genderqueer

Weekend Reflections

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

One of the perks of working for a Jewish social service organization is that I wind up with extra paid days off for religious holidays that I don’t observe. This past week, we had Monday and Tuesday off for the last two days of Passover. I decided to take the opportunity afforded by a long weekend and take a little road trip up to Minnesota, mostly to meet my new nephew. My partner wasn’t able to join me for the trip, so I had a lot of hours of solo driving in the car to do some reflecting on what I was heading toward and, later, what I was coming home from.

The trip was full of excitement of varying sorts (my dad had an emergency appendectomy the evening I got into town, for one thing), but there are just a couple of things I really want to get into.

First, today (April 24, 2014) is the three-year anniversary of my grandfather’s death. He passed away Easter Sunday, ten days after his 90th birthday. Since his grave is in Rochester, MN (an under-two-hour drive from the Twin Cities) and I happened to be in town over Easter, I decided to get up early that morning and drive down to pay him a visit.

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I think a lot about my grandpa. He was a man of deep faith and quiet love, and to this day I respect him immensely. I found out five months after he died that my dad had told him that I was queer; I never knew that he knew, and it is one of my few major regrets in life that I never shared that part of myself with him. I was too afraid, and I thought I was doing what was expected of me.

I think because my grandpa never treated me any differently, I have sort of built him up in my head as being this paragon of tolerance, a rarity in my family. I’m not entirely sure that this is fair to his memory, though. I know that, ultimately, he loved me, and that was the most important thing. But I also know that he probably struggled with the idea of having a granddaughter who liked both boys and girls. About six months after he died, I adopted the name Alyx, and started walking a bit more boldly down the road of gender variant identity. As I stood by his grave (and in the car on my way back to St. Paul), I wondered how he would have handled the knowledge of my decision to start on testosterone.

I don’t have an answer. In the end, I don’t know that it matters. I have hope that the view from where he is now offers a greater sense of perspective, and that he’s able to be happy that I am happy. I hope that he is still proud of me, even though I know I am not the person he imagined his grandchild would be.

Being with my family this weekend was challenging. My mother very pointedly avoided using any names or pronouns in reference to me, though there were ample opportunities for both. My brother called me Alyx when talking to my nephew, but addressed me by my given name at dinner and apparently never gave it a second thought (he also called me “she” a lot). My dad is clearly trying, but it’s still hard.

But it was worth it for the handful of minutes I got to hold my nephew.

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I was crazy about this kid before he was born; I’m even crazier about him now. He is absolutely adorable, and I realized as I held him that there is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep this child safe. While it’s still frustrating that my brother has declared that I’m not allowed to be his child’s uncle (ommer is the title we’ve settled on for the time being), it’s something I’m willing to put up with if it means I get to be involved in the kid’s life in any way.

My strongest enduring memory of my grandpa is of the fact that every time we said goodbye, he’d give me a hug and say, quietly and earnestly, “You’re special.” As I said goodbye to my nephew on Sunday, I found myself saying the same thing to him. I hope that if I have any influence in this child’s life, it’s to teach him that he’s special and loved, no matter who he grows up to be.

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My Brain in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I promise there will be a longer, much more detailed blog next Thursday. In the meantime, here’s another five-item list of what’s been on my mind this week:

