Status Updates From Love & Estrogen (The Real T...

Ours is a queer fairytale about arriving together at womanhood. The princess kissed the frog, but instead of becoming a prince, it became another princess instead.

~~~~~

She fell in love with me as I was redoing puberty as an adult.

Love and estrogen are both drugs - and they have no contraindications. Taken together, they only clarify and magnify each other’s effects …

We were rolling dice that were heavily weighted in our favor but rolling them nonetheless.

… careful reshaping of our existing tissues into a configuration that, because we were all female first in the womb anyway, could have developed on its own if testosterone hadn’t interfered.

Dr. Marci Bowers, like so many who perform sex reassignment surgery in the United States, had a waiting list the length of the drive from Atlanta to her San Francisco practice.

She chose Mount Sinai because she wanted to resignify a relic from my past [from some childhood heart surgery]. She wanted to take this place I associated with death and imbue it with the vivacity of our love.

It was Corey who laid out my life as if on a loom - past, present, before, after - wove it together, and wrapped it around herself.

It was an inconvenient time for me to be hospitalized, half of my legal documents correctly identifying me as female, the other half unchangeable until I had sex reassignment surgery.

She swore she wouldn’t see me as any less female for having once been perceived otherwise.

Like transgender Katelyn Burns, who also transitioned during adulthood, “my girlhood was empty” … I “lost out on what could have been … deep, sisterly friendships” because I couldn’t transition at a younger age.

She would tell me stories from grade school … but I couldn’t echo them in kind because they reminded me of a time when people saw me as male.

Sometimes I was so frustrated that I couldn’t relate to the wholeness of Corey’s life.

Going through so many versions of myself before realizing that the problem was my hardware, not my software.

~~~~~

Being a closeted transgender Mormon is almost a biblical ordeal. The leaders of the church see gender as an “essential characteristic” of a person’s “eternal identity and purpose”, not something that can be changed.

Many of us call our birth names “deadnames”to “stress the inappropriateness of referencing [them]” after we transition, as transgender author Julia Serano put it.

~~~~~

Our old lives don’t just collect dust, we make the dust.

Transgender people are not caterpillars who transform into butterflies … We are more like pet snakes who slough off our own skin to keep growing … When we finish shedding, our old selves lay there for a while, decomposing. It’s not very glamorous, but it’s closer to the truth.

… practically hydroplaned my way back to Atlanta on my own tears.

~~~~~

Corey had left me with the hope that I could be somebody’s summer someone, but I still doubted that anyone would pick me forever.

My mind was wandering when it should have been orbiting around her.

Why go without cuddles if they were freely available?

~~~~~

The joke about lesbians and lightbulbs is that it only takes one to make the change but four more to “process the experience”. Everything we did together had to be dissected … There was no way … to disguise hurt feelings or minor slights.

“Fusion”: the academics who coined that term were worried about “individual boundaries” getting “blurred” by the extreme closeness that develops between two women who fall in love.

… openly gay bars like The Back Door - accessible only through an alleyway, as its name would suggest …

~~~~~

I had no idea how deep & intense queer-lady coupling would be.

For … so many two-woman couples, the border between friendship and romance was not only porous but wafer-thin. As writer Alicia Eler observed, “…[W]hen you’re queer, falling in bestie-love can feel the same as falling in love-love.”

Corey didn’t conceive of me in those terms- as having an adjective before my womanhood.

~~~~~

… whose touch demanded I be present with her rather than detached from my body.

My anatomy didn’t feel like mine, but it was mine nonetheless.

I wanted pleasure but I was grossed out by the sex organ through which I felt it.

If Corey had changed her mind after I told her about my downstairs situation, I wouldn’t have been upset …

An overly enthusiastic reply like “even better” would have made me feel fetishized.

She had neither response … Her three-word whisper was … the only perfect answer to a disclosure I didn’t quite now how to make. “I don’t care.”

So many people still believe that 1% of our body should determine “nearly 100% of what we are.”

…if you’re attracted to a whole person … why should 1% of their body be a deal breaker?

Genitals may just be “1% of the surface area of the body,” as writers David Valentine and Riki Anne Wilchins famously observed in the journal Social Text … but our private parts “carry an enormous amount of cultural weight in the meanings that are attached to them.”

She was quiet because the night was beyond words; only actions mattered now.

~~~~~

Even though she knew I was transgender, she didn’t know for sure what was below my waist. I had Schrödinger’s genitals as far as she was concerned. Maybe I had undergone surgery, maybe I hadn’t.