[Updated on April 7th, 2018, to clarify a point at the end.]
We tend to look at a problem only once it becomes so obvious that it's impossible to ignore. Then we treat only the symptoms we directly saw, move on, and forget until it happens again.
Relating to shootings, especially ones done by teenagers, I think the issue isn't the shootings themselves. It's what drove these people to get to the point where they snapped. These are people who got so fed up with something that they couldn't take it anymore. There had to be signs leading up to it, and the question should be why those signs went unnoticed or otherwise not taken seriously, or why they felt the need to hide their feelings to the degree of making the signs unnoticeable.
I understand those feelings of unhinged hopelessness and/or rage, but mine manifested in suicidal behaviour, directed at myself instead of others. And mine didn't go completely ignored, despite my efforts to cover it up. I had people to support me.
Whether aimed inward or outward, it's not okay that those feelings in people are so ignored by so many. These people should be noticed BEFORE something like this happens, not after. People see things and don't speak up all the time, or take any action.
That needs to stop. We need to ask ourselves why we're just glazing past behaviour we feel too uncomfortable to acknowledge. If you believe that you're a person who cares, what can you do to show that to people who need someone to care?
I care. I'm spread a bit thin because of the amount of emotional support I'm giving students lately, but I will always try to be there. If I see a student in my school who seems distressed, I ask if they're okay. I reach out to them. When they tell me their problems, I don't judge whether what they're saying is right or wrong, I listen to them. I lend an open ear. I give advice upon request, but I do not thrust that advice on them, I give them a chance to ask for it.
I'm doing this, but I also recognize this is not enough. I am one person, and I'm only helping my students and my friends. I have to ask myself what I can continue to do to help others, and how I can expand this. If you're reading this, please try to ask yourself these questions. What can you do to help? How can you incorporate a little bit of help for others into your life?
-----
I am not, by any means, saying that gun control isn't a solution to help prevent the shootings. I am merely saying that this is also an issue that should be addressed, in addition to the gun control.
People who say that guns don't kill people, people kill people, fail to recognize that people kill people with guns. It's like saying toasters don't toast bread, people toast bread. But if there was no toaster involved, then the person could not as easily toast the bread.
The students of Parkland are incredible, and I fully support them and their movement. It's important for people to stand up and fight for their rights, because apathy is the destroyer of democracy. Nothing will be done to solve the problem if nobody points out the problem. And one of the biggest things we haven't ever tried in order to fix the shooting problem is proper gun control. Especially for those who are not part of "a well organized militia."
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Friday, February 16, 2018
*Biological Content* My Transition - Month 10
This is continuing off my introduction post. If you haven't read it yet, click here to view it.
Biological Content Material!
Biological Content Material!
This is mostly about social issues, but I talk about some body parts and their functions in this post. If you don't want to hear about this stuff, you best not read ahead.
Content forewarning:
In this post I talk about my dysphoria, surgery stuff, insurance issues, and I describe social outcasting in a way that could be potentially triggering.
Content forewarning:
In this post I talk about my dysphoria, surgery stuff, insurance issues, and I describe social outcasting in a way that could be potentially triggering.
Month 10 - January
I haven't really touched on a few social things that have changed. The number of things I had never before thought of but are now a constant part of my life.
For example, bathrooms and locker rooms. I don't mean to get political (because this is a stupid issue to have turn political) but most people can just walk up to a bathroom without any anxiety at all, use the bathroom, and then be done. Simple, easy, you just had to use the bathroom. But every time I approach a bathroom, I'm confronted with thoughts like these:
Locker rooms are worse, though. Much, much worse. I don't want people to see the lower half of me naked. I can't go in the men's locker room because I have boobs, and I'm not a man, so I would be very uncomfortable in there. But I can't go into the women's locker room because I don't have a vagina, and I feel like everyone would stare at me, like I don't belong there because of what's in my pants... I would also worry that they would be uncomfortable. If they thought of me as they would a man, they'd just assume I'm using that locker room to get a look at the naked women. But I'm not a man. I just want to change my clothes to go swimming...
The place I go swimming has gender neutral single stall locker rooms, and I love them so much for providing that. If I ever had a bad locker room experience, it would probably scar me for life, and I would never go swimming again until post-surgery...
I guess I'm on the subject of swimming because it's my favorite method of exercise, and I went swimming recently for the first time in quite a while. The experience was interesting. I wore my 2-piece swimming bikini, which has bottoms that have a kind of skirt. The skirt surrounds the bikini bottom, to help hide any kind of bulge. I really wish I could just wear a regular bikini bottom and not have to worry about what's contained within them, but... That's my life...
