Miss Manners I'm Not

Did some walking today and I'm tired now. But at least it stimulated my senses and my mind and gave me some badly-needed exercise.

Along the way, I had an interesting encounter in Bake Way on Broadway. Sometimes I stop there for a snack and/or to use the bathroom. I came in for the latter, but I knew I'd pick up one of their red velvet cupcakes on the way out.

Well, a very pregnant young woman entered immediately behind me. I really needed to go at that moment (I'm still getting used to my diminished bladder capacity!) but, because she got the attention of the young woman behind the counter, she got the key.

She extended her arm toward me. "Here." She tried to pass the key from her hand to mine.

"You go first," I commanded.

"Thank you, Miss."

Now, when I was living as male, the situation would have been more straightforward: She would've gone in ahead of me. And I don't think she would've offered to let me use the bathroom before her.

I found myself thinking about a situation I encountered a few months ago. I'd just gotten on the bus to go to work. I was carrying a tote bag with some books and papers in it: Nothing that would give my pre-op self a second thought, much less difficulty.

Yet an older (at least she seemed to be) black woman who looked rather tired offered me her seat. I was about to politely refuse when something in that woman's expression told me that she really, for whatever reason, wanted to give me her seat and I couldn't, or at least shouldn't, refuse.

Nonetheless, it felt odd, as you can imagine. I'm still getting used to men who open doors and offer you their seats and to use the bathroom ahead of them. But I'm not sure that I'll grow accustomed to other women doing those things for me.

And even if I were to live a few more lifetimes as a woman, I'll probably still stumble through any situation in which a pregnant woman offers to let me use a bathroom ahead of her.

Sometimes I wonder whether I'll ever master female etiquette. I didn't always do so well with male etiquette. But I've learned things that make less sense.

What Would Grandma Think of an Escapee? A Parolee?

The other day was my maternal grandmother's birthday. Today is the anniversary of her death. The latter, I realized much later, sent me into one of the deeper troughs of the depression in which I spent about much of my life as Nick.

I can't honestly say that I've mourned her--or anyone else's--death in a while. Perhaps that sounds callous. But for the past few years I have not had a new death to mourn, unless you count Nick. Yes, at times I mourned him because even though I wasn't happy when I was living as him, there were pleasurable moments. And I certainly learned a few things from him. But there were days that it simply didn't seem fair that he lived and he suffered--for my sake. Not only did he not have the opportunity to bask in the light and warmth of his flame, he also did not have the chance to receive gratitude, or any other reward, from me. That simply didn't seem fair!

And that very lack of justice is the reason why mourning becomes, after a while, futile. We all die; almost none of us gets to pick the time or way in which we'll leave this planet. Grandma was so ill that it was all but impossible to determine her precise cause of death. But would it really have mattered which of the complications from her diabetes killed her? To some doctors and forensic scientists, yes. But not to anyone else.

I think about her now and wonder what sort of relationship I could have, or could have had, with her were she still on this planet. If she were, she'd be 96 years old. I can't say I've spent a lot of time with people around that age. Then again, not many other people could say they have, either.

I loved my grandmother because, well, she was my grandmother. But I liked her because she always seemed to know how I felt. Sometimes I think she suspected my gender-identity issues, or had fleeting thoughts that I was gay, or at least not straight. But she knew that I wasn't a "normal" boy: I could see it from the expression on her face when I showed no interest in toy soldiers or erector sets.

What would she think of what I've become? I'm sure it would be difficult for her to understand, as she was certainly a daughter of her place and time. She was also religious, but I've found that a person's religious beliefs don't always determine how or whether a person will accept someone different from him or her self. I've experienced kindness and compassion from some people who worship in institutions run by men who think that what I've done is wrong, or even worthy of a death sentence. (Actually, a lot of people extend what they think their religions say about homosexuality to transgender people when, in fact, the holiest documents of their faith may have said nothing at all about homosexuality or transgenderism.) And someone who has a PhD in gender studies and no discernible religious beliefs ended a friendship we once had.

Somehow I don't think Grandma ever even had a conversation with anyone in which those subjects came up. She probably never knew anyone about whom she could say with certainty that he or she was not heterosexual. That may have had to do with being in a time or place where people were more covert about their lifestyles, much less their inner lives. And it may also have had to do with the fact that, well, she didn't know or didn't care.

