Selfie-Charmed Life

CW: Body stuff

As of today, it’s been just over a week since I had facial feminization surgery (FFS). Leading up to the procedure, I felt very isolated. Not many people undergo FFS in the first place and most of the people I spoke with that had undergone the procedure were far removed from the anxieties I was, and am still, feeling. Luckily, I did have the chance to talk to some people who had journaled in the weeks leading up to their procedure and shared their thoughts during that time. So now I’m writing this down so that maybe I can pay that forward to someone else.

FFS is an umbrella term for a number of procedures. Specifically, I underwent a forehead reduction, hairline advancement, brow bone reduction, mandibular angle reduction and chin reduction. My surgeon assured me that recovery would be significantly easier than vaginoplasty recovery, but that didn’t help my nerves. I was so anxious that I asked for an additional meeting before the procedure so we could touch base again just so I could feel a little more secure in my decision. It didn’t help. In the weeks leading up to my surgical date, I barely slept most nights and had a hard time focusing on anything during the day. 

The image of walking into the operating room stuck with me more than anything else. The wording of my pre-op instructions made it sound like I would have to walk into the OR instead of being wheeled in like my last procedure. There was something about that idea of having to open the door myself and place myself on the bed that was so much scarier than anything else. It would be like strapping myself into a Tower of Terror ride; a leap of faith that I had to take myself. For the record, I hate thrill rides for this exact reason. 

Even if everything went right, I might still not be happy with my outcomes and $20,000 USD for the worse. There is always the chance of a negative reaction to anesthesia or things healing poorly. Nevermind how some portion of the outcome is going to be up to the aesthetic preferences of the surgeon. With all that in mind, I still knew that I would regret it if I didn’t go through with the procedure.   

When the day came, my partner and I were up at 3am. I say we were up, but I was too nervous to sleep. All the same worries about outcomes, complications and the cost of the procedure kept knocking around in my head. I ended up going with the same surgeon that did my vaginoplasty a few years ago. He is still working out of the same hospital so it felt oddly familiar walking back into the same waiting room. My partner and I ended up sitting on the same bench where I had cried years ago. Sitting there, I clearly recalled how it felt asking my caretaker if she thought I was doing the right thing as if that was a question anyone could answer for me. This time, even if I didn’t know if I was making the right choice, I found comfort in knowing I wasn’t making a bad choice.

Everything else from there to the OR was routine. I winced as the anesthesiologist put the IV in my arm and tried to look unbothered when one of the nurses kept calling me a man. Mercifully, they wheeled my bed into the OR. I was a wreck of nerves as I passed the point of no return and then the lights went out. I woke up hours later in the recovery room. All that work researching the likelihood of waking up during surgery for nothing. 

My eyes were almost swollen shut, my head was wrapped in bandages from the brow up, my mouth was full of painful sutures, my threat was irritated from the breathing tube and to make it all worse I immediately threw up. The combo of existing irritation and vomiting was worse than anything from the actual surgery. My body was producing flem to try to soothe the irritation but that ended up making it difficult to breathe. Coughing to clear the flem irritated the sutures and…you probably get the picture.

Back at home, I spent the rest of the day in bed communicating with my partner via text messages because it hurt too much to talk. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror and my partner astutely covered up all the mirrors I was likely to walk past. An eyewitness told me that the bruising was extensive around my eyes and my face was so swollen that it looked like a perfect sphere. Eating anything but ice chips was painful. Did you know Pedialyte makes popsicles now? They rule. 

The surgery was on Friday and the following Monday morning my doctor removed the dressings and gave me a chin bra to wear for the next four weeks. It’s a weird looking compression wrap that goes under my chin to support it while it heals. According to him, my healing was going great but I still refused the mirror when he tried to show me what I looked like. 

Despite my best efforts, I did end up seeing my face eventually. Our brains have a very advanced neural network for recognizing our own faces. Between the still painful swelling, incision marks tracing my hairline and (still) black/bloodshot eyes, my brain popped an error message. Yes, I could touch my face and feel it. I knew I was looking at myself. Emotionally, it just didn’t click. I didn’t want it to. 

Physically healing has been fine for the most part. I can’t smile or laugh too much before my jaw hurts or eat solid food just yet, but every day is a big step forward. At this rate, my sutures and incisions should be healed in another week or two as I’m getting ready to head back to work.  

But even as things get better in the short-term, FFS is a long and complicated healing process. Things will continue to shift and settle for up to a year before I really know what my face will look like. I’m sure that at some stage of the healing process, I’m going to look in the mirror and feel disappointed before things shift again. 

Everyone I’ve talked to has told me that they’ve ultimately been happy with their results, but what if I’m in that small percentage that isn’t? What if those nerves never reconnect and large parts of my face will always be numb? Those are all possibilities right now. 

Way back in 2019, I wrote a piece for this blog about the Guilty Gear series and how it had played a big role in my own journey through life and gender. Guilty Gear is a franchise spotlights the character's growth and allows them to change based on the events of the storyline. I mean, just look at Ky’s transition into a thriving wifeguy and father.

Like the metal genre that inspired many of the game's motifs, Guilty Gear has always been pretty gay. The most recent installment in the series, Guilty Gear: StrIVe (get it because IV is 4), turns the volume up to 11. After the reintroductions of Testament and Bridget after a decade+ long absence, Strive has some of the best queer representation I’ve seen not just in video games but in media overall. 

(Spoiler and note: I’m going to use They/Them and She/Her to refer to Testament and Bridget respectively)

I didn’t expect that either of these characters would come back to the series. In prior installments, Testament was an antagonist turned brooding recluse. Prior to Strive, their story dealt mainly with their lingering guilt and their inability to forgive humanity for what they experienced during the crusades. Their only remaining purpose in life being to protect Dizzy who leaves on her own adventure at the end of the game. 

Fast-forward to their reintroduction and Testament is now at peace with themselves having adopted a more fluid sense of gender coupled as well as an androgynous presentation. With Dizzy gone and too much free time, they also picked up a pages long list of hobbies including streaming, failing to improve at art and building gunpla. There is even some subtext implying Testament and Johnny are more than friends. We just love to see an empty nested gay thriving.

This kind of stuff is what makes this series so special to me. Testament’s arc wasn’t just tacked on for representation points. It was earned through over two decades of storytelling. The focus on character development makes it easy to feel invested in these characters that aged and matured along with me since I picked up a copy of Guilty Gear XX.

High School was not an easy time for me. I was an effeminate kid and used to get regularly beaten up and called slurs by my peers. It got so bad that my parents pulled me out of public school and put me into a private all boys high school. During that same time, I also started to go through puberty (the first on anyway). I learned how to front machismo enough to get by in a school where the halls were permanently stained with axe body spray and the dress code required students keep short haircuts. Meanwhile, my body was changing in ways I didn’t want and didn’t understand. Some nights, I’d lay in bed imagining a different life where I had been born a girl and cry. In the morning, I’d put on a polo shirt (shirt and tie on Church days!) and go back to school.

There has never been a point in my life that I did not know I was trans. From the point I realized boys and girls were different, I knew I would rather be a girl but I resigned myself thinking that I had drawn an unfortunate lot in life. I wanted to make my parents happy and correctly assumed they would not accept a gay child. The 90's hadn't been a kind decade for trans representation either. Finding Bridget in Guilty Gear was a light bulb moment for me. Here was a story about a character pressured by her parents to present in a way she didn’t want while still striving to carve out her own form of masculinity. It wasn’t a 1:1 fit but her story got me thinking that maybe I too could find my own niche that would feel right for me. 

She was the first character I ever “mained” in a fighting game. I played her story modes over and over again trying to tease out every bit of her characterization. Through Bridget, I found and projected onto other otokonoko media, started learning about makeup/cosplay in secret and started eating a lot of soy thinking it would turn into estrogen in my body. 

Over the course of several years, I got interested in weight lifting which led to a desire to build the body to cosplay Gilgamesh from Fate. My connection to Bridget and other otokonoko characters waned as my body became more muscular but my interest in feminine things and expression never fully went away. At a fighting game tournament, my then girlfriend surprised me with a Bridget keychain knowing how much I still loved the character. That keychain has been in my wallet or hanging on my purse ever since.

It took many years, but I did it. Outwardly, I was an extremely attractive man. I looked in the mirror after hitting my goal weight but couldn't see that in myself. I had all the things I thought I wanted and the affirmation of colleagues, friends and family but it felt empty. Sure, I was fine in my day to day life, but I couldn’t envision a future for myself where I wasn’t either dead or a woman.

Fast forward and I’m now approaching my five year HRT anniversary. The endocrinologists I’ve worked with have told me that this is where most people stop seeing non-surgical changes. There have been some tough feelings coming to grips with that. My relationship with my body is better but remains complicated. One of the last things I expected over the last few days was for Bridget to come back into the Guilty Gear franchise.

