are they uniquely transgender experiences. Lots and lots of cisgender people take hormonal treatments, and many have surgeries intended to affirm their gender identities or presentations. Mine are specific to my circumstances… but aren’t everyone’s?

Most people who are even passingly familiar with trans people will have at least a cursory understanding of “transition,” the narrative process in which trans people start in one place—believing ourselves to be cisgender, however ill-fitting that descriptor may be—and then, through some mechanism of self-discovery (and, if desired and accessible, changes to one’s physical, social, and/or legal status), end in another place. Given the intensely personal natures of gender, identity, and selfhood, we shouldn’t expect one person’s transition to necessarily look like another’s. However, the basic narrative is essentially the same: start at X, go through changes, become Y. Recent developments in trans theory have complicated this a little, suggesting that trans people aren’t “becoming” their gender, but instead are harmonizing their external expression with the gender they’ve always been, but the fundamental movement of the narrative remains a fairly linear arc of character development.

The more I think about it, though, the more I’ve started to question this narrative, even in its modified form.

To be clear, I am not saying this narrative is wrong. I’m emphatically not saying that trans people shouldn’t transition, nor that we shouldn’t have unfettered access to any and all means of addressing gender dysphoria and seeking gender euphoria. I am foursquare in favor of all trans people having access to every biomedical, social, and legal method of bringing their lives into alignment with their internal sense of identity. What I question is the universal applicability of the narrative of “transition” as the foundational concept which many trans people use to explain the arc of their identities.

My own personal experience of transitioning has been… well, not much like other folks. Again, this is not particularly unusual: my identity, experience, and selfhood are my own, and are unique to me. However, the ways in which my experience has differed from other transfeminine people’s experiences gave me pause, and pushed me to ask why they were different. I didn’t feel the strong sense of disjuncture or detachment from my pre-transition self that so many other trans people identified, nor any need to disown the person I’d been prior to my “holy shit I’m a girl” moment. The sole exception to this lack of disconnection from my pre-transition self was the changing of my name and pronouns, the labels I used to indicate that my self had changed… but even then, I wasn’t disavowing my past self. I was, rather, notifying the world of a state change. My old name was now my deadname; my former self was now a past self.

That past self wasn’t a different person, though, except insofar as any of us are different people from who we were five years ago, or fifteen, or fifty. Or, to look at it another way, my past self is a different person, but there’s a continuous thread of consciousness, narrative, and identity between all the people I’ve been and the person I am now. I’m not any of those past selves now, but I contain them within me. They’re all people I was, on my way to becoming the woman I am today.

Which brings us back to the question: Have I finished transitioning?

I don’t know. In one sense, maybe I have. I’ve done my particular subset of Big Things™, and what’s left are either life maintenance things or minor tweaks to a presentation which, for whatever it’s worth, seems to be pretty well settled at this point. Maybe I’m reaching that point Samantha Allen described, where the question is not if I can be a woman, but what kind of woman I want to be.

In another sense, maybe I haven’t finished. Those tweaks and treatments do still sit uneasily on my to-do list, suggesting that—emotionally at least—my transition isn’t done, and may never be. Even if I electroshock every hair follicle on my face into oblivion, even if I train myself into a perfect (or perfect-for-me) voice, even if I make any and every other change that occurs to me, I may still never feel like I’m “done.” Perhaps I’ll be in transition as long as I’m still looking to the horizon for something I still need to do to feel “finished.” Perhaps I’ll always be “in transition,” because I lack a model of what it looks like to not be in transition, to just be a woman.

And maybe there’s no finish line. Maybe transition isn’t any kind of race, marathon or otherwise. Maybe it’s just the word we use to describe this particular bit of our path: a name for the road, or for the kind of terrain it crosses. That word might be relevant in some contexts, but its relevance doesn’t reside in taxonomy. Transition doesn’t make us “more trans,” because there’s no such thing as being “more trans.” You simply are. Being trans is just a way people like us experience gender: a quality of my womanhood, not a gender in itself.

In the end, asking myself if I’m done with transition is the wrong question, because what’s important about transition isn’t whether or not it ends. It’s that, in doing this, we are becoming the people we truly are, the people who, in our hearts, we know ourselves to be. In that sense, transition is just one part of the work I have done, am doing, and will do until the day I die, all to be closer to my best, most authentic self. And even there, there’s no finish line. As clichéd as it may sound, the destination really is less important than the journey: where we’ve been, where we’re going, and where we are in the moment of our asking.

So, am I done with my transition?

I’m still alive, so, no. I’m still becoming who I am, and likely always will be.

That’s part of the fun of it.

[1] This is normally the spot where I’d make one of my self-deprecating quips about being perfectly well aware that I’m old, thank you very much for your concern… but you know what? I’m proud of having made it this far. It’s not a privilege afforded to everyone, and certainly not to enough trans women.

[2] While I’m obviously not transmasculine myself, I imagine it’s quite similar for trans guys, as well as for nonbinary people who go through a transition process.

