[Trigger warning: some medical details on salpingectomy & endometrial ablation surgeries.]
I am a boy. A nonbinary, trans, aro-ace gay boy. A boy with a vagina and uterus and ovaries.
And a boy who just got a salpingectomy and endometrial ablation. That means I got the lining of my uterus cauterized and removed so I won’t get menstrual bleeding anymore and I got the Fallopian tubes cut out of my belly and removed so the eggs from the ovaries cannot reach the uterus anymore, thus avoiding any future possibility of pregnancy.
From the outside, this double surgery might seem “not as big as” or “less important than” the masculinizing mastectomy I had almost two years ago. There’s definitely less of an immediate “visual effect”. I probably won’t really internalize what I have done for a few months, until several months with no menstrual bleeding have passed, until I’ve had several sexual encounters where I don’t have to worry about the risk of pregnancy any more. That will take a while, it will take time. But the reality and meaning and importance of what I have done is starting to sink in even if I cannot “see” it yet (apart from the three small incisions on my belly).
This double procedure I got done on Wednesday is actually a huge step for me. It’s a huge gesture of self-determination: deciding for myself what to do with my own body.
As the baritone section leader in our chorus wrote to me, “You are becoming more YOU”; or, as one of my closest nonbinary friends just said, “this isn’t a surgery for appendicitis”; as this nonbinary friend recognized and validated for me, the double procedure I got done is just as “necessary” as, say, a surgery for appendicitis, it’s not a whim, but it’s different in that it’s a gesture of self-determination.
I decide what to do with my own body, with my body parts, with my fertility. I decide for myself. No one else has the right to decide for me.
Validating words and reactions from my nonbinary friend, from the baritone section leader, from another friend yesterday who said “I’m realizing now how impactful this procedure is for you” or from the buddy who drove me to & back from surgery on Wednesday and who’s coming to celebrate my last gender-affirming surgery with me (& with his family) tonight: I need all these words, these reminders, these reactions from friends because for so long I gaslighted my own self, for months and even until the morning of surgery itself I still had a voice within me saying that this was “just a whim”. But no, this is not a whim. No form of gender-affirming care is a whim. No form of determination over our own body — be it gender-affirming care (which can be necessary for cis people, too), birth-control, euthanasia — is ever a whim.
I am a boy who got his belly cut open to have his Fallopian tubes removed. Because I am a boy with a uterus and ovaries. And I am a boy who wants, and has the right (& the privilege), to decide over his own body.
I wish we all had the same right.
The Little Prince and the Fox 