Zk | Gender

Her hair is tied with a ribbon Saying “This is not for you.” She wears a pendant of stamped brass Saying “Non sum qualis eram.” “I have been a hero since birth,” She tells herself, As though that will somehow Explain her scars. She pierced her own ears, But did a shit job of it. Her tattoos tease around the edges of her identity. Her bones are ley-lines, She tells herself, Strung with symbols Heady with meaning. She has a certain “fuck you” inflected “Je ne sais quoi” about her. Her clothes bespeak carefully constructed laziness. “I’ve got my own style,” She tells herself, While doing all she can To not be seen. She studied order through science and found it chaotic. She studied chaos through music and found it inviable. “I’ll work with words.” She tells herself She’ll write a book, Or publish stories. She wanted to be a bus driver when she grew up. Then a linguist, then a biologist, Then a composer, a conductor. She never wanted to be What she became; The irony of which Is not lost on her.

I bought my name fair and square; Bespoke, built from whole cloth. I wrote it again and again, Savoring every J, Skipping every fifth tittle, Until it felt right, Like sitting inside and watching the snow fall Through the window Or finding the perfect way that branches in two trees Line up with each other Or when the windshield wipers move In time with your music. I built myself fair and square With hands raw from coarse identity. I kneaded and pressed and squeezed, Savoring every curve, Skipping every tenth day, Until it all felt right, Like the sweet smell of pine bark Rubbed between fingers Or the whisper of maple leaves Under hurrying paws Or the perfect overlap of new buds Already sticky with sap.

You get to explain gender to all of your friends — And all of your family — And maybe once more to be sure — And random strangers — And maybe, like, doctors and nurses who should probably know better; You get to explain to your partner that nothing has changed — And that you were always this way — And that really, honestly, nothing has changed — And that this has no effect on your love for them — And I promise; You will get to come out again — And explain that it wasn’t that being gay wasn’t enough — And explain that it has nothing to do with who you like — And explain that that shouldn’t matter — And — oh right, this means you might be straight after all; You get to go through that awkward period of growing your hair out — And learning how to ask for a more feminine haircut — And trying a curling iron for the first time — And figuring out how to eat noodles without also eating your hair — And the worries that you’re just trying to be rebellious; You get to worry whether you’re maybe just trying to be rebellious — And whether or not you might just be faking it — And whether you’re really Trans Enough or not — And whether you’re maybe just appropriating femininity — And whether or not passing really matters to you anyway; You get to dress up in your best clothes — And your best makeup — And worry that your shoes are too masculine — And have your hair game on point — And convince the doc that you deserve those patches and pills; You get to go through puberty again — And it will be weirder this time around — And your skin will grow soft — And you’ll get more sensitive to temperature changes — And — YEOWCH! That’s a new sensation; You will cry a lot — And bite your tongue often — And lower your gaze — And learn to take up less space — And talk softer; And your dogs will still love you.

Saturday is for mechanics. Sunday is for terror. Monday is for acceptance. Tuesday is for purging. Wednesday is for anxiety. Thursday is for sleep. ----- When I am asleep The world changes around me. In spring, I am changed. ----- I’m no good at images, only words, and yet for days after surgery, as anesthesia and countless milligrams, milliliters, millions of drugs leave my system, I’m lousy with visions, each lousy with meaning. I lay in bed, unable to move, struggling to keep my eyes open; I know that if I close them, I’ll be lost, I’ll be lost, I’ll be mired in waking dreams, coherent visions with all the logic of that paler side of consciousness. Perhaps the veil here is still too thin and vague, the pool too clear, the monsters too scary too lean, too mean, too hungry, or perhaps I was too close to death to come away totally unscathed, too close to completely survive. It’s as though, laying here, stinking of hospital, I’m seeing emotions play out, Scene after scene, scene after scene, anxiety shown in heaps of discarded entrails, hope in the ceaseless ratcheting of gears, determination in the marching of feet. If I were an artist, perhaps I could hope to touch these images, but as it is, every word falls short, too vague, too inexact, too tight to hope to explain something so vast by the very act of attempting to reproduce; I can only hint from the margins. That poetry can accomplish what prose cannot in its economy of motion is attractive to me, here in recovery - so tired, so tired, so tired - so maybe I can hope to express the dire import of these visions dancing behind closed lids, or at least remind myself on rereading. Even now, a week out, I’m starting to lose touch with the visions, I can almost touch them if I squint, lie real still, don’t move now, but even then, a shadow of the substance… I’m starting to consign to memory that which was probably memory to begin with. ----- It is two hundred miles between what I expect and what I want. Two hundred long strides that seem impassible from one direction, and from the other a day’s short drive. It is nine and a half hours between question and answer. A half hour of jazz, nine hours of sleep, a scant second of perspective, and I can only traverse in one direction It is eleven inches between who I was and who I am. Ten of those inches are pain, the eleventh is numb, There’s pleasure to be had in there, I’m promised. It is twelve years between what I want and what I get: Ten years of remembering who I will become, two years running, Eight days dreaming. ----- What have you changed? My mind What changed you? Nothing What became of it? I am not who I was What have you changed? My name What changed you? The word What became of it? I am called who I am What have you changed? My looks What changed you? The light What became of it? I am seen as I am What have you changed? My chemistry What changed you? The substance What became of it? My form is my own What have you changed? My body What changed you? The knife What became of it? I am shaped how I am What have you changed? Nothing What changed you? I was accepted What became of it? I accepted myself What have you changed? Everything What changed you? Everything What became of it? I became who I am