[3] The remaining elements will either be ongoing, like HRT and voice training, or require a period of intermittent treatments, like electrolysis. Fun!

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/03/23/no-finish-lines/

#howToBeAGirl #howToBeTrans #meta #operationPolymorph

So, I’m close to two months out from Operation: Polymorph, and it’s been a few weeks since I last updated the blog. That’s not because I’ve forgotten about it. Rather, it’s because my Adventures in Facial Feminization have moved into the long tail of recovery, which is a much less exciting and interesting phase to write about. I could go over the summary of “how I’m doing”—face is still swollen but much less so, some things are still numb and/or painful but much less so, &c.—but at a certain point, even those details become mechanical, rote, and boring.

The awful truth is that, like so many other aspects of life as a transgender woman, trans women’s faces are just like cis people’s faces, and recovery from facial feminization surgery is exactly like recovery from any other kind of facial surgery. The interesting details are largely in the lead-up to the surgery itself and, I suppose, the internal processes of my own brain as I contemplate why I pursued this wild venture.

So, how do I feel now, 53 days out from surgery?

On balance, I feel really, really good.

I have moments where dysphoria kicks my ass, where I look in the mirror and all I can see is the swelling and the stiffness of the parts of my face where the nerves are still reconnecting. I have a lot of moments where I’m just so tired of random shooting pains in my scalp or my forehead, of my chin and lower lip being numb and botox-stiff, of waking up in the morning to sore cheeks from having slept on my face wrong. And I have moments where I can’t wait to just be done with all of this.

But you know what else I have? Moments where I see myself in a reflection and think oh, she’s cute, then realize oh, she’s me! Moments where I remember that, in roughly a year from now, the swelling will have gone down, my face will have relaxed into its new shape, and that’ll just be me. Moments where my wife or my friends make unprompted comments about how good I look, how cute I am, how happy I seem.

And, because I know my wife and my friends, I also know those comments aren’t a function of having my face that’s been surgically altered to be more closely in alignment with hegemonic standards of feminine beauty. You may not know the word hegemonic (“related to the dominant or ruling power of a culture”), but if you were raised with any exposure to Western society, you quite certainly know what those standards of beauty are: white (but not too pale), able-bodied (but not too fit), thin (but not skinny), attractive (but not trying too hard), sexy (but not slutty), and so on.

Oh, and cisgender, or at least cis-passing. Many people seem to think that the whole point of getting FFS is to pass as cisgender. Those people are wrong… or rather, they’re only accidentally right, at best, and for the wrong reasons. Fully breaking down the discourse around “passing” and my particular take on the subject is way beyond the scope of this blog post, so I’m not going to.

What I will say, though, is this: I am openly, proudly transgender, and I have no interest in passing as cisgender… but if it makes it even 5% safer for me to use a restroom, to go shopping, or in any other way to exist in public as a trans woman, then I’ll count the $40,000+X[1] pricetag on my facial feminization surgery as money well spent.

Is that cowardice? Maybe. I don’t know. Ask me when the country of my birth isn’t mooting legislation at a rate of more than two bills a day, all to render me a legal unperson in more than half the states in the country.[2]

At the end of the day, though, the question of whether it’s cowardice, cunning, vanity, or valor is immaterial. What it is, incontrovertibly, is done. I’ve done the thing. The majority of the healing is done, and the remainder is a slow, boring story that hardly merits regular documentation on a blog.

And while I’m far from done posting to this blog, I think this is a good place to wind up these Operation: Polymorph posts, at least for the time being. I might return to the tag at some point, perhaps to share results that are closer-to-final than where they’re at right now. I might not. Who knows? Life moves pretty fast, you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you know the rest of the line.

But here, before I go: one quick picture, from right after I got my first post-op haircut-and-dye-job.

Cheers, folks. Thanks for reading along. 💕

[1] Where X equals the amount of money spent on plane tickets, car rental, lodging, meals, medications, one overnight hospital stay, sixteen days of hyperbaric oxygen treatment, and any other incidentals I’ve forgotten about, over and beyond the cost of the surgery itself.

[2] Granted, they’re mostly states you couldn’t pay me to visit, much less live in, but even I have to change planes somewhere.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/02/27/any-landing-you-walk-away-from-t53/

#operationPolymorph

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Given that I’m just over three weeks out from surgery, it seems like a good time to check in and share how I’m doing. Much of this will come as little surprise to anyone who’s familiar with surgery recovery, whether from medical expertise, supporting someone who’s been through recovery, or the vanishingly small group of people who’ve actually had facial feminization surgery. Still, that leaves an awful lot of people who aren’t familiar, and might find this interesting… and even without that group, it’s still my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to.

So, hi! I’m at t+22 days from my FFS, and my recovery has had an interesting trajectory. My face is still hella swollen[1], which is still causing me some vision problems. In fact, my left eye is fully blurred as I write this, which makes things rather more difficult. Added to that, I’m still in moderate amounts of pain and discomfort. I’m sitting up to sleep like a good girl, and I’m staying on top of my pain meds, but I’m still waking in pain, which is zero much fun.