I felt like my facial hair was rather more noticeable than usual. I guess it didn't help that I went at night, giving it all that time in the day to grow... It was probably a combination of my own insecurities and the fact I couldn't wear makeup to the pool, but I'm pretty sure everyone at the Aquatics Center knew I was trans at first glance. People seemed to be avoiding me, and I got a lot of weird looks.
As I was doing stretches and exercises, a little girl accidentally swam backward into me, and I moved aside to get out of her way. She was adorable, so I couldn't help but smile as she swam past, but when my eyes met with her dad, I smiled at him and he looked downright angry, and clearly uncomfortable. I saw him moments earlier with a smile on his face, but when he saw me as I moved out of his daughter's way, it was like he had immediately labeled me as a pedophile because I'm trans. That's the kind of look he gave me. After giving me that look, he swam after his daughter and moved to the other side of the pool from me. I thought it might be coincidence, but later on when I came back to that pool after visiting the hot tub, he actively moved to the other side of the pool from me again.
Which brings me to the hot tub... When I walked over to an empty spot in the hot tub and sat down, two people got out, and the people next to me moved away. But if I reacted negatively to any of that behaviour, I'd be the "bad person," so I just smiled at those who didn't treat me like I was sick with a plague and happily sat in the hot tub. I just tried to assume that it was a coincidence, or that my getting in reminded them that they're getting too warm. It could be any number of things.
These are just two examples, from this one swimming adventure, but I got many weird looks from people, a discouraging number of people who seemed to be avoiding being near me, and it just felt like, in general, people weren't particularly friendly toward me, yet being very chatty with everyone else. In the two hours I was there, amidst the probably 20 people I smiled at, I only remember one of them actually smiling back, but leaving shortly after.
I have had experiences like these before since I started my transition. I've come to accept that this is simply how the general public is going to treat me, and I can choose to either be upset by that, or I can just be friendly to everyone and hope they notice that, despite being trans, I'm a nice person.
Early in my transition I realized that this must be similar to what racism feels like. I feel like I'm coming to better understand how our culture treats people who are viewed as "different," and how unfair it is that friendly people, for no reason at all, can be condemned simply because of the way they look. It's so easy to judge what you don't understand.
The closer I get to my first year, the more I'm thinking my facial hair may never actually go away. As shown in this picture, I still have a shadow on my face. Also I still have an adam's apple, but that's a different rant subject... The hairs have gotten somewhat softer, and the area and thinned out a bit, but I haven't noticed any progress on it now in over a month, and I'm starting to question whether the softening of the hair I noticed during month 8 was actually just in my head. I might have just been remembering what happened the month before, and the changes were so minute that it's possible nothing happened at all, and I just thought it was still thinning out... In any case, I still see a shadow on my face, even immediately after shaving. The brightening and softening of my skin seems to have made the thick black hairs more noticeable from within the pores...
Electrolysis is not covered by my insurance, from what I can tell. But at my next doctor appointment I'm going to ask my doctor to find the exact CPT code she would use to bill my insurance. That way I can determine exactly how I might find a loophole to get it covered as a "medically necessary" part of my transition. Because it is! This isn't going away, and the goal of my transition is to make my body the way it should have been when I was born. Chances are, if I were born with the right body, it probably wouldn't have had facial hair.
People say "some women have facial hair too" and that really irritates me. No, women typically do not have this kind of facial hair, and if I were born with an X chromosome, I wouldn't likely have any more facial hair than my mother. Male facial hair is thick, like pubic hair. Women who have facial hair might have an occasional long black hair, or they might have some little clusters of them. But are those hairs growing in as thick and course as pubic hair? I doubt it. Do they have to shave every 6 hours to keep the facial hair shadow from poking through their makeup? That seems pretty rare for a woman to have to deal with. So no, "some women having facial hair too" is not a helpful thing to say in this context. It feels condescending, and it makes trans women like myself feel like you're degrading the problem by saying it's not a problem. Trans women are held to a higher standard than cis women in this department, because any little detail in your appearance that seems masculine will be locked onto and used as evidence that you're not a woman. If a trans woman has facial hair shadow, you can bet that some people are going to completely ignore her long hair and boobs to call her a man. So please keep that to yourself if you ever find yourself thinking it when a trans woman complains about facial hair. Instead, maybe you can be of some actual help and suggest a hair removal place.
I apologize to some of my friends who may have just read that and thought to themselves, "Oh god, I've said that to her. I'm so sorry!" I don't mean to make you feel terrible about it. It's just rapidly becoming a pet peeve of mine. It's incredible how nearly every single person I've talked about this with has said some variation of that exact phrase... Nearly. Every. Person. And it just... Ughhhh... JUST NO, OKAY? Stahp eet...