Strive takes place 7 years after XX where Bridget last appeared meaning she’s probably around the same age I was when I decided to transition. Her story picks up with having the fame, wealth and affirmation she was looking for but feeling lost regardless. After soul-searching with Goldlewis (who I read as a gay man regretting denying his sexuality when he was younger) and Ky, she decides to accept herself as a woman. After having a feminine identity pushed onto her, she’s found her own sense of femininity on her own terms. I cried when I first watched her arcade ending. I cried again when I watched it a second time on stream. I’m crying while I’m writing this. 

It’s hard to express how it feels to have this character reappear at this junction in my life. In some ways it feels like meeting an old friend again and realizing you’re both girls now. On top of that, the way the voice actors, directors and writers handled this scene is incredibly nuanced and sensitive. It’s one of the last things I would have expected from a video game with such sparse dialogue, but this is Guilty Gear. 

Outside of a loud group of weirdos that don’t understand Japanese and insist Bridget being trans is a translation error, the reception I’ve seen has been gushingly positive. People with no prior interest in fighting games are thinking about learning Guilty Gear because they want to learn more about this character.

I still have a lot of feelings about this but I’m not sure how to best express them. I guess I’m just really happy to see my friend again and excited that a whole new generation of people get to meet them too.

Maybe she can be to some other people in need what she ended up being to me.

Yet another update in the series of posts where I start with something I watched or read and spin off into something else. First though, here is a short life update! Scheduling facial feminization surgery has been a nightmare and I’m increasingly worried I won’t be able to actually do the surgery within the year whereas before I thought it would be over and done by Fall. Meanwhile, I’m finally comfortable enough to start facial electrolysis again. The unfortunate collision of issues with FFS and having to grow out my beard have been a nightmare for my body image over the past week or so. I feel like shit all the time. 

That aside, one of my distractions from facial dysphoria was the anticipation and eventual release of the comic “I Think I Turned My Childhood Friend into a Girl.” I preordered this one on a binge of ordering a bunch of trans/sapphic comics without knowing what to expect out of it. 

The premise is fun. Two childhood friends have grown apart over the years. The more popular of the two (Mido) has a secret interest in cosmetics having learned from his three older sisters. One day, he asks his distanced friend (Hiura) if they would be interested in modeling for him as a break from his sisters. Turns out the childhood friend is extremely cute and starts presenting femme including wearing a girl’s uniform at school. Mido also realizes he’s attracted to Hiura. Shits mad cute yo 10/10 would recommend.

Past the popcorn romcom elements of the story though, I was caught off guard by how well the story captured just how complicated exploring gender can be. At different points in the volume, characters, including Hiura, switch between referring to Hiura as a guy or a girl. I’ll just use they/them while writing this. Even though every character in the story is supportive, Hiura doesn’t know how to answer direct questions about their identity. In one chapter, the enthusiastic support they receive from the girls at school quickly pushes Hiura to the limit of their social bandwidth.  

It’s a messy start to the story that felt pretty real to my own experience coming out, exploring presentation and trying to figure out who I wanted to be. Gender is a fuck and trying to parse which labels match who you want to be is a herculean task. Even in the best cases where people are immediately and emphatically supportive, the changes in how people treat you are still unmooring. Nevermind all the other things to figure out like mannerisms, fashion, etc. One of the scenes that stuck with me was Hiura finding themselves overwhelmed while shopping for makeup for the first time. I still get stressed in Ulta and I even know what everything is now. 

I can only imagine that translating this comic into English must have been an arduous task. In the English language things tend to be strictly categorical and often binary. I often have to fight for the singular they in my own professional writing over intrusive he/she. In Japanese, pronouns don’t exist in the same way and there are a number of gendered ways a person can refer to themselves that fall along a spectrum of masuline to feminine rather than discrete categories. For example, some women use the more masculine “boku” to refer to themselves or even the rougher “ore.” I imagine that trying to translate a more nebulous idea of gender into English isn’t the easiest task let alone when that is part of the focus of the story. In this case though, the challenges with translation felt like they complimented the themes of the story.

After I finished the volume, I preordered the second, read it again and then went looking online to see what other people might be saying about it. What I found was the dreaded discourse. Specifically, right-wing accounts had jumped on the translation alleging that the translator had injected “transness” into the story where the original work portrayed Hirua as a feminine boy. Looking further, I also found that the translator had read future volumes, spoken with queer people and gone above and beyond to best translate the story into the English language and gender conventions. 

Regardless, the reactionary anime fan engine had wound up in the most predictable way. There is this floating idea of a “literal translation” that perfectly reflects the original work in a new language. The outrage is, of course, selective and tends to revolve around progressive ideas that make reactionary readers uncomfortable (ex. Gay people exist). 

The very wonderful upcoming visual novel “I Became Gay from Translating My New Roommate's Short Story” directly addresses this in the demo. In the story, one of the main characters has an aside talking about how one of their friends/colleagues is being bashed online for translating a work where the protagonist comes to identify as trans. If I recall correctly, the line went something like “you could have the character directly address the reader saying ‘I am transgender’ and some people would still insist that the translator had added that in as part of their ‘agenda’.”

https://proflilyvn.itch.io/gft (go play the demo. It has an extensive discussion of deep dish pizza)

It’s easy enough to ignore the obvious reactionaries that are just looking for something to complain about. It’s harder to ignore the accounts with rainbow flags and pronouns in their bios doing the same. Cis gay communities are not immune to TERF talking points. It’s hard to forget the time one of an ex’s friends, himself an openly gay and effeminate man, soft-ball pitched to me that trans people should ‘just have their own thing’ instead of attending pride. I attended his wedding. It sucked but he wouldn’t even be able to get married if trans people hadn’t thrown bricks at cops. 

The curious piece to me is that, presumably, these people would be 100% ok with the story as long as the trans label was left out of it. All the same events could happen and everything would be cool as long as Hiura wasn’t referred to as a girl at any point. They could wear skirts, crush on a boy and everything else but calling themselves a girl is just too much. Obviously this is bullshit concern trolling. “No femmes” is a meme among cis gay men for a reason and there is a long history of derogating feminine presenting men, but I’m going to take it at face value and assume there are people who honestly believe this. 

Trans people present an existential threat to an essentialized idea of gender. The fact that I was assigned male at birth, but now have a vagina and use women’s restrooms is frightening to some people. It’s frightening because it means that they too could transition. Their sense of gender identity could change. Even if they have no desire to transition, the possibility is there. Worse, I’m much happier and maybe, just maybe, they too could be happier if they allowed themselves to step outside of the boxes they’ve put themselves in. It’s not the events of the story or actions of the characters they’re objecting to; They are having a visceral reaction to the transgender label. 

Trans people usually live in scary times but I’ve been losing sleep lately. The culture war around trans athletes and trans children is front and center in my life and it feels grim. Rest assured the advocates for banning drag shows and trans kids from participating in sports will not stop there. They want to make it illegal for trans people to exist in public. Post-SRS, I have a chronic medical need for supplementary hormones or else things will get pretty bad for me very quickly. I also fear that those hormones might become illegal in the foreseeable future. 

It seems like a jump to start from a queer comic to ending up here, but we live in scary times. As the culture war around my ability to exist seems to only be accelerating, I fear that many of the people who claim to be allies won’t be there. Even some so-called “leftist” influencers have been uncritically spitting TERF talking points to their large followings about banning drag in the presence of minors (TL note: drag is a proxy for openly gay people). Which is a point that only makes sense if you think being queer is inherently sexual and you also secretly, or not so secretly, have contempt for gay people. It’s a frighteningly lonely thought to sit with but here I am.

Turns out I was wrong in the last entry. It was actually my four-year HRT anniversary on the 4th of December. I’ve officially been doing this gender stuff long enough to forget how long I’ve been doing it. Even the google doc I write all these entries in is now over 50 pages long. Time has really flown. Pandemic time dilation has certainly helped that along. 

Like with most of these entries, something has been on my mind. For the past year or so, I stepped up to be a facilitator for the local trans support group that I mentioned in an earlier entry. It doesn’t feel like that long ago but, I’ve become one of the veteran members of the group and I’m actually a pretty good facilitator. Volunteering to help out has been one of the more fulfilling things I’ve done in the past few years. By some standards, I might even qualify as a trans elder now. Don’t worry, I have no intentions of putting out hot take think pieces anytime soon. 

The other day, a friend dropped something that has been lingering in the background noise of my brain since.

“Over the course of transition your problems start to become less about being trans and start being more about just being a person.”