I do want to note, for those of you who haven’t been following along in this epic tale: my face is still hella swollen[2] not because my aftercare has been bad. Far from it! My surgeon’s office has been happy to work with me to find ways to manage my pain and swelling. The issue is that:

Given the choice between a swollen face, blurry vision, and ongoing pain or having my face get all lumpy, then stroking out and maybe dying? I’ll go with the swollen face, thanks.

Also, randomly, I’m currently unable to whistle. Weird, right? I might have to re-learn how to whistle, which is… odd, and will likely need to wait until my swelling has gone down a lot more. It’s not the worst thing ever, just… huh. Didn’t see that one coming.

On the other hand, I’ve been able to do some light housework, which actually feels really good. I’ve been able to eat, slowly and in small bites, some of what my body insists on labelling “real food” (e.g. vegetables, pizza, toast) in addition to smoothies, yogurt, and my morning concoction of instant breakfast, milk, and cold-brew coffee. I’m still taking analgesics, but I’m already looking forward to a future in which they’re a fond memory.

What’s been especially odd is looking in the mirror. I was concerned, pre-surgery, that I’d have no idea what I would look like post-op, and that anxiety has held true: my face is clearly in a transitional state, with things changing literally from one day to the next, and I have almost no idea what I’m going to look like once the swelling has fully receded.

I say “almost” because, as I’ve alluded in a previous episode, I can kinda start to see how things are going to turn out in a few places. My lips are definitely quite different… and I really, really like the difference. Both the filler and the lip lift have given my mouth a softer, sweeter look, especially after the stitches were removed from the border between my lip and my nose. Thanks to the miracle of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the incision line is practically invisible three weeks out, and should do nothing but fade even further as time goes by. I’m also happy to note that my nose, which both my surgeon’s office and I agreed should not be altered in any way, is aesthetically quite well balanced with the new geometry of my face thus far. If the rest of the renovations involve the same aesthetic pleasure, I’ll be quite happy indeed.

It’s weird discussing my face in terms of structure and geometry, but that’s the best language I have to convey things. I find myself looking at my own face rather more objectively, in terms of lines and masses, the way I would approach a still life I was drawing for an art class. This has the odd effect of both depersonalizing much of what’s going on with my face and, paradoxically, making it much easier to approach as a thing that’s happening to me, in me, with me. I can feel and acknowledge my pain and discomfort, but also understand why things are happening the way they are, and do whatever I can to ameliorate those feelings.

So, in summation: things are a little rougher physically than I’d hoped, but not bad overall. And I’m excited to see where things go from here.

[1] Yes, I said “hella.” I’m from California. It happens sometimes. Try not to faint.

[2] See? I did it again.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/01/26/t22/

#music #operationPolymorph

Hello, beautiful creatures.

So, it turns out that recovering from facial feminization surgery is a lot.

A lot of what, you ask? Everything. A lot of pain, a lot of swelling, a lot of time, a lot of frustration and tears, a lot of wondering just when the hell you’ll be able to eat a burger or a burrito or a friggin’ cookie without feeling like you’re doing damage to areas that are already damaged quite enough, thank you very much. A lot of contemplation of the choices you made that brought you to this point, and a lot of questioning whether or not it was worth it.

The genuinely wonderful thing is that I’m home now, safe and sound. I can relax and emotionally decompensate in the comfort of my own home, with my own cats and my own bed and my own everything. The Airbnb we stayed in was perfectly fine, but what I’ve learned in the past few weeks is that it’s impossible for me to fully relax in a space I know belongs to someone else. A hotel room is easier for me, because it’s fully a liminal space which belongs to no one.[1] Home is best, of course, but failing that, an anonymous hotel room is pretty okay.

So, I’m home now, and recovering. How am I?

Objectively, I’m doing okay. I have fair bit of swelling around my eyes, which is causing some vision problems (see below for more), and along my jawline and chin. My forehead is still quite numb, as is most of the top of my scalp. My scalp incision line is healing nicely (though having scabs still falling out of my hair is, frankly, kind of gross). My lips are still tingling and a bit sore, and they’re getting chapped like whoa, but of all my facial renovations, they honestly look the closest to “done,” or at least to fully healed.[2]

About those vision problems: So, the swelling around my eyes is pretty fierce. It doesn’t look horrific, but it’s definitely noticeable. The real problem, though, is that it’s constricting my eyeballs, which means it’s affecting my vision. I can’t really focus on screens for longer than a few minutes without my eyes watering, my vision blurring or doubling, and an eyestrain headache starting up almost immediately. What this means in practical terms is that I can’t return to work yet. Even writing this blog post has been difficult, and I’ve done that in small bursts of work over the course of a few hours. As a result, my medical leave has been extended through the end of January, and I’m doing my best to take it easy on my eyeballs.

And now, I’m going to do just that. Cheers, y’all.

[1] Despite what Republican politicians want us to believe, corporations are not people.

