testosterone

It’s Starting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

In the weirdness of this week (my office was closed Monday and Tuesday due to dangerously cold temperatures), I completely forgot that today was Thursday, so I didn’t have a post prepared for this morning. My apologies to all! But, here I am. Better late than never, right?

It’s just as well that I didn’t have anything written up earlier, because I was having a hell of a time coming up with a story for you all until today, anyway.

Some folks in my office are still pretty clueless about the fact that I identify as transmasculine. I get “girl” and “lady” still, sometimes, and while it’s irritating, generally people mean well, and I try not to get too upset about it. It’s not like I’m particularly assertive or good at standing up for myself, so unless someone around the office who’s figured it out (or been told directly) lets it slip, how are they going to know? My facial hair is still peach fuzz, and since they see me every day, my voice change isn’t all that noticeable.

Our power went out at the office today, and during the half hour that I spent wandering around, feeling lost (I work in IT: no power means I really have nothing to do), a coworker and I were collectively referred to as “ladies.” It didn’t get too far under my skin, but it added to the general blah-ness of my day. Once the power came back on, I got back to work and tried to forget about it.

Sometime later, my phone rang.

“This is Alyx.”

“Hello, my name is [name]. How are you today, sir?”

It turned out the call was a solicitor from HP who had wanted to talk to my department head about servers, but, failing to reach anything but his voicemail, had been directed to me by the operator. Since I am but a lowly administrative assistant, it was a short conversation.

But I was ecstatic.

Never, not once, in my whole life, have I ever been “sirred” solely on the sound of my voice. In fact, in the past, if people had initially called me “sir,” they backpedalled as soon as I opened my mouth. When I worked the drive thru at a coffee shop, I loathed hearing my voice over the headset, cringing at the inevitable responses that included the word “ma’am.”

Until today.

Whether the person on the other end of the line changed their mind about my gender after I stammered a reply, I don’t know. And I don’t really care. All that really matters to me is that the first impression someone had, based solely on my voice, was that I was a masculine individual.

I’m still smiling.

Is That My Voice?

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

No huge text post this week, as I’m focusing on possible changes to the site (possibly moving it off Tumblr, expanding things, etc). However, for your entertainment and mine, here’s something I discovered this week: HOLY SHIT MY VOICE HAS CHANGED IN TWO MONTHS.

I am recording a chapter of The Phantom Tollbooth each month to track my voice changes. The first part of this clip is from chapter one, recorded 7 November, 2013. The second part is from chapter three, recorded 18 January, 2014. I knew my voice was a bit lower, but hadn’t thought it was all that extreme until I listened to these two side by side. I’ve been giggling about it for days.

Kind of Like Gym Class All Over Again

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

On Monday, I went to the gym.

This was a big deal for me. Aside from the two or so miles I walk Monday-Friday as part of my commute, I lead a largely sedentary life. I’m 5’5” and clock in at roughly 225lbs, which mostly means I am a short, stocky, solidly built human. I have a bad back and almost no cartilage left in my knees. I’m not as out of shape as I could be (see: the two miles walked each day), but I’ve been noticing that it is harder for me to get around these days than I’d like, and I’ve started to worry that if I don’t kick my activity level up a notch, mobility issues might become a serious problem. So when I saw that my insurance offered a deal on gym memberships, I figured, why not?

One of the locations in the plan was the Jewish Community Center that’s about .75mi away from my office and right along the bus line I take home. It sounded perfect…until I saw that the workout spaces were gender segregated. I decided to email the JCC and ask if it would be acceptable for a trans guy to use the men’s workout facilities. I heard back from the fitness director a few days later: she said they’d be happy to have me, and that it shouldn’t be a problem, and if I was masculine-presenting, she didn’t think I would need to clarify with the staff which gendered pass I would need, and that I could email her if I had any further questions or concerns.

I finally went in last Thursday to sign up, and while I was there, discovered an extra challenge: I would be using the card from my insurance to check into the gym…the card with my given (very feminine) name on it. I mulled over things all weekend. Sunday, I emailed the fitness director back, stated that I would be coming in the next evening after work, and requested that the front desk be alerted to the fact that a person they would probably take for a butch woman was going to be requesting to use the men’s facilities.

I never heard back. But I was committed to the idea, and I told myself it couldn’t be that bad, right? So I packed my bag Sunday night, and Monday after work, I changed into an athletic shirt and gym shorts, threw jeans and a sweatshirt over them, and trudged to the gym. Once I got there, I took a few deep breaths, walked up to the counter, handed my card to the man behind it, and said, “I need a pass for the men’s locker room, please.”

“I…I’m sorry? I can’t…” the man stuttered and fumbled around.

“I realize that the name on the card doesn’t match that.”

He then looked at my card for the first time. “Right, the name doesn’t match, and…I’m sorry, but I can’t…”

“I haven’t been able to afford to legally change my name.”

“Right…I’m sorry, am I to assume…are you transgender, then?”

“Yes. I emailed the fitness director, K, and she told me it would be all right.”

“You emailed K? And you told her you were transgender?”

“Yes.”

“And she said it would be okay?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be…It’s just that we have several orthodox members, and they might take serious issue with…”

“I understand that. But K told me it would be all right.”

“Thank you for understanding. I will call K on her cell phone right now.”

So he did. He called the fitness director on her cell phone. And that’s when things really went downhill.

“Hello, K? This is M. I have a woman here…she wants to use the men’s locker room. She’s a woman…she’s transgender, her name is [given name], and she said she contacted you, and you said she could use the men’s facilities? (At this point I jumped in with, “Alyx. I go by Alyx.”) Yes, she says Alyx is the name that she uses … Really? You’re all right with that? Thank you.”

