identity

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.)

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.

Bipolar Adventures in Transition

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

So I’m Bipolar. Specifically, I am diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder, which means I deal cyclically with highs and lows, but not quite to the extreme that someone with Bipolar I would deal with. I take an anti-depressant to help the lows from getting unbearable and a mood stabilizer to keep the highs from getting dangerous, but the meds do not erase the highs and lows completely. They’re still there; they’re just more manageable: it’s still a challenge to function during the lows, but function is possible, and it’s hard to hang onto money during the highs, but again, it’s possible.

One of my personal Bipolar quirks is that sometimes, my brain will be plodding along, and I’ll think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on — after all, I’m a pretty introspective and self-aware person. But then I’ll hit a particularly intense bout of mania, and my brain speeds up, and suddenly all of these things that were just vague notions and disconnected pieces before click together all at once into something much more concrete (and often overwhelming).

Specifically, this has a tendency to happen with thoughts related to my gender identity.

At first, I refused to trust these thoughts. After all, mania has a way of making absurd, unwise, and/or otherwise misguided ideas seem like great ones. But I’ve noticed in the past several years that there is a difference between my harebrained manic schemes and these moments of introspective epiphany.

It happened when I decided to try out the name Alyx. I was idly pondering what I would change my name to if I ever transitioned (which was a pretty big “if” at the time, as it was so impractical that I didn’t even consider it as a possibility). Alexander James was the name that immediately popped into my head, and before I knew it I found myself asking my partner if ze thought Alyx could be a reasonable nickname/derivative of my given name. I never had that period of adjustment where I didn’t always respond right away to my new name. My brain had made the shift before I even realized it was happening.

It happened when I decided to start on testosterone. I came to the conclusion that I needed to make a change before I even realized that I was really thinking about it. I held back. I waited and thought and was much more mindful about what was going on in my head, and I conferred with my partner and with friends. I didn’t trust that gut impulse that I got when everything suddenly shifted into place. But in the end, it was right.

And over this past weekend, it happened again. Once again, my identity is shifting, not in a totally different direction, but in a more focused one. My single greatest hesitation with physical transition was the fact that I am convinced that the world does not need another white man running around. It’s been hard to reconcile this with the fact that I am profoundly uncomfortable being read as a woman. I can’t get around it: I am becoming a man. Whether I identify as a man to my core doesn’t really matter: this is how the world is going to start to see me. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really do identify as solidly masculine, and that I can be a man without being a “Men’s Rights Activist”, that being a man doesn’t have to mean being oblivious to my privilege but can actually be a place from which I can (I hope) use what privilege I have to try to make other dudes aware of their privilege.

And as all of that clicked into place, I started pondering pronouns. My team at work (and a handful of other folks in the office who have caught on) refer to me with he, him and his. Friends generally refer to me using singular they, which I’ve been claiming as my preference for a couple of years now. It’s equal parts hard and terrifying and exciting, but I’m realizing that the more I hear myself called “he”, the more I like it. It’s increasingly comfortable, and while I certainly prefer “they” over “she” (and, truly, don’t mind the gender neutral variants), I’m realizing that my preferences are changing.

I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever have a truly stable identity. I’m fairly certain that the only part of my identity that’s remained consistent over the past four years is the part that claims “queer” as a label. In the past five years, I have been many things: a straight, cisgender woman; a queer, cisgender woman; a queer, genderqueer individual; and now, a queer, transmasculine dude…a trans man. My current identity doesn’t invalidate any of my previous identities. Who I am now is real; who I was then was real, too. And I think this is the hardest thing for people to grasp: it would be so much simpler if my identity was black and white, or even greyscale. But it’s not. It’s an entire fucking rainbow of nuances and experiences and even if that makes it harder to understand, I wouldn’t have it any other way.