[2] As my 18-year-old daughter put it, “Like, you have lips now!” Yeah, thanks, kid. 😑

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/01/21/home-again-home-again-t17/

#operationPolymorph #thinkyThoughts

Hello, beautiful creatures.

In a characteristically typical move, I was clever enough to have come up with the title for my first post-operative blog post, but not prescient enough to have written its content. Really, though, I don’t think it could’ve been any other way. After all, it takes no great powers of prognostication to have forecast that I would have all of the qualities given in this post’s title. Knowledge of the actual experiences of which those qualities are the markers, however, does kinda require having actually lived through them. So, to an extent, I’m starting this blog post without knowing where I’m going. It is both tabula rasa and terra incognita, if you will.

Having an organizing theme does help me get my thoughts into some kind of accessible order. Sometimes I try to be super clever with that organizing theme, but clever requires a hell of a lot more energy than I have right now, so instead, you get the easiest one imaginable.

the good

Well, what can I say? I wanted to know if I was someone who could do the thing. Turns out, I am. I am officially six days past my facial feminization surgery, five days past discharge from the hospital, and one day past my first post-op check-in. I’m ambulatory, my pain is being managed, and my swelling has diminished to the point where I can actually start to see some of the changes. The weirdest part of this whole process has been the realization that I don’t actually know what my new baseline normal is. I won’t really have the final-final version for up to a year from now, and I’ll only have the ~80% final version at about three months from now, so being able to see the changes starting to reveal themselves is especially exciting.

the bad

Here’s the hard truth: I’m in a lot of pain. There’s pain at all of my surgical sites, of course—my brow, the staples inside my hairline, my cheeks, my upper and lower lips, my chin, along my jaw, and the insides of my mouth where my cheeks and lip meet my gums—as well as my abdomen, where they borrowed some fat to transplant into my face. I also have a persistent headache, which no medication or hydration is quite touching, and a general, persistent sensation of pressure all around my head, which is both painful and just uncomfortable.

What I want to be careful to stress here is that none of this is unusual or unexpected. Everything I’m experiencing is entirely within normal parameters. Point of fact, both my surgeon’s office and my wife and friends have commented that I appear to be healing really quickly. This is likely due, at least in part, to the post-operative hyperbaric oxygen therapy I’ve been doing. It’s also probably due to the fact that I’ve spent a substantial amount of my non-HBOT time sleeping or resting. Seriously, I overestimated the amount of time I’d have for playing Baldur’s Gate 3 or reading books by an awful lot. Most of my time, I’m asleep… or, y’know, lying in bed trying to sleep. And failing. Because pain.

So, to recap: pain. Healing fast, yes, but lots of pain.

the ugly

Laverne Cox’s hashtag campaign insists that #TransIsBeautiful, while a transfeminine friend of mine insists that “Trans is pain.” Both are true, of course, and I’ll add another one: trans is messy. There’s no getting around this, so I won’t try: living with a swollen faceful of bruises and stitches is hard. It’s hard waking up every morning in pain and discomfort, often far earlier than I’d like, knowing that what greets me in the bathroom mirror is going to be a slightly color-corrected version of the same battered, war-torn landscape of discolored skin, smeared ointment, and goopy eyes I went to bed with. Even with my stitches removed, there’s still a line of angry, crusty, red-black barbed wire impressions separating my nose from my upper lip, ready to inspire any number of cocaine-fuelled elegies about lovers separated by political and/or aesthetic divisions.

Okay, that metaphor got way, way away from me[1], but you get my meaning. It’s messy. I don’t mean “ugly,” in the masochistic, self-destructive way trans girls so often use to hurt ourselves: “OMG I’m so ugly, I’ll never pass, I’m such a brick/hon/whatever,” and so on. I mean it’s messy, in precisely the same way all human bodies are: gooey, sticky, oozing, swelling, inflamed, crusty, and gross. All bodies are like this, and trans bodies are no exception. When we have surgeries, we have to recover just like cis people do: one stitch at a time, so to speak.

This morning, I woke from what I’m guessing was about four whole hours of sleep, my bandages having all slipped off or come loose, with my face throbbing and pounding like a righteously angry funk band.

It’s moments like this where I feel at my lowest, and I think, Why did I do this to myself? Was this necessary? Couldn’t I have just, I dunno, lived with the dysphoria?

The really annoying thing is, knowing the answer to those questions doesn’t actually make things hurt any less in the moment. It just reminds me that I’m paying now for choices I made in the past, in hope of a better future—or, to put it another way, pastTamsin did this to presentTamsin so that futureTamsin can be happier.

And right now, I kinda hate pastTamsin an awful lot, so futureTamsin had better appreciate this.

So, there you have it: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Sounds prety dire, right?

As I said at the beginning, though, I can kind of see her, the woman underneath the swelling and soreness. I can almost make out the shapes and lines of her face: the way her Cupid’s-bow lips sit beneath her retroussé nose, the way her eyes capture the light so much more than they were able to before, accentuated by the sweep of her cheekbones. All of those were present in potentia in the original, but none of them were made fully manifest—incarnate, if you will—until now.

Almost.