I hadn’t thought of how to say it out loud, but that lined up with a lot of how I’ve been feeling. In another month and change, I’ll be attending my first wedding since coming out as trans. It’s exciting but has also been challenging. Women’s formal wear is a minefield of potential fopauxs on top of the already herculean task of finding a dress I like, looks good on me and is comfortable enough to wear for several hours. While trying on a potential winner, I had to ask my partner for help with the zipper. As she struggled to get the thing zipped, I started worrying that it wasn’t going to close because my chest is too broad. Had I been born cis, obviously it would be just close without any hassle. 

Eventually, it did close. The dress fit. It even made my already wonderful ass look even better. Then it dawned on me, it was supposed to be this much of a struggle to get in and out of this thing. If it were any looser, the strapless dress would slide right off. What I had thought was a trans-problem was actually just a person-problem. Anyone would struggle to get into and out of that dress. 

Almost all my recent problems that seem related to being trans are more about the common experience of being a person. The struggles with getting facial feminization are less about being trans and more about trying to navigate the labyrinthian nightmare of a for-profit healthcare system. Same thing with having to take supplemental estrogen for the rest of my life. I think of it kind of like having a chronic medical condition which is again just a person-problem and not really a trans-problem.

Person-problems can overlap with AFAB (assigned female at birth)-problems but they’re not exactly the same. For example, I don’t menstruate. I feel silly about it, but I find myself feeling a little jealous whenever my partner is complaining about cramps. It’s nonsense right? I know I would complain about them too. I know it would suck, but part of me wants to have that problem to complain about.

There are even moments where I get nostalgic for the time my body was convinced it was pregnant for about a week while I was starting progesterone. I even had to cancel a date because I was hunched over the toilet with cramps and nausea. It sucked and yet in that moment I had a taste of AFAB problems. Sometimes I consider going off progesterone to see if I could get back there when I resumed taking it again. Kinda like a tolerance break. 

Four years of pumping large amounts of estrogen into my body has done a lot, but there are limits to what it can do. Honestly, I was sad when I realized I had slipped up and confused my fourth HRT anniversary for the third. It meant I was that much closer to the five year point where most people stop seeing changes. What I got from the process is more than expected but less than hoped for. Even in the absolute dream scenario, I don’t know if I would be totally satisfied. There will always be a gap between where I am and where I want to be. It’s an asymptote extending infinitely forward. No matter how much time passes, I’ll never quite get there.

For the past day or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about the hypothetical button you can press that would instantly make you a cis person of whatever gender. Mostly, it is because I came across a plotline in a fantasy novel that made that hypothetical button a major plot element. In the setting, there is a curse that causes a person to appear as the opposite gender. It’s a relatively common fantasy trope. A character will put on a cursed item of gender bending and spends a portion of the story trying to remove it while other characters crack jokes at their expense. 

In this story however, the curse is used as a vehicle for talking about gender dysphoria in the setting. It first comes up as something that was placed on a woman by her mother who wanted a son and then a second time when a woman seeks out a way to inflict herself with the curse in order to transition. It was a welcome departure from how I’m used to seeing this trope used. As an aside. I would strongly recommend I’m in Love with the Villainess.

Back to the point of departure, I stopped and wondered what might happen if I were inflicted with such a curse. If it flips someone to the other end of a gender spectrum, I don’t know where I would end up. Would it turn me into a man, a woman or just not work at all? Yes, I am a woman but there are some things that I just can’t have. For instance, I don’t have baby pictures or childhood photos that I feel I can share. When other women ask me about growing up, I usually lie and say that I was a pretty intense tomboy. I almost fainted the first time a work friend asked me if I ever get weird food cravings when I’m on my period. 

Those things fill the space between the asymptote of my own transition and cis women. No matter how close I get, it feels like something is missing. It’s lonely. Most people seem to graduate from trans spaces when they get to this point and stop talking about being trans. 

If there was a magical button that would do my life over where everything is the same but I’m now a cis woman, would I even still want to press it with where I am now? Personally, I think I would smash it as hard as I could without a second thought. I also think I still wouldn’t be happy. AFAB problems are still problems after all. My envy is at a distance and the gender just seems greener on the other side of the fence. Even my *very* modest chest is an inconvenience about 99% of the time after all. I think I would even miss parts of myself that stem from my transition. 

Last week was the two year anniversary of my vaginoplasty. In the weeks leading up to the procedure, it was the only thing I could think about. I lost sleep wondering if I was making the right choice and dreading the possibility of complications. Now, I hardly ever think of it outside of the 15 minutes I spend dilating once a week. Sometimes I even forget it wasn’t always like this. It’s a welcome break from the cacophonous cycles of euphoria and dysphoria that used to take up most of my mental energy.

A friend of mine described transition as a rollercoaster of highs and lows that eventually evens out to a comfy ride where you just get to exist. To them, the goal of transition wasn’t to reach some constant state of gender euphoria but rather to get to a place where they didn’t constantly stress about gender.

When I had my vaginoplasty, I also consulted about facial feminization surgery (FFS). In the words of the surgeon that handled my bottom surgery, it’s very easy to get things covered below the belt. Once you move above that, it gets almost impossible to get things covered. After looking at my face, he also said he would feel guilty taking tens of thousands of dollars from me to do some minor work. So, I opted to just do a tracheal shave at the time of my bottom surgery and keep trying to convince myself that therapy would be a better route than additional FFS for improving my self-image.

For a time, it worked. I have a lot of privilege in regards to my appearance. I almost never get misgendered anymore. Even some things that used to bother me like my height, shoe size and small bust have become things I love about myself. Unfortunately, my face hasn’t been one of them. There are good days and bad days, but I’ve never come to a point where I could say that I love my face. Still, the financial cost of doing anything about it has kept me from getting too deep into the reeds about it. That was until about a week ago.

While looking through trans healthcare coverage options through my employers insurance, I came across a plan that promised to cover facial feminization. Taking the financial cost out of the equation, even if for just a few moments, opened a floodgate of facial dysphoria that I didn’t even know I had.

It’s been miserable. I started cropping my face out of photos before sharing them (something I’ve never done before). I can’t look at myself in mirrors without getting emotional. Even when I’m away from mirrors, I can feel my brow and forehead. I’ve been getting headaches from how focused I am on it. It’s constantly on my mind in a way that is making it even harder for my already attention-deficient brain to focus on anything else.

I have the privilege that I could afford to pay out of pocket if I decided to. However, having that option doesn’t make it any easier. I live with my partner now. I’d potentially be spending the cost of the down payment on a house on something that is considered cosmetic. As bad as I feel, I don’t know how I can justify that to myself. It feels selfish. Even if I feel better about myself, what if I go on feeling guilty about it?

Even beyond the financial logistics, there is another factor making things hard for me to get my head around. When I consulted about facial feminization surgery, the surgeon also said he felt that I didn’t need any work done. I didn’t believe him so he called in his assistant for a second opinion; she agreed. I get gendered correctly almost all the time now. Heck, people tell me I’m pretty, feminine and “pass.” Despite that, these feelings aren’t about passing. Personally, I don’t think passing is a worthwhile goal anymore. I just want to be happy and therapy alone hasn’t gotten me there yet.

So now I have some heavy decisions to make and the window for health care enrollment is closing fast. I’m not doing great. A lot of the same questions have been knocking against my noggin that came up around bottom surgery. What if I don’t like the result? What if there are complications? What if this doesn’t make me happy and I’m just always going to come back to this point? Am I just a leaking boat that is going to sink inevitably?

In terms of the story, F.K. is J.J’s childhood plushie. F.K. periodically texts J.J. to ineffectually console J.J. or comment on the events of the game. At first J.J’s relationship with F.K. is uncharacteristically hostile. She yells at her plushie for wasting her time and failing to understand how she is feeling. However, after J.J. gives into despair and is about to accept her death, F.K. that reminds her that she is loved, she is deserving and that she is needed. When J.J. accepts herself and resolves to keep living, the paramedic hands her a blood-soaked F.K. Clinging to the stuffed animal during her sucicide attempt is what slowed her bleeding enough to save her life.  

(Ok, I promised I wouldn’t cry)

F.K. is an unusual character in the narrative of the missing. Unlike every other character that sends you text messages, F.K. is the only one that doesn’t exist in the real world. In my last post, I mentioned how deliberate the game is at presenting every element of the dream as having some connection to J.J.’s psyche. Like the other two characters J.J. interacts with (“Emily” and the Hairshrieker), F.K. is an example of J.J. talking to herself. Whereas “Emily” represents J.J’s guilt at having attempted to take her own life and the Hairshrieker represents her anxiety and fears around femininity. It’s a little harder to place exactly what F.K. is supposed to be. It wasn’t until this most recent playthrough that a viewer gave me an answer that I liked; F.K. is J.J.’s coping skills. 

