Meeting people where they’re at

Yesterday I had planned to meet up & hang out with the gender-expansive gay guy from the chorus with whom I’ve hooked up in order to have a clarifying conversation about our “friendship”. I knew what I wanted to ask him, what I wanted to say, feeling the additional protection of my post-op restrictions that don’t allow me to have sex, yet. 

Well, my plans went to hell (in the good sense). We didn’t have the conversation. It didn’t feel like the right thing to do in that moment. As I was journaling in my diary planning this conversation a few days ago, I found myself writing, “I’m ready. Is he?” The truth is that I wasn’t ready, either, at least not yesterday. 

I’ve been feeling very vulnerable, delicate, fragile, even dysphoric and disconnected from my own body this past week. It’s been hard. Pain and anger and grief and real concern around my dysphoria have been haunting many hours of my days and nights for over a week. 

My decision to have the clarifying conversation with the gender-expansive gay guy was a rational and reasonable one. But yesterday what I needed was tenderness: I needed to be held, literally and figuratively, emotionally as much as physically, by a gay guy friend. I needed connection, validation, gender-affirmation, some gentle touch, not the rational dissecting of relationships. And he met me where I was yesterday. 

But I also met him where he was. He wouldn’t have been ready for such a conversation. Instead of helping to soften his protective shell or lower his defensive walls, it would have made them more impenetrable. Instead of allowing us both to have a sweet afternoon in “teenager mode” together, it would have soured things. 

We met each other where we were at. 

And I also met myself where I was, where I actually was emotionally yesterday, not theoretically on paper.

And now I’m realizing that has probably been one the most important things I’ve learned in relationships — or become more clearly aware of — in the past decade, and especially in the past few years. Most of the “relationships gone wrong” have been due to the parties involved being unable and/or unwilling to meet each other (and/or their own self) where each one was. Not just compromising: actually meeting each other emotionally. This holds for me for all types of close relationships, including with one’s own self.

I think I wasn’t taught this very important principle of close relationships, of meeting people somewhere that works for all parties involved, emotionally. I was taught to compromise, even to sacrifice, and had to fight and shake off so much of that toxic conditioning. Compromising from the practical standpoint is definitely important. But it’s not enough. It’s been a slow process for me to learn to meet people where they’re at, so that our close relationships may work. I’ve learned to do it thanks to sensitive people who have met me where I was, or am. I also learned to do it, partly, through my professional experiences teaching. I’ve learned it instinctively, by doing, by trial and error (oh, so many errors!). The more people met me where I was, the more I learned on an emotional, instinctive level, to do that in return. 

I didn’t see that at first, I just felt it, I felt something that felt better than in the past. Now I also see it. I still mess up sometimes, but at least I see it: this valuable key of healthy relationships.

The lost boy and the invisible man

… And maybe be myself. 

But who am I? 

The boy (in) me is lost. I am struggling terribly with my gender-identity. I’ve been seeing all these masc folks (cis-men, trans-men, nonbinary transmasc persons) and they all seem so much more masculine that me — their looks, their voices. 

I’m hating my voice. It sounds so “unmasculine”. To me it just sounds like a “low woman’s voice” and I hate it. 

Maybe it’s my recent surgery that is considered a “GYN procedure” — “gyn” being the Greek prefix for “woman”. 

I’m struggling to connect with my masculine side, I feel like I can’t find it, like it doesn’t even exist maybe… It feels gone, lost, invisible. 

Yesterday afternoon one of my binary transguy friends visited me. We don’t see each other very often but he’s a true friend and a lovely, sensitive, and very intelligent person. Our gender-identities as adults now differ a bit in that I feel nonbinary transmasc while he defines himself more as a transman (we both define ourselves also as “transguys” but probably with slightly different meanings). As children, though, we had very similar feelings: we both felt that we were boys, we both knew that we were boys, and we both suffered when those boys were stifled and not allowed to be or to grow up. We talked about our gender-identities again during our visit yesterday afternoon and I repeated something I often say, i.e. that I feel I’m a “boy”, I can go as far as saying that I am a “guy”, but I cannot see or feel myself as a “man”. And my friend made a very insightful comment, along the following lines: from the youngest age, we knew we were boys, and that original knowledge is still within us, so even now as adults our perception of our own masculinity can go as far as embracing the “boy”; but then, as we grew up, we weren’t allowed to turn into a “man” and so now, as adults, it’s so hard for us to embrace that possibility. 