I can't deny that there would be times she would have looked at me and seen her grandson. Even if I was an unusual boy, it was as a boy that she knew me. She may have even wished that I weren't trans or that I didn't make the changes I've made.

Then again, she was always so proud of the things I did, whether they were the grades I got in school, becoming an altar boy or simply taking a long bike ride. I think it would make her very happy that I write and have been published and that I teach in a college. I also think she would be even happier to know that I have become someone with whom people talk about their fears and secrets--none of which I've betrayed on this blog! She might not like the fact that some young student got pregnant out of wedlock, but I think she'd be really proud to know that such a student sought me out for advice.

I haven't treated some people very well. But I have made every effort to be better, especially to my parents. And I really would rather deal with people through kindness and gentleness than through hostility and suspicion. Sometimes I'm still on "high alert" or I respond to people as if they're more bigoted than they may actually be. But I'm learning who is and isn't, and simply spending as much of my time and effort as I can with those who aren't, or who simply don't care.

Yes, I would like for Grandma to know who I am now. I think we could've had a nice relationship. But then again, Grandma died at 68 and was--physically as well as emotionally--much, much older than that. Even in comparison to other women of her age, she wasn't healthy. By the end, she was clearly suffering, though she never lost her will to live. At times it was almost painful to see: Her body had become a prison, but she wouldn't dream of escaping.

That's not what I did, though. I finally embraced what was within me. And I was released. I think she might've appreciated that.

I Can See Clearly Now

Tonight is one of those really classic early autumn nights, even if it's a bit chilly for this time of year. The air is crisp, almost brisk, and the sky is clear. In fact, it is on nights like these that one can truly call the sky "clear": On winter nights, pinpricks of light punctuate grow brighter against the dark and the cold: Chiaroscuro is not the same thing as clarity.

But on a night like this can't be anything but clear. The moon and the stars are almost pure light, and everything under them doesn't only reflect that light; it radiates the soft glow of that light.

Nights on which rain doesn't fall will become clearer all through the fall, until around Thanksgiving or so. Then the light of the stars and moon will begin to freeze in place and will remain static, like portraits of memory.

But for now the sky can't be anything but clear, as it is on such an early-fall night.

It was around this time of the year--I was fourteen, if I recall correctly-- I first heard Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now", it didn't seem odd--in some way I couldn't explain--that the song, in Nash's beautiful rendition, came out when it did. And every time I heard it thereafter, I felt some kind of solace every time I heard it.

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

I think I can make it now, the pain is gone
All of the bad feelings have disappeared
Here is the rainbow I've been prayin' for
It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

Look all around, there's nothin' but blue skies
Look straight ahead, nothin' but blue skies

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

Or hope, anyway. As you can imagine, my struggle with my gender identity and sexuality was particularly fierce. I was on the wrestled and played soccer for my school. I hoped that doing such things, and taking extra science courses and mechanical drawing as an elective, would somehow make me more masculine. But the boys on those teams--and, I suspect, my coaches--knew that no such thing was happening. They would make me run wind sprints long after the other boys were finished. The good news was that I got into really good shape--in body, anyway.

Even when I won a match or made a good play, other boys would taunt me. They wouldn't call me "faggot," "queer" or any other derogatory names. Rather, they'd point out, in a mocking way, some girl who'd developed or sexy teacher and coax, in an even more mocking way, that they'd tell that girl or teacher that I had the "hots" for them.

Of course, they thought I was gay. Later, I would identify myself in that way only because I wasn't attracted to women in the same way as other guys. Then again, I wasn't attracted to men in the same way as gays I knew.

Those pinpricks of clarity would remain frozen in the recesses of my mind. I had no way of articulating what I felt--at least not to other people, as most people thought, as I did, that gay men were all "queens" and transsexuals were at least vaguely skeevy. Then again, the only trannies I knew about were Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards and tranny hookers.

So, while I could viscerally feel my own desires, my lack of a language for them left me unable to see the meaning of them more clearly. That would take many, many more years.