  1. My Grandpa. My grandfather’s birthday was Monday. He would have been 93 years old. He passed away on Easter Sunday three years ago (on the 24th, which is one of the reasons next Thursday’s blog will be bigger). I still think of my grandpa often, but his memory is particularly close at this time of year.
  2. My nephew. This weekend, I’m heading up to Minnesota all by myself (my partner has to work, sadly) to meet the tiniest member of my family. I am the proudest of uncles ommers (ah, the joys of language in relation to non-normative gender identity), and I’m so excited to meet the little one, and to deliver the sweater I finished knitting today, which I hope will fit for at least a little while.
  3. My biological family in general. I don’t have the very best relationship with my biological family, for a lot of reasons. Things have been improving with my parents, but they’re far from comfortable. My brother and I don’t really talk, except (in the last six weeks since the baby’s arrival) about his kid, and I have zero confidence that he will ever consistently call me Alyx. (My relationship with extended family is essentially nonexistent at this point: my grandparents have said they will never call me Alyx, “because Alyx is an imaginary person,” and to the best of my knowledge are completely in the dark about the fact that I’ve taken any steps by way of medical transition. One of my aunts congratulated me on new-aunthood on Facebook after my nephew was born, and when I corrected her language, thanked me for the correction and called me by my given name in the same sentence, despite the fact that I have been Alyx (on Facebook and elsewhere) for almost two-and-a-half years.) Needless to say, there’s a lot of anxiety that builds up anytime I am going to be seeing my family, and so I’m feeling pretty tense at the thought of multiple days in a row with them. I’ll be seeing other people while I’m in Minnesota (some chosen family and my partner’s family, who are also chosen family, now that I think of it), but there will be more time spent with my family than there has been in a long while.
  4. Knitting. I tend to come at knitting in spurts. I’ve been in a dry spell for a while, but the pressure of finishing the aforementioned baby sweater before this trip has gotten me working on things again. Aside from the sweater, I’ve recently cast on for the second of a pair of socks, the first of which I knit in about two weeks at the beginning of December. I forget, when I don’t work on them, how much I enjoy knitting socks. Once I finish this one (I’m just starting the heel, and because I have small feet, the end of the heel marks approximately halfway through the sock), I’ve got another pair I started ages ago that I need to pick back up, and I keep looking at patterns and getting excited about possibilities, which has been fun.
  5. Finding ways to feel healthier better in my body. “Health” is such a nebulous concept, and being built as I am (short and stocky and round), I have no expectation that I will ever achieve someone else’s standard of what “healthy” looks like. I’m generally relatively comfortable being the size that I am, but I’ve noticed lately that I’m feeling less okay being in my body (in ways completely separate from dysphoria, which is thankfully not something that haunts me too consistently). I’m increasingly aware that I’m slower on my feet than the people around me. It’s harder for me to keep up than I’d like. I worry a lot about loss of mobility, between some issues with chronic pain and a history of back and knee problems. So I’ve been thinking a bit about steps I can take to do better. I haven’t been back to the gym since the whole misgendering fiasco, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t make myself go back, and that maybe a traditional gym setting isn’t ideal for me. So I’ve started looking around at other options, and have come back to an idea that pops up now and again, which is taking up Aikido. There’s an Aikido center here in Chicago that has a four-week introductory course that they say is appropriate for all body types and fitness levels, and there’s a session starting in July that I think I can work into my schedule. I’ve wanted to take up some sort of martial art for a long time, and Aikido’s lack of competitive spirit and focus on the safety of both the self and one’s opponent is really appealing to me. I’ve also started walking home from work (about 2.25mi) on days when the weather isn’t awful, and I’m finding even the handful of times I’ve done that have made a big difference in how I feel in my body. Admittedly, a lot of this processing is still very much just that: processing and thinking about change, and not a lot of actively making changes. But it feels like it’s paving the way for movement in a positive direction, and for right now, that’s enough.

Facing Fears

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a long winter. I’ve had an on-again, off-again, annoying-as-fucking-hell cold for most of it. It’s never been more than an extreme annoyance, but it’s been there almost constantly for the past several months. Late last week I scheduled an appointment with my doctor for mid-April (the earliest she could see me), and crossed my fingers hoping that I could hold on that long.

And then, this past weekend, it happened: I went from mild discomfort to abject misery in a matter of hours. Saturday and Sunday I mostly stayed at home, fighting off fevers and hoping that if I could just lay low I’d be fine to go to work Monday.

No such luck. I woke up around 5am Monday morning knowing two things with absolute certainty: one, that I had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of making it through a day of work, and two, that if I wanted to make it to any other days of work this week, I needed pharmaceutical assistance ASAP. I was a kid with allergies: I know what a sinus infection feels like, and I know they don’t go away on their own.

Only…I don’t like doctors’ offices at the best of times. Part of that comes from the fact that I worked in a hospital for nearly five years and became very disillusioned with medical institutions in general. Part of it comes from the fact that I am trans and my legal name doesn’t match my presentation. When I’m sick, I like the thought of going to the doctor even less: I don’t have the energy to advocate for myself. It’s scary.

But there was no getting around it. I was getting worse, not better, and I knew I didn’t have enough sick time or PTO to cover more than the one day off from work. So I poked around on the internet and found a Minute Clinic near home, emailed my bosses to tell them I’d be out for the day, and tried to get a bit more sleep before facing my fears.