Or maybe that’s all wishful thinking and projection on the reality of the now, which is swollen tissue and angry nerves playing the most bellicose version of Rhapsody in Blue you’ve ever heard, like George Gershwin being mugged by Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music in a New York alley sometime in the mid-’70s.[2]

Either way, though, I am where I am, good and bad and industrial jazz mashups and angry funk bands and all. Things are rough right now, but they’re also honestly amazing. I thought I’d never actually get to this place, and when I realized it was an actual possibility, I had to ask myself if I could actually follow through with it.

The answer is “yes.”

I’m struggling, but that’s part of the adventure, too, innit? I knew this job was dangerous when I took it. No risk, no reward. Fake it ’til you make it. And so on. (Insert your preferred motivational cliché here!)

At some point I’ll have a whole list of people I want to shout-out and thank for everything they’ve done to support me, but at this exact moment I want to specifically name five:

Okay, I’m all maudlin and sappy now. That’s a good note to end this post on, I think. More to come.

Cheers, all of you, and thanks for reading along. 🖤

[1] And, as Tolkien slyly noted of Bilbo’s wishes to have never gone on that stupid uncomfortable adventure which makes up the bulk of The Hobbit, not for the last time.

[2] See? Toldja so. The really funny thing is, I haven’t taken any narcotics since yesterday morning. Apparently this is just how my brain works. And, for the record, I would never invoke such a fate on Mr. Gershwin, nor would I ever think Mr. Reed capable of such a thing, and I wish them both nothing but loving-kindness in whatever state they exist beyond this present incarnate moment.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/01/11/bandaged-bruised-swollen-stitched-and-sore-t6/

#howToBeAGirl #howToBeTrans #music #operationPolymorph #thinkyThoughts

Okay.

This is it.

Here we go.

Deep breath.

See you all on the other side.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2023/12/29/liftoff-t-0/

#operationPolymorph

Happy Western New Year, everyone.

This will be a necessarily short post, as I’m finishing up the last bits of packing and preparation before boarding a plane with my partner this afternoon and flying to California. As you might expect, I’m a ball of emotions: anxiety, excitement, fear, uncertainty, delight, and more. I’m going to miss the cats, and my bed, and my friends here in Providence. I’m more than a little freaked out that this is actually happening.

It is, though. I just have to get through the next few days.

And that starts with unloading and reloading the dishwasher, finishing up the packing, making sure all our electronics are charged for the trip, and taking a shower. All the mundane, quotidian tasks that go into getting through an average day, and an ordinary plane flight.

My head is a jukebox with ADHD and a randomization fetish. (The rest of me also has ADHD, so no big surprise there.) Bits of lyrics and fragments of melodies are going through my head like buckshot scatter: leavin’ on a jet plane, catch me or I go Houdini, it’s hard out here for a bitch, snippets of Borislav Slavov’s score for Baldur’s Gate 3. As is my wont, I’m making a playlist for this whole adventure, which I’ll probably share here at some point. It won’t be quite the same experience, but at least you’ll have the relevant source material.

In the meantime, though: chop wood, carry water. I’m going to go figure out something for breakfast, then do dishes. It’s as good a place to start as any.

Cheers, friends.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/01/01/leaving-on-a-jet-plane-t-3/

#music #operationPolymorph #travellingWhileTrans #twtitmoap

Well, here we are. One week out.

In a handful of days, I’ll be in California.

A couple of days after that, I’ll be under the knife.

My brain has been in what you might charitably call “a state.” In addition to planning and managing all of the moving parts of a cross-continental trip, I’ve also been focusing on the fine and coarse details of getting everything sorted out for my medical clearance and insurance authorization for the aforementioned trip, and occasionally taking a break from all of that to speculate about the somewhat gnarly specifics of my upcoming Special Guest Star role in a remake of the Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the episode, you can just click on the Wikipedia link to get a synopsis, but if you can find it streaming online—many platforms have The Twilight Zone available—it’s worth watching. Like many TZ episodes, the plot turns on a particular twist which may seem a little hokey to our jaded, adult 21st century eyes, but was still pretty shocking when I first saw it as a wee slip of a girl in the 1970s.

If you continue reading from this point, I’m assuming you’ve seen it, or spoiled yourself with Wikipedia. You’ve been warned.

So, yeah. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this episode, and about that jarring moment when Maxine Stuart is unmasked to reveal Donna Douglas under the bandages, followed by a series of smash cuts to the other medical staff in the room, who look a bit like Boris Karloff in prosthetic “old-school D&D orc” makeup. I think about that moment, and I wonder who the hell thought it was a good idea to let a kid watch that TV show, because all I can think now is, oh gods, what if they unwrap my head and I look like a truffle-hunting Uruk-hai?

Welcome to my brain.