From the conversations you unlock for 100% clearing the game, we know that F.K. is a plush toy that J.J. has had since she was five years old. When asked if she even remembers what F.K. was originally, she says she doesn’t remember but that it doesn’t matter. F.K. is a jumbled bunch of different plush toys that has been torn and repaired over the course of many years. To me, that tracks with how a person develops, discards and acquires new coping skills in response to stress in their lives. Further, it makes sense that F.K. would be the image J.J.’s brain would pick to represent that part of her psyche. 

This interpretation also fits with the structure of the narrative. From the jump, J.J. is alone on an island, being pursued by a monster and trying to figure out why Emily is running away from her. In these moments, F.K. usually fails to say anything more than “are you ok?” to which J.J. gives a resounding “FUCK OFF!” These exchanges mirror the breakdown J.J. was having prior to her sucicide attempt. She had been outed at school as trasngender, her mother has found her secret via reading her diary and now she finds herself pressured to attend conversion therapy. Even the reassurance of the actual Emily fails to calm her down. It makes sense that F.K. has nothing of value to say in the game because J.J. doesn’t know how to cope with the situation she’s in.

The dynamic of F.K. changes once J.J. recovers her memories and realizes what is actually happening. In that short exchange, she listens to F.K. for the first time. From there, the whole script of the game is flipped as F.K. reframes the events we’ve seen not as a story about pain but as one about recovery and resilience. Having reconnected with her ability to cope, the climax of the game begins. 

TW: discussion of self-harm

It’s been a minute. A lot has happened but between SRS recovery and COVID-19, it doesn’t feel like that much time has passed. I’d like to go back to updating this again. 

Lately, I’ve been getting more into streaming and decided to revisit one of my favorite games, The Missing: J.J. Macfield and Island of Memories. It’s a gem that has lived rent free in my head since I first played it and revisiting it after having sorted more of my own queerness opened up some new interpretations in my mind. I’m also writing a longer video essay script, but there is one thing I wanted to get onto “paper” as quickly as possible; I want to talk about the Hairshreiker.

Quick spoiler for the game. The Missing follows the protagonist, J.J. Macfield, through an increasingly surrealist adventure across an island in pursuit of her “friend” aka girlfriend Emily. Along the way, she discovers she has the ability to recover from grievous bodily harm. What follows is a journey of setting yourself on fire, dismembering yourself to just a head and throwing your limbs around in order to solve puzzles and progress. As your progress, things become increasingly surreal culminating in the reveal that J.J. is a trans woman currently dying following a suicide attempt. With the exception of the text messages that outline the events leading up to her attempt to take her own life, everything in the world has a deeper symbolic meaning relating to her history and sense of self. 

At various points in the game, J.J. encounters the Hairshreker. As it gives chase, the player will need to run away and solve puzzles in order to escape to the next area. For as much as there is to say about this game and as much has already been said, I didn’t find much about the Hairshreiker while googling around. The consensus I did find proposes that the creature represents J.J.’s dysphoria or regret or having been assigned male at birth. I don’t disagree with that, but there are some specific things about the way the creature was designed speak heavily to me and so I’m gonna tell you about them!

So breaking it down, the first thing that jumps at me when I look at this design is that the creature is unmistakably feminine. When they first appear, they saunter and sashay before breaking into a run. They even playfully place a finger on their cheek and pop out their hips at points during the chase. Simply put, the Hairshreiker is hot, seductive and showcases an exaggerated notion of femininity. Despite this, the creature is also grotesque with alien movements, a shrill wailing voice and sickly white skin. These two dissonant facets of the design are in chorus rather than at odds and combine to create a creature that is both alien and alluring. It’s also worth pointing out that the wig J.J. is wearing in the image sent around her college is very similar to the Hairshrekier’s own hair. 

The second thing that comes to mind, is the image of the bright red box cutter contrasting against a ghostly white hand. It went over my head at first, but a friend pointed out to me that Japanese media has a strong association between box cutters and self-harm. Considering that the art gallery also has an image of J.J. self-harming with a box cutter despite it never occurring in the game, this choice must have been deliberate. The Hairshrieker is never seen without the box cutter in hand. Since the story of the game is a dream, we can only assume that the connection between these different forces represents something significant in J.J.’s mind. To her, this warped image of a feminine self is deeply connected to her suggested history of self-harm. 

I’ve talked on this blog before about how I knew I was trans from a young age. I also knew that my position as the oldest child and having been named after my father meant that my parents had big expectations for me. I knew that telling them my secret wouldn’t go over well so I lived for ~26 years knowing for every minute that I would have been happier having been born a girl. My parents took me to therapists trying to find out why I was so unhappy. My memory of that period is hazy, but most of those therapists must have had some idea what was really going on with me. One of them even tried to suggest to my mother, without outing me, that their child wanted to be someone else. My mother disagreed and we started seeing someone else soon after. 

    Knowing that my parents wouldn’t approve meant that I had to repress my desire to be a woman. Repression isn’t a passive process, it’s something you have to actively keep up with. Dysphoria and the desire to transition would creep up on me and I’d have to find new ways to choke it back down. As a kid, I remember visualizing my desire as an over-the-top feminine sentai monster that I would have to defeat. Other times, coping with dysphoria meant punishing myself for once again having such a selfish desire to be a woman. After all, how could I be the good kid my parents wanted me to be if I had this awful secret that I knew would hurt them?

   Years of repression warped my relationship with femininity into something monstrous. It was something that I had to actively avoid and it only got worse as I got older. Seeing a partner’s vanity table stressed me out. Even walking past cosmetic isles in stores was harrowing. I had created a monster out of myself. All those fantasies about striking it down never worked, it always came back. Deep down, I knew that if it caught up to me, then I would have to accept a truth about myself. In a sense, I would die. 

So how does this all come back together with The Missing? In a game where J.J. is able to recover from almost any injury, the Hairshrieker is one of the only things that can actually kill her. In her dream, being caught by the monstrous image of femininity that she created is one of the only real threats. As the game progresses, it becomes harder to escape. During the final escape sequence, there are even some cases where getting cut is unavoidable. The only way to progress and temporarily escape from J.J.’s monstrous sense of femininity is to give in to self-destruction. Sometimes those injuries feel like they’re helping you in the moment.  

That does change however when you reach the finale of the game. J.J. accepts herself, her desire to transition and that the Hairshrieker is a part of her. That acceptance gives her the power to finally put it to rest and find peace living as her authentic self. 

               It’s June 2020 and that means it is officially the gayest month of the year. I haven’t updated this page in a minute, but something has been kicking around in my head for the past few weeks. The discourse has been messy this season, as is tradition. For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on the term “bisexual lesbian.” Up until a few months ago, I had never heard of someone calling themselves a bisexual lesbian and I’ve since gone on a journey and learned some things about myself along the way.

               If you’ve followed this blog, you know that I struggled for a long time with identifying myself as a lesbian. For me, I felt like I defaulted into the label through my transition instead of going through a more intentional process. If I was identifying myself openly as a woman and interested in dating other women, then I just became a lesbian. However, to me lesbianism was more than just a sexuality. It was a social group with an extensive political history and a whole playbook of norms to learn and follow. I felt like an imposter and it kept me from dating for a long time after my ex-fiancée left over my transition. With time, effort and therapy, I was eventually able to accept that I was not appropriating something. When I finally hyped myself up enough to go to a lesbian mixer in DC, I realized I had been my own biggest gatekeeper. The lesbian community was my community and that history was something I am a part of. In retrospect, it was also rooted in my own excessive reverence for a label. I had put lesbianism so high on a pedestal that I myself could not reach it. 

               Back to the topic at hand, having allowed myself to pass through the gates of lesbianism eventually turned around into feeling like lesbianism was something that had to be guarded in the first place. When I first came across the term bisexual lesbian, I was confused and reactive. After all, how could someone be bisexual AND a lesbian? Do these people not know *our* history? How can someone even just call themselves a lesbian without bending over backward in introspection and crying in their therapists basement?. Moreover, I has enormously convinced myself that this new label was diluting the significance of my own identity.

               While my emotional reaction is something that I’m not proud of, it eventually abated into a more rational process. As a data scientist, one of the core rules is not to try to split continuous variables into neat categories. Doing so will always make things messy and distort the story you are trying to tell. It’s easy to sort sexuality into camps whether it’s the binary gay/straight,three-way of gay/straight/bi or however you want to divide it up. As I’ve learned more about myself and connected with other queers, I’ve come to like the kinsey scale for these kinds of things.

               The kinsey scale is built with the idea that sexuality is a spectrum that doesn’t fit as neatly into categories. With this perspective, the emergence of terms like bisexual lesbian make a lot of sense. Labels are all over the place in queer spaces and there is a pressure to find some combination that reflects your specific experience. The gay/straight/bi classifications fail these people who find themselves *almost* exclusively attracted to women with some attraction to men. If someone finds themselves somewhere in the shades of grey that naturally exist in the beautiful world of human biodiversity, there might be a need to introduce a new term into the vernacular to express that. 

