Words, Part 2: The Penis, Mightier than the Sword

I got my second letter today. I only had to meet with the other therapist twice. She had a draft ready before our second meeting, which we used to clear up a few details and answer some follow-up questions from the first session. She didn't seem to have any reservations, and told me she thought I was very passable and that I seem to have a healthy attitude and approach to my transition. So the paperwork's out of the way, with just over a month to my surgery date.

I'm happy to have that done. If she hadn't agreed to writing the letter within a month, I'd have had to go to another therapist. But I also didn't want to go into our first meeting demanding that she work according to my schedule, which was to get that letter by mid-February. Going into therapy with an ultimatum would have been a good way to make her not want to help me. So I didn't even bring it up, and instead I let her tell me how many sessions we needed after getting to know me a bit. By the end of the first session, she was confident we'd need only one more, which was great with me. One less thing to worry about. This was just another piece of paper I needed to prove what I already knew, that I am ready.

Alison was happy for me when I got my first letter, but thought it was kind of stupid that I had to get another letter at all to back up the first therapist's conclusion. After thinking about it a bit, I kind of agree. Sure, it's a major decision and it's irreversible, but I'm an adult and I can make my own choices about my body. People who choose to have a baby aren't necessarily ready or qualified to raise a child, and that's a permanent change in their lives, too. Of course, you don't usually need a doctor's help to conceive, but if you did, do you think anyone would make you go see a councellor to make sure you're having a baby for the right reasons?

I think it comes down to this: what I'm about to do seems crazy to a lot of people. It must seem like I could just be confused. Why would a man want to get rid of his penis? Penises are how society defines a man, and maleness is considered a virtue. So getting rid of one must mean there's something wrong with you in the head. It's a downgrade. Men think their penises make them superior to non-penis-havers. They really do. Even though it plays a relatively minor role in a man's day-to-day life, many like to think it's the most important thing about them, and a symbol of their awesome manly power and invulnerability and entitlement to take charge. If you've got a big penis, you're a god among men (who are, in turn, men among women, putting you two tiers above women). Everyone should tremble in fear of their own inadequacy compared to you. Why would you give that up? You'd have to be nuts, right?

I'll be completely honest. I don't even hate my penis. I never have. The only reason it feels like it doesn't belong anymore is that I've realized that I am female, and society (except for a certain minor segment I don't have much interest in) doesn't care for women with penises. It gets in the way now, both literally and figuratively. It doesn't make me feel like any less of a woman having it there, but it does hurt my ability to live as who I am. And I don't feel any real attachment to it; I just don't particularly hate that it's there. I don't think I'll miss it, either, though. I expect that sex will be better without it. Right now, it feels like it's in the way, and it does sometimes embarrass me somewhat that it's there. I don't hate it, but I don't want it, either. And I don't have any real reservations about getting rid of it. Tucking is a real inconvenience; I sure won't miss that.

Anyway, I'm not crazy. I'm also not expecting my surgery in March will dramatically change me. I'll be the same person I was before. It'll feel closer to normal, I guess, which will probably be nice. It'll open up some new sex options, while closing others that don't feel right anymore, anyway. That's pretty much what I told the second therapist. Good enough for a stamp of approval on another form.

Advice for the Budding Transsexual

I've come across a fair number of sob stories -- no, calling some of these "sob stories" is trivializing them -- I've come across a fair number of horrible, tragic stories since I started accepting who I am and talking with other trans people. Every transgendered person I've met has a long story, many of them sad. Too many, if you ask me, and too long.

My story was never all that compelling. I didn't know what was "wrong" with me. I didn't want to admit that what I felt was real. I wanted to live a lie, because the truth was too hard for me to accept. I retreated into the sanctuary of my own mind and a fantasy world where I could be the person I wanted to be.

The fantasy was always there, and it was nice to daydream about. But I always had a thousand excuses lined up for why I could never transition. I'd never pass. I'd never get over the shame. I'd be ridiculed, mocked, and maybe assaulted. I'd regret it. People would think I was weird. People wouldn't like me.

It's really easy to give up before you begin if you think about all the things in your way and all the things you'll never be able to do. I used to think about those things a lot. Now I realize that everything that was in my way was something I was putting there myself to stop me. I built my own blockade to hide behind, because I was scared. I was scared of what I would become, or maybe I was scared of what I already was, and didn't want to admit. I was safe behind a wall of reasons I could never do this, and that was comfortable to me because not ever starting meant never having to confront those fears.

I've met several transpeople (mostly younger girls) over the past year and a half who have nothing but reasons for why they can't do things, or why their life will never be happy. Usually, nothing that's wrong in their lives is in any way their fault. Any solution you might propose to a problem they're facing is quickly met with a reason it would fail ("I tried that but...", "I can't because...", "Even if I did that, ..."). Failure's never our fault. We never had a chance. Sure, we never really took a chance, either, but the game was rigged from the start as anyone can plainly see.

