phone booths, iii: snakes and ladders.
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.
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
posted by little light | 3:30 AM
18 Comments:
I--wow. Amazing. You know what, I'll shut up and let those who can really bring something to the discussion bring it, but I just had to say first how grateful I am that you blog.
That was really, really powerful -- really powerful. I feel like if more rad fems read this post, or posts like it...
Well, I don't want to say it's humanizing because that suggests that I thought you were dehumanized before, which you aren't, not in my eyes. But in many people's eyes yes. And for a mtf person to talk about fertility -- that's a powerful thing, a powerful statement of womanhood. Fertility is important to men too but (as far as I have seen) not so central; your post... well, it rather explodes some of the images I think people have of transpeople.
Every time I read your posts, I'm practically moved to tears, and feel a really strong urge to hug you. I should be so lucky if I ever have kids for them to have a caretaker in any capacity who's anything like you. I've never thought about fertility in such stark, visceral terms. Thank you so much for sharing these incredibly personal things.
ll, i want to tell you, i always read your blog and am consistently moved by the things you write. i have a hard time commenting because i don't know what to say, but i want to thank you for telling your story even when the climate isn't necessarily safe or comfortable. i think it's safe to say that you are an inspiration to a lot of people, and i am also grateful that you blog. take care!
This reminded me, albeit somewhat tangentially, of this recent post by a writer I very much admire. To quote: "This "madness". At its worst, it's something that can only be learned by living a life - sometimes only when you are ready to leave it. It is a place where there is nothing but choices, and sometimes they all seem equally bad - and picking one means 'cutting the strings'. flying solo, doing the high trapeze act without a net, laughing in the face of destiny and thumbing your nose at God. At its best it's the fire that tempers the iron in us, the one choice that HAS to be made no matter what, the need to learn to live with consequences."
You know how this hits, right down somewhere a little off the gut. We've talked about these things before.
My eyes are watering.
I'm ... short a few words, here. I wave my hands at you in pain, and sympathy, and such respect for your strength.
these types of discussions fascinate me, mostly because i had already reproduced before i started transition, and i never had the feeling that i wanted to, with apologies to my son. it was my ex's idea, and wanting to please her, i submitted.
in fact, the whole idea of self-sterilization came easy for me as i had already fulfilled my family obligation. the fact that my offspring was a son, made it even more significant, especially as a jew. i had perpetuated the family name - one i no longer carry myself, by the way.
and as sexist as that may sound, that is a pressure that was pervasive in the culture of my youth.
anyway, thanks for your insights - as always, i look forward to each of your posts.
*hugs* I'm sorry that was so awful for you.
...and to bring it here, in 'public'? I am amazed and humbled, as always.
I'm glad you did what was right for you, in the end.
Sometimes I think I understand giving up one's fertility, but this post made me realise that long-term birth control has only made me more able to ignore it, that I'm controlling my fertility rather than having it externally changed and having to deal with it.
This was really powerful. Thanks for posting it.
You are a powerhouse.
God. This post struck so many chords with me.
I had a not dissimilar situation with this - being young and having no money, being able to transition with a roof over my head ended up taking priority over worrying about future reproduction. Now, if I were to, I'd be in the same position, I'd have to go off hormones and such, and there's no way I would.
It's really hard in a sense because I'm very family-oriented, and I'd always wanted children. As you said, the only alternative for a biological child would lie in a male-bodied fertility, and for me, that was just something I wasn't comfortable with.
I'd still love to be able to care for a child some day, but sometimes one just has to take the cards one is dealt. Le sigh.
gah, little light, what is it with us people of color and family and reproducing???? i myself have been worried since I was a small kid about the whole reproducing thing--about losing my mexican name to a white man, about my family "dying out" because i had gone "too white".
you are opening the wound the way it needs to be--deep and gently, so that it can be cleansed and healed...
*HUGS YOU*
I wasn't ready to respond to this earlier.
but um... yeah. just... just hugs. lots of them.
You.
You are a Goddess.
And fantastic, and a fantastic writer.
I felt the same thing when I followed my endocrinologist's advice and cut off hormones for 2 weeks before a cleft palate related surgery. Like the life was draining out of me and all of the progress attained in the scant 3 months I had been on the medicine was washing away. I'd have to say that was probably the hardest thing I've had to do since deciding to transition. Just felt... wrong.
This is my first time at this blog, and I appreciate that you write with such candor, and that I didn't have to perform any feats of trustworthiness before getting to read this great piece. Not that I'm against trustworthiness and demonstrations thereof, just that I feel lucky to have such an easy time gaining access to writing like this. Thanks.
" and she made it clear that my decisions about my body are my decisions,"
What an awesome partner you have!
I come from a different viewpoint. I have absolutely no desire to continue my gene pool. There's some pretty fucked up people in that mess of chromosones. Letting them fade away is entirely acceptable to me. When we wanted to have children, we adopted. As a result, I have the amazing pleasure of getting to know and love two wonderful homan beings, my daughters.
Being true to your body is good. And you have many choices, even if one choice is passed over.
It's bad, but it's good. Hang in there, Little Light!
little light:
there's another kind of fertility in this world; the fertility that is in our heart and soul. This kind of fertility grows other people in spirit, even just a little bit: by our words, our touch, our acts of kindness. Our own clarity about ourselves, if it is shared with others as compassion and empathy, is as fertile as any set of genitals.
What you just shared was very touching, very growing. A little light in our lives. Thank you.
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