I think he hit the nail on the head. I remember once this past summer I felt so deeply and intensely that I was a “man” that I even wrote about it here. I felt — & wrote — that I was “my own version of man”: a nonbinary trans man, but a “man” nonetheless — whatever “man” may mean.

For a fleeting moment, for a couple of days this summer, I was able to go that far, to allow myself to be “my own version of man”… 

… Where is he now?

I’m not a “hot guy”

The first time I hooked up with the gender-expansive gay guy from the chorus, he said to me just twice, “You’re a hot guy”, and it felt extremely affirming to me. I don’t see myself as a “hot guy” but hearing it explicitly from a gay man is validating of my gender-identity. At least in some ways, in small doses.

When we hooked up again last week, he said to me many times, “You’re so hot”, and a couple times, “You’re so sexy”. 

That doesn’t feel good to me. And even the phrase “hot guy”, which was repeated to me also by a transguy friend who visited me yesterday, can bother or upset me. 

When, instead, the  gender-expansive gay guy from the chorus said to me, “… I feel attracted to you… ”, that felt good.

One of my ex-boyfriends from almost two decades ago, used to say to me that I was so beautiful that he wanted to sketch me (he could draw really well) and that my eyes looked like something out of a painting by Tiziano (the great Venetian artist). A friend’s husband in California once said to me that my profile looked like one of those male profiles you can find on Grecian coins. A couple friends in California used to say I reminded them of classical sculptures of boys or young men.  

All of those comments felt really good to me. 

What’s the difference between those types of comments?  

Said to me once, the phrase “you’re a hot guy” can be affirming because I can focus on the gender-validating aspects of it contained in the word “guy”. Repeated many times, it starts to make me feel objectified. “Hot” or “sexy” by themselves, instead, just feel sexually objectifying and thus upsetting to me. I feel a sexual charge in those words that I don’t know how to deal with, I cannot understand or relate to, and therefore almost make me shut down. Even the “hot guy” comment, if reiterated too often and/or in the wrong context, can be upsetting because then I feel there’s some kind of expectation attached to it: if I’m “hot” or “sexy”, or if I’m a “hot guy”, am I expected to behave or act or feel in certain ways? I feel objectified and also burdened with something that I don’t understand and don’t know how to handle. 

If instead, someone says “I’m attracted to you”, then it’s about them, not about me. They are free to feel attracted to me and to feel attracted in whichever ways is congenial to them, even if it’s sexual. At that level, I feel we’re both subjects, there’s no objectification (at least I don’t feel it), and I don’t feel like I’m expected to do something that might not be natural to me. 

The aesthetic comments, though, are the easiest for me to handle. Precisely because they’re aesthetic and thus I can relate to them. I can look at someone and think, or say, “they resemble that painting or remind me of that sculpture”. That’s how I feel about most “attractive” people: I find them aesthetically attractive, there’s no sex involved. And it also feels more objective to me: it feels like there’s no judgement (positive or negative), it’s just the statement of a fact, the similarity between two things; if I wanted to, I could even pull up a photo of me and compare it to a Grecian coin or to a painting by Tiziano or to a classical sculpture, and maybe agree or disagree. But I don’t have to act or behave or feel in any way that might not be natural to me, I don’t feel like it’s required of me to act or behave or feel in any particular way. I can just be. And maybe be myself.

My salpingectomy is a political act

Yesterday evening my buddy who drove me & took care of me all day for my double procedure on Wednesday came over for dinner with his wife & daughter to celebrate not only the Winter Solstice with me but also my last gender-affirming surgery. It was a lovely gesture and we had a lovely time. 

On Tuesday, ironically, I had my last menstrual bleeding. As I hung out with the younger, gender-expansive gay guy from the chorus and talked about my upcoming surgery, the focus was on “never getting my period again — YAY!”  

Even the original decision months ago of getting a salpingectomy came as an additional procedure that my doctor offered me while I was planning to get the endometrial ablation done. 