I dragged myself out the door and onto the train before I really had time to process what I was doing. By the time I got to the sign-in kiosk at the clinic, I was feeling pretty delirious. I grimaced as I typed in my legal name and gender, wishing I was at my usual clinic where I don’t need to deal with those questions anymore. I tried to smile when the nurse practitioner came out and called my back, thankful there was no one else around to hear her call my name.

She asked about prescriptions. I listed my psych meds, and left off the hormones. And then she asked about when I had my last menstrual period, and I realized I couldn’t dodge that bullet, so I backpedaled and disclosed the fact that I am transitioning and on testosterone. To my surprise, the nurse said she wondered, but didn’t want to say anything because she didn’t want to offend me either way.

The exam itself was painless enough, and quick; she concluded that yes, I did have a sinus infection, and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics. And then she asked if I had a different name that I went by, added a note to my file saying I used the name Alyx, and then told me that if I ever come back, I can check in under whatever name I want and just tell whoever’s working that I’m in the system under a different name. While I don’t know if her coworkers are as understanding, I was impressed and grateful.

(A side note: the pharmacist was not so understanding, and more or less shouted my legal first name when my prescription was ready, which was totally unnecessary as I was sitting RIGHT THERE. But oh well. Clearly, I can’t win them all.)

It made me think about the fact that so many trans people (including, at times, myself) go without medical care rather than dealing with the pain and shame and frustration that we often find attached to medical settings, and how lucky I was that things went well. Of course, this mostly just made me angry, because I shouldn’t have to think about how lucky I am that I was treated like a human being. That shouldn’t make me lucky. That should be commonplace. I’m all for gratitude, but I shouldn’t be overwhelmed by it simply because a medical professional treated me humanely: this is something I should be able to expect. I don’t know how to make the medical community a safer space for my trans siblings. I am encouraged by the progress I’ve seen, but it’s not enough. The entire healthcare system in the US is broken, and as we work to fix it, this is something we need to be aware of and work toward.

(To end on a happy note: the antibiotics are working, and I feel much more human now. Hopefully I’m done being sick for a very long time.)

One Rule

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

Technology is a fascinating thing. Thanks to the power of the internet, I’m not only able to put part of my life out in words for public scrutiny on a weekly basis, but I’m able to see who my audience is — at least, I can see what countries/states you’re coming from. It’s a regular reminder for me that the world is both vast and yet small enough to be this interconnected.

A couple of days ago I had a website stats first: I was able to see the search terms someone put in that led them to my little corner of the interwebs. The query? What do I do if I’m transmasculine. Well, honey, I don’t know if what you found here was helpful, or if you’ll ever be back, and that is a loaded and nuanced question if I ever saw one, but I’m going to give you the simplest answer I have:

You do what you need to do to stay alive.

If that means staying in the closet because you’re not in a safe space, then that’s okay. If it means tearing down the walls and being out and loud and proud, that’s okay, too. Educate yourself. Find your options. Find ways to be more comfortable in your skin and your brain. But mostly, stay alive. (Are you familiar with Kate Bornstein? She is fabulous, really into this idea of staying alive, has written some wonderful things about ways to do it, and has started a #stayalive hashtag movement on Twitter.)

Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you might believe about yourself, know that I believe that your life has value. And maybe in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t make a difference to you. But maybe it does, and that’s reason enough to say it. You, yes, you, my friend, are valuable. Your mere existence is revolutionary. People will try to tell you otherwise, but I promise they’re wrong.

I don’t believe that the “it gets better” rhetoric is actually helpful at all. Because sometimes, it doesn’t ever really get better to the extent that we want it to. But someday, even if things aren’t the best you can imagine, they might be better than they are now. And sometimes that hope makes holding on a little easier.

Hang in there, kiddo.

The Naked I: Insides Out

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Assuming that things go roughly according to plan, but the time this posts, my partner and I will be very nearly to Minnesota, where we are headed for a long weekend to spend time with family and friends…

…and to celebrate the opening weekend of a show that I have a piece in!

So I’m going to take a break from life updates and plug the show: The Naked I: Insides Out.

The show has been created and is being produced by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities, a wonderful theatre company that focuses specifically on work by women and transgender artists. The following is the show description from the 20% Theatre Company website:

20% Theatre Company Twin Cities is thrilled to present the world premiere of THE NAKED I: INSIDES OUT – the 3rd in a series of NAKED I plays that explore queer and trans* experiences through monologues, short scenes, and spoken word poems. This production will take place at Intermedia Arts February 13-23, 2014 and will feature the work of over 100 LGBTQ artists and allies – including contributing writers, directors, performers, designers, technicians, and more! This show will include 25 pieces chosen out of 119 submissions! 

