Basic Science

Science is our best attempt to accurately describe reality.

That's all it is. It is not the arbiter of what is or is not real. It does not prescribe anything; that is, it does not tell us things are a certain way, and thus compel them to become so. It is a means of description in which accuracy and alignment with reliably provable fact are paramount. This is why it evolves. It is our best collective understanding of everything, and as we evaluate everything with the benefit of our current understanding of it, we can arrive at newer, better understanding of it. We achieve this primarily by hypothesizing as to how or why a thing is, and then testing that hypothesis as narrowly and specifically as possible.

For a very long time, in western culture, trans women were regarded by science as men who had a disorder. But as that description did not feel right to any actual trans women, the study of whom necessarily included interview, the description had to evolve. With new data, such as strikingly similar experiences of gender and body described by a wide variety of otherwise disparate and unrelated people, it became clear that trans women are in fact women, and we find new evidence to support that constantly. The pace of accepting this as fact is picking up, because we have started asking the right questions. Trans women, and the people who study us, are over the question of what we are, and have moved on to other questions, built off of the foundation of understanding that we are women.

One common refrain from cis people who do not understand what being trans really means, especially when it comes to this kerfuffle about bathrooms and locker rooms, is that girls like me "should just get the surgery" if we want to be in the women's room, with other women, since we claim to be women (a claim we make because, as women, we're women). This is said without any awareness of what is involved in these processes, by people who still fundamentally believe we are delusional men with a psychological disorder, and that gender lives in genitals.

But getting The Surgery is not as simple as going to Wal-Mart and hitting the Genitalia aisle and seeing what's in stock, picking up an affordable, American-made vagina, taking it home, and following the installation instructions. It's not as simple as stopping off at the local Genital Reconstructive Surgery shop after work and getting it taken care of. And it's not even as simple as getting other surgeries that require a multi-step insurance authorization process.

One challenge is dealing with multiple medical professional bodies who have been incrementally catching up to the reality of our existence. For example, nearly all trans health providers rely upon the WPATH Standards of Care for guidance. Most, if not all, insurers require adherence to them when they cover transgender services. The first edition of the WPATH SoC was released in 1979. Even though the version 7 standards are available, many insurance carriers are still referring to the version 6 standards, despite their outdated and inaccurate information about trans people. But even when version 7 was released, DSM-IV was the current DSM for mental health professionals, and it still referred to the condition of being transgender as a disordered one: Gender Identity Disorder.

When DSM-V was released in May, 2013, one of its changes was to formally de-pathologize the transgender existence. Like homosexuality before it, being transgender was finally recognized, through years of the application of rigorous scientific examination, for what it always was: not a disorder, but a natural variation. Something less common than most developmental tracks, but not actually wrong in any sense.

There is no longer any diagnosis in the DSM for being transgender because, as science has advanced, we've collectively learned that it is not a mental illness. Instead, the DSM-V recognizes Gender Dysphoria, a type of stress that only trans people experience, and one that underlines many trans experiences. It's the stress of knowing you are one thing, and being told by everything around you, from your culture to your body, that you are something else. Interestingly, a "diagnosis" of this non-problem, for lack of a better word, is required in order to access services. This is the first step of many on the road to Genital Reconstructive Surgery (GRS, sometimes called "SRS," Sex Reassignment Surgery). As many of these steps are built around the now-outmoded pathologized model, they are regarded by a number of trans people, myself included, as unnecessary and draconian. Ironically, the "just go get the surgery" crowd and I agree on this. I should be able to just go get The Surgery. But I can't. Nobody can.

There's a more sinister problem around class and economics when it comes to figuring out who is "really trans," as many (understandably confused) cis people demand. Sometimes, even other trans people demand that. I was extremely lucky to be where and when I was when I realized I was female. I had no romantic relationship or job to worry about offending. I had reliable income, though it was an extremely tight stream. And I had access to some pretty comprehensive gender-affirming services through the VA. This meant I was able to "prove" I was trans by seeing a psychologist, who agreed, during our first-ever meeting, that I had been incorrectly designated male at birth. I didn't wheedle and beg, I just told him about my experiences, and he said I hit more than enough criteria for the diagnosis. It also meant I was able to afford the fees associated with legally changing my name and gender. People can change their legal names, for a fee, to whatever they like, whenever they like, generally speaking. But the gender marker can't be changed without the diagnosis, and in Washington, requires the use of a specific form.