... Moving on... *cough*
My dysphoria continued to gradually get worse throughout this month, and within the last few weeks I started to cry nearly every time I took a shower. Whether it be from seeing my lower half in a mirror, or from looking down while scrubbing my legs. At this point I've definitely decided that I'm getting a vaginoplasty, it's just a matter of how.
I'm still learning more about how I'm going to get this covered by my insurance, and I'm still asking questions, but I find myself consistently with my sights on the operation that uses peritoneum tissue to form the vaginal wall. This operation was only just developed in March of 2017 by Dr. Jess Ting of Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, and has only been performed on 30+ patients. But despite all the risks, after messaging the doctor and getting his FAQ list about the procedure, I feel like the benefits are worth it, and I have a good feeling about the doctor. If I don't do this, I think I'll spend the rest of my life questioning whether I made the right decision. The most recent question I'm getting answered is whether New York accepts out of state medicaid, and whether Mount Sinai Hospital accepts medicaid. If it doesn't, I might have to make a GoFundMe page in order to afford the surgery...
I could choose the easy way out and have my surgery covered 100% by a guy in Oregon who I know for a fact accepts outside medicaid, but he doesn't do this particular operation using peritoneum tissue. That makes a significant difference, and this is the kind of thing I refuse to settle on, because this is probably the biggest and most personal decision I've ever made in my life, and I'll be living with it forever.
... No pressure!
The left side was apparently one of the only pictures I had of myself without makeup from this month... Right side picture with makeup at work.
For example, bathrooms and locker rooms. I don't mean to get political (because this is a stupid issue to have turn political) but most people can just walk up to a bathroom without any anxiety at all, use the bathroom, and then be done. Simple, easy, you just had to use the bathroom. But every time I approach a bathroom, I'm confronted with thoughts like these:
- "Does this place have male/female bathrooms, or single stall?"
- "Is anyone else in the women's room? If so, I need to keep my voice quiet so it doesn't out me. I don't want them to know I'm trans."
- "If someone in here finds out I'm trans, how are they going to react? Will they kick me out? I just need to pee..."
- "If I get kicked out of the women's room for being trans, where will I go? I can't use the men's room. Look at me, I'm clearly a woman, and I don't belong there."
Locker rooms are worse, though. Much, much worse. I don't want people to see the lower half of me naked. I can't go in the men's locker room because I have boobs, and I'm not a man, so I would be very uncomfortable in there. But I can't go into the women's locker room because I don't have a vagina, and I feel like everyone would stare at me, like I don't belong there because of what's in my pants... I would also worry that they would be uncomfortable. If they thought of me as they would a man, they'd just assume I'm using that locker room to get a look at the naked women. But I'm not a man. I just want to change my clothes to go swimming...
The place I go swimming has gender neutral single stall locker rooms, and I love them so much for providing that. If I ever had a bad locker room experience, it would probably scar me for life, and I would never go swimming again until post-surgery...
I guess I'm on the subject of swimming because it's my favorite method of exercise, and I went swimming recently for the first time in quite a while. The experience was interesting. I wore my 2-piece swimming bikini, which has bottoms that have a kind of skirt. The skirt surrounds the bikini bottom, to help hide any kind of bulge. I really wish I could just wear a regular bikini bottom and not have to worry about what's contained within them, but... That's my life...
I felt like my facial hair was rather more noticeable than usual. I guess it didn't help that I went at night, giving it all that time in the day to grow... It was probably a combination of my own insecurities and the fact I couldn't wear makeup to the pool, but I'm pretty sure everyone at the Aquatics Center knew I was trans at first glance. People seemed to be avoiding me, and I got a lot of weird looks.
As I was doing stretches and exercises, a little girl accidentally swam backward into me, and I moved aside to get out of her way. She was adorable, so I couldn't help but smile as she swam past, but when my eyes met with her dad, I smiled at him and he looked downright angry, and clearly uncomfortable. I saw him moments earlier with a smile on his face, but when he saw me as I moved out of his daughter's way, it was like he had immediately labeled me as a pedophile because I'm trans. That's the kind of look he gave me. After giving me that look, he swam after his daughter and moved to the other side of the pool from me. I thought it might be coincidence, but later on when I came back to that pool after visiting the hot tub, he actively moved to the other side of the pool from me again.
Which brings me to the hot tub... When I walked over to an empty spot in the hot tub and sat down, two people got out, and the people next to me moved away. But if I reacted negatively to any of that behaviour, I'd be the "bad person," so I just smiled at those who didn't treat me like I was sick with a plague and happily sat in the hot tub. I just tried to assume that it was a coincidence, or that my getting in reminded them that they're getting too warm. It could be any number of things.