At least I knew that it would be all about seeing clearly, seeing all the obstacles in my way. Hearing the song would give me hope for that; sometimes I had nothing more than a wish. But at least the points of light were there, even if the sky wasn't clear enough for them to shine on me,or I simply wasn't looking at them.

Tonight I looked at the clear fall sky.

After One Month: Today

Today I turned one month old.

And I can't believe a month has passed already. Now tell me, how many people say "Time flies!"--or, even better yet, "Tempus fugit"--at the age of one month.

I don't think even Catullus or Cicero could've said "Tempus fugit" at the age of one month. Nor, for that matter, could they or Victor Hugo have said "Comme le temps passe vite."

So, does this make me the smartest one-month-old in history, or what? ;-)

OK, enough bragging. That's so unbecoming of a lady. I have to uphold what Regina says about me: that I "reaffirm femininity."

She and I had lunch at Uncle George's restaurant today. If you're ever walking (or pedalling or driving) along Broadway in Astoria, Queens, you've got to eat there. They serve real Greek food, not what you get in a diner. And the food's excellent, plentiful and relatively cheap. Best of all, on a day like today--sunny and warm, but not too--they open up the window/doors on the 34th Street side of their resataurant, and you can sit at one of the tables in the semi-open area. So, you have something like the atmosphere of a cafe's sidewalk terrace, but you can still have a conversation with whomever you accompany, or whoever accompanies you.

Regina explained, in her gentle way, that I am still really an embryonic woman. (How would the world be different if my brothers and I had spent our formative years watching a program called The Embryonic Woman instead of The Bionic Woman?) My body is still becoming acclimated to what Marci brought out from within me, and my mind is sorting out all of the new sensations in old places and old sensations in new places I'm feeling. That process, I suspect, will take quite a while longer.

And she reminded me of something she'd said months ago: I'd been giving birth to myself. Now that the new life I had been carrying within me is living in this world, she said, I am, and am becoming, a different person from what I was before my transition. "Any time you give birth, you're not the same as you were before," she explained. "You really divide your life into 'before' and 'after.'"

That, she said, is the reason why things I expereinced only a few weeks ago seem as if they happened a lifetime ago. The spring semester at the college seems like aeons ago; if I talk about the day I graduated college (if indeed I can still remember any of it!), I may as well be talking about the day Panagea started to break up.

Regina and other women I know who are or have been mothers have told me that once you give birth, your life is not only yours anymore. They all said exactly those words, or something very, very close to them. I wondered whether that made me different from, and not quite equal to, all those women who bore sons and daughters into this world.

While I am not yet ready to compare myself to my mother, Regina, Millie, Sonia or anyone else who are or have been mothers in the way most people would define the role, I can say that I have this in common with them: the sense that because I gave birth, my life is somehow not mine alone. Even though I gave birth to the person I've always known that I am, I didn't do it solely to satisfy my own ego. Furthermore, I now have a responsibility--one that I have taken on gladly--for the life to which I've given birth.

Anyone who fulfills that responsibility is a nurturer. Lots of people don't want to be seen as one because it's not a respected role, particularly in milieux that are dominated by men. Women who live and have sacrificed everything else for their careers--whether in a corporate boardroom or the halls of academia--so often look down on women who, by choice or circumstance, are mothers. They seem to think that somehow the work they do is more rigorous and demanding than what mothers, or other nurturers, do.

"Nurturing" is not necessarily synonymous with "coddling" or "feeding." Sometimes nurturing can involve those things. But to me, it's really about giving, or helping to attain, whatever that life to which you've given birth needs in order to survive, much less thrive. And, in doing so, the nurturer finds mental and spiritual sustenance for his or her own journey in the act of nurturing as well as in the life he or she nurtures.

I can't think of anything more rigorous or demanding than that. I've told my mother that no matter how hard or long I work, I will never have worked as hard or long--not to mention given or sacrificed as much--as she has in raising me or any of my brothers.

She's still nurturing me. Regina is, in her own way. Millie, too. And they all have nurtured, and continue to nurture many, many other people.

What they do makes our lives possible. Today it's my turn, even if I'm only one month old.

Crossing and Returning

Today I crossed state lines as a woman.

Technically, it wasn't the first time I did that. On the flight home from my surgery, I crossed a few state lines. But somehow that isn't the same as crossing them on land.

