Transitioning with Me

I am continually amazed by my parents. Certainly I am amazed at the unconditional love they have shown me starting with a young, introverted tom-boy, to a butch lesbian and then to a transgendered son. What continues to be remarkable is that they have not stopped telling their story. A few months ago their church presented a symposium on GLBT folks in the church. On Sunday the told our story--my transition and their journey with me. I could say more but in this case they can speak for themselves. Below is a link to their story.

http://thespiritspace.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-27-from-elizabeth-to-eli-made-in.html

Mom Remebers

I called my mom last night and reminded her of where we were five years ago that night. She was with me in Baltimore and took care of me, emptying my drains, changing my bandages, entertaining me. On the day of the surgery Mom and Anna arrived with me at 7am and stayed in the waiting room the entire four hours of the surgery.

Since that time my mom's memories have faded but she said she remembers two things from that experience. The first was how kind and respectful everyone at Dr. Fisher's office was. The second was that they asked me if they needed to call me a cab for me after surgery to take me back to the hotel. That was when it hit her that people often go through this surgery alone. She said her heart just hurt for them.

I tell this story not to show how amazing my mom is (though she certainly is and that's something I never take for granted). Instead I am writing this to anyone out there who has had to go through surgery alone or will have to go through surgery alone--someone is thinking of you and caring for you. When she says her heart hurts, she means it. It may be of little comfort when you are climbing into a cab alone, but I hope it will mean something when you are lying in a hotel bed and looking at a body that finally makes sense.

WHAT WILL YOUR PARENTS SAY...

I've been blessed with parents who not only accepted my transition, but wanted to take this journey with me. I think sometimes we forget that for our parents it isn't just a matter of accepting but they are coming out as well. In my case it was telling everyone in the small town I grew up in that they now had a son when before they had two daughters. Its a complex road full of twists and turns that seem to sneak up on you when you least expect them.

My parents recently told their story in their church. My sister said that some people even stayed through he second service to hear it again. I asked them to send it to me and as long as they approve I will post that as well.

Note: Parts of this story may have been recycled into "Living my Legacy" which was also posted here so if pieces sound familiar, forgive me.


In May my mom came to New York. I would be visiting the doctor for the first time to investigate hormone replacement therapy and I wanted her to be there. It wasn’t anything as metaphoric as my mom being present at my birth as a girl and re-birth as a boy. Rather, she had been there when I broke my leg, she had been there when I got my first and second set of stitches, she was there for my first visit to the GYN appointment and it seemed only natural that she be here for this. She arrived at my house and we immediately opened a bottle of wine. What began as idle conversation had, by the third glass of wine, turned to tears. I didn’t know how to explain to my mom, who had tried to raise me to be a proud woman, that I had made the decision to become her son. She was supportive and respectful, but also sad. She cried for the childhood she felt I had lost and she cried for the woman I would never become. “Your dad and I are just mourning. It feels like a loss.” These words stayed with me long after they were uttered. I suppose I understood what they were feeling, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. Doing so would have meant that a part of me was dying and for the first time I had begun to feel truly alive.

The next day my girlfriend Anna arrived from Philadelphia and we all went to the doctor together. I stayed quiet during the visit and let my mom and Anna ask the questions. A form was passed around that listed possible side effects, everything from acne to death. They asked a few questions about the drug’s safety but not what was really on both of their minds. That was a question that the doctor could not answer. I knew they were thinking was, “Does he really have to do this?“
I tried to treat the rest of the day like a vacation for my mom, but this just wasn’t possible. The two women that care about me the most had spent the morning asking questions about whether or not testosterone would kill me. Suddenly becoming a tourist was out of the question. We ended the day with dinner in SoHo, not talking about what was on all of our minds. Anna was scared, my mom was concerned and I was exhausted. I knew they were thinking about the risks and whether it was worth it. Hormones had been my plan for months, but for them it had only been a reality for a few hours. I wouldn’t have been able to defend my choice if asked, I would have only begun crying. Thankfully, both these women knew me well enough not to ask. They allowed me the comfort of talking about books, school, art, and the food on our plates.

On Sunday my mom left, but told me she wanted my dad to come visit. She said that after twenty-five years I finally seemed comfortable in my own skin. She wanted my dad to see this. So, in August my dad flew from Michigan and I met him at my front door. He did a slight double take before hugging me explaining later that he expected to see me with a full beard after being on testosterone for only two months. I didn’t tell him I had run home expecting whiskers after only two hours. Clearly neither of us knew what to expect. The next day we boarded the subway and road to the West Village where we rode the elevator up eleven floors to see my therapist. I needed to say some things to him that I wasn‘t sure I could without the help of a mediator and the motivation of paying $100 an hour. All the effort I had made that summer to keep them updated on my progress seemed oddly unimportant to them. The weekly phone calls as my voice changed, the photos, the stories about my new support group, it all seemed so common to them. A daughter becoming a son is not an everyday occurrence. It’s hard to learn a new name when you worked so hard to choose the first one. It’s hard to know what to do with the memories of a daughter when he’s creating new memories as a son. Things felt like they were changing every moment of every day, and there they were all the way in Michigan. Why weren’t they struggling like I was? Why didn’t they feel as unbalanced and turned around and spit out as I did? “Well what would you like me to do?“ he asked. “I don’t want to question your decisions or make you think I don’t love you and respect what you are doing.” A loss of respect wasn’t what I was afraid of--it was loneliness. I needed them. I needed to feel confused and scared and excited with people who knew me and not just what I was becoming. Mom, him, my sister, and Anna were the only people close enough to me to really experience this transition the same way I was. I needed them to see me as I changed even if I was five states and 750 miles away.