You can make a compelling argument for why anything that's hard to do is actually impossible. Focusing on all the things that will probably go wrong and obstacles you'll never be able to figure out a way around is a great way to convince yourself it's not worth even trying. It's hopeless, so why bother? Then again, some people try, and fail; others try to fail. Which kind of failure would you rather be?

One day a year and a half ago, I stopped looking for excuses to stay put, and started looking for things I could do to move forward. I didn't know if I could do this. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I didn't even know if I wanted to do it. But I did it anyway, because I finally saw all my excuses for what they really were: a defense mechanism for my own fears.

As hard as this transition has been at times (and believe me, it's hard at times), I don't think I've once regretted doing it. I do have regrets, but they're all about the time I wasted convincing myself this was never going to happen.

That's my story, and that's my only real advice. In the end, there's only one person who can really help you and it ain't me, kiddo.

Ringer

In my early college days, my friend Chris and I organized some casual pickup softball games on Sunday mornings. Chris used to lure people to the games down by the bayfront by providing free beer. Eventually, we got some money from the student government to buy a few bats, some balls, and bases -- then things really took off, with sometimes as many as 10 or 12 people showing up to play. That was no small feat, considering how many of the players were hard to rouse at the ungodly hour of 11 am on a Sunday. We often had to beg people to come play and drag them out of bed, personally. It was a highly-successful program that continued for years, rivaling other popular student activities such as participating in really annoying drum circles and being involuntarily committed to a mental institution for evaluation under Florida's "Baker Act".

I never much went in for warm Busch beer (by the way, yuck!) on a Sunday morning, but I did like softball for some reason. I eventually started playing on a team made up of a mix of faculty, students and alumni from my college in a local softball league. I played with that team for several years, and I was not a superstar, but I could hit pretty well and my fielding was not at all bad, if a bit inconsistent. I made the occasional spectacular running over-the-shoulder catch and also occasionally botched an easy fly ball. It kept the games exciting, because you never knew what was going to happen when the ball came my way. Our team was pretty good, and we even beat the middle-aged-policemen team one year to win the league championship.

After college, I played briefly on a team at my first real job. It was a coed team and we forfeited about half our games for lack of enough female players. Oftentimes, we'd be desperately calling female friends who had never even played softball to come play on our team that same night, because we needed 5 or whatever number of women was required. We had 15 guys on the team. They all showed up every week. If there was a game at all, you were lucky if you got to play a couple of innings if you were a guy. Sometimes, even when we had enough women, the team we were playing against did not, and so they'd forfeit. It was not as fun a league as the college team. I haven't really played since.

With surgery coming up in a month, and me about to get a nice, legal "F" on my documents, I thought it might be fun to get back into softball. Fairfax county has a website that lets you post if you're interested in getting on a team. I filled out my vitals, including clicking "female" for gender. I didn't really say anything about the fact that at one point I used to be a pretty decent player. Of course I also didn't mention the stuff about my physical gender at birth, either. No need to complicate things; this is just a softball league.

That was yesterday, and already I've been asked to join 3 teams outright, and to "try out" for another team that is, according to the voicemail, "... one of the best if not the best coed team in Division 1, and we also play in tournaments and blah, blah, blah." I told them basically nothing about myself except my name and sex and I've got people clamoring for me to play with them. Ten years ago, I was lucky to get in the lineup for a couple of swings on my company team. Suddenly I'm a hot commodity to strangers. So be it.

I don't know if I'm any good anymore. I'm sure I can still field pretty well. I'm fast. I doubt I can hit as well as before, and I never had any power to speak of in the first place. Hormones have made me a lot weaker, I've noticed. I bet I can still throw okay -- I mean, for a girl, of course. Actually, I used to be pretty good at throwing like a girl (i.e. stepping forward with the same foot as your throwing arm). I figure I'll just adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" policy for now when dealing with potential teams and teammates. I don't mind if they know I'm trans, but I don't see how it's really important at this point.

I'm going to join the one all-women's team that asked me to play. Coed was always less fun, with its plentiful forfeits and goofy rules designed to even things up. And when testosterone is involved in the game, it just tends to make things less fun, anyway. I've always found that to be true.

Change I can believe in

I live in DC (okay, not in DC proper, but a quick jog from DC). Two million people came to town this weekend to take part in the ceremony to inaugurate our new president. My mom and stepdad flew in from Chicago to be a part of it. Alison and I watched it from my living room, because it was too damn cold and crowded in DC. Mostly, too cold.