I wanted to run. But I didn’t. He handed me the men’s locker room pass, and told me where to find the facilities. (If he had been a ’50s housewife, he would have been clutching his pearls, according to the look he was giving me.)

I went down to the men’s locker room, took a deep breath, and held up the little card to unlock the door. Once I was in, I threw my things in a locker, took off the jeans and sweatshirt, changed into my gym shoes, and put in my headphones. I spent a handful of minutes in the cardio room, warming up on an elliptical machine, and about 25 minutes in the weight room, hypervigilant, certain that someone was going to come in and scream at me, trying to focus on the music. I spent rather more time on each machine than I really should have, but I was determined to make it at least half an hour before facing the man upstairs again. Finally, I made my way back to the locker room, and rushed to pull the jeans back on over my shorts and to change back into my regular shoes.

I didn’t interact with anyone the entire time. There was one boy who came into the weight room and looked uncomfortable, but I couldn’t tell whether that was because of me or simply because he was an awkward, gangly teenager.

To his credit, the man behind the desk did have the sense to call me Alyx when I traded him back the pass for my fitness card before I fled the building.

The full weight of how horrible the whole experience made me feel didn’t truly hit me until much later. It’s Wednesday night as I’m writing this, and I still feel like I can’t process the emotions involved. It was…demoralizing. And humiliating. It was kind of like being in gym class all over again. And it was dysphoria-inducing, which, for someone like me, who doesn’t typically experience a lot of intense dysphoria, was a really big deal.

I haven’t decided if I’m going back next week. There’s a part of me that wants to, just to make the man behind the desk uncomfortable. But I honestly don’t know if I have the emotional energy.

———-

An update: the fitness manager got back to me and was extremely apologetic. She’s offered to give me my own locker room key so that I don’t ever have to repeat that experience, and on my suggestion is going to talk with HR about sensitivity training for the front desk staff. So there’s a happy ending. 🙂

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.

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.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

A handful of weeks ago (somewhere around week 3 of testosterone), I declared in a conversation with my partner that I thought (though I conceded I may have been imagining it) that my butt was smaller. I was walking past the mirror in the men’s room at work, and I looked over, and noticed that my (not insubstantial) backside seemed a little less, well, substantial. It may have been a trick of the light, or wishful thinking, or some combination of factors. But I was pretty sure I was right.

It’s turned into a bit of a running joke. My partner likes to tell this story to friends, who generally act amused and then try not to stare at my ass.

I didn’t really have any particular evidence that there had been any true physical changes until last weekend, when I went to zip up my winter coat’s two-way zipper and realized that I didn’t need to unzip the bottom part to get the coat to fit around my hips. It was startling. One of the reasons I got that coat in the first place was the fact that men’s coats generally didn’t fit very well around my hips and butt, because I’m a curvy sort of human.

I truly knew it was no longer all in my head the next day, though, when my partner squeezed my butt, then stepped back and exclaimed, “Whoa, your butt is smaller!” At which point ze then took a good long look and added, “And it looks really good in those jeans.”

Beware the Bottomless Pit

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Last week we used Thanksgiving as an excuse to spend some time with some lovely friends and chosen family and eat lots of really wonderful food. (These are the parts of the Thanksgiving holiday I can get behind. The celebration of colonization, the racism, the willful ignorance of the genocide perpetrated by our European ancestors, not so much. But the food and loved ones…I’ll take any excuse for that.)

And the food was really wonderful. Bacon-wrapped turkey stuffed with herbs, rosemary and goat cheese mashed potatoes, and twice-baked bourbon maple sweet potatoes with marshmallows were just some of the highlights. It was wonderful, and there was a lot of it.

So, as is fairly standard on Thanksgiving, we stuffed our faces. One by one the friends around the table admitted defeat, gave up, and retired to the more comfortable chairs in the other room. Everyone was stuffed.

Everyone, that is, except me.

I wasn’t hungry anymore after my first heaping plate, it’s true. But I could definitely have kept going.

And as much as I was amused, I could really only think one thing:

Hello, second puberty. You’re going to be expensive, aren’t you?

Accidental Fudge – An Introduction

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

When I started testosterone injections four weeks ago, my physician pointed out that going on testosterone would basically be inducing menopause. I didn’t think much of this statement until a few days ago, when it happened: I started getting hot flashes.

This is not something that’s supposed to happen when you’re 25. Dear Universe, I am sorry for all those times I made fun of my mother when she was menopausal.

Today after work, I needed to stop at the grocery store to pick up some things for the dinner I was planning to fix for myself, my partner, and our friend who was coming over. As I got off the bus, I felt a hot flash coming on; by the time I got into the produce section of our tiny neighborhood grocery store, I was afraid I was going to pass out. I did my best to focus, grabbed the produce I needed, and then turned my attention to dessert. I saw a jar of hot fudge on a shelf, picked it up, and put it in my basket, thinking that ice cream with hot fudge sounded lovely. I then turned and began making my way toward the ice cream aisle.

Halfway there, however, I found myself feeling confused. Why was I going to get ice cream? This store had gluten free cookies! I found some cookie options for myself and my dinner companions, and made my way toward the register, still hot and dizzy, feeling like I had accomplished a huge feat in holding it together long enough to get my grocery shopping done.

As I unloaded my basket, I suddenly found myself holding a jar of fudge, wondering how it got there. And then I remembered. I thought about telling the clerk that I didn’t want it, but I was too discombobulated to manage conversation, so down the conveyor belt and into the bag and home with me it went.

And that is how I ended up with accidental fudge.

When I got home and told this story to my partner, ze thought it was so hilarious that it merited not only a singular blog post, but the beginning of an entire blog about my transition-related adventures.

So here it is, folks. Accidental Fudge.