Can’t You Wait Until I’m Dead? ~ Chapter 11: The Big Bang

On Sunday, a few days later, I faced even deeper doubts about the course of my transition. I got up to shower around 8:30, and as I reached for my bathrobe hanging behind the bedroom door, the world turned black; I heard a bang and regained my vision from a completely different angle. Lying on the floor. Sarah’s face was hovering over mine, and the terrified look on her face told me that something horrible just happened.

She heard me say, “Woozy,” and looked over to see me fall in slow motion, like a felled tree. The sharp bang I heard was my head hitting the nightstand, and there was a “thud” I didn’t hear when it hit the floor. My left eye struck the nightstand, and although I wasn’t in pain, blood flowed down my nose and cheek from two deep cuts.

With a quiver, she said, “Don’t move! I'll dial 911.” The thought of paramedics hauling heavy bags of medical supplies up the stairs and into our bedroom mortified me, so I told her I’d dial “811” instead—the provincial number to speak to a nurse. While Sarah cleaned up the blood, I held the phone to my ear, and the nurse advised us to go to a walk-in clinic. Sarah helped me dress and drove me to the nearest clinic open on a Sunday morning. After a couple of butterfly bandages and a promise to check in with my doctor later, we were home with a cautionary tale.

The thought of that morning re-traumatized Sarah when it came up, so I avoided joking about it and was more careful getting out of bed in the morning. Here’s the thing: passing out after getting up too quickly, called orthostatic or postural hypotension, wasn’t unusual for me, beginning as a teenager, but the suddenness of my collapse was unlike any of the ten or twenty times before.

Spironolactone is also a diuretic used to treat high blood pressure, so it was the perfect drug to make my orthostatic hypotension worse. Because Dr. Melnyk warned me about it, I feared she might stop hormone therapy, and I didn’t tell her more than needed to explain the bandages. Afterwards, I increased my salt and water intake to reduce the odds of it happening again.

The worst part about my eye injury was that I looked even more masculine, and my dysphoria spiralled. I looked like I’d been punched in the eye, and it evoked images of cut and bruised leading men in Hollywood movies. I didn’t think I’d need more counselling after starting hormones, but the injury-induced relapse drove me to call my therapist and talk through what happened. She said, “Look in a mirror and talk to yourself—your face and body. Listen to the reaction in your head. You will need to catch up with what will change and what won’t, check in a couple of days later with yourself, grieve the losses to come, honour them, and trust and listen to messages that surfaced.”

After I hung up, true to habit, I opened an empty document on my laptop and wrote:

Reaction to face and body—scars around my eye will heal. It will take time (and painful electrolysis/laser), but facial hair will thin out. I can use foundation when it bothers me too much. Hair on my head will grow out, and I’ll look more feminine. My thin bones and fair wrist look feminine enough for me already. Besides, appearances aren’t everything; I need to accept myself as feminine and stop hiding mannerisms—my instincts to behave female.

I have spent so much time trying to look and act masculine that I started to believe it, and it eventually became painful. Cliché: what’s inside is what counts; let hormones and hair removal work slowly and not be the focus. Wounds will happen; we can’t pin everything on outward appearance and let them derail our inward progress. I need to talk to the person inside and ask them what will make them happy. Focusing on the aging man in the mirror and the hopeful transition to the aging woman in the mirror is a slippery slope. Look past the mirror.

On catching up with what will change and what won’t—I may lose erections, breasts will grow slowly, and body hair will thin out and become finer over twenty-four to thirty-six months. Muscles might shrink. Bones will remain roughly the same; I will still have an Adam’s apple, a square chin, and thinning hair on my head. My personality and knowledge will stay unchanged. I will still be into DIY.

On grieving and ways to honour it—"killing [deadname]” isn’t accurate. Most of [deadname] will be there, including years of experience, memories of friends, family, students, and self. I may be grieving the loss of a charmed male life, male appearance, and the privilege that goes with it. There’s fear of bullying and physical abuse—will I feel more vulnerable? There’s fear of losing the admiration and love of my mother and Sarah. There’s fear of that feeling I get when I see a trans woman with an Adam’s apple and other “male” features. I don’t want others to feel that way about me. Initial recoil and revulsion are inevitable, like meeting someone with facial scars for the first time. It’s like disfigurement. Muscles have grown from hard work, but they will shrink with the loss of testosterone and disuse. How can I honour the loss of [deadname]? Birth of Allison?

Idea: write a transition letter like a birth announcement and research coping with disfigurement.

She gave me another assignment: “Think about anything you might be missing or haven’t thought about yet. Thoughts you pushed aside while hiding in your work. Maybe you have some questions now. Trust yourself and listen to messages that surface.” My stream of consciousness went like this:

Seeing many trans women and drag queens makes me wonder if I’m repressing anything else, like being gay? Do I think I’m a lesbian because I’m attracted to women and attracted to women because I was born with a penis and testosterone? When I don’t have either, will I change? One trans surgeon said that trans women end up in thirds after surgery, with one third liking men, one third liking women, and the last third attracted to neither. If I did drag instead of transition, would it be enough? If I had female friends, would it be enough? I need to get to the core of who I am, but what is the core? How will I know?