It is surprisingly hard to think something real when every indication, every word, all you feel tells you that that must not be the case. There’s no easy way to make yourself face that which your emotions continually deny, no matter how true you know it to be.                  But why must all these contradictions claim events that mean the most to us? What prevents them from taking the unimportant? The small? Is the import just to big? Can we not fit all of the thing in our heads? Are we too weak? Is the life-changing too vast to explore, to seek out every corner?

Have you considered that your constant seeking may be the problem? That your anxieties leaking all over may be what’s preventing you from recognizing what’s actually true: you can do things for yourself. It’s allowed.

It also doesn’t help that there were so many delays. The scheduler losing my application, and me counting days after those who consulted after me got their dates; The mishap of the letters, and me rushing past gates and their keepers; countless thoughts of countless regrets — regrets which hadn’t yet happened — as mom frets that maybe I will wind up hating my new body. And why not? Why not fret? Surgery! How gaudy. I fight with myself enough over how this surgery is plastic, how I’m just doing something sugary to somehow make myself somewhat more appealing. How trite. How selfish. How lame. How revealing of my bottomless shallowness.

Your saving grace being, as always, dysphoria: more than any cough or cold, more than your chorea, it provided you with a problem. Something fixable. It gave you a tangible solution to something integral that plagued you.

That I had something I could concrete at which to point that would be fixed by this act, I could thus annoint it as somehow more worthy, something worth doing. If I could go through some process of ungluing, excise this thing from myself I might become whole in some way never before imagined.                 Ah, but the toll. There must always some arbitrary price to pay — Self-actualization must never be free — and hey, Everything in society must come with a reason. To come up with letters, proof, for that season of change must serve some sort of divine end. To wait eighteen long months, to refuse to bend to others’ whims…

You got your letters, you got your date, you did it. You did your labor, you did your time. They let you fidget and twist in the wind. Hell, they did it to you twice. Your letters only good for one year, you had to ask nice for a second set.

Yes.    To preempt your ‘why’, I followed my own advice: If I feel the same when I’m depressed as I do when I feel nice, It’s a thing worth doing. Eighteen months is time enough to let at least two depressive cycles call my own bluff. When they did not, when I panicked at having to reapply and still pulled through in time, well, no need to justify my actions any further. That’s when it all became real. That’s when I was in. That’s when I could tell just by feel that I was ready for this change. I wasn’t ready ready, but I was ready enough to come off as rock steady when I called the surgeon’s office. I was visibly confident, even at the pre-operative appointments, totally cognizant that I didn’t deserve this.

Whether or not you deserve this is not up for debate. Not because you do or don’t so much as because the hand fate dealt you. You had the job, you had the insurance, the means. You made the call. You took the step. You passed the screens. You did this.

There are so many words that could be said about the preparation for surgery, all those steps that led to that six-thirty AM call. The days of purging. The anxiety. The drive. My husband’s gentle urging. That night in the Airbnb. That last shower with the Hibiclens. All that has faded. It’s distored at the edge of the lens of my memory.         No, what remains is the two hours before: the being so scared that I was reduced to the barest core. There was nothing left of me but fear, not even a name. I could still drive — the fear was quiet and tame — I could get us to the ambulatory surgery waiting room. But beyond that, I was a non-person. Or convict: my doom was in their hands.

Non-person? Doom? Give yourself at least some credit. You still had agency. You still had a choice, could have not let it happen. You say of travel that getting you there is their job: you felt the same here. You crossed the doorway and let this mob of nurses do theirs.