OK, so I crossed from New York into New Jersey in the Lincoln Tunnel, on an Academy Lines bus to the Jersey shore. But there is a marker there delineating the two states. You don't see any "Colorado-Kansas" or "Welcome to Illinois" signs when you're 33,ooo feet up.

So why was I crossing state lines as a woman? Well, I assure you, it wasn't to do anything illegal, or even transgressive. I went to meet Mom and Dad for lunch. It was my first face-to-face meeting with them since my surgery.

Time was when I used to ride that bus from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York to the Jersey shore once or twice a month. Today was the first time I took that bus in four years, when I met Mom and Dad for lunch in the same diner we visited today. That day, I was seeing them for the first time since "coming out;" it was the first time they saw me "as" Justine.

I got off the bus at a place called Airport Plaza in Hazlet, NJ. From what I understand, there was an airport there long, long ago. Today about the only thing it has in common with an aviation terminal is that it always looks either windswept or overheated by the sun. It's basically a parking lot surrounded by some stores that always manage to look drab no matter how often they're renovated. That's the reason why the lot is never more than half-full, which adds to the sun-baked, windswept effect.

AP was like that more than thirty years ago, when I was attending high school a couple of towns away.

Funny that I was thinking about my high school years during the months before the surgery. I probably went about twenty years, or close to it, without thinking about them at all. But somebody told me about a site called classmates.com, which I checked out of curiosity. I found myself looking at the profiles of people I hadn't seen since graduation day. I had no desire to meet most of them again, yet I was curious as to what they were doing and where they were doing it.

I actually e-mailed a few of my old classmates, which led me to correspond with Sue, whom I hadn't seen since we graduated. She was one of the smartest kids there: I know, I had a bunch of classes with her, and she did better than I did in most of them. But the first things I remembered when I saw her name were that she was the nicest, and by far the wisest, person I knew in that place.

If souls really are re-incarnated (Something I am willing to believe.), Sue must have lived many, many lives--or, perhaps, a few particularly intense ones--before becoming a middle-class daughter in Middletown, NJ.

As you can imagine, high school was a difficult time for me. I never got beat up, mainly because I was an honors student who played soccer, which meant I didn't spend much time around the sort of kids who would've beaten me up. But as I now know very, very well, sometimes the so-called smart or educated people can be the worst bigots of all.

To be fair, I probably would've been in the closet no matter where I was at that time in my life--or, for that matter, just about any time in my life before I turned 40. And, I probably would've been deeply depressed throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, no matter who or what surrounded me.

But at least in high school I was friendly with Sue and some other sympathetic girls. In fact, it may have served as cover: Some of the boys and a few teachers used to nudge me and wink as if I were some sort of stud.

In addition to those girls who weren't girlfriends, I talked with a fair number of adult women. They included some of my teachers, particularly Mrs. Mastri, who taught the World Lit class I took during my sophomore year. But even more of a presence were my mother and her female friends. whom I saw just about every day.

My mother always seemed to have smart, literate women around her. I remember talking about Ayn Rand and Alexis de Tocqueville with Kay Murphy--who made a terrific quiche--and Wuthering Heights and some poems of Emily Dickinson with Betty Carr. Another friend of my mother's was a vegan, which was all but unheard-of in that time and place.

These women were all my mother's age or thereabouts. I actually felt more comfortable with them than just about any of my own peers. Although I was nowhere near "coming out," I knew I couldn't live the sort of life people seemed to want me to have. That is to say, I could not live as a man. I didn't say this to my mother or those women. But whenever I said I didn't want to get married or have kids, or to follow some of the career paths other people seemed to want for me, they never tried to convince me that I would "grow out of" what I thought or felt.

I didn't have women like that in my life when I went to college, or for a long time afterward. In fact, college seemed to be even more gender-segregated than high school was. And I was attending Rutgers, not some religious fundamentalist college or a military academy.

Those thoughts occured to me when I was on the bus coming home, after Mom and I saw a bus painted with the insignia of my alma mater while we were waiting for the bus I would take back home. I joked that I could get on that bus.

"Would you?"

