Odd Angsts

It's been far too long, I know, since I've posted last. There has been plenty of gender-related sillyness.

I was involved in a top surgery benefit show for myself and two other trans men this past Friday. It didn't exactly go as smoothly as planned for a number of reasons, but we made a few hundred, which is a start at least. I'm tempted to whine about what went wrong (and whine especially about the phenomenon of a lot of friends not showing up--I'm sorry kids, this wasn't just a Pegasissy show, this was a chance to support my transition and show that you cared about this struggle; not to be lame, but I'm a little hurt) but it's not so productive. Oh well. I suppose this is what happens when you invest yourself emotionally into something that happens at a bar (though the bar in question, Cowfish, was exceptionally gracious and kind in letting us use the space for free.) And a lot of things did go perfectly fine. A co-worker of mine came with his partner and seemed pretty amused by it (by "it" I mean my maudlin performance in a "chill wave Roy Orbison" outfit and my participation in the fashion show segment wearing a blond toupee and a bridesmaid dress with nipples embroidered on the front.)

Speaking of bar incidents--and I'm not going to into it in depth here--but I had a crazy anti-trans experience with the staff at John Henry's a couple weeks ago. Briefly, a friend and I got our IDs checked for gender by a bouncer when we were trying to use the bathroom. Pretty fucked up. If you want strong drinks for cheap in Eugene, just go to my house. JH's doesn't need your business, and you don't need their bullshit.

Let's begin properly with the physical changes. My voice dropped down a little more after my shot last week, though I'm still trying to work it out. My voice does this thing where when my voice first drops, it actually sounds pinched and high because I'm still trying to resonate it in my throat instead of my chest. I'm working on this. I think I might start attempting to actually talk from my chest and not be a totes squeakbox all the time, just as an experiment. I am slowly acquiring sparse but definite sideburns, and I keep shaving 'em in the hopes that they will one day blossom into something reasonable. My increased hirsuteness (not to be confused with hir cuteness) is, while not necessarily troubling, a bit of a marvel to me. Today my endocrinologist mentioned how lucky I was to not have gotten any acne, though I was a tad alarmed earlier this week when two zits appeared on my face simultaneously, an occurrence more or less as rare as conjoined twins.

Testosterone-fueled emotions continue to be a wild and interesting ride, but one I'm lately more able to predict and get a handle on. I've had occasion recently to feel irrationally possessive in a way that is perhaps stereotypically male, and though it kind of put a damper on my night at the time, I've since worked it all out. My post-T emotional patterns--I'm just going to politically-incorrectly call them my "male" emotional patterns--are kind of a double edged sword, if you will. I find myself feeling things like possessiveness and rage that I hadn't previously experienced, at least to this extent, but somehow my left brain has been freed up too in a certain way, so I can, increasingly successfully, step back and dissect the venom out of the raw emotions and figure out what I'm actually angry about (which is rarely the thing that sparked my anger in the first place.)

It was in one of these dissection sessions that I realized I'm not totally out of the woods as far as being completely satisfied with this trans business. I like to believe that, now that I'm just over ten months into this testosterone stuff (!!!), everything has stabilized and I'm totally home free. But I realize I'm still pretty self-conscious and nervy about this sometimes. I keep trying to write about this in detail and then realizing that my personal insecurities don't need to be on the internet. Ugh.