Two Weeks and Counting–Happy Surgery

The countdown begins.

 

If all goes according to plan, in two weeks from right this minute, I’ll be on my way up to Seattle’s U.W. Northwest Hospital to have my chest masculinization surgery.

 

That is, providing I pass the COVID test on the 22nd. (I’m steering so clear of people and contagion points between now and then that I’m gonna look paranoid to anyone who comes near me.)

 

I do NOT want this surgery put off any longer. I want to get underway with my “no titty committee” and get ‘er done!  I’ve waited 60 years for this!

 

This will be Happy Surgery.

 

I have Christmas Tree Brain just contemplating being able to look at myself in a mirror and see a masculine chest.

 

I look forward to going shirt-less in my back yard when I’m working hard out there.

 

I’m looking forward to buying clothes that are for men without having to get larger sizes to accommodate my ample bosom.

 

I’m looking forward to people looking at me and assuming “male” before they assume anything else about me. (I’ve often been mistaken for male when wearing heavy coats. All my life.) They’ve been assuming “female” my entire lifetime because I have big tits, so they presume I don’t have a penis.

 

(I may have been born thus endowed, if I was intersex at birth and “corrected” to fit a female binary–the default option for intersex children in the decade I was born–but I can’t confirm that without expensive tests. My brain sure convinces me I’m male, from top of head to tip of toes!)

 

Gender confirmation surgery will be happy surgery. Those who can’t wrap their heads around what it’s like to feel alien inside one’s own skin will have a hard time understanding why gender confirmation surgery is such happy surgery, but millions of transgender folks get it.

 

It’ll be like being put into the PERFECT make and model of a vehicle, like driving a Mercedes instead of the Ford Pinto I was given (which were subject to bursting into flames when struck by other vehicles, an apt analogy to what it’s like to be a closeted transgender person).

 

I have thanked my body many times for being strong, robust and able. I have never thanked it for presenting as female.  Presenting as female makes me feel like a fraud, like a “bait and switch” sleazy operator. I am celibate because I won’t play a game that I’m not equipped to play in the way that my brain decrees it ought to be played.

 

(Is that opaque enough while being clear enough to pass muster to the most curious among you? If not, in clearer words, whenever I saw two heterosexual lovers making love on the big screen, I was one with the guy, not one with the girl. My brain is wired to be a guy!

 

(This paragraph is parenthetical additional explanation and clarification) If I transitioned, top to bottom–not something I’m seriously considering at my age–I would be a heterosexual male. Some transgender people would be homosexual males if they transitioned fully. The difference between sexual orientation and gender orientation is this: sexual orientation determines who you want to go to bed with; gender orientation determines who you want to go to bed as. Is that helpful to anyone who may be feeling confused? Gender orientation isn’t exclusively, or even primarily, about sexuality; it’s chiefly about how you view, and want to be viewed by, the world as an individual.

 

So, when I encounter male supremacy (white or otherwise) in this body, my first inclination is to beat the snot out of the offender.

 

My next response is to thank my lucky stars that I will always be a feminist, someone who recognizes that men and women should be treated as (potentially) equally adept in all matters: judicial, societal, marital and professional. (A lot of what we’re taught to accept and except as youngsters is cultural, not native to our thought processes.)

 

I learned the hard way how marginalized females are in most societies, including this one. As a guy with a guy’s brain, I have always been infuriated whenever I was viewed or treated as “lesser than (white) males.”  I’m naturally inclined to fight for underdogs of almost every stripe, as a result. I recognize bigotry and unearned favoritism a lot faster than most people do.

 

I’m not even all that crazy about being viewed subjectively as a white male because of the way far too many white males regard and treat others, but I am a white male and so part of my new responsibility will be showing people we’re NOT a monolith; we’re as various and as nuanced as any other human (or animal) being!

 

(Here’s just one brief example of white male privilege and their cultural blindness to it: I was at a networking meeting one time talking to a guy when another guy butted into the conversation and diverted my partner’s attention  from the subject at hand, and he didn’t even seem to notice that they had just “dismissed” me without so much as a side-ward glance. I just suddenly became invisible and non-essential so, after about a minute and a half of that crappy behavior, I just shook my head and walked away–and never had anything to do with either of them again. They showed me who they were, and I believed them. But on the surface, the one I was talking to seemed smarmy, like the sociopathic evil-doer/Trump supporter that he eventually showed himself to be on his FB page!)

 

I usually wear inclusive shirts so people know I’m not a white supremacist, not a Trumper, not a bigot, and not afraid of diversity. I just bought two BLACK LIVES MATTER face masks, too, because if somebody’s gonna hate me, it’s gonna be for all the “right” reasons, not a case of mistaken identity!  (As an added benefit, I hear many fewer crappy things from bigoted white people who just assumed I think the way they do!)

 

My SUV has equality stickers on it.  (I got a note on my windshield one time calling me a communist. No doubt it came from still a’nutter kool-aid-drinking member of the Trumpster Cult.)

 

I’m not hiding anymore. We’re in a fight for our lives and for the type of nation we want to become. This is no time for being silent.

 

Becoming a “self-made man” (post-surgery) won’t turn me into anything other than I’ve always been. I’ll just look like him for the first time since I was nine and sprouted these abominable extra appendages that proclaim me someone I’m NOT!

 

That’s true liberation to me. Freedom to show people who I really am inside!

 

Happy Surgery Ahead!