But I did my part. I made my parents a nice breakfast and packed them a little brown bag lunch to take with them (I felt like I was sending them off to school), and got them to the Metro at 7 am. Then Alison and I went back to sleep, and woke up at much more civilized hour to watch some of the proceedings. When President Obama said something about how we're strong as a nation in part because a lot of us would rather work fewer hours than see our friends lose their jobs, I turned to Alison and said, "That's true. I'd take the day off to avoid seeing my friends get laid off. Definitely." So, I'm helping to make America strong, in my way.

Actually, that day is coming where I work, and I actually did think about taking the day off, but they never told us when it would be. Turns out, it looks like it's tomorrow. Rumors have been flying about "The Big Day" being every Friday since mid-December, but from today's flurry of activity, it looks like tomorrow's really it. Lots of reports of mysterious meetings being scheduled and the higher ups being councelled by HR on how to lay people off (there's no easy way -- I've done it, and it's not fun for anyone involved). I didn't buy in to the previous rumors, but it looks like it's really just a question of how many people they're going to cut tomorrow and whether this is just a first round of many or whether we're done cutting for a while.

Personally, I'll be happy if I make it through tomorrow with a job. I have 5 weeks until my surgery. I really don't want to be out of work while recovering from my operation. That would put me in a really bad spot. After I get back, if they let me go, I will at least be ready to look for new jobs. The economy may still be in the crapper, and I may have worsened my prospects for finding a new job (as a woman and as a transsexual, my opportunities are probably not as good as before), but at least I'll be ready to work. I've been laid off before (Domino's Pizza, age 16; Greenwich Financial Modelling, age 28) and it wasn't fun, but I found better jobs each time. Really, the only bad part about getting laid off is the "off" part.

I'm more worried that the whole world seems to be going to hell and collapsing all around me. Funny, but it feels like the better I feel about where I am personally, the worse I feel about the state of the world. I could really have timed this transition a lot better by picking, say, any other time at all. Five years ago. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Any of those would have been good. I'll deal with whatever comes along, but I'd appreciate it if someone would get this whole economic meltdown contained. I'd do it myself, but I have more important things to worry about right now, like me.

Oh, well. There's a nice new president who's clean and articulate and smart and confident and unflappable. The last one was clean and... um... well, he owned a cowboy hat. I hope this new guy can get the country back on track soon. I don't want a return to the gluttonous eighties, nineties and early-to-mid oughts. I'd just like something serviceable.

Words

Neither of us seriously contemplated sexual reassignment surgery for her during our first meetings, but gradually this option became more and more compelling. Ms. Clayton no sooner took one step forward, than she was comfortable with it, and ready to move to the next. She has accepted disappointments and found ways for dealing with them, but for the most part, she has gloried in her new life as a woman. ... I have no hesitation in supporting her request for gender reassignment surgery.

-Letter from Dr. Catherine Payne dated Jan 12, 2009.

The Harry Benjamin Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders state that two letters from mental health professionals are generally required for genital surgery. I got my first letter in the mail two days ago, from Dr. Payne. The second will be from a therapist who evaluates me and corroborates her recommendation. I need to get that second letter soon. My surgery date is less than 2 months away. I'm scared, but I'm ready.

It was also exactly a year ago today that a judge signed an order granting my request to change my name legally to "Suzanne Jennifer Clayton". That was more or less the start of my so-called "real life test", another requirement for surgery. I remember seeing that piece of paper in my hand and feeling the gravity of what I'd just done, of what I was committing myself to. Up until then, I was "Suzanne" to some friends and family and "Scott" to the world. One signature on a piece of paper changed it, and suddenly all of my IDs would start carrying my new chosen name, bringing me further past the point where I could comfortably turn back if I weren't ready.

Dr. Payne and I reflected recently on how far I've come since we started meeting in June of 2007. She didn't expect me to end up where I am now. She confessed to me that when she first met me, she thought I was probably gay or a crossdresser or just confused sexually. I'm glad she didn't tell me that at the time, because it would have crushed me, even though back then I didn't know where I was going to end up or what I was, either.

Maybe I surprised myself where I've ended up, or maybe I always knew where I wanted to be but just wasn't sure how I was going to get there. In any case, here I am now, staring at another document with the power to help me drastically change my identity. This one is the culmination of a year and a half of self-exploration, self-reinvention, and trying to establish my new place in society.

It seems like it shouldn't fit on such a thin piece of paper. This letter carries a lot more weight than you'd know from feeling it in your hands.

Transsexuals Among Us

Probably the weirdest thing that happened to me this weekend while I was down in Jacksonville, Florida was when an old woman shook my hand and told me how warm my hands were. That doesn't sound weird unless you've actually held my hands, in which case you'd know that I met the one person in the world with worse circulation in her fingers than me. It's sort of a family trait, but just take my word for it -- my hands are ice cold.

