If You Love Hope, Let It Go

The end of my time in the chrysalis rapidly approaches. 946 days ago I took my first dose of estrogen. In four days I’ll report to a hospital near Trenton, New Jersey and fall into the oblivion of general anesthesia. When I awaken a few hours later, a vagina will be part of my body for the rest of my life.

My wife once commented that she deals with stress by making excel spreadsheets, while I deal with stress by writing essays. This is the essay where I write about bottom surgery.

This is an awkward thing to write about, and a difficult one, too. It’s awkward because none of this is remotely okay to talk about in most contexts. It’s difficult to have any conversation about genitals in a way that doesn’t get instantly labelled as dirty or scandalous or salacious. On top of that, I’m not just talking about genitals in the abstract, I’m talking about mine. But awkward or not, this is a meaningfully big chunk of what being human is. This is also one of the most significant events I expect to ever happen in my life, as it is for many trans people. Someone ought to say something about it, and I feel like I might as well take my pass at it.

It’s difficult because it’s hard to figure out where to grip something so close to my soul. There are a few other trans women I’ve seen write about why they’re getting bottom surgery, maybe most notably Julia Serano, but none of these pieces really land for me. My soul is different from their souls I suppose.

I’ve been through a few drafts of this piece in my head. One was going to be titled “Skycrane.” The idea being to frame it around how even though this seems like a batshit idea, the medical body of knowledge is clear that it really works and makes people’s lives better.

One draft was going to be titled “Teenage Dream.” In that version I’d frame it all around how I first started fantasizing about this when I was 14. How I’d lie in bed thinking of how Ariel’s longing to be human made sense, because I kinda-sorta-gosh-idk-maybe longed to be a girl the same way.

I had a draft called “Breakable Heaven,” and one called “This Too is the Bardo.” There I’d talk about the afterlife and reincarnation. I’d talk about how almost the only thing I’d let myself imagine when I thought of Heaven was the thought of waking up warm and clean and female. I’d talk about how overwhelming it is that what I imagined in paradise can actually happen not there but in New Jersey, in our world of dust and mud where nothing is perfect instead of everything. I’d talk about how this feels like being reincarnated while my heart still beats, and how silly I feel even writing that.

Really all of this is overthinking the problem. When sex reassignment surgery was first developed and refined in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s, there was an assumption that no sane person would ever want this. It was assumed that this was a last resort for someone mentally ill, and so rigid gatekeeping was maintained to limit access to only those who fit their cis profilers ideas of what a transgender person should look like and say. We don’t do that anymore. We now broadly understand that being trans is a normal variation within the spectrum of being human. There was a bit of hoop jumping I had to do, but largely I just told my surgeon that I wanted this, and now it’s happening.

In a sense, that’s all there is to say. I’m doing this because I want my body to be this way. There isn’t any other explanation “needed,” any breaking that down that desire into constituent parts. It’s there, and it’s been politely but firmly pressing on me my entire life. The only way my soul can relax against that pressure is to yield to it.

It feels like saying that isn’t enough though.

It’s surprised and mildly annoyed me how complex my emotions have been as my surgery date approaches. Throughout my life, being masculine and being male is something that’s given me everything from discomfort and confusion to self-loathing and despair. So allowing the most masculine part of me to be transformed into the most feminine part of human existence seems like an easy choice to make, whatever hardships I have to endure to get there. In a real sense it was an easy choice. The very first day I started journaling about my gender, the first day in my entire life when I seriously considered that I might be trans, I wrote about this change to my body. Every time I considered taking a step back, delaying or calling off this part of transition, I knew in some deep nonverbal part of me that I’d be back here. As certain as the beat of my heart, I knew I’d be here someday, and the sooner the better.

Still, reassembling my identity with womanhood in my core, mantle, and surface, has been tricky. Old identities don’t like being destroyed or dissolved into something new, even when they’re maladaptive. Letting go of the self-hate I carried all through my life has brought me joy and peace like warm summer rain. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, and the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. But as happy as I am to let self-hate go, I felt it so urgently and closely for so long that losing it completely feels like losing a part of myself. And nothing in my body has stoked that loathing more than what’s changing next Tuesday.

Even stranger than that is the knowledge it isn’t all just self-hate and self-disgust. I have a sweet tooth for more than just sugar, and knowing that something that’s given me so much pleasure is going to be cut, reshaped, and sewn back together into something new is an easy thing to be anxious about. I feel that anxiety, and honestly I wish I was more disgusted in myself, so that letting go might be easier. I fully expect that things will only be better, more what I want, more like I’ve imagined in my head since I was 14 lying on my childhood bed and wishing so much that I had what I’ll be getting next week instead of what I was born with. But still. Healing takes time, and it will be different. Leaving for a new home is always bittersweet, even if the balance is on the sweet side.

 So I’m excited, nervous, joyful, anxious, trying to cultivate and keep faith, waiting in joyful hope, as the day approaches. Almost, but not quite, everything existing at once.

It’s easiest to pare down that everything to the core truths that are helpful when I look back on the arc of my life and see the desire shining here and there like a series of rotating beacons. I remind myself how, even when I tucked into denial and convinced myself this wasn’t something I wanted, the want was still there. How it ground away at me until the bedrock yielded completely to what the water of me needed. I remind myself to look forward, to a future when this is just a warm and simple part of me that I love. I don’t know how far off that is, what challenges and complications I might have to deal with along the way, but knowing that future is there makes me happy to keep moving forward.

For so much of my life, the desire I had to be shaped this way was accompanied by a conviction that I could never be this way. It felt like an awful truth, and a strange nonrational hope sprang up to resist it. Being the attempted rationalist that I am, I resisted right back. I went through all the stages of grief over and over again letting go of that hope. I denied it, insisting that I was perfectly happy with my body and my life as they were. I bargained with it, imagining alternate universes with different rules and different realities where I might be able to shift and shimmer into something I wanted to be better. I dove to the depths of anger and depression more often than I like to think about. I tried my best to accept it, tried to think I’ll never be a woman, and that’s all there is to it, and tried to ignore the part of me that blossomed like dandelions saying But still, it’ll happen. After something like 20 years of cycling through that personal wheel of Samsara, the hope was gone.

Now here I am, days away from the dearest part of that hope being made real in the flesh of my body and not just in my imagination. This is the wildest, most emotional part of all of it for me. Hope that I’d discarded, scorned, ran from, suddenly back. It’s grown up and returned to me changed. I feel like I don’t deserve it, and it’s almost painful letting it back into me. But it belongs in me, again, now, and I’m trying my best to let the self-destructive part of me melt into something softer, something that can accept the good that’s possible in this world.

I don’t expect that my life will be perfect after May 7. But I have reason to hope that this deep and painful flaw running through the structure of my life will finally be repaired forever. It’s a good world we live in, where this is possible.