               Even though labels never perfectly capture reality, they are perfectly capable to separating people. While I kept my own initial gatekeeping to myself, I’ve seen people in my social media circles post their own takes about how bisexual lesbians don’t exist or how they are harming “actual” lesbians. I’ve also seen already marginalized people hurt by that rhetoric leaving them feeling excluded and unwelcome by people they have common cause with. 

               Over the past few years, I have been getting into horror movies. The potential of the genre to be political, subversive and overtly queer keeps me wanting to pry my fingers open just a little bit whenever I get too scared. Which is why I was so excited when I first heard about the movie “Bit” making rounds and winning awards on the festival circuit. I was promised a film starring a trans actress playing a trans character in a movie about lesbian vampires. The trailer even promised that the film would talk about gender! When it showed up on streaming platforms recently, I added it to my list with a quickness. Spoiler synopsis in the next paragraph so skip that if you care.

               Laurel is a trans teenager that has just graduated high school in suburban Oregon. While she figures out her plans, she goes to spend the summer with her brother in LA. During her first night, she goes out to a club with her brother and falls in with a group of cool lesbians who happen to be vampires. After an awkward hookup with one of the women, she is bitten but the leader of the group, Duke, stops the feeding before she dies causing her to become a vampire. Laurel wakes up in a dumpster the next morning and goes through the awkward “why does the sun hurt” phase before reuniting with the cool lesbians. They offer her a choice to either take “the cure” or become one of them. She does and becomes a cool vampire lesbian. Along the way, she learns Duke’s backstory of having been enslaved by an elder vampire named “The Master” who she ultimately burned to death. She saved his heart though and eating it piece by piece allows her to access his powers including the same mind control that he used to enslave her. Laurel refuses to feed, which bothers the increasingly controlling Duke, until her out on control hunger causes her to nearly kill her brother feeding on him during an argument. She goes back to the group begging for “the cure” only to find it never existed. A fight between her and the other girls ultimately leads to The Master’s resurrection only for the girls to defeat him again. The film ends with Duke being thrown in vampire prison and Laurel poorly reassuring her now-turned brother that it’s going to be ok and she wants to make a world where everyone is a vampire. The girls, now without Duke, are shown eating pieces of The Master’s heart and the screen fades to black.

               It’s a tight low-budget genre film, but it was marketed as an intersectional feminist horror film. As a trans lesbian, the promise of representation was a main driver in me even spending the money to rent it. I was left wanting and increasingly frustrated the more I thought about the movie. First off, Luarel’s trans status is never directly mentioned. There are nods throughout like her having issues getting into a bar with a, I can only assume, pre-transition photo ID. Since the vampires have a rule about never turning a man into a vampire, she asks if that includes her and is quickly reassured that she is a woman. In the opening party scene, a drunk classmate comes up to her to tell her how brave he thinks she is. I picked up on all these nods, but I also could totally see someone watching this movie and completely missing that she’s trans. In an interview, the director stated that he wanted to make a genre movie with a trans character that didn’t focus on how trans they are. That’s all well and good, but you’re also pushing your movie as an example of trans representation without ever directly saying it. If you could easily make this character cis without changing the story, is it still meaningful representation? 

               Second, Laurel is a shitty person. She’s manipulative, selfish and ignores the people around her. One of the driving issues that leads to her confrontation with her brother is how she has been ignoring her family and friends since moving to LA. Her parents and brother are incredibly supportive of her transition. When she first starts acting strange, her mother doesn’t even judge her for potentially partying too hard. One of her friends, who is coded as a gay man, has a falling out with her because she has been ignoring his increasingly desperate attempts to get in touch with her. While going though his own issues, this rejection by his best friend causes him to attempt suicide. Her brother even admits that he moved to LA because her transition was smothering his ability to get his parents to acknowledge his own issues. Despite that he still does everything he can to support her. At the emotional climax of the film, Laurel deflects, denies and faces no consequences for it. As a trans women that lost friends and family to transition, I couldn’t help but feel like she is a brat.

                As a piece of feminism, this film also doesn’t really have much to say past a thin layer of “girl power.” One of the rules of the group is to never turn a man into a vampire. Duke even directly says she wants to turn all the women of the world into vampires so men will know how to be afraid. However, we later find out that Duke has been using the mind control powers she gets from eating her abuser’s heart to influence the choices of the other girls. There could be a message somewhere here about how white feminists can end up reproducing the patriarchy and imposing it on minority women. After all, we find out there never was a cure for vampirism. Duke just decided she wanted Laurel to be part of the group and that was it. If Laurel never had real agency in becoming a vampire then presumably the other women didn’t either. We could even assume that Duke has been “collecting” women of color for her proto-feminist commune in the pursuit of token representation. This would twist would cast Duke as the villain of the film and actually had something to say about intersectional feminism, bodily autonomy and rape culture. However, the movie closes with the other women also eating The Master’s heart and gaining his powers. Laurel’s hollow reassurance to her brother feels empty because she has also violated his bodily autonomy by turning him and perpetuated the cycle. That ending diffuses any charitable reading of this film’s feminist themes despite the director’s insistence that he is a good feminist. 

               What I find so frustrating is how this movie could have so easily been better. In the back third, Laurel could have had to confront how she has used her trauma and transition to manipulate the people around her. This could mirror Duke’s own manipulation of other women to protect herself from the trauma of having been made a bride of The Master. Even without the life of her brother hanging in the balance, this would have given the ending confrontation between Laurel and Duke actual pathos and a feminist theme. It also would have meant that The Master would never need to be resurrected to be a final boss. The final boss was a gaslighting white “feminist” who had been there the whole time. Instead, Laurel goes on to further victimize her brother and become her own kind of villain. If this movie does get a sequel, I don’t know if I want to see it.

               I’m not sure if I can really recommend this movie. After reading an interview with director, himself a straight cis white man, I feel even worse about it. He simultaneously seems to want praise for having cast a trans actor while making a movie where her transness is a minor point. This whole movie could easily have been redone with a cis lead or even heck an entirely straight cast. I’ve written before about how gender and sexuality are inherently political, but he seems to be either unwilling or unable to grapple with that. The result is a movie that feels at odds with itself. Even the director has said in interviews that he was very concerned about “being a guest in the house” and seems preoccupied with staying in his lane at the cost of the film. That restraint does a disservice to the film and produced a missed opportunity to create something actually feminist, actually intersectional and actually interesting. 

Highlights from the interview I mentioned.

 https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/bit-movie-the-story-behind-brad-elmores-vampire-film.html

               There is a character in the Fate/ franchise I’ve been thinking about lately. Astolfo is a recent entry in a long line of characters that have all the aesthetics of a femme enby or trans woman while keeping the character’s gender ambiguous. The appeal to queers like myself is obvious, but I noticed a certain subset of political reactionaries (read: alt-right) also gravitating to these characters. At first, I was confused so I asked some friends what they thought the appeal might be and I heard some interesting responses. Despite how the character looks, their gender is never confirmed. Consequently, Astolfo’s character allows people to play with queerness in a purely aesthetic sense, sometimes for shock value, without addressing the underlying politics of queer life. It’s not even a new thing. I’ve also become aware of a small sub-culture of “femboys” who seem to also cross into the territory of queer aesthetics while remaining ambivalent or even hostile to the politics of queer life.

               Suffice to say that queer life is inherently political. The first Pride was a riot against police disruption of queer spaces. In a world where the dominant message is that trans is worse than cis, just having self-confidence is a revolutionary action. Heck, even just living a normal life and having a slow morning in my PJs is political.However, life in late capitalism has also meant that queerness has also become a commodity. One of the most visible cases I can think of is the case of drag. My first exposure to drag, as I expect is true for many, was through the film Paris is Burning. The movie is a documentary covering the Ball scene in New York during the 1980’s. The film focuses almost exclusively on people of color dealing with the weight of poverty, racism, sexism and homophobia while trying to live their lives with dignity. It’s a beautiful film that I still think about regularly. 

                The community that created culture trends that persist to this day was inherently political. There is an extended sequence in the film discussing the idea of “realness” and how part of the Balls was to show how a person could carry themselves with dignity even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Performers would walk the runway dressed as doctors, lawyers, etc to express the message that they are capable of living that life. It’s hard to talk about drag in the year 2020 without also talking about Ru Paul and Drag Race. The show is extremely popular, and I first found out about it through my straight ex-fiancée. The show managed to take the culture of the New York Ball scene and sanitize it so it would be marketable to a straight audience. Politics aside from milquetoast centrism are usually ignored or only given lip service to avoid making straight people uncomfortable. 