Before he left I asked a favor of my dad which turned out to be the more difficult than any other part of my transition. I asked for a picture of his chest. I wanted my nipples to look like they would if I had been born his son. “Honey, I love you, but that’s a little too weird.” He could not forget the female chest in front of him. “I don’t think I can look at you with your shirt off and think ‘that’s where my nipples are,’” He paused and sighed. “I’ll think about it.” It wasn’t the changes in my body that concerned him as much as the relationship they suddenly had to his. I was beginning to inhabit a body like his. Eventually he would see me with my shirt off for the first time since puberty and seeing his body reflected in mine was maybe too much. Still, he would think about it. That was all I was asking for.
In November we all traveled to Washington to share the holiday with my mom’s family. Surrounded by extended family my dad turned to me, patted my hand and said, “Honey, it’s still a little weird for me, but if you want a picture of my nipples you can have that.” What began as a routine holiday dinner became a most intimate moment between father and son. Not only had he offered me his chest, he had done it in front of the entire family.

In December I asked my mom if she could take the picture of my dad’s chest and bring it with her to my surgery. She arrived in January two days before my consultation with the surgeon and told me he just couldn’t do it. “He tried, he really did, but it was just too weird for him.” That was ok. I would have to leave my nipples up to fate. Surgery would create a piece of me. I needed to accept the stitches and the scars however my body saw fit. This recreation was not something I could control. My parents had no control over the daughter they gave birth to, and in two days we would travel to Baltimore to create the son I always was.

LIVING MY LEGACY

Summer is all about the reality show and realizing your dreams. I see these talent shows and hear people tell their gut wrenching stories about how they've given up everything to follow their dream of being a musician, dancer or fire eater. How they've sacrificed and toiled because this is the only thing they want. Then I think about my own life--what do I want more than anything? For a while I was really feeling down because I couldn't come up with anything. I started to feel passionless. Then I realized that it wasn't that I didn't have a dream, but rather that my dreams had been realized. Ever since I can remember I've wanted to have a partner that I love and care about, own a home of my own and, most importantly, to become a man. Over the past few years I've attained all these things. It's not that I have no dreams, it's that I simply have to dream up some new ones.

Below is a story chronicling the ups, downs and ultimate wonder that my dreams of transitioning could become a reality.

When I move to New York I will become a man. This is what I kept telling myself. Passing had been on my mind for over a year, but the thought of transitioning in Philadelphia where I had spent the last five years was simply too daunting. I though Harry Benjamin‘s Care Guidelines were hard and fast rules. The thought of living as my “chosen gender” for at least a year before I could even be considered for top surgery and hormones terrified me. I tried to learn ways of passing by joining a drag king troupe, but the only thing I liked about being on stage in drag was that I looked like a man while doing it. Inserting this masculine look into the rest of my life without the dim lights of the bar achieved only a few odd stares and a friend asking me why my boobs looked “kinda smushed.” How would I tell my friends and co-workers I was now a boy when I couldn’t even convince a stranger? Unassisted manhood would have to wait until I left.

For the first time since undergrad I would be entering an entirely new world where I didn‘t know anyone. I wanted the transition to be immediate. I wanted to bind my breasts and answer to a boy’s name. I hoped everyone could just assume that I had always been the man I now claimed to be. Unfortunately it was not that easy. I went to bed ready to bind my breasts the next morning. I woke up unable to do just that. I told myself it was because of the temperature. “It’s August. You can’t begin regular breast binding in August.“ Really, it was that I thought I could never pull it off. No one would believe I was a man. I‘d just be the sweaty dyke with “kinda smushed“ boobs that couldn‘t breath. I’d also enrolled under the name Elizabeth, not knowing I could do anything else. With every building I went to and every form I filled out, I had to say this name. By the third time of repeating a name I couldn’t identify with, all the bravado I had taken with me to New York had drained from my body. I was standing on the steps of South Hall when one of my new classmates asked me my name. “B-“ slipped from my mouth before I could stop myself. I choked on “-etsy” and went home feeling defeated.

This defeat was really self-prescribed. At every necessity to passing I had placed a road block in my path. I hadn’t chosen a name, much less used it on enrollment records, I wouldn’t bind for fear of looking stupid, and most importantly I had a hard time believing I really was a man. If I couldn’t believe in my manhood I could not expect it from anyone else. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t physically ready to safely walk through life as a man who may not always look so “manly.“ I wasn’t mentally ready to defend my chosen gender which was questioned at every pass. I wasn’t emotionally ready to deal with those who didn’t believe in my manhood, and most importantly I wasn’t spiritually ready to stop feeling apologetic for who I was. I still though it was my problem that I didn’t look like a man, that it was my fault I was challenging others to stretch their minds around gender past what they understood it to be.