"Go back to Rutgers? To that time in my life: no, no way, no how. It was one of the easiest times in my life but..."

"You were miserable."

I nodded. "It was one of the easiest, but one of the worst, times in my life."

"If you were doing your life over, would you have gone there?"

"I don't know. I'd say no, except that, at that time in my life, I would have been miserable just about anyplace."

"That's true. Would you have done school differently--taken different courses, hung out with different people?"

"Maybe. I think it would've been better to've had a different attitude about it all."

What I didn't get to say--my bus pulled in--was that I would like to have been living as female. But she knew that already. What I would've liked, in addition, was to have gone somewhere where nobody knew me and therefore had no expectations of me.

If I wanted to make such a move today, I probably could've gone back to the place where Mom and I had lunch: the Marina Diner on Route 36 in Belford, NJ. The food was good, but it didn't have quite the same "feel" to it as it had when I was young and it was our favorite diner. We guessed that the ownership had changed: The waitstaff and cooks all seemed to be recent Mexican immigrants. I have nothing against them, but it's certainly not what we remembered.

But most important of all, none of the customers looked even remotely like anyone we knew back in the day. Nor did anyone in the area, the town, surrounding it. I didn't need my sunglasses or anything else to go incognito there.

Mom and Dad were the only people I recognized there, or at Keansburg beach, to which we drove afterward. It was just as well; I wanted to see them.

And I'm glad I did: Mom in particular didn't seem too happy about this trip up north. Things were pretty tense between my parents, my brother and sister-in law. I hope I made things a little better for them in our former home--and as the woman I am.

Feeling From Within

"Only her hairdresser knows for sure." I don't know who said that first about whom. But one thing I noticed is that I've talked much more with my hairdressers than I ever did with any barber I had as a man. Anna, my current hairdresser and Toni, who did my hair until she left to do theatrical makeup, know the very reason why I started going to them rather than male barbers. For that alone, they know more about me than any of those barbers did.

Now I'm noticing that the woman who does my nails (naildresser? nail-polisher? nail-finisher?) has a similar role, even though she speaks much less English than Anna or Toni and doesn't speak any other language I understand. Hannah--that's her "American" name--is a pretty Korean woman with a very warm smile whom I'd guess to be about 30, maybe 35 years old. I have been going to her for about two years now, but today was the first time I went to her since my surgery.

In spite of her limited English (I've taught her some. I hope I haven't handicapped her!) I find I can talk pretty easily with her. I guess someone in her line of work encounters all sorts of people, especially here in Queens. But she also has interpersonal skills that overcome her gaps in language. She seems to engage everyone who comes into her shop, even the boyfriends, spouses and children of her customers. I should also mention that I see her every week or two, whereas I go to Anna every two months or so.

And so Hannah knows my secrets--well, a lot of them, anyway, including the one that's not a secret. You know which one I'm talking about. I'd told her I was having the surgery, but I think she may not have been sure of when. So, when she saw me today, she remarked that she hadn't seen me "for a long time."

That I was having my surgery was a shock only because she thought I would be gone longer. She thought that, being gone for a month, perhaps I'd gone to visit my family or friends, or on a bike trip someplace. She, like many other people, thought that the surgery and recovery from it took many more weeks or months. Many other people think the same thing, as I did until I began researching it in anticipation of my own surgery.

She also thought I'd be in more pain than I'm experiencing. That part still surprises me: I haven't felt any pain, and now I don't feel sore unless I bend or sit upright for long periods of time. And I am starting to feel twinges like little electical shocks in and around my clitoris.

Back when I used to go to bed with the hope that I'd wake up as a woman, I used to tell myself that my penis was really an overgrown clit'. Marci did indeed use part of my old penis to make my clitoris, but the sensation is very different. Although I can feel those twinges and tingles on the surface, as there are a lot of nerve endings there, I feel as though those sensations are coming from within the clit. It feels more like a life force than a sexual charge. On the other hand, when I used to get an erection--or simply feel twinges on my penis--that sensation remained on the surface of the skin, as if the impulse began and ended there. I'm not saying it's like that for males generally; I'm saying only that's how it was for me.