              I watched a few seasons and became a fan of some of the queens but stopped watching after season 10. In this season, one queen made her performance overtly political. The Vixen steered conversations to address intersectional issues like racism in the gay community. It ruled. Her reward for it was being edited to be the villain in scenes and the discourse I saw around the show, especially from straight people I knew, turned against her. For having introduced politics and especially for having drawn attention to how an artform pioneered my queer POCs was being consumed by an audience of largely straight cis women, she was vilified.

               Drag Race is a cultural force that speaks to how queerness as an aesthetic can be packaged in a way that appeals to a straight audience. Another example you don’t have to look very far on twitter to find is “yass queen feminism.” This brand of feminism borrows the aesthetics of queerness while ignoring the intersections of racism and sexism to focus on the wants of straight white women first and foremost. “Yass” is a phrase I associate heavily with Ball culture but yass queen feminism doesn’t seem to care much about addressing the intersectional issues that produced it. It’s the kind of feminism that my sister seems to ascribe to. She would go to Pride and party with her friends to look like a good ally. However, when I came out as trans she hung up the phone on me. We haven’t spoken for almost three years now. I’m sure she believes that she is a good ally. She says the right things and goes to Pride, but she didn’t hesitate when it came time to choose between ally-ship and her comfort.

It started a few weeks ago. A friend had invited me to come out to her transgender discussion group. I was nervous and still in noticeable discomfort following SRS, but I jumped on the metro and made me way to the group. Even though there were queers people from all areas of the trans spectrum present, I was the only trans woman post-op with all their documents updated. As we broke into smaller groups for more focused discussion, I also noticed how the challenges facing many of the people there were very different compared to what I deal with in my daily life. There was a Morgan that was stressed about coming out, updated documents, etc, but there is a lot of emotional distance between her and the person writing this right now. Even though I was able to give advice and reassurance having gone through and overcome many of these challenges, I didn’t feel like anyone there was able to empathize with my situation enough to do the same.

It’s something I’ve been struggling with. Yes, I am transgender. However, I don’t feel very trans lately. One of the hosts on a podcast I like, Genderfluids, talked about how trans memes helped her connect to a sense of community. Jokes about stuff like pickles, titty skittles, computer science degrees, etc are goofy but can help trans women empathize with each other and feel less alone through the awkwardness of puberty. Since SRS, I don’t take spironolactone so salty foods like pickles have lost the appeal. I do injections instead of pills now and my degrees are in psychology. I do look good in chokers and thigh highs, but that’s besides the point. There aren’t even that many good memes about the post-SRS experience because healing is so unique to the person. Even the other women that I’ve talked to that worked with the same surgeon have all had drastically different experiences.

Not to dwell on memes, the media that does deal with  trans life tends to focus on the early phases on transition. There any abundance of stories about coming out or coming to terms, but not that many about what follows. The only two cases I can think of that I’ve come across that dealt with someone late in the process are the third volume of Our Dreams at Dusk and The Bride Was a Boy. The first is a transmasc narrative about being outted and the second ends with the author “going stealth” and not speaking about her transition to even her husband’s family. As this blog is starting to reflect, media is a big part of how I see myself and I just don’t see myself in these works I used to enjoy so much. I’ve tried to read myself into lesbian literature, but it doesn’t click like those early trans stories did. I’m getting better about it, but part of me still struggles to trust the validity of my connection to lesbian culture. Even trying to find porn that reflects my experience is hard for several reasons I don’t need to get into.

     Either dating sucks or I suck at dating. It’s more than likely a mix of both, but yeah. Before transitioning, I avoided it. My partners usually had to ask me out and I would struggle with vulnerability until the relationship died. I was afraid that if I was ever honest with someone, I would have to disclose how badly I wanted to be a girl. Even though it made me uncomfortable, dating as a straight boy was like bowling with the bumpers up. Even though I was bad and could still miss the pins when asking someone out (oh dear, was I terrible at asking people out when I did try), there was a cultural script to follow. Eventually, I even got engaged to a woman that knew about my intention to transition and was supportive.

     Transitioning in the context of a relationship was a different kind of bumpers. Because I was still attracted to my partner, I didn’t have to worry as much about labels or how my transition might be impacting my sexuality. Eventually, she left. Part of processing that breakup was going through the inventory of things we shared and what I wanted to keep as part of myself. In the process of going through the “us” of the relationship, I realized how much the “me” had really changed. I started this relationship as a man and was now presenting myself and (most of the time) being treated as a woman. I was now a woman that is attracted to women.

     It took a lot of time and a lot of therapy for me to ultimately feel like I was deserving of calling myself a lesbian. My sexuality felt secondary to my gender identity and I see lesbianism as more than a sexuality orientation. It’s a subculture with rules, history, terminology, and more. I was also joining the party at the ripe age of 30 so the women in my dating pool would know all these things already. They would have all the labels figured out so I felt like I had to figure out how to label myself! I approached the issue like an academic and read a lot of books on lesbianism. While I was trying to explain all of this to my therapist, herself a 60-something year old lesbian, she stopped me with something to the effect of “Morgan, you’re overthinking this. You’re a lesbian. It’s not that complicated.”

     With that vote of confidence, I started dating again and going to local lesbian events around DC. At first, I was terrified that my status as a trans women would alienate me, but I noticed other trans women around the room at the lesbian happy hour and realized it was just a bunch of women that dig other women hanging out on a rooftop in Dupont Circle. The internet had lied to me and I had a great time. Dating followed a similar pattern. I made sure to put my transness front and center on my Ok Cupid profile, but I was still terrified that I was going to be rejected because of it. Instead, the women I dated just treated me like another woman. My transition has only ever comes up when I’m talking to other trans people and it’s only been a positive there. Again, the internet lied to me.

     Another thing that I’ve come to realize, that is embarrassingly obvious in hindsight, is that the labels I stressed so much about aren’t that big of a deal. Yes, it’s fun to talk about who is a top or bottom, but things aren’t quite so clear. I’ve even been asked out by people that I assumed were straight. Strict labels don’t really work so well in queer spaces. I said that hetero dating felt like bowling with the bumpers up and now things feel way more complicated. It’s a good thing though. Taking down the bumpers opens opportunities for conversations that might not have happened otherwise. Stuff like, relative position preferences, what feels good, who is paying for dinner, etc. become essential parts of a relationship early on. 

     Unfortunately, there is a downside. Having these conversations also means that it’s hard not to get invested with people. It’s something I haven’t been mindful of. If things fizzle out or we just end up being friends, I tend to get burned out. Consequently, I tend to date in waves and then take a break when things don’t work out. It’s been a lot of learning about myself as a lesbian and I’ve met a lot of cool people even if I haven’t found another partner yet. It’s all a process.

               Awhile back, a podcast I like did a series of episodes on the financial costs of being queer.  Whether it’s issues with fertility, employment discrimination or transition expenses, capitalism cuts at all forms of queer life in different ways. Even in the past week, I’ve spent hours on the phone going back and forth between my insurance company and the hospital about medical bills relating to errors in how they processed my reassignment surgery. It was great to get check my mail before heading out on New Year’s Eve to find a surprise bill for $2,000 and be unable to get a clear answer about whether I actually owed that money. That totally didn’t ruin my evening. Even now, I’ve been given the runaround, told the wrong things and had to learn my benefits better than my insurance company. All along the way, I keep thinking about how none of this would be happening if I were cis or didn’t feel the intense genital dysphoria that I did. These kinds of costs are obvious and can be neatly summarized. However, I’ve been thinking about the different kinds of costs I’ve paid during my transition that can’t be so easily quantified.

               My current job is supposed to either end or be extended in October. As of now, it looks like my contract will likely be extended. However, it still leaves me at a weird impasse. I could stay in the DC area or I could leave. If I stay, I could either look into buying a condo or continue to hemorrhage money renting in one of the most expensive areas in the country. Both options have very clear financial costs but also opportunity costs. Buying means committing to stay in the DC area even though my job sometimes feels insecure. Compounding that, working adjacent to the federal government means I have the constant stress that an executive order might come down the pipe that would prohibit trans people from working in the government. It seems farfetched, but we live in hell. Since my healthcare and ability to afford HRT is tied to my employment that adds yet another anxiety so I keep more money in savings than most of my cishet peers in anticipation that something might happen. The precarity of the situation makes it hard to make bigger financial decisions because I feel like I need to always be building a financial bulwark against looming disaster instead of laying a foundation for bigger things in my future.

