Can’t You Wait Until I’m Dead? ~ Chapter 10: Meeting the Community
The next week, I visited Toronto for a research ethics conference and was now consumed by wanting to know what I might look like dressed as a woman. Toronto had a larger LGBTQ+ community than Vancouver, and I hoped to find someone who had time to do a makeover. A web search turned up a consultant offering an evening of makeup and wardrobe changes for three hundred dollars, so I booked an appointment with her and made plans to take a bus out to her place in the suburbs. A couple of hours before I was about to board the bus, she emailed back to say she was sick and would need to reschedule. I was heartbroken. I had already pictured myself, like the women in Jess Dugan’s photos, wearing a wig and a dress, or a tailored pastel business suit, with just enough makeup to hide my male features.
After I cried a little, the release gave me another idea: there was a large enough community in Toronto that might have a support group for older transitioners. In my hotel room, looking out over the city lights, I googled “older trans support group” and, to my astonishment, found a meeting the next night.
I made my way to what was, to me, a famous queer landmark in Canada, “The 519.” Near the gay village and the convention centre, Toronto had the griminess of New York City, with humid, roasting subway stations, and everyone brushing shoulders on block after block. I climbed the stairs to the empty room, thirty minutes early, and waited for someone to arrive. After a few minutes and a chance to reconsider, a person in men’s clothes, over two hundred pounds, with closely shaved hair and large hands, arrived and asked if I was there for the support group. I said “Yes,” and they replied, “I’m usually the first person here because I never know how long the drive from Oshawa will take.” Oshawa was the car manufacturing capital of Canada, and it was an hour and a half away, depending on traffic.
I was ashamed to admit to myself that I couldn’t find the motivation to travel thirty minutes to visit a support group in Vancouver when she was spending more than five hours twice a month. A wig, a dress, and some makeup later, she was still early enough to set up chairs in a circle. Gradually, more women of various ages, colours, cultures, and stages of transitioning found their chairs, and I wondered whose regular spot I had taken.
When the facilitator, Shadmith, arrived, she asked us to go around the circle and introduce ourselves. I said, “Hello. I’m Bertie, but I’m hoping to look and feel more like Allison in a couple of months.” We all had a difficult path in common. The youngest in the group had long, blonde hair and a slender figure, and said little beyond her name, acting as if she’d been forced to attend, spending the whole meeting staring at her phone.
Only one of us was taking hormones, and she had only been on them for a week. Some couldn’t start hormones because their doctors wouldn’t prescribe hormones to someone dealing with depression, and some couldn’t get past a family situation. Like one woman, unemployed, living with elderly parents and unable to come out. Others were frozen by the same fears plaguing me. What if I transition and look like a freak? Will I lose my friends and family? Lose my job?
After we talked about what we might do to get unstuck, we hurried down the stairs and onto the dimly lit streets, heading toward a coffee house a few blocks away. The sense of newfound camaraderie faded after a few steps, and I drifted away from the group without saying goodbye. I needed to get enough sleep for an early morning at the conference, I reminded myself.
With a doctor’s appointment to start hormones scheduled a few days later, I realized I was moving forward despite my fears. The brief connection with women transitioning was an important step in finding my place on the gender spectrum. In a phone call with Sarah that night, before bed, I pictured each of them in the circle and shared their stories with her. I remember thinking that everything I heard and learned in that one meeting would make a powerful play or short film. Their lives and stories needed to be told, and I wished I had collected their names and numbers to keep in touch.
***
Despite all my preparation and learning the drugs and doses that fit my needs, Dr. Melnyk caught me off guard three days later when we sat down to discuss my first prescription. I thought I would start on spironolactone and estradiol patches at the same time. Dr. Melnyk wasn’t comfortable starting both and preferred the “start low and go slow” principle taught in medical school. If I had to choose, I wanted to start on estradiol, but she was concerned about the risk of hyperkalemia (dangerously high blood potassium) with spironolactone, leading to muscle spasms and fatal cardiac arrhythmias. I left the office with instructions to start on 50 mg of spironolactone, have my potassium checked the next week, watch for low blood pressure, and return in two weeks to talk about estradiol.
With medication sorted, my focus shifted towards removing the facial hair that had plagued me since it first began growing in high school. Every trans medical guide and personal account detailed how estradiol thinned body hair with time, but it didn’t affect facial hair. The only permanent solution was electrolysis. To avoid the pain and expense, I thought I could do much of it myself carefully, and bought a used electrolysis machine from a man on Kijiji. I removed only a few hairs with a magnifying mirror and realized that it was a technique best left to professionals.