And that’s exactly what happened. I crossed that threshold, and then there I was: a patient before a team ready to handhold. At that point, I was no longer bearing all that weight. I was able to relax and let them guide me, a piece of freight working through a system. I even had a barcode to scan. Some gabapentin. My belongings in a bag. A rundown of the plan. An IV, and a second after the first missed. Meet the surgeon, then the anaesthesiologist.             I felt myself then a virgin. I was at this point being prepared for some strange sacrifice, a process of pain and cutting, of rebirth. A cut, a slice, and I would become something more…what? Mature? More complete? Where I’d never put stock in virginity before — so obsolete — it fits well, now.

It’s the penetration. It’s the being opened up. The breach in tegument. There is change implied in the loss of virginity. Something elegant, something beyond just the physical. Maybe it’s maturity, maybe it’s a coming of age, or even some strange aspect of purity. It’s a one-way change

That no-going-back-ness grew stronger and stronger, and the minutes just seemed to go longer and longer, as I got closer and closer to the fateful moment of change. I was laid on my back. I wwas wheeled to the OR. “How strange,” I thought. “That I’ll never know where this room actually is. I’m wheeled here on my back, the surgeon does his biz, and I’ll wake up in post-op.” To this day, I have no idea. Did all of my friends go through this? Did Katt? Did Lutea? Were we all whisked away to some dreamside room where we would be changed? Some strange, perhaps-tomb? After all, this surgery, this procedue, none of this was riskless. Would this be where we died? Would we pass here, resistless, in the depths of anaesthesia?

Was that really such a worry?                I mean, I suppose it had to have been. You spent all that time polishing your will. How could you begin to deny the death-thoughts inherent in a nine-hour surgery? That you didn’t still leaves you feeling like you’re living a forgery of a life.

But then I was in. I was in that room with surprisingly green walls. The nurses dropped me off, and from down those hidden halls came surgeon, anaesthesiologist, what seemed like dozens of people. “Here, hold this over your face,” someone said as a needle wandered into my IV’s injection port. “It’s just oxygen.” My hand began to slip. Oxygen? Some sort of intoxicant? They laughed, repeated, “No no, you have to hold it up.” Perhaps it was O2, but whatever was injected began to interrupt any train of thought. The jazz music they’d put on, at my request, was overwhelmed by static. My vision followed. Silence: blessed. Speed: surprising. Is this death? A rush of nothing. Is this death? Nothing.     Nothing. Nothing. Is this death?                   Nothing. Is this death? Silence, static.

    Was this death? Nothing.        Nothing, death?     nothing                     Nothing,                              Nothing.     Was this death? Death?         Nothing.                           Death? Nothing.                  There was nothing. Silence.     Static.         Nothing.                   Death.               Death.                        Silence.                            Death.        Silence.     Static. Static.         Static.                 Death, static.                          Death. And then you woke up.

And then I woke up, and I was in the post-op recovery room. Disoriented, loopy, giggly, not yet in pain — a small boon. There was the nurse, and there was JD. How long had he been there? After some indeterminate time, I was wheeled…somewhere. Yet more anonymous halls. Yet more competent nurses. Language was not yet wholly available to me, no verses yet to be had, despite the heady sensation of the opiate coursing through me; only giggles, however inappropriate, every time we went over a bump or up a ramp. And then I was in my room.             Me. A bed. My IV. A lamp. Square. Spacious. A bathroom I could not yet walk to. Hourly vitals. Friendly staff wandering through to talk to. And a button in my hand.

That button, which you were instructed to press every seven minutes. A morphine drip, or dilaudid, at a guess. Every seven minutes, a bit of nightmare dripped into your veins. Every seven minutes, more entrails, more gears, more chains coursing through your mind.

There was pain, too, and the drip did indeed lessen that. Still, the pain grew less, and soon I switched meds to combat that ebbing tide. Tylenol. Hydrocodone. The button was removed. Pills. Pills. Every four hours: pills. I complain, but improved nonetheless. Antibiotics. Stool softeners. Painkillers. The nurses wandering in and out became my tillers: They steered my days, steered my pain, steered my diet. We talked. We laughed. We shared private jokes in the quiet of the night over BP cuffs. They helped with bedpan duty, thankless though it was. Another patient would cry, flutey, and they’d hurry off. I remember none of their names. Every now and then, when he made it down to Portland, James would visit, perhaps spend the night.

Your laptop unweildy, you spent most of your time on your phone. Even when no one was there, you were never quite alone. Hours on Taps. Hours on Telegram. Five long days on your back, and you, a side sleeper! Anything and everything to distract from that fact.

It wasn’t all monotony. The surgeon came in to check on me. They removed my dressing, and then my packing, setting me free, stepwise, from confinement. The last day was the biggest of all: The packing, catheter, and drains were removed. I tried to crawl from bed, found myself on the verge of collapse. I showered and saw my body changed. They measured my urine. Nurses glowered at how little. They threatened to put the catheter back. Embarrassed, I defecated, then tried again. Now on track, I was finally discharged. It was then that I finally saw, from my wheelchair, the hitherto only hinted at hall outside my door. It was somehow still unreal to me. Or perhaps I was simply to eager to finally be free from the room.