There are an infinite number of stories to be told, and as a company focused on social change, human rights, and the voice of queer and trans* artists, 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities is determined to tell as many of these stories as we can – thus creating/producing a new NAKED I show every few years.

The first Naked I production, The Naked I: Monologues from Beyond the Binary, by Tobias K. Davis, was produced by 20% in 2009. In 2011, 20% put out a call for submissions for a second Naked I production: The Naked I: Wide Open. My partner and I both had pieces in that show, and I ended up doing the layout work for getting the script into a publishable book format. It was an incredible experience, not just for us, but for everyone involved and everyone who came to see the show (which sold out two runs, was in the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and toured around the country a bit in 2012).

Last year, when the call for submissions for the next iteration of the Naked I went out, I submitted a handful of pieces, and one of them wound up in the show. (I did the book layout for this script, as well.) The Naked I: Insides Out is every bit as beautiful and important as its predecessors. If you are in/near/able to get to the Twin Cities in the next couple of weekends, I strongly encourage you to check it out. The first couple of performances have sold out already, and I’m sure the others will as well, so if you’re interested, be sure to grab your tickets (sliding scale $5-$25) at that first link I posted. (If you can’t catch the show, all of those links attached to the titles up there will take you to Amazon, where you can pick up a copy of the script. It’s powerful stuff, and well worth the read. Also, I made it look extra pretty.)

We’re going with a bunch of wonderful friends to the sold-out performance this Saturday, and I am so excited. I had a little bit of contact with the director of my piece, but I really wanted to just let go of this rare piece of work that I’m actually pretty proud of and see what happened to it in the hands of the director and actor who are taking it on. I have every confidence that it will be amazing. I am thrilled and humbled and honored to be a part of something so important and poignant and hard and lovely. While a part of me will always be terrified waiting for the reaction of the audience to the words I’ve written, I still can’t wait to share this with the world. It’s an immense privilege to be able to tell my stories, and, as an extension, the stories of the other people like me, and it’s a privilege I hope I never take lightly. Stories have the power to change the world, and this production is full of world-changing stories.

The Obligatory New Year’s Post

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s official: 2013 is over. It’s been a big year for a lot of reasons, and while it may be cliche, I think there is some value in looking back and looking ahead, and the start of a new year feels like a good/convenient/why not time to do that.

So for starters, let’s look back on 2013, shall we?

  • Sometime around the beginning of the year, I decided I needed to get back to job hunting, because eight unpaid days off over the holidays (and more unpaid days off after I threw out my back in the first week back) forced me to acknowledge that my job was neither what I wanted nor what I needed.
  • In January, I threw out my back. My partner was taking a nap on the futon, and I bent down to pat hir on the head, and couldn’t stand back up. I missed three-and-a-half days of work. I probably should have gone to the doctor, but I couldn’t handle the thought.
  • April was marked by another instance I shall not recount here when I should have gone to the doctor, but couldn’t handle the thought. I was too afraid of going in and being constantly misgendered by medical professionals.
  • In June, I hit my first quarter century.
  • At the end of July, I FINALLY got a new job, one that was full time and gave me my own health insurance plan. Suddenly I was in a work environment where I could be out, where I could be assertive about pronouns. It was a huge shift, and got my mind whirling out of control about the issue of physical transition, which had previously been nothing more than a very shadowy dream.
  • By the end of August, I was having pretty terrible panic attacks at the idea of social interaction anywhere that I wasn’t out and knew I would be read as female the majority of the time.
  • September 1, my health insurance kicked in. I had my very own plan for the first time, and a good one at that. I scheduled a doctor’s visit at Howard Brown Health Center for mid-September, thinking initially that I would just go in for a routine check-up, but realizing by the time the day arrived that I was going to ask about starting on testosterone.
  • When I called the clinic to schedule my other two appointments in the Informed Consent process, I found out I would have to wait until Halloween to continue the process. I grabbed the appointment, and told myself it would be okay, because it would give my partner and me time to discuss what I was doing.
  • It was okay. I have the best, most supportive partner ever.
  • November 7, 2013, I had my first injection of testosterone cypionate. I have never been so calm about a decision in my life as I was in that waiting room, even though my appointment wound up starting an hour after it was supposed to.

