I totally lost it today.
I fell apart. I was short with my partner. I got upset over small things. I found myself, in trying to talk about it, shaky and weepy and sick. Everything felt
wrong--like even my bloodstream belonged to someone else.
How did it happen? Well, I tried to give my body over to serving, for a little while, as a vehicle for my fertility. And it was...educational.
Let's put this in context: you can't deal, holistically, with trans issues without stumbling across fertility. And fertility is a big dog to be coming out, you know? If we're talking about big mojo to be poking with a stick, fertility is about as big and old as you can get.
After all, it's older than
people. Hell, it's older than
animals, this notion of the reproductive drive and everything around it, even though we started making a big symbolic deal out of it, oh, shortly before we figured out that sharpening one end of a stick made mastodons marginally easier to kill. A lot of anthropologists and historians will tell you that we know humans were humans--sentient, society-forming, humans--when we start to find burials. Consciousness of death and our connections to each other and contemplation of what we mean, you see. But we were probably pretty damn worked up about fertility
right before that.
Now, relationships between the greater trans/transgender community and fertility, those vary a great deal, depending on what folk do with their lives and genders and how physical they get about it. But transsexuals? We choose to make ourselves infertile.
Let's take a deep breath, and look at that again.
We choose to eliminate our fertility. Animals. Deliberately. Eliminating. Their ability. To
reproduce.
It's not just, say, non-reproductive sex. Or committing to a lifetime of non-reproductive sex. Or celibacy, even. Those leave the mechanisms intact. And you can trans- gender and leave all that intact, too. But when you trans- physical sex? There are consequences.
Some of us come up with end-runs around the concept. As it turns out, this thing happens even before you monkey around with genital structure directly. Long before (or in the absence of) a hysterectomy or a vaginoplasty, in most cases, hormone-replacement therapy tends to render the subject--well, not to put too fine a point on it--sterile. But that's on a timetable, and a lot of us sneak in in advance, duck on down to a fertility clinic, lay down some cash for some freezer space, and preserve us some gametes before the clock runs down. Heck, those of us on the male-to-female spectrum, once upon a time, produced those gametes by the squillions, without even much thinking about it. (I don't know if I did or didn't. I was never tested, and there's a goodly chance I was never fertile in the first place due to my dubious genotypical status. We'll never know now.)
This is a handy solution, if you have the money to put down. It was what I was going to do.
The trouble is, there is a running clock on it. You stay on the hormones long enough--and we're talking a couple of months--that stuff stops working, progressively. You have to go back off the meds to--and now I'm going to focus of MtF-spectrum stuff, because I know it better, and if any of the guys want to drop in to offer a FtM-spectrum perspective to match, feel free--get your little gamete factories working well enough to get your sperm counts high enough to save a viable sample.
When this first became a decision to make, I did not have $400 laying around. My partner offered to help, being amazing, but I was proud, and in bad, bad financial straits, getting my healthcare through a nonprofit emergency clinic, and still having rough times with my family. And on top of all of that, I was scared--imagine you've gone through all the effort to come out as trans, to deal with that, to identify against all expectations as who you are and identify further what you want to do with your body, and then you need to go to a fertility clinic and have a bunch of long, detailed conversations about your genitalia. Poke poke. And then you have to--in a weirdly clinical setting--manage to, ah, stimulate the situation to the point where you, shall we say, produce results. To go in the freezer next to the Otter Pops.
A lot of folk have more guts than I do, and manage just that for themselves. I was deeply leery. I didn't think I'd even be able to physically manage, and all that distress for the longshot gamble on maybe getting some genetic material to save in case I want genetic offspring at some point in the future, even though I don't right now? Hard to make simple decisions about it. In the end, going on the medication took chronological, emotional, and financial priority, and I put off the decision. And then two months went by. And then four. And then eight. And then it became clear that if I wanted to be making babies in anything resembling the old-fashioned way, I needed to put the brakes on my physical transition.
My partner has always talked about how beautiful the children we would make would be, and I have agreed.
My parents have leaned hard on me to do this, as a sort of compromise buy-off for their getting more comfortable with having a daughter. It's standard--after all, both of their cultures put a lot of weight on the filial duty to reproduce and carry on the family line. The notion of me changing my name is hard enough on them; the notion of my blood ending in my body is harder. I have siblings, but it's still hard. As family-oriented as I am, that might be hardest.