Now, I didn't talk about that with Hannah today. But I think she knew that somehow I was experiencing and feeling things differently from how I'd experinced them as a male--and that, somehow, perhaps, my feelings were more like hers or other women she knew. "Welcome to the women's world," she said. And then, as we parted, she gave me a very tender hug and kiss: the kind a woman gives another woman because she understands how the other feels, from within.

Looking At My Vagina

Three times a day, I have to locate my vagina. I do that with a small mirror I hold in my left hand as I lie down. Then, I gently probe the area under my pubic bone with the stent I hold in my right hand, and begin my dilation. Come October, I will have to do that only twice a day; during the second week of the new year, I will be down to once a day.

Although I now have a little more than two weeks' worth of practice, the procedure still seems as odd as it seems exhiliarating. As I was telling Dr. Jennifer the other day, I never had to pay so much attention to my body as I do now. I'm not complaining; that's actually a good thing. Back when I was in the best condition of my life, I was merely pushing my body to its limits and pounding it into submission. Looking back, I realize that although I was in what most people would call "really good shape," I really wasn't very healthy even though I rarely even caught colds, much less had more significant illnesses.

And now I not only have to locate my vagina, I need--and want--to look at it. Even though it's a new organ, I feel that it was always there: I have a hard time imagining or even recalling that a penis was there for 50 years.

I feel a bit like that woman in The Vagina Monologues who said she'd never seen her vagina. Of course, for 50 years, I had no way of physically seeing mine, either, even though I could always sense one within me.

If my first steps as a woman felt as momentous to me as Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon felt to so many people, my first examination of my vagina was the inverse of that. Rather than conquering and leaving an imprint on some place outside myself, I was exploring a space within me. It was scary at first: I thought that my clumsy fingers would touch the wrong place the wrong way and ruin everything. What "ruining everything" would mean, I didn't know.

Of course, nothing got ruined or even damaged. Rather, the folds of my labia and the moist strands of flesh in varying shades of pink inside them suggested, to me, the complexity and emotional intricacy of undulating hills and rivers or a winding seashore. Somehow, those qualities made me feel, if not simple, at least innocent in the way of a young girl stepping for the first time down a winding path in a primrose garden.

I know that I am merely describing first impressions, and I have absolutely no idea of what I will encounter among, or beyond, those curves and folds and turns. And that is exactly the reason why I want and need to continue from this first exploration.

Nurse Phyllis was neither boasting nor exaggerating when she told me that I would leave Trinidad knowing more about my vagina than many cisgender women know about theirs. In many cultures, women are forbidden from knowing about their own bodies; in other cultures--including, some might argue (and I might agree), the one in which I live--women are discouraged from learning about what distinguishes them from, rather than accepting that they are inferior versions of, men.

When I say what I'm about to say, I hope that no-one thinks that I'm implying that we're somehow superior to men. But now I do know that when a woman examines her own body, she has to look inward in ways that are never necessary for men. I say that knowing that I have only begun this exploration, and in spite of all the discouragement they receive, many women have gone much, much deeper than I have, or possibly ever will.

For many women, such exploration is painful--emotionally as well as physically. In My Vagina Was A Village, one of The Vagina Monologues, a Bosnian Muslim woman recounts a brutal gang rape she suffered. After being probed, prodded and invaded with everything from surgical instruments to bottles, "Pieces of my vagina came off in my hand." I have seen VM three times, and I never saw a dry eye in the audience at the end of that particular monologue.

In light of it, and my own experience, the newness of my own vagina is startling. While I have nothing that even remotely compares to the expereince of that Bosnian woman, as a child I was molested by three different men: a close family friend, a neighbor and a priest in the church in which I was an altar boy. Bad as those experiences were, they was not the cause of my gender identity conflict: the knowledge that I am a female preceded my physical violation by years. But I can't help but to wonder what it would have been like to have been penetrated vaginally, not only with those men's penises, but also with sticks or other objects, rather than being made to stroke and suck their cocks.

I also can't help but to wonder whether my new female organs, on which most of the surgical scars have healed and over which hair is growing, will be--or is--somehow marked by the sexual violation I expereinced when my vagina was still within me, and which I tried to bury in my closet.

After I finish this entry, I will dilate one more time, take an epsom salt bath and go to bed. Tomorrow morning I will look at my vagina again.