They can't take it away from me

    So then. Here I am, in a  nightie and dressing gown, on my friend's sofa with my feet propped up. Safe and warm, about 10 days after having my GRS. Almost no pain due to damn good anaesthesia, some discomfort but not much, no serious complications either during or afterwards, happy with the result. The bastards can't take it off me any more like they did before. That's all you're getting about my surgery.

    Surgery then. The big end point, the goal, the Nirvana. It's mythologised in certain trans circles, and the faster you can get it the sooner you become a Real Woman. You'll have seen it here countless times if you follow blogs like this one, the people who have everything privately funded and roar through the process like an express train before ripping everything up and running away once they've got the prize, abandoning any friends they've made along the way as inferiors, mere trannies in contrast to their self-evident grasp of femininity.

    Bitter? Yes, bitter as fsck. It's happened to me a few times, to the extend that for the last few years I've insulated myself from it, not got too close if someone shows all the signs. It's called internalised transphobia, and it's nasty.

   So then. Surgery. How was it for me? What did I get from it. And no, by that I don't mean what did I get physically from it, I meant what did it do for me.

   The answer? Surprisingly little, in a sense.

    It's neither a quasi-religious nor a transcendental experience, an angel doesn't descend from on high and bestow a Scroll Of Womanhood upon you, and you definitely don't start pooping glittery butterflies and rainbows out of the thing. It's not a rebirthday, in fact I'm exactly the same person as I was at the start of last week, except it hurts if I move the wrong way and I have to dilate three times a day. I had a procedure, not an experience, and afterwards I had a comfortable hospital stay under the incomparable care of an extremely high quality team of nurses and other staff.

   What I did get was a release from the fear that they could take it away from me. When I woke up from the anaesthetic I was immediately lucid and awake, and the first thing I did was ask if it had been done, before taking a look under the covers and bursting into tears sobbing that I've been in the system very nearly nine years and that they couldn't take it away from me.

    That's it, they can't take it away from me. They have, in the past, multiple times. A referral refused, hormones messed up, discharged from a GIC. But now, no matter what any dinosaur gender clinic medic thinks, they can't take it away from me. It took a while to dissipate, the fear hung around thrashing about like a pressure hose let go by a fireman. I had a full-blown panic attack in my first night, having dreamed that one of the rarest surgical complications had occurred and they'd given me only the cosmetic procedure. It was only with the pack coming out and my first dilation that particular tiny fear was laid to rest.

    So now I have a vagina, or to be more accurate, a neovagina. It's taken me nearly nine years in the medical system, a lot of fighting and a lot of heartache to get it. It's physically part of me, but it's slowly becoming mentally part of me over the weeks. As it heals and the swelling recedes, it becomes less a wound and more a body part. Already I like the way I look in the mirror, and there is way more to go on this journey. I can take a confidence I didn't have before, and that feels good.

    But coming back to what I said earlier, if it didn't make me a woman, what did? The answer there is immediate, getting out there and socialising as a woman, being a woman. From my first hesitant outings at the start of this decade and through a while living half-and-half to a whole bunch of years living full-time, that's what made me a woman. Workplace discrimination, speaking at hacker camps, travelling to find stuff to write about, being part of the turning of the years in a small rural community, being one of the Ladies Who Clean a parish church. And much more, being female is something in which there is always more to learn. This is the thing that so many of those speed transitioners I mentioned earlier so often get wrong, they spend their 18 months collecting medical procedures like gold stars on a coffee shop reward card and then emerge at the other end without socialisation, it hasn't magically made them a woman in anything but if they are lucky, looks. They either fall flat on their faces and begin the socialisation process a bit wiser, or they retreat into that internalised transphobia and become embittered and afraid of their own shadows in case anyone inevitably figures out their pasts. It's no way to live.

    While the past nine years have been hellishly awful at times I'm glad I have all that socialisation time. My demons on this front were laid to rest quite a while ago, and I sense some that lingered will evaporate over the next few months. It doesn't fix everything like a magic trick, but maybe it will deal with those parts of it.

    It'll be good to get back to talking about cider again. I pressed this year's batch, three days before going into hospital. It'll be fermenting now, ready for racking after Christmas when I'm back home.

    I'm looking forward to that.

Here we go then...

Wow, even by my recent standards, May to September is something of a gap between posts. Truth is, this summer's been a bit hard work. I mentioned in my last post being burned out, and that's just about what happened. Against a backdrop of having to fight for my surgical referral, some really annoying family stuff, and my dad's health being an on-the-horizon worry.

Unexpectedly though, some things did turn out well. There was some slightly dodgy stuff behind the scenes with referrals to my chosen surgeon, I began to shine a bit of a spotlight upon it with a few well-chosen press contacts. Then unexpectedly my chosen surgeon received his own NHS contract, and for the first time in eight and a half years I found myself at the front of the queue. I could have had my date back in the summer, but put it off until October because of the Electromagnetic Field hacker camp. Some things are important enough not to miss.

But it's all been a bit of a mess. Not sleeping very well, breaking down at conferences (My first remotely viral Tweet), and generally not being able to function. A chat with my editor helped, some of the pressure is off my shoulders until some time after my recovery. Now getting together all the bits and pieces I'll need to function and care for myself after surgery.