I was in Florida for my grandmother's 90th birthday party, a nice little party with 150 of her closest friends and relatives held in an evangelical church. She's great, my granny. She's really happy for me and I can tell she's proud of me for going through this. I'm really happy for her, too, since she's 90 and still in such good health. I think she's really enjoying this part of her life, and I am too. My grandfather died many years ago at 92. I doubt he'd have been as comfortable with my transition, having fairly rigid definitions of gender, but I think he'd have probably come around, too, in his way. I love my family. They're so supportive and loving. Strange, but very supportive.

Pretty much everyone else at the party was oblivious to my "condition", as far as I could tell. Possibly not this one family, from whom I got a strange vibe, but they might have been tipped off about me (for reasons I won't go into). Anyway, I felt pretty much welcome among a group of (mostly elderly) strangers.

When I got home, my friend Keith sent me a link to a story about people trying to revoke transgender rights in Gainessville. Some conservative group ran ads that showed a little girl going into a women's restroom followed by a scruffy man, with the words "Your City Council Made This Legal" (check it out). I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, but honestly, this is really disgusting. Implied in this ad is that (a) allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their chosen gender enables child molestation, (b) somehow it would be more acceptable for a boy to be in a men's room alone with a creepy pervert than a girl, and (c) transsexuals = perverts. It's kind of a beautiful in its oversimplicity, really. Why, you can even agree with the message and still claim you don't have anything against transgender people. I don't have a problem with those people themselves, I just don't want scruffy perverts in ballcaps molesting my daughter, which would obviously happen if... wait, how does this work again? Well, kudos to the ad wizards who came up with this one, anyway. I think it's a brilliant little piece of shock propoganda.

It's a pity that to many people, trans rights come down to these sorts of inflamatory non-issues. And it's a shame that most people don't have the slightest idea what being transgender is really about, as if it's just some kind of sexual thrill for us. I think I'm very lucky to blend in sometimes. I avoid a lot of this sort of misunderstanding and bigotry and hatred mostly (or so far -- knock on wood). I don't expect that stuff will ever disappear. I've met a lot of transgender people, and by and large, we're a strange bunch. We'll never quite blend in as a group. Different = fear.

But I can still walk up to a lot of the people who don't realize they should be afraid of me and what I represent, and the biggest clue they'll get is that my hands are the icy cold hands of pure evil. If I'm wearing gloves, they might never know...

Cost/Benefit Analysis

My latest credit card statements include my most recent trip to Dallas, Christmas shopping and travel expenses, and lots of new entertainment expenses now that I'm dating Alison (restaurants and clubbing expenses, mostly). The only thing that shocked me was that they didn't really seem all that much higher than normal. The bills were high, sure, but these days they're always high. There's always a shopping trip or a medical expense or something pushing those balances up every month. So I just sign over my paycheck month after month to Discover and Chase and Wells Fargo and watch my savings flatline.

Upcoming for this year, I've got a $16,500 invoice for my upcoming surgery in March, more E3000 sessions for at least a few more thousand dollars, and probably some cosmetic work ranging from $6,000 to $30,000 depending on what I eventually decide I want. None of it is tax deductible or covered by my health insurance, of course. And, lo, the pile diminishes.

I haven't been tracking my spending since I started on this little adventure of mine. That's kind of too bad, because it would be interesting to know how much this all costs me in the end. I didn't keep track mainly because it doesn't really matter and part of me doesn't want to know, besides. Offer me any amount of money to go back to living as a guy for the rest of my life, and I just can't do it. It wouldn't be worth it. I never even gave the costs much thought from the outset. They were pretty much irrelevant, even if this costs me everything I have.

Sometimes that doesn't make a lot of rational sense to me, because so much of this is is scary and depressing and exhausting that I'm not sure why I'm willing to take on so much risk, put in so much effort, and sacrifice so much just to live as the gender I always wanted to be. I still have days when I'm reminded of how hard this can be and how fucking horrible it could turn out. The old me would have still opted to transition knowing the outcome (so far), but I also have to admit he wasn't so wrong to be afraid all those years. There's a comfort in hiding this part of you away. In a lot of ways that's easier, and certainly a lot less risky.

This was never about rationality, though. If you follow your heart, you're going to end up making sacrifices and enduring some pain and self-doubt. You never know how much until you do it. Some things don't really lend themselves to risk management and cost/benefit analysis. So we plow ahead and hope this turns out well. If it does (and so far it looks like it does), then great. If it doesn't, well at least we found out. Better than living your whole life not knowing what it would be like, I guess.

Fuck it. Happy 2009. It should be an interesting year.