what you wanted/what you got

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I remember watching the film Orlando my freshman year of college. I don’t remember much about the experience, except that I was too scared to tell the female friend with whom I watched it that I envied Orlando, because I’d yearned, every night for years and years, to wake up the next day and just magically be on the outside the woman I knew I was on the inside. I vaguely recall that this change brought a lot of complications into Orlando’s life. She lived in a society that placed oppressive restrictions on women. But at least she was seen and accepted as a woman, I thought to myself. That was all I wanted. And even though some part of me knew it was absurd, I held on for years to the idea of my own transition as something that might be kind of magical, something that, when I was done, would finally give me what I’d gone to sleep praying for every night for so long–the ability to finally be seen by everyone as the woman I knew myself to be. I imagined going “stealth,” living as a woman and not telling most of the people in my life that I was trans.

Now, it’s 20 years later. This year, 2014, I’ve been through two challenging transition-related surgeries–hardly the same as Orlando’s effortless, magical awakening to a new body. And while I may have gone into transition in the hopes that someday, everyone would see me as a woman…

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(via transgirlnextdoor)

given that people tweet shit like this at me:

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and given that, sometimes when I walk down the street, jerks loudly ask, “Are you a dude or a chick?” it’s pretty clear that I will never get the magical transition I thought I wanted. It’s pretty clear that going “stealth” will never be an option for me.

And you know, facing the reality that I will probably be seen by many people as existing between genders for the rest of my life is scary and painful. It feels lonely. I sometimes think that maybe the nastiness of the world would be easier to endure if at least I had a love in which I knew I was fully seen and accepted as a woman. I don’t have that right now, and although I know it’s possible that it could happen someday, it’s easy sometimes to feel like this limbo that I exist in is a place where that particular kind of love can’t reach me.

But we none of us get to choose. On my flight home from Arizona where I’d had my SRS, I was sitting next to a woman who, at 50, had just been diagnosed with cervical cancer. She’s gay, and the fact that she’d never had kids and never took birth control put her at the highest risk statistically. She said she’d had to have all of her “girly parts” removed, and I thought about what she’d just gone through and what I’d just gone through, how I’d dreamed of such a different life and how life never plays out quite the way any of us expect, so all I can do is find a kind of meaning and value in the ways that my life isn’t what I’d hoped it would be. I can say to myself, maybe this is the path I needed to walk.

Alongside that moment from Orlando, there’s another moment I often think about when I think about my transition. This one is from a Twilight Zone episode called “Number 12 Looks Just Like You.” It takes place in a terrifying future where every man and woman undergoes the transformation, choosing from a series of templates so that everyone is blandly attractive and everyone looks exactly like millions of other people. One young woman named Marilyn, who is not conventionally stunning but is certainly beautiful in her uniqueness, resists undergoing the transformation. “Being like everybody, isn’t that the same as being nobody?” she says, and her uncle calls her ideas “radical.” People sometimes call my ideas radical, too, but I think it’s just because, like Marilyn, my experiences afford me a different perspective on things. 

Like Orlando, Marilyn ultimately undergoes a kind of transformation, and the results are far more chilling. With her individual appearance, her individual emotions and her individual perspective are washed away. “The nicest part of all, Val,” she says to her friend at the episode’s conclusion, “I look just like you.”

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Today my therapist said, “You’ve been through a lot, Carolyn.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not always easy but it’s never normal or boring.”

“I don’t think you ever really wanted to be seen as normal,” she said. And maybe she’s right. I thought I did want that. Sometimes I still do think I want that. Sometimes I feel intense bitterness wash over me as I jealously crave the life I thought I wanted, and I feel in that instant like Bilbo at Rivendell in that split second of the Fellowship film where you can see the Gollum in him.

But if I’d gotten the life I thought I’d wanted, I think I probably would have been like Marilyn. I would have been nobody. The edges would have been sanded off of the perspective that’s mine and mine alone. Things would have stopped cutting so deeply. Words might have stopped being alive inside me.

When I was in the waiting room, right before the surgery, daytime television was playing, and I had this suffocating feeling of normalcy. A vision of a life spent in pursuit of the hollow, meaningless kind of normalcy I’d once put so much value on. The kind of normalcy that I’ve managed to escape. 

Maybe the transition I got, the life I got, is closer to what I actually wanted than the life I thought I wanted would have been. I don’t know. I can’t ever know. But it’s the only one I’ve got so I might as well do what I can with it.