Undiluted sunlight while you waited on JD to get the car hurt your eyes. You could still barely stand, afraid to jar your new body in your dizziness. Almost more overwhelming than the hours before the surgery was you helming your dissociating self.

All the way to the B&B, crossing that street, getting settled, I was nothing. I was not myself. I was soft, bepetaled. I was new. I was raw. Cliché, sure, but I was a flower newly sprouted. Under anaesthesia, I ceased to tower over the earth and instead became one with it. Or my dream finally became reality and I had become a tree, the theme of growth omnipresent within me. It was too much, too much. So I slept. I waited for Robin to join me, just to clutch at things familiar. Something to anchor past me to the present. I had become a tree, had grown, and sure, it was pleasant, but all the same, I still needed something to keep me grounded. I needed to not be completely unmoored, to not be unbounded. But it was done.

It was done. It was complete. You’d started taking action, and kept on taking steps until you were there, beyond abstraction. This was concrete. This was real. This was true. You were true. You weren’t false before, but all the same, now that you were new, you were more true now

What can I say of healing? Of life after change? I got used to it, bit by bit. I slowly learned my range, the extent of my new body. Proprioception caught up immediately, and there were no phantom sensations, and the immediacy was startling at first, but I got used to it, to my new form. Over the next weeks and months, I slowly learned my new norm. I learned by regaining feeling. I learned with every muscular flex. I learned by dilating. I learned by masturbating. I learned by sex. While I refused to let my happiness hinge on such a thing, a part of me hoped it’d make me more comfortable get in the swing of sex, and while it helped, I still was still largely okay without. My body was still my own. Whole and entire. My life played out, and I became more myself.

This isn’t going how you pictured it, this bit of writing. You were going to talk more about healing, about fighting for permission to change, about your $76,000 bill. And here you talk of trees and growth. Did you not get your fill? Do you still need this outlet?

Apparently.       Apparently I still need to revel in the newness. Apparently, what I need out of this project isn’t the trueness of the concrete. We should really have expected nothing less. This is a project to dig for truth, a project to confess. It is not a project for describing stitches stabbing me in the clit. It is not for telling about each successive dilator testing the fit of my new depths. Could I have gone into that? Yes. Perhaps. Perhaps I still will. Later. For now, I still need to run laps, to circle around some dark core and discern its edges. Perhaps if I know that shape, if I peek over enough hedges, I’ll somehow know myself better. I don’t know. It feels unlikely. Maybe there is no knowing the self. Still, I have to try, rightly or not.

Fair enough. Still, at some point, discuss the concrete. So many have asked you to, and perhaps you’d feel complete. Perhaps that, too, would be of use to you. Not everything demands such thorough introspection. Not everything fits in the wetlands of your subconscious

Of course not. I know this. You know I know this. I’m not deflecting, just focusing on this part of the abyss. The concrete aspects are for writing with clarity, not with verse. They’re for writing with the sincerity borne of experience, so that perhaps others can benefit. Of this, only I need benefit. There is an etiquette to writing for others. Here, there is only an ally. This is for me and you. Your role is to hear my lie, to call it out, to force me to correct myself, my words. My role is to keep on writing, be it about surgery or birds, and to learn from our discussions. To learn? To suffer? Perhaps more the latter. To hurt, and grow tougher by hurting.

You have been called on that, yes, writing to suffer. And it’s not wrong. You sit at your laptop and fill the buffer with sentences and lines and paragraphs of memories and pain. Do you really grow tougher? Is it masochisim, or do you gain real insight from this?

I think I do. It’s therapeutic to try and understand myself better. is it not? With every paragraph and line and word and letter, I think I reduce the borders of that abyss. Or if not reduce, I spraypaint a red line five feet from them, so that I can deduce my roughest edges. I’m often say that it’s easy to discern boundaries by crossing them. I’ve crossed them here, with you. Foundries of thought and emotion are within me, ceaselessly toiling. I want to tour them all. I want to see them boiling. I feel them. I house them. I smell them and taste them. I just also want to understand them. There’s no chaste hem to the subconscious, so I have to map it, map these crude sources. Then I can experience thisness — I hope — when buffeted by forces internal.

If you say so, I suppose. Do you think it’ll work, though? Aren’t such works unknowable by definition? They grow, they wane. You can sense them by their effects and emissions, but isn’t seeing them, truly seeing, knowing their positions, reserved for dreams?