Old Home Week

Thank you all for your very nice anniversary messages. It isn't exactly a Big Day for me--I watched the dreary "Assassination of Richard Nixon," bought a Barbara Ehrenreich book and the "Diary of Anne Frank," and had some leftover butter chicken for dinner.

But on the other hand it's kind of a big deal, which I think my post conveyed.

I'm going to try and revisit some topics of note this week on the blog. But not tonight; I'm beat. However, in the meantime, if you've ever wondered, why isn't C.L. on Facebook? Well, now she is. Drop on by and become a fan, if you're so inclined.

Me and My Vagina, Special Anniversary Edition: Part II of an Infinitely Reductive Series

Today is the anniversary of my surgery. In fact, as I type this now, I am about a year removed from my first full day of having a vagina--Thailand being twelve hours ahead of my local time, and the six or more hours of my surgery having started at noon Bangkok time. (I don't remember how long the surgery lasted, as I slept through it and for a long time afterwards, only waking up for a brief moment to say goodnight to my significant other of variable and often fabulous gender.)

In fact, there's almost a week of time that I have very little recollection of--the five days I had to stay immobile in bed, according to my surgeon's regimen. Not everyone does this; had I gone to the Canadian surgeon I first considered, I'd have been up and walking around after about a day or so. Everybody does things differently. But I'm somewhat glad for being immobile; during that five days I only moved once, and that was because I'd thrown up on myself the first day after my surgery--juice boxes and opiates don't agree all that well. The only way to get me clean sheets was to move me to an entirely new bed. Which meant I had to crab walk over to it. Now, even under normal circumstances, that would be both uncomfortable and ungraceful; but I had to not only contend with the pain from my brand-new down there, with the attendant catheter and surgical drains, but since I'd also opted to have my boobs done at the same time, I could barely move my arms; the surgeon went in under my armpits, and to be honest that pain was more omnipresent and inconveniencing than the other.

But other than that, and my SOOVAOFG saying goodbye to me to fly home--we'd spent ten days together bumping around India and Cambodia prior to my surgery, and vacation time is precious nowadays--I really don't remember much. I slept a lot; I was too out of it to even watch TV. Every so often, they'd bring me a thick creamy soup and some juice boxes to eat and drink. I rarely ate the soup, but I drank the juice. (As an aside, Thai sweets of all kinds tend to be sweeter than American sweets--probably because they use real sugar.) I've come to realize that it wasn't so much that I was drugged out of my head--Thais don't practice American pain management, and I didn't even have a morphine drip--but because nothing changed. There was me; my bed; my room with the blinds drawn; and the occasional ministrations of kind Thai nurses who spoke little English. (My Thai was suspect at its best and no match for my pain and grogginess.)

But eventually they packed me up and sent me home, after giving me a huge, cumbersome, old-fashioned bra. It was trimmed with lace and looked like something from the "18-hour bra" commercials I'd seen as a kid. And then I was dumped back in my hotel room, just me and my catheter bag--they didn't take the catheter out until the next day, which was a little scary and gross. On the other hand, it was pretty convenient for lying in bed and drinking stuff, which was about all I was up for.

But it's surprising how quickly you can heal. I was moving around the hotel room that, night, had enough energy to make breakfast the next day, and even hosted a pizza party for some of the other patients of my surgeon a day or so after that. (We had a couple of these affairs. They were interesting; we'd have a great time for about an hour, and then everyone would be in too much pain to continue. But they were fun while they lasted.)

That was all a year ago.

Things have changed. For one thing, I now only have to dilate once a day for about 30 minutes. That will mean I can actually get up at the same time but still get to work earlier, which will help me have more time and energy to write in the evening. I've had sex, by which I mean--this being America and all--PIV sex, so now I know how much I've been missing. My recovery has been remarkably hassle free, even with the UTI I developed a month after getting home.

There's more, of course, much more. But how can I put it all in words? There are days when I forget that I never had a vagina, and there are days when I forget for a second that I do. There are many days when I am astonished by the miracle of it all, and many more days when I simply take it for granted. And most of all, I feel like what I am supposed to be. I feel like a woman.

And I felt that way before. I am not going to play pussy politics with you and engage in zero-sum games about the proper anatomy a woman needs. It's reductive, and cruel, and ignores the economic reality of far too many trans women.

