Transition Chronicles: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (to Thailand)

“What if you feel the same?" 

We were having breakfast at a little cafe in Eagle Rock last week, and Felicia, out of concern for my psychological and emotional well-being, asked me this. What if I go to Thailand and I have this expensive surgery that I’ve been saving up for for years, and I feel the same?

But already, nothing is the same as it was. When Felicia and I first met as English teachers at a public high school in Los Angeles, I was still presenting as a boy. Felicia became one of my first confidantes. Back then, the cloud of gender dysphoria overshadowed my every waking moment. The pain was constant, inescapable. Though I put up a decent enough front that you wouldn’t know anything was wrong just by looking at me or talking to me, inside, I felt emotionally crippled by the anguish. I felt like my soul was curled up in a tiny little cage while my hollow body went through the motions of something superficially resembling a life.

 As I discussed in my recent post on the film Kiss Me, I long lived in a place where I was caught between the desperate need to transition and the terror of doing so, the belief that I would only be strong enough to do it if I could conjure up a circumstance in which I could make a fresh start somewhere where nobody knew about my past. But this desire to make a fresh start somewhere was at odds with the fact that what I wanted to do more than just about anything was work for GameSpot. When I was hired, I was asked which name they should use for me in the system: my legal name, or Carolyn, the name by which I’d always been known in the GameSpot forums, and in my work for the site as a freelancer, the name I considered my "real” name. It was a moment of truth. I didn’t know if I had what it took to be publicly, visibly out as a trans woman on a video game website where, let’s face it, not all the readers were going to be understanding about such things. 

But standing there at that fork in the road, I couldn’t deny who I was any longer. Even if it meant announcing it to the world, I knew it was time once and for all to stop locking Carolyn up in the tiny little cage, letting her out for fresh air occasionally before imprisoning her again. And although it’s been awkward and although in many ways I’m still figuring out who I am, I’ve been amazed by how much stronger a foundation I feel I have since embracing who I am, and how capable I am of letting the hostilities of internet trolls bounce right off of me. My transition is still very much in progress and I have a long way to go, but I’m already far more present in the moment, far less overshadowed by the pain of gender dysphoria.

That’s not to say that the feeling of dysphoria is gone. It will probably never be entirely gone, but it’s still a bigger factor in my life than I’m willing to live with. And one of the biggest triggers of my feelings of dysphoria is my face, or specifically the cues that have developed in my face that lead that primal part of the brain that categorizes people based on gender–and yes, even my brain does this–to put me in the box labeled “male.” It’s jarring and painful to me. It feels deeply, deeply wrong. 

And so on Tuesday, January 7th, I leave for Thailand, where I will have what’s called facial feminization surgery. Specifically, what I’ll be having done are what’s called a “forehead recontouring” (the forehead is actually the primary cue for how we gender people according to their facial structures) along with a reduction in the prominence of the brow, and also a recontouring of my (very strong) jawline.

I’ve talked to a number of trans women who have had facial feminization surgery, some with the specific surgeon I’m seeing in Thailand, and they have all felt a reduction in their feelings of dysphoria as a result of the surgery. But I am managing my expectations. I’m not expecting miracles here. I don’t think that this one step is going to be the make-it-or-break-it step of my transition. It’s a journey in which every step matters. Will I have “passing privilege”* after the surgery is done? I doubt it. And that’s okay. I used to be terrifically concerned about what the average person on the street might think when looking at me. Now, I don’t care so much. I’m doing this for me, not for them. And if I’m just a little more comfortable with what I see looking back at me in the mirror after the surgery, it will have been worth it. 

That’s what I told Felicia. I’m so much happier now than I was before I started this journey, so I know that the path I’m walking is the right one. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover in 2014. Let’s get going.

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*(I hate the term “passing,” by the way, since it implies that one is successfully passing oneself off as something that one isn’t, when the opposite is true. It’s when I’m seen as male that I’m being perceived as something that I’m not.) 

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If you have (respectful) questions about my trip to Thailand, my transition, or whatever, feel free to use the Ask me anything doodad at the top of the blog. I think it works.