More seriously, though, it’s starting to actually sink in that this… is… happening. This is real. In roughly the same amount of time from now as a caffeine-fuelled marathon of all the modern Doctor Who episodes and specials, I’ll be waking up (much too early for my liking), showering (and washing myself with a scary chlorhexidine body wash), dressing in something comfortable, and being driven to a hospital where I’ll be COVID-swabbed before sitting down to have a nice chat with my surgeon, who I’ll be meeting for the very first time. Then, I’ll change into something somewhat less comfortable, get jabbed with an IV, and sit around for a while before they decide to wheel my silly self into an operating room. Then, they’ll give me the good drugs, and I’ll start counting backwards from some number I won’t even be able to remember because I’ll suddenly be in a recovery room, coming back to consciousness, swathed in bandages and high as a kite, and it’ll be all over but the recovery.

This is, as you might imagine, incredibly weird.

A GIF of David Tennant looking out of frame and saying, with a dubious look, “Bit weird.” He then looks straight at the camera and makes an “eugh” sort of facial expression.

However, as weird as this all is, I have to find a way to shelve the weirdness for the next few days, because I have Things to Do:

• Laundry. Oh, gods, so much laundry.
• Meds: securing, double-checking, packing.
• Finalizing cat care.
• Getting spare keys made.
• Miscellaneous paperwork things.
• Dishes and other house-tidying things.
• Packing. All the packing. Pack all the things!

…and like that. I’d be more stressed by this list of chores and responsibilities, but it’s actually helpful to have a full docket. I don’t have time to stress about medical procedures or to fret about whether I’ll be a pretty girl once a semi-random stranger has taken a scalpel (and other tools) to my face; I have to make sure my kittens will be fed!

If beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, so too are all other subjective states: fear, insecurity, anxiety, dread. Maybe it’s okay to live, at least temporarily, in a liminal state of not knowing what I’ll look like in two weeks’ time, of not knowing how well I’ll handle my pain eight days from now, of not knowing how people will react to my new face. Maybe it’s okay to feel a bit like Maxine Stuart, swaddled under all that gauze, hoping that my big reveal will be less Boris Karl-orc-ff (see what I did there? that’s called a callback!) and more Donna Douglas, or at least my own twin sister. She would’ve been kinda cute, I think, even at 50.

Only one way to find out, I guess.

Anyway, this post is far more “Tamsin uploads her brain-fluff” than earlier installments. This is just me woolgathering, rambling, letting my brain kinda spiral out on things, and I think that’s okay. I don’t always have a point to make, a moral to offer, or a tidy hat-trick wrap-up to perform for an appreciative audience.

Here, have a creepy picture of a beholder instead.

I hope you’re all doing well and moving into the Western new year from a place of security and safety. Further updates as events warrant.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2023/12/29/eye-of-the-beholder-t-7/

#beholder #dungeonsDragons #eyeOfTheBeholder #howToBeAGirl #maundering #operationPolymorph #theTwilightZone #thinkyThoughts

[Note: The following is a post imported from my old Mastodon account at queer.party. On rereading it recently, I realized this was one of my early approaches to thinking and writing about FFS, and kinda sorta belonged here, so… here it is.]

As journalist, humorist, and author Samantha Allen once rightly pointed out, a huge amount of “the transgender experience” is paperwork. The experience of filling out the intake paperwork for the surgeon I’m hoping to have redesign my face underscored this point to a distressing degree.

In particular, I found it interesting how much of the paperwork was intended to convey three ideas:

To recap: in filling out this paperwork, I’ve agreed to participate in the pathologization of what is, in my experience, emphatically not a medical condition at all, but a perfectly ordinary variation of human experience. In other words, I’ve agreed to pretend I believe and affirm the truth of something I know isn’t true, so that the people who pay (most of) my medical bills will agree to pay this one, too. Ain’t capitalism grand?

Of course, even that’s a simplification of a much more nuanced issue. Is being trans a mental health issue? Well, it wouldn’t be if we lived in a healthy culture, but goodness knows that’s not so. Is gender dysphoria a mental health disorder? Depends on who you ask, but I’d argue that being “healthy” in a sick society is no sign of true health, and being “sick” in a sick society may just mean you’re responding appropriately to your environmental conditions… but that’s another post.

What I will absolutely say is that being trans in this culture makes me feel all kinds of awful, and induces a wide range of mental distress which, blessedly, I’ve been able to hold at bay through the deployment of that favorite fake boogeyperson of pearl-clutching conservatives, GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE! Yes, that’s right, I’ve been treating my mental distress with judicious applications of estradiol, progesterone, and most recently—gasp!—GENDER-AFFIRMING SURGERY to divest myself of some excess baggage I’ve been toting around for 50 years.

[Editors’ note: Tamsin means her testicles, which have since been incinerated with the rest of the hospital’s medical waste by now. A fitting end, in our opinion. -Ed.]

Am I a hypocrite for filling out this paperwork affirming something I don’t believe to be true? Maybe. Here’s a question I find far more interesting: is it in any way meaningful to make moral judgements on “hypocrisy” in a system which rewards complicity with the essentials for survival, to say nothing of the comforts which make a life out of survival, and which penalizes honesty with denial of life-saving and life-enriching care?

