Joyce’s Reviews > Love & Estrogen > Status Update

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.

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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.