So somehow in all these months the focus has been a lot, maybe mostly, on the ablation and the desired result of stopping my menstrual bleeding. 

As I let the effects of this double procedure sink in, though, I’m starting to realize that it’s actually the salpingectomy that means more to me. And it means more to me than “just practically eliminating future risks of getting pregnant” (which is already super important per se). 

My salpingectomy is a political act. It is my way of refusing that some patriarchic asshole in power might rob me of my rightful control over my own fertility.  

I’ve known my entire life that I would never want to bear children and the risk of getting pregnant has always been one of my greatest fears or horrors. The right to control one’s own fertility has been one of the principles and battles I’ve felt most intensely and keenly since puberty. Since my very first sexual experiences a quarter of a century ago, I have been super careful & active about not getting pregnant and living with that constant fear at the back of my mind. But it’s not “just” that. I have also felt at a deep, visceral level that the right to self-determine our own fertility is one of our most important human rights while also being one of our most vulnerable “Achille’s tendons” as one of the most direct ways that persons with a uterus have been kept under the control of others. 

I grew up with the idea that birth-control and abortion were inalienable, almost obvious, human rights. I also grew up in awe of the people who made that possible. The shock and disbelief and fury at seeing that those two pillars could be demolished were intense. And then, a fierce resolution slowly grew within me: in this dystopian world where unfortunately the worst versions of patriarchy might rob us of our human rights, I chose for myself.

For me, it’s not “just” about never getting my menstrual bleeding again; it’s not “just” about not risking an unwanted pregnancy (although those are huge, super important points per se). For me, it’s about saying: “I refuse a bodily function that could make me a pawn in the hands of the worst representatives of the toxic system that is patriarchy. I refuse my fertility. For ever. Irreversibly. By free choice. And thus, I liberate myself”.

The boy who got a salpingectomy

[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.

Standing on the threshold: the day before

Another sleepless night, tossing and turning in bed. Restless and sleepless despite my physical tiredness. 

It’s my emotions. So similar to the couple of days prior to my gender-affirming top-surgery in January 2023 and so similar to the last couple of days in Spain before moving to California in January 2016. 

The main feeling I had then and have now is that, at this point, I’m ready. Ready and impatient. I feel like I’m standing on a threshold, about to take a step that will forever change some important things about me and/or my life, and that at this point I just can’t wait to step over that threshold and be on the other side. 

Just as for that big move from Europe to California in January 2016 and my masculinizing mastectomy in January 2023, the weeks and months leading up to the decision and to actually getting everything ready for the decision to become reality were hectic and stressful, with so many practical things to get done and so many issues to solve that one almost forgets the reason, the meaning of the step. The goal, from the practical viewpoint, is clear: and that keeps me going and allows me to get everything I need done from the practical viewpoint. But it’s only the last couple days before the step over the threshold that, for me, the deeper reason or meaning of that step come more fully to my senses again. It’s in those last couple days before the step that I really feel, on the one hand, the importance of the decision for me and, on the other hand, the need to do some rituals to mark and celebrate this step, these last moments before an irreversible change.  

As I did in January 2016 and in January 2023, today as well I will be doing something that feels special and meaningful to me in general but also to me particularly as relates to this step. This afternoon, I will be going to “the city” to visit the Christmas Market first with the gender-expansive gay guy from the chorus with whom I had hooked up and then by myself; and then I might join him and some others for a movie night at his place in the evening. 

If I don’t visit the Christmas Market today, I probably won’t be able to see it again before it closes this year. This year more than others, with the gay men’s chorus holiday performances, Thanksgiving with my dear running friend & his wife, and Friendsgiving with one of my queer families, I have felt not only the importance but also the real opportunity of making new, positive memories around the holidays: so going (back) to the Christmas Market today, both in pleasant company and by myself, feels like a delicate, profound, and important ritual for me today, since then the market will close before I’ve recovered enough from tomorrow’s surgery. 

Then, there’s the symbolic importance of spending some time today with a gender-expansive gay guy and, in particular, someone with whom I’ve recently had physical & sexual intimacy. My double procedure tomorrow is both gender-affirmation and birth-control, so spending the day with him, and then possibly with some other gay guys for movie night, seems particularly appropriate for this surgery: it feels right to me. 

