transition

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.)

Finding My Voice

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

For the past eight weeks, I have been taking a songwriting class. I’ve written roughly half a dozen songs, most of which I’ve played for my classmates.

On Sunday, for the first time since high school, I am getting up on a stage and singing. For the first time ever, I will be publicly singing something I wrote.

I’ve watched my words performed on stage by other people. I’ve never actually performed something of my own before.

And I am terrified.

When I was in high school, I sang with our youth group worship band a handful of times. Every time I stepped behind a mic, my voice jumped up an octave. Having a high voice bothered me then, too, even though being trans was nowhere on my radar.

My voice is significantly lower now than it was when I started on testosterone almost four months ago. (Case in point.) And I’m more comfortable in myself now than I was in high school. And I’ve performed on a smaller scale in front of my classmates. And the audience will be almost entirely comprised of people in songwriting classes, or their families and friends, so I really don’t need to be worried.

But I am.

I’m afraid of being misgendered. Because my voice is not so low that it doesn’t happen anymore.

I’m afraid that I’ll get up there and forget all the words that I wrote, or how to play the music.

I’m afraid that my voice will get lost in falsetto.

But I’m going to do it anyway. And I guess, in the end, that’s what matters. Right?

My Hips Don’t Lie (I Think)

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

(Apologies for the late post today, folks! Thanks to a combination of lots of little weird things not going quite right, my whole week has felt rather off, and I didn’t realize until I was about to pass out last night that I didn’t have a blog written yet. Oops! Anyway, I hope this one makes you chuckle. Enjoy!)

I am not a small human.

I will grant you that I only stand 5’5″ tall, but I am a stocky fellow. I take up space. And I have always (at least since puberty number one) had hips.

Now don’t get me wrong: hips can be useful. They’re great for balancing things like laundry baskets carried in one arm so your other hand is free to unlock and open doors. If I was planning on ever bearing children, I’m sure I would find other instances in which I was thankful for my hips.

But when you’re trying to achieve a more masculine presentation, hips are annoying at best, and dysphoria-inducing at worst. For someone like me, whose chest can be fairly well concealed by a binder, hips turn into one of the bigger reasons I wind up being read as a woman.

Last week, in preparation for our trip to Minnesota, I found myself tackling a mountain of laundry. We live on the second floor of our building; the laundry room is down the stairs, out the door, around the corner, through another door, and down a few more stairs. For someone like yours truly, whose back and knees tend not to love stairs in the first place, laundry is kind of an extra obnoxious experience. But I was determined to get it done. So I packed up a mesh bag full of clothes, flung it over my shoulder, hauled it down the stairs, and started a couple of loads.

Once the laundry was dry, I actually did that thing that I’m told real adults do and folded everything. I then put the laundry in one of our small laundry baskets, picked it up, swing it around under my right arm, and braced it against my right hip.

That was what was supposed to happen, anyway.

Only…I couldn’t find any way to balance the basket without tilting the whole load of freshly washed shirts and socks and a wonky sort of angle in relation to my body, shoving the corner of the basket into my side under my ribcage.

It made getting the laundry back upstairs (through four closed doors, two of which were locked) quite the journey.

I had known for a while that my butt was smaller, but I never, ever, ever expected that my hips would slim down in the least. And my hips are definitely still there. But…they’re not as there as they used to be.

I’m not complaining. But it’s weird to suddenly find yourself unsure of what your body, the body you’ve spent 25 years getting to know, can and cannot do.

Three Months

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Tomorrow (February 7, 2014) marks three months that I’ve been on testosterone!

It’s been quite a journey. And I’ve finally gotten my first lab results back (a lab visit, a lost test result, a second lab visit, and two weeks later) as of Monday, which has been great. I’m continuing on my initial dosage, since my progress has been good (estrogen is negligibly above the goal level [or was, back in December, and is less than half what it started at], and testosterone is well within the goal range [more than ten times where it started]). It’s nice to have some concrete numbers to back up the changes I’m seeing and feeling day to day.

Things that have changed in the last three months:

  • My voice. Holy shit, my voice. (Pop down two posts for a sound clip comparing November and January: it’s even a bit deeper now.) My voice was the thing that most bothered me prior to starting on T (and was one of the only things that made me dysphoric), and I am loving the changes I’m hearing. I’m much more comfortable answering the phone at work, and although I’ve been singing in a high tenor range for years, it’s gotten a lot more comfortable.
  • My hair. Mostly, there’s more of it. On my stomach, my arms, my legs, my back (not so happy about this recent development), and on my face. Up to this point I mostly just have peach fuzz on my face, but there’s been enough of it that I’ve shaved a few times, and I’m noticing more dark hairs coming in between shaves, particularly on/under my chin.
  • The distribution of my body fat. My butt is smaller. My hips might be, too (though not much…thanks to my skeletal structure I’ll always have wide-ish hips). My stomach is maybe a little bigger. They’re not huge changes, but they’re big enough that I’ve noticed.
  • My appetite. Prior to starting T, it wasn’t uncommon for me to skip meals, either out of distraction or because I simply wasn’t hungry. I joked that I had the metabolism of a stationary boulder. After starting T, I was suddenly hungry ALL THE TIME. It’s evened out a bit (finally…feeding a teenage boy is expensive), but I still am hungry way more often than I used to be.
  • My need for sleep. Whether it means I’m a teenage boy or an old man, I’m not sure, but I’m going to be earlier and waking up later than I was before.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the changes I’m seeing. While I don’t love everything about it (like the handful of back hairs that have shown up, or the fact that I can never seem to get the injections in my right leg to go as smoothly as the ones in my left), I definitely don’t have any regrets about starting down this road. I look forward to seeing what new changes lie ahead!

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.