At my current vantage point, I view the past, the present, and the future equally. While true parity is impossible to verify, I feel balanced. When I tried to live in the past, I reaped only bitter black sorrow, a pain that I drowned in clouds of fragrant white smoke. My future kept me from seeing my present, and living in the now just depressed the hell out of me. I understand now that whatever path I take does not begin today nor end tomorrow. Coming to understand this has put me at a new peace, interrupted every so often by the thorny cloud of self-doubt. It'll always hover over my shoulder, no matter if my decision to transition is right or wrong.
But now I'm at a point of decision: I've been at my current therapy venue for about 3-4 months. At every point along the way, I've reserved a tiny spot at the back of my mind for the dim hope that they would recognize my plight (and partially that I would come to believe in my own suspicions) and allow me access to hormones.
As a child, I played role playing games and read fantasy novels endlessly. Something about the concept of a journey to unlock one's own mystic power excited me. To claim the holy sword, the artifact of God's presence on Earth seemed the greatest calling any one human could hope for. Even if it meant giving up my life in the process; if I could die as an act of love to my companions, to the human race, what more could I ask for?
At seventeen, I read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In the archetype of the monomyth, I saw the very thing which fascinated me. It is to me the essence of beauty, that which can be named but never shackled by mere words. The ultimate boon he spoke of, that is what I view hormones as. It's not the end purpose of the process, but the process itself wouldn't exist, I believe, without them. The conception of gender transition only appears in medical literature after the synthesis of testosterone and estrogen had become possible in the 1930's. Maybe it's due to a historical demarcation of differing medical philosophies, but I believe that transsexuality would not exist without the possiblity of hormone therapy.
At first, I was wary; what if my background of fascination with myth made me want to seek estrogen as a tool to change myself and my world? At the same time, what if my transsexual dilemma was the root of my fascination with the monomyth? I implicitly understood that the two possibilities contradicted each other. Now, I'm not so sure that either need be correct. Dwelling around the edges of my internal debate and seeing it within others, I think I might realize that neither option need be true, and that both could be true to varying extents.
The heroine discovers his true identity, something at his and her core that cannot be destroyed. Campbell said that the enlightened being produced by the ultimate epiphany is equal parts man and woman, and yet above both. I understood this, and I think I worshipped it, wished to embody it. I can't say that I don't still. It's not wrong, even if it feels perverse sometimes. At first, I viewed gender transition as moving from one's birth gender to a bi-gendered state and then to the target gender. Now I understand that my target gender is that beautiful state of truth (for me, 75% female, 25% male - the energies are not divisible by such simple math, but, eh).
Our memories of childhood are fickle things; even when submerged, they speak in voices unable to be silence. As I child, I wished fervently to be a girl, but I got over it. Or did I? Energies repressed always come return to the light of day. It's a fact which touches me viscerally.
I don't feel right that the decision of when I will be able to go on hormones is in the hands of the establishment that I pursue psychotherapy through. This unease can be traced to two primary causes: impatience, part and parcel of any immature personality, and something a bit more intellectual: wariness of gatekeepers. I have the unspoken suspicion that there's some test I must pass, some rubric I must match up to before I can proceed within this structure. I'm sure that someone is deciding my fate from behind the scenes, and I don't like it.
I don't like the feeling of jumping through hoops, because the mere fact that there are hoops invalidates their effectiveness as a measure of anything worth measuring. I don't like it because, now that I feel confident in my identity, I have no way to earnestly communicate this without coming across as somewhat disingenous. I want to get it this whole thing done of my own accord, but that takes money that I don't have. Once I have the hormones in my hands, I'm sure that they'll be willing to help me, but this whole situation seems bass-ackwards.
I wouldn't mind if it felt like just another obstacle, because the hero/ine must clear all obstacles and journey to the bottom of night before obtaining the god-power. But I've fought off everything I could so far, and no heroine may defeat the greatest evil without the power to change reality, the sword of evil's bane, the power within herself. I feel this power pulsing within me; I've nurtured it as best I can. Whereas before, if completely denied the option of hormone therapy, I wouldn't have transitioned, now I know that I would have to anyway. The person within me is real, and I can acknowledge this now. The fact that I cannot grow into her physically as I do so mentally troubles me.
My distrust of my caregivers is paranoid, but with reason; I've read enough horror stories of transpeople dwelling within a system indefinitely, and advisories to pursue other resources if one feels one's needs aren't being met. I haven't done so because of a fear of wasting the energies I've already expended here and a lack of money. I feel that I've done everything that I can within my current situation, and it's not enough for them.
What I haven't done is changed the parameters of my life to extend my boundaries, at least in the sense of getting a job and moving out. I have complications that arise around doing so, but more than that I have a fear that is paralyzing me from stepping over that threshold. Now that I'm starting to put this fear to the light of day, I can see that it's without substance, and that I needn't heed it. Once I have a job as a woman, it's all over.
Not! But, relatively, this phase of inability to completely transition will end, and I will finally be at terms with fighting the Final Boss: living the rest of my life. Surviving is truly the ultimate goal of transition, which is alright with me. If, through maintaining my survival, I can find within myself something beautiful, some power and grace above what I currently possess, even better for me. The hormones may be an effective shield, but my mind is my sword, and my will my armor.
...fuck. Is that what they're goading me into? I hate mindgames.
Friday, April 22, 2005
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