#transition?

Today, August 19 2017, I had an intake session with a gender therapist! I'm also super excited because I'm going back on Wednesday for a legitimate session.

I've needed to get in to therapy again to treat my anxiety/depression, but the final push was opening myself up enough to speak to a therapist who also can help me on my gender journey.

As they got closer I can hear them talking and they both have a deeper/male sounding voice. So I shrug mentally and begin to check them in. When I asked the long hair peep’s name, they said Melissa. Still I didn’t assume anything, I mean Shannon & Kelly are also guys’ names. I had to check their ID, and sure enough, in their ID they definitely displayed more feminine features.

I didn’t display any outward response, but inside I was just so giddy & happy for them. Like “Yes, go you! Fuck with people’s idea of gender and how they assume that you are a certain gender because you dress a certain way or have a certain name or certain physical feature. “

It took me such a long time to identify & be comfortable with my body, to figure out my gender identity in spite of how I like to dress or present myself. That there is no one way to be men or women, neither or all or something that hasn’t been named yet. I don’t need to label or squeeze myself in any one box just because. I’m glad that people are figuring those things out for themselves sooner.

So during Holy Week I spent a lot of time processing and figuring out how to cope with things, and one thing that definitely seemed to help me feel better was reframing our relationship and my expectations of my husband. What is he to me, I asked, and the answer I gave at the time was, a roommate I sleep with. Both in the sexual sense and not. Do you expect a roommate to constantly care about your feelings? Do they owe you comfort and support? No. You cooexist in a shared living space, which we can do -- I've detailed some of the ways he's not my *ideal* roommate, but he's not beyond what I can tolerate, and also does a lot of really nice things for me that a roommate normally wouldn't.

But then later in the week he has to go and get all up in my business, demanding my attention and noticing that I seem a little down and wanting to know why and is there anything he can do to help, and like ... this kind of derails my progress toward emotional independence and is hard to adjust to? But it's a kind of ridiculous thing to complain about: You're being too nice to me today; I wish you would be cold and distant so we could mutually ignore each other.

I've spent most of the weekend lying around doing nothing (as in playing stupid rpgs and listening to asmr videos and sleeping) and being useless and feeling too tired to want to be productive. But yesterday I did work on registering for classes in the US and getting transcripts that I'll eventually need here (and of course they all have to be apostilled, because enrolling in a public university here couldn't possibly be easy or straightforward) and in the evening I finally got around to contacting a couple of Facebook pages for local trans men and they got back to me really quickly about an endocrinologist. Also I started looking up online counseling services because having someone who speaks English and is guaranteed queer-friendly and can meet with me more than once every month or two would be nice for obvious reasons.

But here's the situation: Betterhelp, generally the cheapest service around, no longer costs $20 a week like when I almost signed up for them back in Taiwan. Now it's $35, and one of the more recent articles I read said you only get that rate after the first two months, during which it's more like $90 a week. The endocrinologist costs $100 per consultation and I'd have to figure out *when* to make appointments given that I'm already missing work occasionally for official public healthcare system stuff, and it's far enough from home that I can't just sneak over during my work-from-home day, and I'd rather not tell Husband anything until I'm actually starting the hormones. Otherwise he will do everything he can to dissuade me. Plus there will be blood work and I don't know how much that costs at private clinics because what I've gotten done so far has been through the public system, but I can't count on them helping me out with everything. And my first month of acne meds cost $150 and I can expect that to recur for quite a while. And Husband is going to be paying like $175 a month for intensive Portuguese classes. And while it's nice to think that most of the major expenses on the house are dealt with, you never really know and the stupid motorcycles are definitely going to need more repairs occasionally.

And how we'd been doing for money is: I get payed a little under $1100 a month after healthcare/social security is taken out, Husband apparently a little less even though he'd thought he'd be earning more than me in his new position (thus the Portuguese classes; there are lots of better-paying options once he learns it, with employers who aren't as horrible). And we get some money from the girl who rents the front studio. Last couple of months Husband has been able to handle house and motorcycle payments mostly without my help, I've been bringing enough money to my grandma to stay on schedule for paying back the loan from her in 5 years as we agreed, we mostly take turns on groceries and stuff, and in February and March I secretly put away $500 a month in 3-year certificates of deposit, which I'd been planning to continue doing monthly for a year to have a safety net, and we barely squeaked by with that money gone.

So that plan is scratched if I go this route. which puts me in a very uncertain place in a few years when I've got my permanent residency and no longer have to stay in this situation. And that's assuming he doesn't decide to divorce me the moment I start transitioning. Should I plan to wait a few more years because of that?

The other thing I did last night was browse Youtube for videos about ftm singing voices, because vocal changes are the one thing I'm a little scared of. It was reassuring to hear voices not getting noticeably worse; I don't have to have an amazing voice, just not become considerably more mediocre at singing than I already am. I might actually sound better, because right now my voice is kind of breathy and muffled-sounding. But ... many of the same guys who sound great singing have rather less appealing speaking voices. Some of them keep a relatively high pitch and feminine intonation patterns, but the timbre is raspy and grating and completely unlike a cis woman's (though very like some cis men I've known). I really don't want to sound like that. :-l

As for therapy, I've also been thinking about what I really want out of it, and honestly the sad thing is that I don't really envision fixing my marriage. It's easier to imagine someone teaching me the skills to build the relationships I want with other people, so that I have someone to leave him for instead of going back to being desperately lonely. Of course my confidence in being able to have other intimate, supportive relationships constantly fluctuates. On the one hand, it's kind of amazing to look back and remember how the most mundane social interactions used to terrify me, and now I generally expect to be able to handle most of what I encounter in daily life. On the other, there's the realization that, while my autistic-ish personality doesn't make me incapable of reading facial expressions and body language, it is quite possible that I'm only getting some of the information and there's a huge amount that I'm not even aware I'm missing. Also, there will probably always be issues with my own facial expressions and vocal intonation that mean other people read things into what I say that I never intended. I don't really know how fixable this is.

And is far as relationship skills applicable to the current one, like setting boundaries and being assertive and communicating clearly, I have been improving? But it doesn't seem to matter? Like instead of just wincing and making a face or saying "No" or "OUCH!" I've been outright saying "I don't like that. It doesn't feel good," but that didn't stop my husband the other night from continuing to do things in bed that I was complaining about, and then being surprised and insulted when I stopped the entire thing after figuring out that I just wasn't going to enjoy any more of it.

Also, he has the most incredible ability to forget things I've told him (sometimes things I've told him a million times), but recently I finally realized that sometimes the issue is that he doesn't process it in the first place. The lightbulb moment was when he read a set of WhatsApp messages (all of like 3 sentences) from me in front of me after he got home, reading the first few words out loud and then trailing off / mumbling, only to not react like I expected, and then a few minutes later he looked at them again and finally noticed what I had said. So now I finally understand why I'll text him something, he'll say "ok", and then later he'll argue with me and insist I never told him.

But of course there are so many other things he could do. He could decide this is a hard limit for him and he will enforce his boundaries by withdrawing affection, not sleeping in the same bed, not helping with practical things like shopping or cooking or taking me places on his bike. He could get mean and make my life hell. He’s said before that he’s not a good person, that he has a dark side he keeps in check, that I’ve never seen him angry but when he’s angry he’s terrifying and knows how to use words to hurt people more than a physical beating ever could. He’s told me that my complaints have brought him close to the breaking point. Multiple times. Sometimes when I hadn’t even known I was doing anything wrong.