Some women posted online about a clinic in Texas where a doctor sedated clients while two electrologists “cleared” the thousands of follicles on their face and neck over the course of three to five days, spaced out with six weeks between treatments. I envisioned myself in a chair, like one at a dentist’s office. My face flooded with surgical lights, surrounded by a doctor and electrologists, quickly, painlessly, and permanently done with shaving forever. I wasn’t ready to spend thousands of dollars on multiple trips from Canada, hotel stays, and clinic fees, and chose instead to find local electrologists who billed by the hour.
A couple of electrologists in Vancouver advertised that they provided transgender hair removal, so I booked an appointment with the first one who responded. She asked that I arrive with my beard grown to three millimetres, which seemed excessively long to me, and the longest I had ever been. The stubble triggered such dysphoria that I had to write again to keep from spiralling lower. I posted an essay about irreversible mistakes and living with the consequences, featuring a black-and-white photo of hospital orderlies in the 1960s.
On Being Human
2 June 2016 – There are a couple of things I’ve always felt guilty about—moments where, if I could go back and change what I did or said, I would. But life isn’t like that. You can do things that change your life, or the lives or feelings of others, that you can never undo. The broken bones and hurt feelings you cause might heal, but they leave scars, even if they’re invisible to everyone else, and if you’ve got a conscience, you’ll feel regret for the rest of your life.
The first time I experienced one of those moments was when I was eighteen and working as a nursing assistant in a nursing home. I was assigned to what was called the “Medicare Ward,” where the residents required complete care. We would help them get up in the morning, shower or bathe them, change their diapers if they wore them, and help them to the toilet if they needed to go. Some could communicate their needs, but most couldn’t, at least those I was responsible for. We fed them, secured them to chairs if they were at risk of harming themselves, and then tucked them in at night.
My training consisted of a few days in a classroom, where I learned basic health and safety procedures, as we were hired to be the hands and muscles of the nurses at the home. We didn’t make any of the big decisions, or so I thought.
One morning, the nurse assigned me to get an elderly woman with late-stage dementia up, and she hadn’t used her diaper that night, so the nurse had me help her onto a portable toilet until she did her business. I put her on the toilet and went off to help another patient out of bed. When I came back, she had tipped the chair over, and she was on her side, howling in pain. The nurses and another assistant got her back into bed, and that was all I heard for the rest of the day.
The next day, the administrator called me into his office and told me that she had broken her hip in the fall. They needed to know whether I had buckled her onto the toilet, and I told them honestly that I didn’t remember, but that I usually did. I could easily see myself forgetting to fasten the straps, and if she fell out of the chair, I thought it had to mean that I hadn’t buckled her in, so I felt as though I was lying when I said that I must have. I had that tingly sensation I get when I'm in trouble, and said what I had to say to avoid getting fired.
The thought that I might have caused a broken hip, and likely a hastened death considering her age and infirmity, has troubled me ever since. Whether I forgot or whether she unbuckled herself isn’t important—I should have stayed with her to ensure she was safe.
The second time I caused irrevocable pain was during a disagreement with my partner, and I carelessly let slip a phrase that couldn’t be taken back—“It’s always about you.” In my mind, it was the first cut that must have left her feeling as though she would always have to be cautious around me. It was the moment we lost the absolute safety and innocence in our relationship. Perhaps there were other times before that, but that’s the one I remember and regret deeply.
I’ve since caused and suffered similar moments in other relationships and realize it’s just a part of being human, though I wish it weren’t. My idealism, or call it perfectionism, will always be both a strength and a weakness. I want to be perfect, and I want everything around me to be perfect, but at the same time, I know it’s impossible.
I cope by being paralyzed—inactive—until I’m forced to make a decision. I’d like to loosen up and stop being paralyzed, but as I write this, I remember writing nearly the same words to myself thirty-six years ago in my parents’ basement. Is there a lesson here? I can’t go back, but I can apologize, try to make things right, and then accept my flaws and their unintended consequences.
***
I wrote about causing others physical and emotional injury, but the subtext was my subconscious fear about the permanent changes coming to my face from electrolysis, and to my body from hormones. I always hated my facial hair, so if the unthinkable happened and I found myself “de-transitioning,” I wouldn’t miss it, but needing “top surgery” to remove breasts would be harder for me to accept.