After tomorrow’s procedure, I will no longer get any menstrual bleedings and no longer risk getting pregnant: having lived with these two realities for a quarter of a century, I can hardly imagine how that will be, how it will feel. But I imagine that, at least in some ways, it might help me feel more like a “gay boy”… 

This scared child

[Trigger warning: some detail about surgery (ablation & salpingectomy).]

Last night, despite my tiredness, I couldn’t fall asleep. I was physically exhausted but my mind kept spinning, taking some upsetting thoughts & feelings and running with them. I could literally see, feel the spinning — one of the few times that I have really been able to understand physically what it means that our mind can “spin”, and “spin out of control”. Fortunately, I was able to keep it under control, but barely. The way I found and maintained this control was to finally say out loud while lying awake in bed at nearly 1 AM: “I am scared”. I said it over and over again, almost a dozen times — “I am scared”, “I am scared”, “I’m scared”, “I’m scared”… Then, heeding the (scared) child within me, I put on a lullaby, turned on my tummy hugging both the pillow on which I put my face and my cuddly animal (a gray triceratops called Tracy), and eventually fell asleep. 

In three days I am undergoing surgery again, a double procedure: ablation and salpingectomy. It’s both a gender-affirming surgery for me and a practical safety measure given that I am a gay boy with a uterus living in a country where abortion is no longer a guaranteed right. 

I want to do this surgery. I’ve had to postpone it a few times this past year and now I’m feeling ready and impatient to get it done. But also scared. This scares me more than both my masculinizing mastectomy and the UCL surgery. Both procedures (ablation and salpingectomy) are considered “standard, not very invasive, and with a short recovery time”. But they’re going to go into my abdomen. And that scares me. Also, the pain and discomfort that I’ll feel for a few days after this double procedure scare me because they’re probably going to be worse, or of a type that I’m not used to, compared to the pain after other surgeries I’ve had. 

I’m also scared because I don’t think my housemate, i.e. the person I’m living with, understands the seriousness of my procedure coming up — or of any surgery, really. They’re all wrapped up in their whim of getting a kitty (they already have a dog) in a rush now and I feel that my needs, not only around my surgery but also around having some more time to settle into this place where I have been living for only two months, are not being heard. 

And here’s where the scared child in me really comes in. Not so much for the reasonable, justified fear around my surgery; but rather for all the other fears that have been coming up this past week and really escalated in my mind last night. The fear of my needs not being really heard or valued by my housemate. The fear of my friends leaving me behind and/or not missing me. The fear of the other members of the chorus forgetting me and/or not missing me. The fear that the text messages from one of the chorus member with whom I have plans for Tuesday were not really to check in about our plans to hang out but rather a veiled way to change those plans and/or avoid spending one-on-one time with me. 

Looking at this list of fears from the “outside” what does one see, what do I see? A person — a child — who is fundamentally afraid of not being valued (loved?). Whether it’s my practical/living needs or my presence or time with me one-on-one, it all boils down to the same deep fear: “I am not enough”; “I — i.e. me as a person, my needs, my emotions, time with me — am/are not valuable, not important, not worthy”. 

This wound is so deep. Its origin probably goes back three or four decades. 

How does one cure, heal such a deep wound? 

I don’t know.

But what I do know is that today I’m going to sit with this child, take its hand, and do what I can to soothe its fears (while also trying to separate the practical issues, like living compromises with my housemate and surgery preparation, from the emotional ones).

FOMO

I’ve been wiped out by fatigue since Tuesday and yesterday I woke up with a sore throat and I still feel tired and with cold symptoms. Apparently, I have nothing “serious”: the swab/PCR tests for COVID, STREP, RSV, and flu all came back negative, so that’s good news. But I’m probably fighting something and definitely in need of rest. And today’s pre-op phone call with the nurse really brought it home to me that I cannot get sick now, that this weekend is the most critical time before my surgery next Wednesday. 

So, I really should skip the last two performances with the gay men’s chorus. Realistically, I probably still wouldn’t have the energy for the show tonight. And the show on Sunday is really at the most critical moment before my surgery as far as contagion risks go. 

