Half a Year

This is a milestone. Half a year since I began hormones.

This update won't be like the others. It won't be an itemized list of the minutiae of the past month. Instead, prepare for some rambling musings on the whole experience, where I started, where I'm going, and what it all means.

Beginnings

Wednesday, February 26ᵗʰ. I put on my skirt, my frilly top, my high-heeled boots, and way too much makeup. I gobbled some of my anti-anxiety medication, paced around, and finally got in my car. My appointment was right behind the physics building, where I spent all my time at UNM; I parked right next to the LIDAR array our research group is working on. I don't pray, but I certainly hoped to myself, “oh please don't step outside to work on the damn thing now” (re: my boss). My heart was pounding the whole way to the clinic; I scrupulously avoided eye contact.

I checked in, a truly cringeworthy experience. Internally I had a bitter chuckle at the irony: I was there as Rachel, to see a doctor about being Rachel, and I had to check in and interact with everyone as Ryan (because paperwork). I was so nervous waiting in the exam room for the doctor. When he got there he started asking me questions about what I expected from the hormones. No, I’m not expecting it to get rid of my facial or body hair. Yes, I know there’s only so much it can do for appearance with immutable bone structure. No, I don’t expect it to change my voice. He suggested I might want to get a laser ablation procedure done on my vocal folds to undo some of the damage wrought by testosterone during puberty. Basically, he wanted to make sure my expectations were realistic.

I was afraid I might answer something wrong and he wouldn’t give me the hormones. But 15 minutes later I walked out of there with two prescriptions – spironolactone to get rid of my testosterone, and estradiol to replace it with estrogen – and a spring in my step (yes, even in heels). I went home, switched to boy mode, and went straight to the pharmacy. That Wednesday afternoon, I took my first doses, and my first step toward physically becoming Rachel.

Retcon

Comic book fans will be familiar with the term 'retcon' in layman's terms means that the writer waves his hand and tells you 'Remember when we said this? We screwed up, forget about that.' 

 Retroactive Continuity: rewriting past events to be consistent with the new present.

My brain is doing this to me now and it's a very strange experience. Some of my memories are being amended to be consistent with the present. The memories stay almost completely the same, except one or two things are different. The other day something reminded me of walking around the neighborhood in high school. It was a vivid memory, as my random memories tend to be.

Two things were retconned, though. First, my CRPS has been written out of existence in that memory. Gone, entirely. Like it was never there. I see this as consistency with the fact that it's been in remission for a decade. It's no longer really a part of my life, so why would it be there in a memory that had nothing to do with it?

Second, I've been rewritten as a girl. Not a trans girl in transition or anything. I was a girl and always had been. This is incredibly detailed retconning, too. I "remember" what I was wearing; I "remember" my sense of what I looked like; I "remember" my stride, completely different from how I actually walked at the time.

So now I'm remembering my life as it wasn't, subconsciously replacing the actual me with an alternate me more consistent with my present self-image. It's almost like I don't actually remember me in any of those memories - I remember my interactions with the world around me, then insert myself into it.

I'm not completely sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I hate the failure of memory and the fundamental dishonesty of my brain. What I consider fantasy is replacing reality. But is it really? The only thing that seems changed is me - the rest of the memory seems intact. And is a change of "me" to maintain better coherence with the present me really so bad? Besides, it feels really good.

Regardless of the merits of the confabulation, my brain is being pretty clear about things:

Remember when you were a boy? That was a mistake, forget about that.

Identity Crisis

Warning: Wangst ahead

tl;dr: Suddenly having trouble calling myself female instead of transfemale.

*sigh* I'm having an identity crisis. I choose to identify as just plain female, not transfemale, But now I'm not sure I can do that. I want to be just female, but wanting doesn't make it so. I was never socialized as a girl, I didn't have the experience of growing up as a girl or of living my adult life as one. The maleness of that is a part of me, however much I wish I didn't have it or wish I could jettison it.

Can I ever legitimately claim to just be female, not specifically transfemale? My therapist assures me that after 7-10 years or so (so when I'm 40, ugh) I'll reach a "post-trans" state where it doesn't even occur to me that I'm trans. I have my doubts about that; we'll see. For now, I just don't know that I can claim to actually be what I merely want to be.

This didn't quite come out of nowhere. I've been having crazy dreams this week. Some of them really drove this home for me, either because someone rejected my femininity and insisted I was male (which robbed me of my female voice and features - them saying it made them correct), or because I dreamed I was a cis woman and waking up felt like being snapped out of a happy delusion.

Still, as a transwoman, I'm a subcategory of just plain woman, not something separate and distinct. I just feel now like "female" carries too strong a connotation of cis or at least early transition. Not being either, having lived my whole life male, I feel like it's a lie, or at least misleading.

Not changing it on Facebook, though. I have to cling to the hope and desire to one day not be 'that trans girl' (which probably says more about my own insecurities than anyone's perception of me). *sigh*