But there's no question that I like myself better this way, that I feel a peace with my body I never felt before. That I had to wound myself to heal.

Not that I'm completely healed. None of us, I suppose, ever really can be--and I'm not just talking about trans people. If we measure lives by ideals, then we're all a little broken, all in need of some kind of healing. And I've come so very far.

But there are still times when I resent that passage; when I resent all the things that were taken from me, all the things that I never had--even the bad things, even the things that in a sense I was fortunate enough to miss: if I feel the omnipresent judgment of every damn TV commercial on how I should look, act, think, and feel simply because of my gender, can I really long to have had that drummed into my head from the moment it poked into our world? Do I really feel sorry for myself for not having spent three and a half decades as a victim of sexism?

No. Not really. But I do regret the necessity of it all, the long slow struggle to find out who I am, the summoning up of awful reserves of energy just to survive each day, and then the ultimate effort to make myself into the person I desperately needed to be. And so I regret that passage; but I am grateful, oh so very grateful, to have survived it.

And you could say, maybe, that my vagina is a symbol of that: a physical manifestation of not just my womanhood, but my struggle to achieve that womanhood, a signpost showing how far I've come and how much I had to undergo to reach it. I suppose that would be fine; I'd hardly be the first woman to eulogize my vagina, and I doubt I'll be the last, cis or trans.

But I don't really do that much. Because most of the time it's just a vagina. And believe me, that is more than enough. In fact, it's perfect.

Is YOUR Muffin Bluffin'

What's that? Yes, ducks, we are still a going concern, though lately that seems to be...going away!

(Thank you, I'll be here all week.)

The truth is that the day job from hell--currently consuming 50+ hours of my week every week--while allowing me to do useful stuff like eat and pay off both my credit cards in a year, is Not Conducive for the whole writing thing, especially when I don't get any sleep.

That said, I still do try and do stuff, and I'm hoping to pick up the pace at Tiger Beatdown, at least, where Sady and I have been talking about stuff of late! Some of it will even be cool!

Anyway, if it's Wednesday Thurday, it must be Below The Belt! This week, I write about one "Lady GaGa," whom, I hear, is all the rage with the kids these days!

I am almost terminally unhip when it comes to popular music. It's not that I have snobbish pretensions, or at least I try not to--I'm a firm believer in Duke Ellington's maxim, "if it sounds good, it is good," and there's room for both Mozart and Garbage on my iPod, Radiohead and John Coltrane, Bjork and Kanye "I'm going to interrupt this playlist" West. But the fact is, I don't watch MTV--not that they have much to do with music nowadays, but I'm dinosaur enough to remember when they did--or listen to much top 40 radio, so I almost never have any idea of what those kids, thesadays, are listening to. (And they need to get off my lawn, too.)

It's so bad that about the only way I hear popular songs is when they're background music for a TV show. (When my ex made me watch "Smallville" or "The O.C." with her, I used to parody the way that they would have a constant churn of hot bands: "Hey, I hear {BAND_OF_THE_WEEK} is playing at the club tonight! I love {BAND_OF_THE_WEEK}." Of course, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is immune from my scorn, since a) it's awesome and b) all of those bands are safely a decade behind us.)

But even a pathetic stick in the mud like transfeminist has heard of every queer's new best friend, The Lady Gaga. 

 Ba-ba Lo Lo Lo Bel Bel Below the Belt!

Songs of Love and Hate, and Mascara

Sady at Tiger Beatdown has been running guest posts on breakup songs in honor of Valentines Day, and was kind enough to ask me to write one. So I did, and it's over here. I wrote it on Leonard Cohen, who you might have guessed is my favorite songwriter, but of course I touched on other stuff. Trans stuff! (I know, I know, jeez lady can't you ever not talk about that?) But it was an interesting assignment and I ended up getting personal in a way I don't always do even over here, so you might find it good reading. Meanwhile I'll hang out here muttering the "Dress Rehearsal Rag" to myself.

Many Returns, Happily Confused

Who dat saying they going to beat Below The Belt? Who dat? Who dat?