2013 has been quite the ride. Here are some things I’m looking forward to in 2014:

  • A shaving supply shopping date with my partner. (The peach fuzz is coming in!)
  • The facial hair that will necessitate the above. (I’m aware that this is going to take a couple of years, probably, before it’s really all there. But whatever.)
  • A trip back to Minnesota in February to watch one of my pieces (and the pieces of several other writers) be performed in The Naked I: Insides Out.
  • A deeper voice. (I’ve already noticed that I can hit more low notes with more volume when I’m singing.)
  • Learning new things at work.
  • Learning new things at home (about me, about my partner, about whatever manic obsessions I develop as time progresses).
  • The birth of my first nephew, and learning what it means to be Ommer Alyx.
  • Knitting more.
  • Writing more.
  • Reading more.
  • Expanding this blog.

It’s an incomplete list, to be sure. But I’m very excited to see what this new year brings!

Cheers!

A Break From the Laughs

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I realized around 11pm last night as my partner and I were leaving our friends’ apartment (where we spent a good chunk of our Christmas, which was lovely) that I didn’t have anything queued up for the blog for today. It’s been a pretty uneventful week in terms of physical changes related to transition, and I couldn’t come up with a funny story. But as the holidays tend to be rough for a lot of folks, particularly surrounding family issues, I’m going to dispense with the humor for this week and talk a bit about my grandparents.

I’ve seen my maternal grandparents once in the past two years, at my brother’s wedding. It was the first time I had seen them since my paternal grandfather’s funeral more than a year prior to that. We barely talked, but it was evident that I had been outed as queer by someone else in the family (which made me angry, and caused a fair bit of drama after the fact, but that’s another story). They didn’t seem particularly pleased, but more or less avoided talking about the fact that I had not grown up to be the granddaughter they expected.

A few weeks after the wedding, I received a letter in the mail from my grandfather (dictated to my grandmother, as Grandpa is blind). He encouraged me to write. He remembered the children’s book that I had written for a college course, and expressed hope that I would continue to use my gift for words.

As I held his letter in my hands, I made a decision that I never thought I would make: I was going to come out to my grandparents officially, not just as queer, but as genderqueer as well. I never came out to my paternal grandfather, and it’s something I still regret. I had to try.

So I wrote him a letter back, and said that I was writing, and in fact, a piece I wrote had been included in a theatre production that was a series of monologues and short pieces about gender and identity. I told him that the play had been hugely successful, and had touched lives in huge ways, and that I was so proud and honored to have been a part of it. And then I explained, in terms that I hoped would maybe make sense to my octogenarian grandparents, that part of why I wrote the piece that was in the show was the fact that I did not identify as a woman or as a man, but that I lived somewhere between or outside of the two.

It was a difficult letter to write. The response was even harder to read:

We love you, and you will always be our granddaughter. We will never call you Alyx, because Alyx is an imaginary person.

Since then, I have gotten the occasional card or note from my grandparents, usually ending with something about how they hope I’ll return to Jesus and turn my life around. Last week, I received their Christmas newsletter in the mail. Aside from being addressed only to me (ignoring the fact that I live with my partner), and using my given name more times than the note necessitated, I was surprised to find no hints of hellfire in their most recent missive…just a simple statement that they wanted to see me.

And that’s when I was hit by the full realization that my grandparents don’t know that I am transitioning. And I don’t know how to tell them.

I’m afraid to tell them.

I’m afraid that I’ll be uninvited from every family gathering from now on. (I generally avoid family gatherings for the sake of my own sanity, but it’s nice to get the invitation, you know?)

I’m afraid they won’t want me to come to their funerals.

More than anything, though: I’m afraid of being more of a disappointment than I know I already am.

Because I love my grandparents. They’re good, intelligent people. I admire the depth of their faith, even if I disagree with many aspects of what they believe (though I probably disagree with less than they think). I want them to be proud of me.

I want them to be proud of the fact that another piece that I’ve written will be performed in the newest rendition of the show I was in before.

I want them to be proud that I am in a happy, healthy, wonderful relationship.

I want them to be proud that I have chosen to take steps to feel more comfortable in my skin.

I want them to be proud that I am happier and healthier and more whole than I have ever been in my life, and that I take more steps in that direction almost every day.

And I know they’re not.

And I know they never will be.

And that hurts.