And then it went down
into the earth and didn’t know anything
because there everything was dark,
it didn’t know it was no longer a foot
or if they buried it so it could fly
or so it could
be an apple.Pablo Neruda, “To the Foot from Its Child”
I’m sorry I’ve been such a blog deadbeat. I have been preoccupied lately. I think that a lot of the baggage with which I loaded surgery is working its way to the surface, sometimes more and sometimes less painfully than I was expecting. Ironically enough, I have a few posts related to post-op malaise, but I’ve been dragging to much to finish and produce them. I’m very tired. I don’t think I’ve been taking very good care of myself over the past few months, because I don’t tend to take very good care of myself in general. I haven’t given myself enough time and space around this, and I’m feeling the overextension now. Nearly three months later, my body still feels a little bit sore. I didn’t prepare for that kind of recovery, and that was careless.
I also didn’t prepare for the emotional fallout. The idea that we’re wheeled out of the operating room shiny new people has been interrogated enough that TransAmerica managed to present a more nuanced read, to acknowledge that surgery is frequently very stressful and complex, particularly surgery undertaken for these reasons. Conscientious patient-driven care is helping with this as well; now that we’re talking about the subjective experience of a procedure that usually involves weeks or months of recovery, the surgery narrative doesn’t sound as cartoonishly magical. I knew that we are often scared and tired and depressed, that The Surgery is a catalyst for all kinds of emotions, but I didn’t take that probability into account in my life.
I am an anti-spiritual person, at least on a personal level. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of involuntary symbolism in going through an enormously involved procedure, supposedly the culmination of several years of contemplation and work, only to see no immediate change whatsoever. Anticlimaxes are a great way to reevaluate relative distance, temporal and emotional.
This might sound bizarre, coming from your friendly transsexual blogger, but I seem to finally have figured out that I am a transsexual. I have internalized reality: that I have been passing consistently–that is, that I have been post-transition in one important way–for years now. Surgery really was an anticlimax; a couple handfuls of tissue are negligible compared to all of the other changes I’ve undergone.
Awhile ago, Brownfemipower linked to this post-surgery synopsis from a guy whose experience of surgery, and reaction to his post-op body, were very different from mine. I was told to be prepared to be shocked by the appearance of my chest after surgery, even potentially alienated from it, but the guy who advised me had a different procedure (I believe the one Metamorphosis Boricua’s blogger underwent) much closer to his first testosterone shot. The change was probably much more drastic.
A friend of mine told me that for a long, long time after starting testosterone, he was incapable of believing that he looked male because all he saw in the mirror was his face, and of course his face could never be anything but a recognizably female face, right? I can’t select text on MB’s blog, for some reason, but his first view was a revelation. Mine was a sideways revelation. I saw my chest for the first time and thought, “It looks puffy. It looks the same. I mean, yeah, it looks flat and everything, but it was flat before. You told me I was gonna have a male chest, and all I see is my chest except a little less breasty, so–”
Obligatory Reading of the Day – Femiphobia
Provocative and excellent post by Sara Robinson: There’s Something About The Men. Most definitely read the comments as well. Then come back here in half an hour and read an old post of mine that I have scheduled for republishing…
I don’t have anything profound to say in response. Though it seems anticlimactic, your chest has now been re-contoured, right? So depending on what you choose to do with that, whether you work out and develop pectorals, or whether you let them be the way they are. But you can now take off your shirt in public with less hesitation. You can go swimming, maybe. Once my voice dropped, I was seen differently even before my facial hair grew in. As guys, now that we’ve transitioned, we’re faced with social pressures like taking off our shirts when we swim, etc. That’s not to say we shouldn’t occasionally buck the system (why shouldn’t women be allowed to take off their shirts if they want to? an why shouldn’t men wear skirts if they want to?) and the ditochotemy of what men have to be and what women have to be, but it’s hard to do that everyday, and sometimes we just want to go to the bathroom and be left alone.
I just have to note that I think it’s funny that the word “femiphobia” is in the linkback. For a second, I thought it was going to be something really bad, but I clicked the link and it’s coturnix just linking back to the whole blog. Classic false positive of me being afraid people will be nasty to you, piny, for being so open with us about your transistion.
I had breast reduction surgery exactly one year ago. My own surgery was because of back pain, and all the other stuff that goes along with having big breasts. Although I know people who have had surgery as part of their transitions, and had witnessed the emotional after shocks, it never occurred to me that there would be so much emotional baggage for me to wade through.
I have nothing super profound to say about recovering from surgery, just that it changes our relationships to our bodies. I still have moments of forgetting I had a reduction, of having to adjust to my body’s size and shape, and of course, the scarring. It took me way longer than I had assumed to feel comfortable with a partner seeing and touching my chest.
What a powerful post you linked to.
The night I spent in the hospital post surgery, I dreamed I was flying.
Though it seems anticlimactic, your chest has now been re-contoured, right?
Heh. Um, no, not exactly–I had lipo only, not keyhole or double-incision, so as of right now it is remarkably not re-contoured; it’s so swollen that it looks pre-op. It will be recontoured, as soon as it decides to forgive me for subjecting it to liposuction, and then I’ll probably feel less self-conscious about taking my shirt off in public. That’s at least a few months in the future, though.
And I have pecs already; they’re one of the reasons I’ll hopefully be able to get away with nothing else.