            It’s been about two months since SRS and I’m generally back to fully normal functioning. I’m back in the gym, but trying to take it easy. Dialation has gotten a little less comfortable, but still bearable, as things tighten down there. As of today, I’m also approved to have sex again, although I expect that relearning how to orgasm will be a whole different adventure. Physically, things are going alright despite some ongoing discomfort and a lingering regret that I didn’t buy stock in kotex before starting this process. Emotionally though, it’s been a different story.

               About a month ago, I posted a blog here about the loneliness that set in during recovery. As I’ve been able to get back into the gym, have friends visit and even go on some dates, that has gotten better. As the loneliness has receded however, an unexpected tide of dysphoria has risen to take its place. If I wasn’t prepared for post-op depression, I certainly wasn’t ready for dysphoria to rush back into my life especially after the extreme euphoria I had following SRS. It has certainly been hitting different though and I’ve feeling a whole new flavor of bad vibes lately.

               In my field, there is a term called precarious masculinity. Because much of what comprises manhood is cultural instead of biological (like having boobs and stuff), masculinity has to be maintained through performance. In the laboratory, men who find themselves emasculated are more likely to grunt more in the gym, respond to provocations with threats, etc. The core idea is that masculinity is something you do more so than something a person just *is*. The model breaks down under a queer theory lens, but it works well enough here. I used to have a lot of anxiety around what I perceived as my own precarious femininity. When I was at my lowest in self-image, I’d worry that my sense of womanhood could be easily taken from or denied to me. I’d worry about how my urine sounded in the bathroom and whether that could out me as having a penis. I’d worry about my voice during meetings. I’d even worry about my shoe size as something that could get me clocked.

               As I became more secure with myself, and even before SRS, that felt like less of a thing. My voice is a woman’s voice and my shoe size is a woman’s shoe size because I am a woman. Even the rare moment where I get misgendered doesn’t make me sad over being stripped of my femininity so much as I get angry over the lack of acknowledgement of what feels self-evident to me (my boobs are right here! They’re small, but they are perky and sensitivity and great!!!). It’s still not a great feeling, but it’s coming from a place of security with myself instead of fear that something could be taken from me. However, that change has also impacted the way I experience dysphoria. If I was afraid that something could be taken from me before, now I’m feeling dysphoria around something more akin to impostor syndrome.

               It even took me awhile to figure out that the general bad vibes I’d been feeling were a new way dysphoria was getting to me. It’s new, terrible, and hit me very bad this past weekend while I was at Magfest. I have a complicated relationship with cosplay that I’ve talked about here before. The last time I tried to do it, I left feeling awful about my body even though my friends told me I looked great. To date, I don’t look at the photos from that event and felt sick when I last saw them. Leading up to Magfest, I thought about cosplaying but the combination of post-op depression and the reality of post-op limitations kept me from following through. The convention was full of, presumably cis, women cosplaying, having fun and connecting through their shared hobby. I felt like my stomach was turning whenever I was walking around the convention alone. In the past, I would have been bracing to be misgendered and wondering if the people around me were thinking of me as a woman. This time, I felt both secure in my womanhood and also like an impostor in that space.

               It’s not like I haven’t had a longstanding interest in cosplay. I used to read 4chan’s cosplay board and have had an interest in sewing and makeup since my childhood. However, I had to tuck that away. Letting it show would end up with my parents and friends raising eyebrows at best and calling me some colorful slurs at worst. Being around younger women that are so much better this than I am and able connect with each other through their hobby had me feeling like an alien. When I tried to explain my reaction to a friend over lunch, he tried to reassure me that I would eventually get there if I worked on developing those skills. As much as I appreciate his reassurance, the loss of time is a big part of the issue. I’m already 30 and don’t even know how to style a wig or work a sewing machine. Even if I were to really commit, I’d still be years behind and feeling like an unwelcome guest in a space. Had my childhood been different, I think I would have loved to be there with other women. Instead, I feel like an outsider and the dissonance between what I want and my reality hurts me deeply. It’s not that I don’t trust the integrity of my identity as a woman, I don’t trust my ability to connect with cis women as a woman and I so desperately want that.

     It’s been a minute, but I’ve had a couple things on my mind lately. Months ago, I read the third volume of a series that I wrote about previously. The fourth and final volume should show up later today, but I’ve been thinking about this one in particular again and I want to use it as a springboard to talk about some other stuff I’ve been dealing with lately. Before the year is over, I want to talk about emotional labor.

     Our Dreams at Dusk is a series that centers around a young queer teenager as he comes out and learns to accept himself, but what I want to talk about centers on another character that was in the background for the previous two volumes. Utsumi is an older man that works in the drop-in center. While hosting a workshop one day, a woman arrives with her daughter at calls Utsumi by a woman’s name. When he responds with confusion, the woman says they went to high school together which Utsuki confirms. That former classmate, Koyama, stays a character throughout the volume as she attempts to “reconnect” with her former volleyball teammate. While arguably well-intentioned, she exclusively deadnames him, uses she/her pronouns to refer to him, ignores correction and even lets it slip that she’s quite homophobic. 

     This pattern goes on and ultimately culminates in a confrontation where Koyama insists that Utsuki gives a talk about gender identity at her daughter’s school. After all, if Utsuki doesn’t teach people about himself how could they ever understand? It’s even for the sake of the children! However, Utsuki finally lets it out and tells her know through tears that he doesn’t need her understanding and least of all her pity. It’s a moment where I had to put the book down.

      Throughout the story, we don’t get much insight into Utsuki’s reaction in terms of perspective or dialogue, but the art does heavy lifting. His posture gets lower throughout the volume as having to make space for this woman wears him down. In one passage he affirms that he doesn’t think she’s a bad person, he sees her as misinformed and even specifically tells the other members of the drop-in house not to confront her. The lack of perspective that the reader gets feels like such an important decision by the writer. Utsuki must bottle up his own reactions in order to get through his daily life. We don’t get to see his pain as a reader because he can’t show it. It’s something he directly states later in the volume. It’s heartbreaking and relatable.

     This is also one of the few pieces of media I’ve come across that directly centers a trans person that is“transitioned.” It’s much easier to find stories about people questioning or early in the process, but Utsuki lives as a man, passes as a man and doesn’t center his transness in his daily life. As I’m now two years and one neo-vagina into the medicalization of my own process, it’s gotten harder to relate to those stories in the same way. Instead, I’ve gotten more used to having to do what Utsuki does. I sit with my discomfort when coworkers misgender celebrities or when my family members call me John. It wears at me, but I don’t have the energy to just be angry all the time. I have to let some things slide or else I wouldn’t be able to go through my daily life.

     It’s been hard to keep doing that in the past couple of months. I wrote before about my experience leading up to SRS and how my aunts were questioning my choices and making sure I was aware of how much my choices were upsetting my mother. I remember one specific case where a friend of mine and I drove up to Baltimore to visit a bookstore and see a concert. My aunt had asked to talk, so I called her back thinking it would be a short conversation while my friend went browsing. Instead, I found myself trying to defend the integrity of my womanhood against her assertions that I couldn’t be trans because she had known me my whole life. Over and over, she would tell me that she didn’t understand and that I had to help her. Eventually, I was so frustrated that I found myself crying on a street corner outside a café in Baltimore while trying not to let that slip over the phone. After we ended the conversation, I ended up having to do a Q&A session with her so that she could hopefully understand my situation better. I don’t think my aunt is a bad person or means harm, but she hurt me deeply and I had to sit their and take it while trying to explain queer 101 to her. Lesson 1: Yes, I was assigned male at birth. Yes, I am a woman. Yes, I am a lesbian. 

     All this has been especially relevant during the holidays. Both sides of my extended family center around Chicago and I made the choice not to attend again this year. Unlike last year, I was invited, but I don’t want to put myself in an environment where I’m going to have to answer questions for the benefit of other people. Especially, I don’t want to be around my sister. When I came out to her three years ago, she hung up the phone on me and blocked me on all social media. Even as things have started getting better with the rest of my family, she refuses to interact with me or acknowledge that we’re related. That reality has made holiday gift giving complicated. When I told my parents not to expect that I’d be sending a gift for her this yeah, they told me to give her time and try to be more understanding. Once again, the expectation was that I needed to be kind and understanding while ignoring my own needs for affirmation and validation. In the eyes of my family, their comfort is more important than my dignity. If I get angry and disrupt their comfort, it would threaten the tenuous relationship we have. There are no stakes for them in these exchanges and I’m expected to advocate for myself and answer invasive questions about my sexuality and gender identity before being judged.

