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.

Photo by Dhivakaran S on Pexels.com.

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.

Not like this, though. (Unless…?)
[IMAGE: Animated GIF of the TARDIS tumbling through an exciting series of CGI effects, from the opening credits of Doctor Who.]

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.

William Wallace Denslow‘s illustration for “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater,” from a 1901 edition of Mother Goose

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.

Photo by lil artsy on Pexels.com.

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