To pare that down even more, I’m getting FFS as a way of reducing both psychological and social stress. So, let’s pivot. Maybe it’s a mental health issue after all: if not intrinsically, at least operationally. In this time, in this place, being seen and known as feminine reduces the pain, distress, and unhappiness I experience in a fundamentally transphobic society.

In this circumstance, accepting the pathologizing of my intrinsic identity, rather than locating the pathology where it justly belongs—within the society in which I’m trapped—may just be the opportunity cost for getting my revised character design into production.

Maybe I’ll feel bad about that later. If so, at least I can cry about it with a face that more closely resembles the one I see in my dreams than the one I currently see in the mirror.

Vanity? Indubitably. But that’s hardly the greatest of my sins.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2023/07/01/paperwork-and-pathology-t-185/

#howToBeTrans #operationPolymorph

Operation: Polymorph is less than a month out.

I’ve spent the past month-and-a-while working to ensure that my procedure(s) will be covered by my new insurance, as my old insurance will be cancelled four days before the surgery date. As of this week, though, that appears to be resolving in my favor. I’ve gotten labs done, filled out forms, booked an AirBNB, bought plane flights, reserved a car, made phone calls, gotten x-rays of my head, filled out different forms, sent and responded to emails, filled out even more forms, gotten two different CDs of images to the other side of the continent (the first one had the wrong files), and told my story to anyone who had the patience to listen to me rant about the whole thing. I’ve argued, I’ve complained, I’ve laughed, I’ve raged, I’ve politely explained to people that the extant state of affairs is unacceptable, and I’ve cried.

And now, the insurance situation is mostly resolved. With luck, I’ll have my prior authorization in place by the end of the week. I need to get a few more labs done, and to mail the second CD of my facial x-rays to the surgeon, but as of right now, I’m on track to complete all of my surgical prerequisites before their due dates. All of which means that, as of this moment, I’m on track to get my facial gender-affirming surgery less than four weeks from now.

All of this has been bringing up a whole lot of thoughts and feelings for me, many of which can be summarized as oh god oh god this is actually happening, but a few of which are a little more coherent:

• My usual guilt at availing myself of privileges I know so many other trans folks have suffered, even died, from the lack of having.
• My worry about being a burden on my beloved wife, who is not only supporting me through the lead-up to the procedure, but is accompanying me to California—a place she likes only slightly more than, say, the ninth ring of Hell—to take me to my surgery, then to care for me in the two weeks following.
• My fear that I’ve become one of those utterly tedious people who never stop talking about their health issues, their insurance woes, and how utterly unfair and hard everything is.

Underneath all the guilt and worry and fear, though, is a glimmering of what I must ruefully—but sincerely—identify as hope. A breathless, trembling, childlike hope.

You see, there’s this girl… and, um, she’s me. She always has been.

“Tamsin” isn’t an identity I chose, made up, or developed over time. It’s the name I chose for myself: for the girl and woman I always was, hidden and trapped inside the person I had to become to survive my childhood, my adolescence, and so much of my adulthood. Tamsin is me, the me I should’ve always been, the me I finally get to be. That’s what transition is, cis friends: it’s becoming more and more the person you truly are and always were. It’s the process of working your way out of the carapace of the identity that formed around you while you were too young, too scared, or too dissociated to actually be your whole, authentic, true self. It’s the act of sanding, chiseling, and carving away the accretions of years, even decades, of life in the wrong gender: societal expectations, familial obligations, internalized falsehoods, other people’s traumas.

And in some cases, that carving away can be kind of literal, as will be the case of Yours Truly. After all, at the end of all this philosophizing and self-analysis, there’s a plane flight, a car ride, and an exceptionally rare date with a man: one with a lovely smile, a breathtakingly advanced education, and a scalpel.[1] I’m going to ask that man, and his extremely well-trained staff, to help carve away something like 40 years of those accretions I mentioned, specifically the ones on and around my face. This isn’t meant to “make me a woman,” though, because I’m already a woman. It’s not even meant to “make me look like a woman,” because what does a woman look like? There are statistical commonalities within certain groups, but those are trends, not determinative physical traits. They don’t make one a woman, so this whole process doesn’t either.[2]

So, what’s it meant to do, then?

The short answer? Time travel.

Barring certain esoteric practices, it’s not possible for me to have been the girl she would’ve been, because that’s not how linear time works. However, through the miracles of gender-affirming treatment and cosmetic plastic surgery (along with patience, persistence, and a great deal of pain and discomfort), it’s possible to essentially roll the clock backwards temporarily, and make some changes while we’re back there. I’m asking my surgical team to carve away around four decades of the effects wrought on my facial structure by a testosterone-dominant puberty, and to shape what remains into their best-guess extrapolation of what I might look like in a timeline where I grew up as Tamsin, rather than the pumpkin shell Tamsin was kept in.