Two other important things came out of that counselling session: the first was that she mentioned the cautionary tale of a client who described themselves as “a minor character in their own autobiography.” They never considered their own needs. I’d have to focus on what made me happy and watch out for the “shoulds” in the way.

The second was an exercise she called “The Road,” where I’d list my values, wants, needs, experiences, and interests, then identify the ten most important things for nurturing a healthy existence. Any needs or values I’d absorbed from others were placed on the side of the road, and I’d need to consider whether anything I’d do would add to or subtract from the things on the road. If there had been any tough decisions in the past that hadn’t worked, “The Road” could help figure out why.

Her follow-up was to look for “mud holes” in the road, but I couldn’t recall what those were and searched online. The search led me to a toolbox for resilience on the American Psychological Association website, reminding me that I’d done this before. The cognitive behavioural therapy goals I developed in 2014 while working through the BounceBack program were part of “The Road.” I’d need to build relationships with friends, note little positive steps along the way, and maintain an optimistic, long-term perspective. Here’s how the exercise went in 2016:

On the road: feminist, atheist, vegan, rational, scientist, music, art, writing, movies, life stories, DIY, thrift, conservation, nature, peace and quiet, walking, hiking, camping, kayaking, snorkelling, and meeting interesting people. I want to contribute, be recognized for expertise and knowledge, and be a creator of something (art, music, literature preferred). I need time to think, relax, and create because I don’t like to be rushed or limited by time. I feel like a tomboy most of the time, but want to be elegant in public when it fits the occasion.

Side of the road: home maintenance, repair projects, work.

To nurture:

1. Maintain and build relationships with family.

2. Find friends and build relationships outside of family.

3. Develop writing ability.

4. More art appreciation (galleries, shows, museums, reading, etc.).

5. Create more art.

6. Eat more salads.

7. Explore the sides of my personality I’ve repressed or abandoned for lack of positive feedback (e.g., used to love fashion magazines, musicals, drawing, painting, singing, classical guitar).

It was then that I mapped out the path to the new me.

***

As my eye healed, I focused on hair removal and studied transitioning at every opportunity. A Reddit user who hadn’t undergone any laser or electrolysis shared selfies over sixteen months on estradiol, and most of the hair on her chest and stomach was gone. It had thinned out on her arms, but most of it on her face remained, so my work was cut out for me.

The first electrologist I visited hugged me warmly and kept me engaged with banter about my future plans while she zapped silver hair, one by one. She was incredulous that anyone would plan to transition in place and not change absolutely everything. “This is the time in your life to dream of big changes.” She sold herself as a life coach and therapist, and once owned a house a few blocks from ours, so she was nearly a neighbour too.

For the dark hairs on my face and neck, she had a laser hidden beneath a blanket. When it was time to use it, she covered my eyes with safety goggles, coated my face with a gel, and hit my face with beams that made it smell like burnt popcorn. The laser was so powerful that many hairs popped out of their follicles in the hours following the sessions. Her rates for electrolysis were reasonable, and she was the best electrologist I visited, but after my moustache grew back and I questioned the expense and permanence of the laser treatments, she said she didn’t have time in her calendar for me anymore.

I should have seen it coming. One time, she noticed that one of my dark hairs pulled out easily while she was doing electrolysis on the silver ones and asked me accusingly if I’d done any laser treatments behind her back. She probably needed the brief and expensive laser treatments to make her books balance, but her friendliness and coaching came off as tactics to profit from my vulnerability.

The truth was, I had been cheating on her. She didn’t have as many calendar openings as I needed that summer, so I visited one of the premium laser places in town for a consult, deciding against using them when they seemed unhappy with my mix of dark and silver hairs. I saw two other electrologists once or twice between appointments with her, and I bought a pulsed-light hair-removal device to use on the rest of my body. Flashes from the electric razor-sized lamp weren’t nearly as powerful as her laser, but it came with a partial refund when I volunteered for their “Before-and-After” program. The flash lamp would cover over forty times the surface area for the price of a few of her small laser treatments.

One downside of the “Before-and-After” program was that I had to bare my hairy back and chest in a family photo studio—sometimes with small kids nearby. The young female photographer handled the job professionally, but the dysphoria and embarrassment it triggered weren’t worth the couple of hundred dollars I received. To make matters worse, towards the end of the six-month photo series, my breasts had grown, and I was technically flashing her.

After all that, the photo studio didn’t manage to send the photos to the company, but they honoured their discount deal by sending me a cheque and gifts from their catalogue. They quietly cancelled the program, allowing me to avoid the public exposure of my pale and slightly less hairy skin. It was in my deadname, but topless photos can live on forever somewhere on the internet.

As my personality and superficial appearance slowly transformed, estradiol shaped deeper changes within me.