And this is me: I used to cry myself to sleep, at twenty-one, at the thought that I would never be able to bear a child. I have never had a problem with adoption, and I always considered it as an option for myself, since I have always wanted to parent one way or another. But it's hard to get an adoption approved when you're a brown transsexual woman who's probably ending up with another woman, and neither of us swimming in cash. And it still dug in deep when I thought about that emptiness anyhow, and I cannot predict how future versions of me will feel about it.
So I talked to the doctor down at the nonprofit clinic. She told me that if I went off the hormones for a month, and got tested, and then maybe stayed off another month, I might theoretically be able to get my counts up high enough to go through the ordeal of saving a sample. After that, I would have to start all over again on the medications, have to go through the vomiting, gut-wrenching, nose-bleeding, nauseous adjustment period all over again, with a possibility left open I didn't have before. Maybe. An even longer-shot gamble, now, with a good chance that even with all that, there'd be nothing to save.
Likely, the changes that have already happened to my body wouldn't reverse. Probably, there wouldn't be complications if I just went off for a month or two and back on. Yes, it would be a strain on my system, but I'm not yet twenty-five, and resilient. And then there would be options. Just a month or three of my life. Just another short delay, when I managed to wait twenty years to do this thing, and so many don't get the chance until much later in life. A month is a blink of an eye. Two months isn't even a season.
So I went off the hormone treatment. And nothing has ever convinced me more that I'm doing the right thing for myself by being on it. Just talking about the months off with the doctor scared the hell out of me, somewhere visceral; I was just about holding back tears in the exam room, and again when I tried to talk to my partner about it. Within hours, it escalated, and by the next morning, I felt--for the first time since I began this thing--like I wasn't at home in my skin. My dysphoria, absent for weeks and months, reasserted itself. Suddenly, pulling on my jeans and tank top, I felt like I was playing dress-up. Like all this was a mockery. It all just seemed hopeless. The prospect of more months feeling more or less like I used to pre-transition horrified me. I felt like I was giving in, somehow. Backsliding. Conceding ground I bled to win each inch of.
For, what, a day off the Pill? It didn't make sense. Even on a basic endocrine level, I shouldn't have been chemically disrupted enough yet to get as upset as I did. I was doing this for responsibility and filial loyalty, right? For foresight and the big picture and the long view? For the basic organic urge to reproduce? Wasn't it selfish and self-centered and shortsighted to place how I felt right then ahead of how I might want what options a decade down the line?
Didn't I owe my fertility to my family? Didn't I owe them to disrupt my body, make it feel unnatural and off, so that it could serve as an incubator for my reproductive capabilities, just for a little while, a matter of months? What was my temporary skin-crawling alienation from myself, just for a little while, just for a little while, next to, well,
Posterity?
And then it started sounding awfully familiar, and I started feeling, on a tiny level, like it was maybe time to think about, well,
choices. The analogy sort of drew itself; on a small scale, what was on the table was my reproductive freedom. Was my body for me to live in, or to make more bodies with my family name attached? Was it for my partner's needs? My parents'? My own? Was it worth it to make the deeply-uncomfortable concession of siring a child just so I could have one with my nose, when even if I never get to adopt I can still help caretake? I can be a teacher. A favorite aunt. A godmother. I can do those things, and at this stage in my life, those seem like far more attractive things than this mess, this looming, inexplicably dreadful thing that was the possibility of being a grown woman called on to father a kid someday, to compromise with my folks, to offer the possibility to my partner. To concede that the fertility that I have--that I had--was a male-bodied fertility, something I have never wanted any part of.
We all make compromises. We all decide what parts of us we allow others--including our loved ones--to lay claim on. But something broke when I made the decision to transition. I had to commit to the prospect that I belong to myself, and that I have the right--leaving aside other people's notions of who, what, and how I am--to make my decisions, and to look in the eye the notion that every cell of me is my own responsibility, subject to my own choices. And then I had to come to terms with the fact that, in some ways, there were choices for which it was too late. There will be mourning for that. It is what it is.
So I sat down with my partner, seeing as I was hyperventilating and getting weepy, and we talked it over, and she made it clear that my decisions about my body are my decisions, and reiterated her support. And after two whole days delaying my physical transition, I poured myself a glass of water. Dropped my pills onto my tongue. And took it back.
Labels: body politic, feminism, phone booths, queer, trans