Rationally, I get it, it makes sense; but it’s hard to make peace with this. 

I’m struggling to make peace with the fact that my performances with the gay men’s chorus are over for this cycle, are over for the next three months. I had just started enjoying them last weekend, after all the difficulties, and that enjoyment isn’t available to me anymore. And to make it worse, I have to miss the shows that my friends are going to see: half a dozen of my closest friends will be attending tonight’s performance and my running coach got thickets for the Sunday show. I was so much looking forward to performing for my friends and coach, for them all to see this other aspect/identity of me, to share with them the joy of this other community, this other family I have found. And the shows tonight and on Sunday would also involve some socializing afterwards, so I’ll miss that, too. 

All this is making my FOMO come up. I’m feeling sad and disappointed, also because I hadn’t taken into account to skip this weekend’s performances, I was really counting on them and looking forward to them, so last weekend’s shows were to me the preliminary of these. If I had known or foreseen then that I would/should skip this weekend’s performances, then I probably would have approached last weekend’s shows differently, with a different mindset or emotional preparation. This way, instead, I’m emotionally unprepared and it just feels like a huge loss. I’m losing out on the fun and magic of performing with the additional pleasure of performing for my friends. I’m losing out on time with my gay men singers family. I’m losing out on socializing time with my friends and/or with the gay men singers after the shows. I’m missing out on seeing the chorus members to wish them happy holidays in person before the three-week-break until the next cycle. 

And the next cycle will be different: there will be new/additional newbies, different music/songs… altogether a different vibe. 

What if I’m forgotten?

I’m feeling left out, left behind, and without the opportunity to get some real closure for this phase ending — because this particular phase with the gay men’s chorus does end this weekend and I won’t be there for it.

“Internal Family Systems”

I’ve never really done therapy with the Internal Family Systems method but I am familiar with the concepts and tools from it. And I think I’ve been living or enacting it in my life lately, partly even unawares.

Lately, I’ve been having lots of (not unpleasant) dreams in which my sister and/or my mother appear together with myself at different, younger, ages. I’ve also been thinking a lot about my various identities lately: how I miss my “bro-time” and my athlete identity, especially the “climber me”, because of the lack of opportunity to climb with my buddies; how the queer parts of me have had so much more space to express themselves and explore because I’m spending so much more time in different queer environment and with my queer friends/families; how the more “professional me” has been quite subdued or absent because I’ve been unemployed and/or unmotivated in my latest job; how the more childlike, and often specifically boyish, parts of me have had more space because of my experiences and exposure with the gay men’s chorus, which are still so new to me. 

This “fractionality” in me has felt more pronounced lately and in some ways uncomfortable, almost leading me to not recognize myself. Within the gay men’s chorus, for instance, I’m not the “PhD scientist” or “STEM professional”: they might see me as a trans guy who sings and is an avid athlete, but really there I’m mostly a teenage gay (trans) boy trying to find himself in a new, mostly unknown, world. That’s also how I felt, for instance, when I hooked up with the gender-expansive guy from the chorus who is fifteen years younger than me: in many ways, I can feel I’m older, more mature, more experienced than he is (e.g. when it comes to jobs I’ve had and places I’ve lived); but close up, in that specific type of intimacy, I’m a teenage boy and in many ways much “younger” and less experienced than he is. When I chose to hang out with him and to hook up, I instinctively made the choice of allowing my teenage-boy-self to have that experience, somehow feeling instinctively that he was safe even if it felt a little scary.

And it’s probably going to be similar with other guys from the chorus if we hang out as friends. 

I think this answers part of my question: what do I want from this chorus, from being part of this chorus? A big part of what I want, or need, is letting myself live some of those experiences as a young gay boy that I didn’t have two decades ago. 

I guess that’s actually living the Internal Family Systems method: I can be my young gay boy self at chorus; be my “PhD scientist” or “STEM professional” at work; be “bro-y” with my climbing buddies… And I think that I was my own mother and sister in my recent dreams, the way I felt profoundly that I was — or could be — my own father last spring & summer. By allowing myself to be all these different parts of myself, all of these different roles in my life, I can help heal some of my wounds.

So, although it might sometimes feel like I’m made up of fractions, I think I’m still a whole after all…