At last, the tears came. Just a trickle at first, while I was driving home. And now, at home, the dam finally gave way and the tears poured out flowing freely and abundantly.
It’s really starting to hit me now, all that I’ve been through, all that I’ve put myself through, with the strength and conviction and determination, almost blind determination, of self-preservation and self-definition.
Two years ago at this time I was spending the last of my three nights on the road on my way from California to Colorado. I was spending the night in Grand Junction before my last leg to reach my final Coloradan destination with only a very vague idea of what would come next for me — really, with a plan only for the following 4-5 months then.
One year ago at this time I was at my French climbing buddy’s place, trying to relax before my gender-affirming top-surgery the next day.
Both of these events were life-changing for me, really life-changing, just as my move from Europe to California had been in January 2016.
From each of these three events there’s no going back. They’re irreversible. Even if I did go back to California, or Europe, or if somehow I got the “original, feminine chest” again, it wouldn’t be the same anyway, I wouldn’t be the same anyway. These three events have changed not only my life but also, and especially, transformed me so deeply that there’s no going back.
And each of these events was a huge leap of faith, something I did almost blindly, with only a vague, or short-term, idea of what I was in for, of what could be in store for me, of what life would be like for me afterwards. Each time I was leaving so much behind, leaving behind almost everything I had or knew or had known. Upending my professional, relational, and geographic life in the case of my two major moves; overturning my gender identity with all that entails — A LOT — in our life, with my top-surgery last year.
In each of my two big geographic moves, I basically packed my bags and left — crossing an ocean & a continent, in the first case; driving halfway across a continent through snow-storms, in the second.
As to my gender-affirming surgery, it’s hard to put into words how different life is for me now and how it’s still changing for me and how much emotional effort and how much energy/focus it’s taking to get used to this “new me”, despite it being “the me that feels more true” to me. Walking in this world as a male-presenting individual while still having the almost constant awareness of not being an AMAB person and sometimes even the fear of being “discovered” or “considered as an impostor” because of being AFAB. The constant doubt or worry of not knowing exactly how the world perceives me, what other people see. The desire and conscious effort to claim my place in male spaces such as men’s restrooms and men’s changing rooms or simply men’s clothes or my deeper, more masculine voice or “male attitudes”. I am very aware and self-conscious about how I do these things, use these spaces, and how it means to me that I am claiming male spaces that I’ve always felt belonged to me, or I belonged to, but were to some extent inaccessible to me before because of my “AFAB status”, because of my body. But now I have a masculine chest which gives me just enough confidence to enter and take up space in these male places, but still not enough confidence to feel wholly comfortable and/or safe in them. And maybe I never will.
But even if I never feel fully safe or comfortable in male spaces, there is no going back to female spaces for me. And this is one of the things I didn’t wholly realize a year ago when I took the huge step, the leap of faith, of my gender-affirming surgery, i.e. of getting my breasts amputated and my chest redesigned.
Just as I didn’t have a full or real or complete idea of what I was heading towards when I moved from Europe to California and then from California to Colorado.
In each of these cases, I followed a sort of “life instinct”, almost “survival instinct”, along with a strong desire or dream. In each of these cases I knew I couldn’t continue to live where & how I was, I knew I needed that specific change although I didn’t really know all that that change would entail. This to me seems like some deeply-rooted, natural “life force”, some innate and almost primeval drive that is the expression of the strength, or conviction, that life can have. Not only a survival instinct, but also a drive of that innate core in every living being to find its true expression despite, or against, all odds.
The Little Prince and the Fox 