I’m doing all the things I can do to make this procedure successful, both administratively and healthwise. I’m getting my labs and exams, filling in my paperwork, foregoing my evening glasses of wine or weekend cocktails in favor of sparkling water with juice to flavor it, and in general being a good girl. I took care in choosing a prodigiously gifted surgeon,[3] and I’ve made all the arrangements for a quiet, restful recovery. I have, in short, done everything I can do, and it’s only moderately maddening that I still have no way of knowing if this will work. None of my preparations are a guarantee of success; there are too many moving parts, but more importantly, the conditions of success are too dependent on factors outside anyone’s control.

In fact, the definition of “success” in this scenario is a bit nebulous. I’ve frequently quoted Mae Dean’s gag from Real Life about her transition goals being “like, this? …except girl though,” and that’s as pithy a summation of what a success state looks like as I can imagine. I don’t want to look like a runway model, an actress, or a YouTuber, or an Instafluencer. I’m not trying to look younger, sexier, or more like a reification of hegemonic white femininity. I just want to look like the woman I would’ve grown up to be if I’d been able to be the girl I was. If that also results in me being cuter, hey, I’ll take it.

Therein lies both the hope and the fear. After all, there’s no guarantee of success, no assurance that the surgery will be successful in making me look like my own twin sister or the alternate-timeline version of myself… and here’s the kicker: even if it does, there’s still no guarantee it’ll alleviate the dysphoria I experience.

I mean, the odds are good that it’ll help, certainly—that’s the point of gender-affirming treatments—but for those of us who experience it, dysphoria can be notoriously difficult to overcome, manage, or even explain.

That’s the other piece of this puzzle, the bit I haven’t really talked about. I’ve talked about transition as the process of transcending the false self and becoming your true self. What I haven’t discussed is the experience of realizing that true self while still trapped in a body that matches all the expectations ascribed to the false self. I haven’t talked about that because, frankly, talking about dysphoria is often deeply unpleasant, especially when you’re in the midst of feeling it. Fortunately, I don’t have to come up with something new to say; instead, I can recycle something I wrote recently. I was talking with a cisgender female co-worker, who said she couldn’t imagine how awful dysphoria must be. I replied that I was glad—I wouldn’t want her to feel it, because it really is awful. Then I continued:

If you want to imagine it, though, pretend for a moment that you, exactly as you are right now, were to be suddenly metamorphosed into a stereotypically “masculine” body, and that everyone around you is suddenly acting not only as though this were totally normal, but as though you’ve always been this way. You might know in your heart of hearts that you’re actually a woman, not a man… but how would you prove it? How would you even explain it to someone? How would you move through the world as a woman, knowing you’re a woman, but being seen and interacted with as a man by everyone around you?

It’s an imperfect analogy: outside of fiction, no one is suddenly polymorphed into another body. Nonetheless, it was a sincere attempt to convey the sense of disjunction, misalignment, and flat-out wrongness that are the hallmarks of the dysphoria many trans people experience… even if, as Zinnia Jones‘ classic essay “That was dysphoria?” 8 signs and symptoms of indirect gender dysphoria suggests, we often experience it without realizing what it is we’re feeling.

In my teens and twenties, I would sometimes vent my frustration over being sexually objectified by making comments about wanting to disfigure myself, to mar my own face with an X-Acto knife. If I ruined my “pretty face,” I surmised, people would be less attracted to me. They wouldn’t respond to me as though my appearance, in conjunction with my presumed maleness, was an invitation to treat me as a willing object for their attentions and desires. I wouldn’t be a “pretty boy” anymore… and I wouldn’t feel cheap, dirty, and ashamed.

In retrospect, I wonder how much of that was a manifestation of dysphoria. To be clear, being objectified is awful for anyone of any gender… but there was also a component of my response to that treatment which was intrinsically gendered. Not only I was being objectified, which was gross all on its own, but I was being objectified as a male. Insult to injury. Salt to the wound. I was pretty, I was desired, I was coveted… but as a “boy,” as a “man.” And that drove me to contemplate disfiguring my own face.

Even as an idle comment, that’s rather telling. I would submit that, especially with that context, facial feminization surgery is by far the safer, healthier, happier option.

Less than four weeks to go. We’re cleared to taxi, and the runway stretches out before us. Still plenty of time to stop the plane, or for mechanical failure to keep us from takeoff, or any number of other issues to arise.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. No guarantees.

But I have hope.

Update as of 08 Dec 2023 16:30 EST: The prior authorization is in. Barring any bizarre SNAFUs or unforeseen circumstances, we’re on for the 4th.

Cleared to taxi, indeed.

[1] On reflection, I realize that sounds like the setup for a genuinely terrible-but-stylish suspense-thriller, something more Blumhouse than A24. Oh, well. Onward.

[2] “Ah,” murmur the chin-stroking Gentlemen of the Internet, believing they sense a flaw in my defenses, “but what is a woman?” Well, there are lots of ways to respond to that question, but whatever and whoever women are, one thing’s for certain, dudes: none of us need you to answer it for us.

[3] That he’s an in-network provider with both my former and current insurance companies was, I freely admit, also a contributing factor.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2023/12/08/09-clearance-to-taxi-t-27/

#howToBeAGirl #howToBeTrans #operationPolymorph #polymorph #thinkyThoughts