These are just two examples, from this one swimming adventure, but I got many weird looks from people, a discouraging number of people who seemed to be avoiding being near me, and it just felt like, in general, people weren't particularly friendly toward me, yet being very chatty with everyone else. In the two hours I was there, amidst the probably 20 people I smiled at, I only remember one of them actually smiling back, but leaving shortly after.
I have had experiences like these before since I started my transition. I've come to accept that this is simply how the general public is going to treat me, and I can choose to either be upset by that, or I can just be friendly to everyone and hope they notice that, despite being trans, I'm a nice person.
Early in my transition I realized that this must be similar to what racism feels like. I feel like I'm coming to better understand how our culture treats people who are viewed as "different," and how unfair it is that friendly people, for no reason at all, can be condemned simply because of the way they look. It's so easy to judge what you don't understand.
The closer I get to my first year, the more I'm thinking my facial hair may never actually go away. As shown in this picture, I still have a shadow on my face. Also I still have an adam's apple, but that's a different rant subject... The hairs have gotten somewhat softer, and the area and thinned out a bit, but I haven't noticed any progress on it now in over a month, and I'm starting to question whether the softening of the hair I noticed during month 8 was actually just in my head. I might have just been remembering what happened the month before, and the changes were so minute that it's possible nothing happened at all, and I just thought it was still thinning out... In any case, I still see a shadow on my face, even immediately after shaving. The brightening and softening of my skin seems to have made the thick black hairs more noticeable from within the pores...Electrolysis is not covered by my insurance, from what I can tell. But at my next doctor appointment I'm going to ask my doctor to find the exact CPT code she would use to bill my insurance. That way I can determine exactly how I might find a loophole to get it covered as a "medically necessary" part of my transition. Because it is! This isn't going away, and the goal of my transition is to make my body the way it should have been when I was born. Chances are, if I were born with the right body, it probably wouldn't have had facial hair.
People say "some women have facial hair too" and that really irritates me. No, women typically do not have this kind of facial hair, and if I were born with an X chromosome, I wouldn't likely have any more facial hair than my mother. Male facial hair is thick, like pubic hair. Women who have facial hair might have an occasional long black hair, or they might have some little clusters of them. But are those hairs growing in as thick and course as pubic hair? I doubt it. Do they have to shave every 6 hours to keep the facial hair shadow from poking through their makeup? That seems pretty rare for a woman to have to deal with. So no, "some women having facial hair too" is not a helpful thing to say in this context. It feels condescending, and it makes trans women like myself feel like you're degrading the problem by saying it's not a problem. Trans women are held to a higher standard than cis women in this department, because any little detail in your appearance that seems masculine will be locked onto and used as evidence that you're not a woman. If a trans woman has facial hair shadow, you can bet that some people are going to completely ignore her long hair and boobs to call her a man. So please keep that to yourself if you ever find yourself thinking it when a trans woman complains about facial hair. Instead, maybe you can be of some actual help and suggest a hair removal place.
I apologize to some of my friends who may have just read that and thought to themselves, "Oh god, I've said that to her. I'm so sorry!" I don't mean to make you feel terrible about it. It's just rapidly becoming a pet peeve of mine. It's incredible how nearly every single person I've talked about this with has said some variation of that exact phrase... Nearly. Every. Person. And it just... Ughhhh... JUST NO, OKAY? Stahp eet...
... Moving on... *cough*
My dysphoria continued to gradually get worse throughout this month, and within the last few weeks I started to cry nearly every time I took a shower. Whether it be from seeing my lower half in a mirror, or from looking down while scrubbing my legs. At this point I've definitely decided that I'm getting a vaginoplasty, it's just a matter of how.
I'm still learning more about how I'm going to get this covered by my insurance, and I'm still asking questions, but I find myself consistently with my sights on the operation that uses peritoneum tissue to form the vaginal wall. This operation was only just developed in March of 2017 by Dr. Jess Ting of Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, and has only been performed on 30+ patients. But despite all the risks, after messaging the doctor and getting his FAQ list about the procedure, I feel like the benefits are worth it, and I have a good feeling about the doctor. If I don't do this, I think I'll spend the rest of my life questioning whether I made the right decision. The most recent question I'm getting answered is whether New York accepts out of state medicaid, and whether Mount Sinai Hospital accepts medicaid. If it doesn't, I might have to make a GoFundMe page in order to afford the surgery...
I could choose the easy way out and have my surgery covered 100% by a guy in Oregon who I know for a fact accepts outside medicaid, but he doesn't do this particular operation using peritoneum tissue. That makes a significant difference, and this is the kind of thing I refuse to settle on, because this is probably the biggest and most personal decision I've ever made in my life, and I'll be living with it forever.
... No pressure!
The left side was apparently one of the only pictures I had of myself without makeup from this month... Right side picture with makeup at work.
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