Sometimes, in order to ensure broken limbs heal correctly, they must be re-broken to set properly. The greater and older the misalignments of a disfigured skeleton, the more it must be mangled before true healing can begin.
But how much can a poor bird endure before its spirit, too, snaps?
Gradual Goodbyes
When one begins meddling with their endocrinology, the process is one of gradual titration and re-titration - small moves and slight effects. Many people chemically engineer their hormone balances for birth control, menopausal support, or menstrual regulation. I’ve engineered mine to break out of a chemical paradigm which was harmful to my mental well-being, a change which required a more comprehensive redesign of my body’s state of being.
This took years. Years filled with pills, blood draws, tears, growth, laughter, atrophy, and relief. There was pain, yes, but never on the scale of that which I was fighting to tear down – that was being torn away. It never felt like I was really losing anything.
I was losing something, though. My body as it was, and how I understood it, was being lost as I remolded it day by day. It was an easy loss, though, as the differential of the changes was a positive result across the entire domain. I never experienced net loss at any point. Sure, I had bad days, but I never felt truly worse for what I was doing.
A First Loss
Eventually, though, a more discontinuous step was needed. I was reaching the end of what could be done chemically; to really get my body chemistry where I needed it to be, I had to stop my body from producing the chemicals I had too much of in large quantities. This meant surgical intervention, permanent change, and in this case literal loss.
It was not only tissue I was losing; I was giving up a feature of my body which is given a high degree of importance in culture for those who possess it – it could even be called emblematic for the social class I was working to desist from. This did not bother me.
More tangibly, taking this step would entirely preclude me from having children who were my genetic descendants. Absent context, I would have rather retained this ability, but the context in which I would theoretically be able to have children repulsed me. Nothing, I thought, could be worse than having children in the manner which I might naturally be able – this made the decision easy.
The procedure, too, was easy – I was not meaningfully debilitated, and my daily functioning was only really affected for a few days. Still, this was a permanent change; for the first time I had done something to myself which could not be undone. The gravity of that was not lost on me, but perhaps I did not fully appreciate it at first. It was a few weeks before the full scope of what this would mean was entirely clear.
Still, this change was an instantaneous positive, and how my body was before it has now faded into an obscure vagueness. In less than a year, it was difficult to imagine life without this change, and I did not want to imagine it.
Silenced Songbird
The next instantaneous, irreversible change I decided to pursue was more of an uncertainty than the last. I had a feature which bothered me tremendously on my neck, but I seemed to be the only one who noticed it. Bringing it up with friends or at therapy was more met with confusion than anything else – “remove what, exactly?”
Still, it bothered me. I had no attachment to the feature as it was; I resented its very existence. The only thing which truly gave me pause was the risk required by its removal.
This operation on the throat brings a scalpel very close, concerningly close, to the vocal folds. There is a chance that, in a mishap, one could have their voice forever changed for the worse.
This terrified me. One of the things I had been sculpting in my gradual changes was my voice; I had put a lot of effort and care into making it exactly what I wanted it to be. I had struggled hard to be able to sing again and sing strongly. I was extremely attached to my voice, and even thought of it as a core factor of my selfhood. It was inextricably part of me; to lose it would be to irrevocably change who I was.
Still, the risk was small, and I decided to go forward. The night before surgery, I decided it would be fitting to use my voice to the fullest extent I could, so in the shower I sang and screamed, letting lose from the pit of my stomach until I could feel exhaustion heavily on my chest. I closed my eyes and tried to put the feeling to memory; if I lost my voice at least I would have this.
As it would happen, I did not lose my voice. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure of this for the first couple of weeks where I could barely summon it, and only in a scratchy growl. While I was immediately thrilled to have the unwelcome tissue gone from my throat, I, for the first time here, experienced a negative change at first. Losing the tissue was not enough to counteract the possible loss of my voice, and I was scared for a time. I felt down. I felt the loss.
Kicking Myself From The Nest
Finally, I’ve come to the last change. To what is widely considered the capstone of this process I’ve put myself through. The wholesale reconfiguration of genital sex is as dramatic a shift in the human body experience as can be imagined, and it is, I can now say, a profound test of mind, body, and spirit.
The weight of my body’s form on my emotional well-being has been evaporating for years. This, really, was the last significant incongruence. I’ve not ever been happy with this aspect of myself, and its reconfiguration was part of the plan from the start. However, through all of my change and growth I’d found myself in a place bordering on acceptance of it.
It could be that I’d just gotten very skilled at selective dissociation, but it cannot be denied that I was, before this change, happy with myself. I was satisfied. I had a partner who loved me exactly as I was, and we had a good thing going which neither emphasized nor diminished this part of me. With them, I was comfortable.
Still, I dreamed of more. I imagined myself in a state where I had never been malformed, a state free of all tension and hesitation, of all discomfort and shame. I hated the accommodations I needed, and I resented the associations society places onto the sexed aspect I possessed. The latter filled me with terrible anger and pain - how dare such awful conclusions be imposed from this deeply personal and intimate aspect of myself, over which I heretofore had no control?
The symbolic charge comes from everywhere. Some categorically like me work to reclaim and reform the image of this aspect just as political agents on all sides imbue it with all kinds of meaning to their own ends. To me, all this amounted to a deeply personal violation of my sense and image of self. I wanted nothing to do with any of it.
I did not want this sort of social pressure to be the main instigating factor for kicking myself out of my nest where I was relatively happy as I was. I had to focus on the internal misalignment I felt with my body – if it could be corrected, then why should I hold back? Still, I must admit it was some combination of both of these things, along with general inertia, which pushed me out over the unknown, to fly or fall.
As My Bones Grew They Did Hurt
As I write this, I am in the depths of the pain of change.
I have been rendered onto the care of others, almost entirely dependent. Though I am glad to have such support, I cannot help but grieve the loss of my illusion of self-sufficiency. I cannot do much, and even less on my own. To see my friends and family go to such lengths to care for me – I feel profoundly loved, and just as guilty for the imposition.
There is such effort with this change, and such risk. I cannot yet tell that it will all work out; it may not, and I may have lost a factor of intimacy with myself and my partner for nothing. I am scared, more scared than I’ve ever been that this will truly be a loss in the end. That I have forever changed myself for the worse.
I’m struggling hard to give myself grace, and to find patience. I must find my peace again, now; I cannot wait to be further healed. I long, beg, and cry for peace - for any solace I can get.
May strength find me.