So. There's the annoying stuff. Now the good stuff. Electromagnetic Field. I think I've written about previous hacker camps, and how because of my slightly larger than life appearance and the work I do for Hackaday I have become somewhat well-known. It's still a bit weird. I was never the popular kid, ever. And yet these people, people I regard as cool, want to hang out with me, seek me out. That's unexpected. Hacker camps are a blast, I'm still writing this one up a couple of weeks later, and it'll take me a while to come down. For the first time I made an outfit, there was a cyberpunk-themed area very well done with shipping containers and lights, and I made a black dress with glow-in-dark Hackaday logos. And then tried to do my best post-apocalyptic tech journo look for the camera, ending up like a bad '80s album cover shot. Can't wait for the next one.

It's good to be back writing here without having to think about the subject. I feel bad I've been away for a few months. In a few weeks I'll be having my GRS, but fear not, this won't become one of those breathless every five minutes update GRS blogs. It just is what it is, I'm not looking forward to it or the aftercare, but I'll get through with it. And get back to writing about cider and tech.

Waiting game

    It's tempting to sit and whine incessantly about one's situation, but after eight years of it and with little changing, there's not much point really, is there. So it seems like an age since I last posted here, in fact it's about two months. I didn't say so back then, but at that point I'd had another surgical referral sent off, and this is where it gets rather complex. 

    The surgeon I want is the most experienced of the UK surgeons who would have been my choice all the way through as he used to be the NHS's main surgeon. He now operates privately, but can see NHS patients through a contract with another NHS trust as he doesn't have his own NHS contract. And the NHS trust have started being awkward about it and want their own surgeons to do the work, so people aren't being referred to him. My referral is unusual, coming via a gender identity clinic that they don't see often and with very insistent wording, so things seem to have gone slightly awry. People whose referrals went in at the same time as me are now getting their dates for surgery with the trust's surgeons, while I've not heard anything. 

 

    That's a dense paragraph, but the result is that I think I may be about to have another setback if I don't do something about it. I've been here before, they stick you on the pile and forget about you for six months, then tell you they can't do it. Not this time, is all I can say.

    So what's to be done? Kick up the mother of all fusses, of course! I feel that over eight years of this have given me the justification to be very prickly indeed, so it's off on the round of ringing up and kicking butt. Gently, but insistently where necessary. And I'm quite happy to turn on the muckspreader if I get bumped out of the system again. I shouldn't have to do this stuff, but nobody else is going to fight my corner for me. Pain in the arse, isn't it.

Getting out there at Maker Faire UK in Newcastle.

   Meanwhile, life goes on. April was spent on the road for Hackaday, a fantastic conference in Dublin followed by a round of smaller events and finally working a show up in Newcastle. There was a time when the gender psychs asked for evidence of your being out in the world, well I think standing up in front of several hundred people and talking about microphones probably qualifies. Flying overseas was a first since transition for me too, 

    All of that plus the referral stuff has left its mark though, I've been increasingly burned-out since the beginning of the year. So I'm on a couple of weeks holiday, not writing and trying to get my sleep patterns back. I started this blog years ago when I was sitting unable to sleep in the small hours, it seems as though I've come full circle.

    The summer looks promising, a couple of hacker camps to go to, plus all the usual highjinks. If all goes well I plan to have the surgery in October, but who knows whether that'll turn out. One thing's definite though, this won't become one of those minute-by-minute surgery blogs that you get from enthusiastic speed transitioners who don't appreciate the meaning of the word "triggery".

    Blogging was a thing, back when I stumbled fro the closet. It may not be so much of one now, but I still like writing as a format. 

     

EMDR

    Here we are in March then, after a weekend during which we had unseasonal snowfall over the British Isles, today had a real air of spring. I even saw some bees having a go at our winter blossom bush.

    I last wrote here in December, and that's an unusually long gap for me. It's not been an easy two months, and I've been firefighting to keep my work going. The last eight years have taken a significant psychological toll on me, and facing up to some past traumas from school and other moments in earlier life has come together with the huge stress of a complete loss of trust in the ever changing field of what is possible in my medical pathway to leave me in a bit of a state.

    I have a couple of things today I didn't have a couple of weeks ago though, first I have a proper undisputed referral for surgery, and second I've started therapy for all that trauma and psychological toll I was talking about. I'll believe the surgery is real when I wake up from the anaesthesia and they finally can't take it away from me, but the therapy has been a very tangible thing that has already had an effect.

    EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is a technique for locking away trauma that works under the assumption that the things coming back to bother you haven't been processed by the brain in the way most memories are. As I understand it REM sleep allows us to put away the happenings of the day, into long-term storage if you will, and sometimes that process is not effective and these memories hang around to plague us. EMDR tries to replicate this eye movement while guiding you through some of the trauma, the idea being that it does the same filing task.

   Does it work? Far too early to tell. It's quite intense, and upsetting. I went to a school which I would not send my children too, but that some parents would sell Granny to get little Tarquin into. I didn't choose it, my mother pushed all of us into scholarships at academic hothouse schools, and I was the outsider at every point. Nobody gives a crap about the psychological scars of a shit time at one of the so-called best schools unless someone pulled their knob out at you, so the huge number of people like me with problems in later life that didn't involve anything like that are left hanging. There are support groups for people who went to boarding schools, but in my case I fall through the cracks as a day school pupil. As you can imagine, bringing all that kind of stuff up is ... difficult.

    You are warned that it'll affect you for a few days afterwards, and it's true. I've not been in a good place at all over the last few months, but the last few days since the therapy have been a bit grim. I know it would be a hell of a lot worse with testosterone, I have always said I hated the aggression that came with being a bloke.

    So there we are. Slow, tired, beset by trauma. It will get better, this is part of the therapy. As to the surgery, when that comes is anyone's guess. I've given up. Within the year seem likely though, and that can only be a good thing.