           It’s been about three weeks since my surgery and I’m going back to work tomorrow and before my second post-op appointment in the afternoon. Looking back on my last post here, it’s unreal to think about how different things are compared to just two weeks ago. Things have continued to get better albeit the day-to-day strides aren’t quite as big anymore. I’m able to walk round normally, drive, cook, theoretically clean and all that. Dilation is a pain mostly in terms of scheduling but hasn’t been nearly the agonizing experience the internet led me to believe it would be. Outside of one minor fright where I tore a stitch in my outer labia during dilation and had a minor panic attack over finding blood in my pad, things are going well physically. Even then, my doctor told me that was likely to happen and we’ll see what he says tomorrow. I’m endlessly thankful for my friends that have let me talk about my gross body stuff and especially Kara for reminding me that I’m out of the woods for anything going catastrophically wrong and helping me calm down at a dark moment. However, I still panic now and then that my clitoris fell off or something because bodies are weird. In terms of pain, I’m realizing that it’s already 9am and I haven’t taken any pain killers. It’s uncomfortable, but totally manageable without medication.

           Physically, things are going about as well as could be expected if not better. Prior to surgery, I was the most worried about having a difficult physical recovery so that’s been a relief. However, I was so focused on pain that I didn’t stop and think about the social and emotionally dynamics of my recovery. In The Bride Was a Boy, the author doesn’t spend much time talking about srs recovery. It’s barely a full page. She says she spent most of her time playing games and watching anime and breaks down crying over how lonely she was after reconnecting with her partner. I thought it was oddly brief when I first read it, but now I understand. As my caretaker left, I was excited to have all this time to relax and play video games, watch TV and eat snacks. After a few days, I was tired of games, the snacks had been eaten and the loneliness started to set in. After a few more days, it became unbearable.

           It’s not like I’ve been totally alone. I have some wonderful people that would text me good morning and text back and forth with me throughout the day. Heck, my mom has even been calling to ask about my recovery. It’s the most openly we’ve been able to talk about my transition and some of the first times I’ve heard her genuinely laugh in years. Even though I had tried to line up visits with people from around the country and a lot of people have told me they would like to visit, plans get cancelled without anyone at fault. Phone calls and texting only go so far and outside of some short visits, I’ve been mostly stuck in my apartment alone for three weeks. Having all this time to sit and stew while hearing about other people’s holidays with partners and family made things much worse. Spending Thanksgiving alone felt like a bed I made for myself and I cried over how undesirable I feel. I’ve been crying a lot.

           A friend of mine visited me on my third night in the hospital. As soon as my caretaker left the room, there was a pause in our conversation and she whispered to me “So...how does it feel?” At the time, I was under heavy drugs and couldn’t really give a solid answer. However, a few other people have asked me different flavors of the same question. I wanted really get down to unpacking my experience in the hospital and first days at home both to answer that question without protective irony and to maybe put another resource out there for anyone also contemplating a vaginoplasty.

           As I said in my prior entries, I was not sleeping well in the days leading up to my surgery and was a wreck of anxiety. I picked up my caregiver on Monday evening from the airport and took the next day off work. Prior to surgery, my surgeon requested that I go on a clear liquid diet and bowel cleanse. Before I drank the bottle of magnesium citrate that would glue me to the toilet for the rest of the day, I cried to my caregiver about my cold feet. My aunts (on my mom’s side) and my mom had been sending me passive aggressive texts about how much I was hurting my mother and how worried they were that I would have regrets. Their manipulations worked and I was terrified that I was making the wrong choice. Part of me wanted to run away. However, after I drank that awful lemony liquid, I couldn’t run very far from the bathroom. I was committed.

           Early the next morning, my caregiver and I walked to the train station. Along the way, I kept ruminating on the sinking feeling in my gut and how scarred I was of what the next few days would bring. After we got to the hospital and I got checked in, she pulled my head onto her shoulder and told me it was ok to be nervous and even more ok the cry. Right there, all the tears I had been choking down came pouring out as we sat in the waiting room. Even though her daughter had broken our engagement, she was still treating me like her family and I felt like I had a mother for the first time in years. Eventually, they called my name and I went up to the prep room. After signing some forms, talking to doctors and fainting after they put an epidural catheter in my back, they wheeled me off to the OR. I don’t remember much past that. I was joking with the surgical team to help with my anxiety and then I woke up a few hours later.

           I don’t even remember being moved from the recovery room to my own private room. I would later find out that I fainted again when the staff moved me to the hospital bed. As they nurses were scrambling to get me stable, they started referring to me with he/him pronouns. Apparently, I met this with something to the effect of “I just cut my dick off, can you please respect me enough to call me a woman.” Go low-blood pressure Morgan! As I came back to reality, there was a sign on my door saying “I identify as female” that my caregiver had made and a note of my diagnostic board requesting that anyone use she/her to refer to me. Tragically, this didn’t stop the misgendering by some of the staff. Being stuck in a hospital bed for days and dependent on someone that is deliberately disrespecting you like that is an awful experience that I would not wish on anyone. Even a week later, it still hurts and has undermined a lot of my confidence especially in my face. Beyond that, I mostly just slept and ate for the rest of the first day.

           The second and third days were difficult. I was stuck in a bed and unable to move or feel my right leg thanks to the epidural having been placed off-center. I shitposted on twitter to pass the time and watched a lot of dateline mysteries on my hospital TV in between naps. My lower body was mostly one big bruise which made rolling over or even sitting up incredibly painful. Sleeping was hard and the tight surgical dressing around my thighs and lower abdomen was itchy at first and gradually became saturated in my blood. I had to sit there and wait 48 hours until my surgeon could remove it so by the second night I was sitting in a heavy wet medical diaper saturated in my own fluids. It was disgusting and I felt sick every time I moved. The relief I felt when it came off was short-lived because that was also the first time I would see my vagina. It just looked like a big bloody sore where my penis had been. It was swollen and covered in dried blood. I didn’t even call it my vagina during my stay in the hospital. I kept referring to it as “the surgical site.” When my surgeon left after the visit, I cried alone in my room.

           The next major step before being discharged was walking again. On the third day, a doctor removed my epidural and the nurses helped me up once I had feeling in my legs. The pain was excruciating, but I wanted to be out of that hospital so bad. I managed to waddle past the nurse’s station outside my room before my blood pressure crashed (for those of you keeping score, this makes three times) and I was rushed back to my room. I’m a very fit person with a low resting blood pressure. I also lost a lot of blood during the procedure, so I was a fragile maiden there for a few days. My catheter was removed around midnight that night and I had the big girl job of learning to pee again. It was a weird and painful sensation with more blood than urine. Unfortunately, the amount of packing in my vagina eventually put pressure on my urethra and I was unable to pee normally after that first time. I ended up sitting on the hard-plastic toilet next to my bed in tears because a nurse had left me there and I was both afraid to stand on my own and unable to pee. I felt like a disaster of a human and had to be re-catheterized when the backed-up urine in my bladder became too painful.

           I was eventually able to walk with assistance and that was enough for me to get sent home on the Saturday following my procedure. My caregiver and I climbed into a lyft and headed back home. The next two days were miserable. I spent a lot of time struggling find comfortable ways to sit, bleeding through my clothes, almost fainting again and crying. There was a moment where I was struggling in the shower and almost accepted that my aunts were right.

           It did get much better though. On Monday morning, I had my first post-op appointment. Again, I almost fainted on the drive there because my body screamed in pain whenever the driver took a turn on Rock Creek Parkway. There are a lot of twists and turns on Rock Creek Parkwat. I got into the stir-ups and probed my surgeon and his PA for feedback on how I was doing and told them how awful I felt. After they took out the packing and went over the process of dilating, they left me in the room. I cried in the stirrups before I cried even more while getting dressed. Something had changed though, standing didn’t hurt as much anymore. They had been able to get so much width and depth out of me that the amount of packing in my vagina was adding a lot of pressure. For reference, I am able to get to the second to last dot on the biggest dilator which is apparently much wider and deeper than the average cis woman’s vagina. From that point on, every day has been a massive step forward. I went from being unable to leave the house, to walking assisted, to walking unassisted for short walks, to being able to now walk almost normally.

           To answer the question “how does it feel.” If feels flat and that’s wonderful. Every day since I’ve had the packing removed and started dilating has been better than the last. As much as I was dreading the weird alien-looking medical dildos that are now with me for life, having to take time to feel my vagina and stretch things out has helped a lot both mentally and physically. It feels like part of me now and I love it. As the swelling has gone down, I can imagine how it’s going to look and seeing myself in the mirror without a bulge gives me the biggest rush of dopamine. I’ve been smiling for days now even though my abdomen is still a big bruise and I have some significant discomfort. Still, I’m way ahead of where I was told I would be mostly thanks to my level of fitness prior to the surgery. Yes, having low-resting blood pressure did cause me to faint a lot, but having low body fat also meant that there was less tissue to cut during the procedure. As of one-week post-op, I’ve been able to move around well enough to restart HRT and re-feminize my face and figure after the three weeks of discontinuation was starting to show. My pain is also manageable with just Tylenol and I’ve been able to avoid oxycodone.