I began to realize the every day, unexpected practical challenges of becoming a man—moments where I was forced to make split second decisions as if I’ve lived them my whole life. Saying my name when I wasn‘t even sure what it should be, that moment’s hesitation before I chose what public restroom to use, filling out paperwork and feeling like I was required to check male or female when neither of these was really accurate; all of these mundane things became high stakes decisions. Every time I checked “Female” on a form I felt that much further away from becoming a man. Every time I wrote my name I lost a little bit of myself.

I finally gathered the courage to change my name. As much as I wanted it to, changing the name and pronouns people used to refer to me was not something I could subtly accomplish. I didn’t want to choose a name, my parents were supposed to do that for me. I didn’t want to tell people to use male pronouns, that was supposed to happen naturally. I didn’t want to be aware of my transition. I just wanted to have always been a man. I felt bad for asking something of people that I was certain they had never encountered before in their lives. Even the most sensitive of people needed to hear from my own mouth, “I am becoming a boy and changing my name to Eli. Please refer to me with male pronouns.” Most people needed to hear this more than once. A name isn’t just a name. It is the sound that is immediately connected with your person and knowing this made it hard to ask someone to change and even harder to correct them. Thankfully I was surrounded by people that wouldn’t listen to my apologies, they simply kept trying. Some asked what name I wanted them to call me, some needed to be told. Some waited for me to tell them to use male pronouns, some just started on their own. Everyone respected my decision.
Still, I was struggling. After six months of thinking about transitioning, the pressure to actually do something finally became too much. I showed up in the nurse’s office in January crying and shaking, begging for refills on my anti-depressants. She asked if I’d ever considered therapy. I nodded, glad she had asked, and was ushered into a serene, light blue room across the hall. While the noise machine hummed outside the door my new therapist Jennifer kindly asked me my name. I told her I didn’t know.

“People have started calling me Eli,” I said quietly.

“Is that what you’d like me to call you,” she asked?

“I guess,” she waited expectantly. “Yes,” I concluded, “Call me Eli.” She nodded and wrote my name on my chart. I had done it. I had finally made a decision and was beginning to take control of my life.

Together we worked on how to live with the most honesty possible. I knew I always wanted top surgery, but I was concerned about hormones. The health risks were a part of this concern but I was more worried about becoming just another straight, white male. I was scared of loosing the community that had made me the person I was. I didn’t want to loose the feeling of pride in walking down the street as a open queer person. My politics as a feminist and my personal identity seemed to be in conflict until Jennifer finally asked me, “What do you expect to see when you look in the mirror?“

“A flat chest and facial hair,“ I said without hesitation. That was when I knew that I needed to start hormones.

I had my first shot in June of 2004. After leaving the doctor I went to get sushi at a small takeout stand in a hallway between a laundry-mat at an apartment building on west 17th street. As I ate my avocado roll I waited for my first surge of manhood. The photos of the smiling Japanese owners on their trip to the Vatican stared back at me while the radio in the back room whined grainy hymns accompanied by a thumping bass beat from the dryers no more than twenty feet away. While I chewed, I waited for my whiskers to grow and my womanly body to fade away. When I opened my front door two hours later I went straight to the bathroom and inspected my face. Nothing. Not a glimmer of a hair, much less a five o’clock shadow. Nothing had changed. There would be plenty of time to become the man I wanted to be.

When I had begun seeing Jennifer I told her that within the next year I wanted to have top surgery, and just short of a year later, January 11, 2005, I went to Baltimore for chest reconstructive surgery. Something that the year before was just a dream I never believed could be a reality had actually come true. I woke up in the recovery room and looked down at my body. For the first time I saw the body I had always seen in my mind.

The most remarkable thing about all the doctors and therapists I have seen is that I was never asked to explain myself. I never had to prove my manhood. I was in the midst of a dichotomy between a medical profession that had seen this all before and a community of people that were struggling to understand me. In retrospect I wouldn’t have even known how to explain myself. I wouldn’t have been able to prove anything to anyone. Everything felt uncertain. I finally realized I couldn’t know for sure until I took the leap to start transitioning. I thought critically of each and every decision I made along the way. My most difficult critic proved to be myself. Once I had accepted the decisions I was making and the person I was becoming, my community, both medical and social, supported me in living my reality.

At some point in my childhood I had seen something on TV about sex changes. I was young and naive and thought maybe things would just be ok. I could go to the doctor, get the penis I seemed to be missing and restart my life as a boy. When I told my parents I wanted to be a boy at nine years old I realized from the looks on their faces that it wasn’t that easy. Now, seventeen years later it still isn’t that easy, but it is possible. It hadn’t been since puberty that I could spend a summer without my shirt on. I’ll have to wait a while longer to pee standing up. Still, what was a dream at nine is becoming a reality at twenty-six. That thought still amazes me.