I had my birthday last week, which beyond the reminder that I am a) one milestone closer to ultimate mortality and b) so much older than so many of my internet comrades, was a true blast: I took the day for myself, finally caught "The Hurt Locker," and had dinner with the hardest core of my friends. And friend gave me "Leonard Cohen: Live From London," which takes me back every time I listen to it (which is constantly) to the concert of his we both had the good luck to be blown away by last year.

So, hey, yay for transfeminist. Pass you some nachos and maybe you'll care, right?

But wait, things are going to get complicated.

On y va, cherie!

Hiram Monserrate Watch: Then Fall Caesar Edition

In our ongoing quest to track the downfall of New York State's douchiest public servant,* this story brings a smile to us:

The State Senate on Tuesday expelled a senator convicted of domestic assault, the first time in nearly a century that the Legislature has forced a member from office.

The Senate voted 53-to-8 to immediately oust the senator, Hiram Monserrate, a Queens Democrat convicted last fall of a misdemeanor for dragging his companion down the hallway of his apartment building.

Monserrate has vowed to fight the expulsion, and his lawyers are expected to file a restraining order today, if they can make it through the snow. Sadly, one of them is Norman Siegel, past head of the New York Civil Liberties Union and candidate for Public Advocate; a guy, in fact, that I voted for. Not so happy to see his name there.

Still, the Senate voting to expel somebody for a misdemeanor--normally in Albany, you get a mulligan on your first five or six of those--is a welcome change, and the fact that it was mainly because of the specific crime he was convicted for--battering a woman--is an even more welcome change. This being Albany, however, who knows how this will end. Probably with the Monster Rat as majority leader.

*At the state level. There's a lot of competition above and below him.

The Dilemma Of Having a Long Tail

Now, ducks, before you think that I mean that my surgeon had some, er, interesting ideas about anatomy, by a long tail I just mean: I have a past. It was not particularly unaccomplished, although--duh--it wasn't exactly fulfilled. But I did some cool things, was on (syndicated) TV a few times, got married, got divorced, wrote a couple dozen books, learned to speak French, even learned a little aikido.

Oh, the books? Yeah, you might have guessed that's what I wanted to talk about.

Now, before you search the ISBN catalog (and begin speculation that I am actually John Irving, finally over his castration issues), let me hasten to say: as writing goes, this was pretty assembly-line stuff. I wrote, mostly as work-for-hire, not-quite-textbooks. For 8th graders.

I say not-quite textbooks because they weren't text books: that is, you wouldn't teach a class using them. Instead, these were the books you'd read to do a book report on, say, Gold. (I didn't write one on gold, but I kinda wish I had--it was more interesting than some of the stuff I did write about.)

Now, I'm telling you all this because a few months ago I got something from my publisher. I was rather astonished--it couldn't be a royalty check, those dried up years ago. But I was even more surprised when I read what was inside:

Fan mail.

It seems that a young boy had read my book about a famous sports figure of the previous century, and written me a letter.

Well, not me exactly.

Me, just before. The other me. The...aw, you get the picture.

So, I've been trying to figure out what to do with this: it was a nice letter, though it asks some interesting questions (did I play football as a boy, for example), and rather charmingly lets me know how cool it would be for an author to write back to him.

But--and this is the dilemma of me and my tail--how on earth do I go about this? Write back using my old name? No offense, but I hate having to do that; I still have a few accounts under my old name and I never call their customer service anymore, because I'd have to....it's too gruesome to contemplate.

Or do I write back and say that Old Name was a pseudonym (not exactly a lie) and I'd be happy to correspond but I am, you know, a girl. Not super honest, but maybe more palatable.

Or do I do evangelism? Say, hey kid, here's an update about me: and maybe open his mind up to queer and other possibilities? Is that too heavy to dump on a kid? Sheesh, I don't even know how old he is!

(Hmm, maybe I could write to his parents. Hadn't thought of that.)

Anyway, I've been going back and forth about this; I've kept the letter pegged to my apartment door, so I see it every time I leave. And it was a nice letter, and maybe deserves a response.

Then I realized: hey, I have a smart readership. Small, but smart: you guys are like the elite core of my future dominance of a tiny little corner of the trans internet! So, I thought I'd ask you all to weigh in, ducks: I put it up as a poll at the upper right. Or answer in the comments. Or ignore the question--trust me, I sympathize.