Where I'm concerned, "proving" I'm a woman has already been done. But not everyone has access to that kind of healthcare, and even if they do, they don't always have the money to take legal steps to correct their gender or update their name. And since trans people are routinely denied housing, healthcare, and employment on the basis of their being trans, many of us find ourselves crushed under the weight of overlapping systems that each individually say they don't want to deal with the fact of our existence.

As a trans woman, I have to constantly prove that my gender is real. Not only that, I have to constantly prove that it's not what a lot of people insist it must be. I have the benefit of a lot of documentation from very well-qualified people behind me. But I was female well before any doctor said I was female. In fact, I was female before the doctor who took me out of my mother said I was male. That realization is why I can't support a requirement for trans people to have medical documentation supporting the validity of their gender unless it's in the context of a single-payer, guaranteed-as-a-right healthcare system with robust and modern transgender services.

It's been suggested that the changes to the DSM between the fourth and fifth editions were achieved through political means. This suggestion tends to come from people who view our existence as a political problem. It also tends to come from organized religious groups. The idea is that trans people, a number of whom, like me, did not really know that being trans was even an actual thing until they realized it applied to them, somehow are all connected and organized in the same way as the churches that come up with ideas like this. And that we've used that powerful (haha!), unified (are you serious?) community to lobby for these kinds of updates. It's the idea that trans women, for example, are a bunch of men who are essentially playing a dirty prank on the entire world. It's the idea that being transgender is not the singular trait, like eye color, that it actually is, but rather is one that is coupled necessarily with some kind of predatory sexual nature.

And yet before I knew I was trans, I did not know any trans people, personally. I had, to my knowledge, directly met and interacted with all of three trans people. Two were trans guys I met peripherally, and barely interacted with, and the third was a trans woman with whom I went on one spectacularly uninteresting date. I was not part of some massive secret society, bent on dismantling "traditional" marriage or gender roles. I was just a girl who didn't know she was a girl, and I mostly spent my time wishing I was dead, for a reason I did not know or understand. And ironically, I was doing my best to uphold "traditional" marriage and gender roles, when it came to my own life.

When I did see those trans guys, I thought something to the effect of "that's kinda weird, but whatever," and did my best to treat them as they asked to be treated. I used their pronouns, I used the names they gave me, and the idea of either or both of them in a public restroom with me meant nothing to me at all. I treated the one trans girl with the same kind of acceptance, with the exception of expecting that she'd use a women's restroom, and not be in a restroom with me, since I was still under the impression that I was a guy.

This is largely what I'm after from other people now. I don't expect them to understand the how or why of my womanhood. I don't honestly even care if they do. Reading up on all this shit is a big commitment that a lot of people don't have time for, because none of it applies directly to them. What I need is acceptance of the fact that I'm a woman. What I need is for other people to accept that reality, even though it seems incomprehensible to them, in the same way that (most) people accept that the earth is more or less spherical, and not flat, though that idea, too, was once the height of radical thinking, and widely rejected.

The rejection of facts does not nullify them.

It makes sense to me that groups that are organized around ideas or beliefs might also automatically perceive other groups as being similarly organized. But we're not a group. We're a demographic. Just like people with heterochromia, or mid-digital hair. And for trans people like me, the ones who knew something was wrong, but not what, for decades before realizing that the problem was an incorrectly designated gender at birth, that demographic was Them for a long time before it was Us.

When children who do not know each other, around the world, in multiple languages, are clearly declaring their gender as something other than what it was designated at birth, that is just natural variation. There is no cult leader. Because there is no cult.

Today, I completed my application for vaginoplasty with Dr. Marci Bowers. Dr. Bowers is the only surgeon contracted by Washington Health Care Authority (Medicaid) to perform this procedure. Her clinic is in California. It would not surprise me to learn that she is not just the only GRS surgeon for WA HCA, but for other states' HCAs, as well, in addition to California. In any case, there is a long, long line for GRS through WA state Medicaid.

If I were an out-of-pocket patient, I could get processed and into the queue right now, with a non-refundable deposit of $1,000. Without that, I am told it's an average of four to five months before the clinic receives pre-authorization from Medicaid. And that's when I get on the list. Not when I get the surgery done. When I get in line.

That line is two years and four months long.

I was told that, for patients who don't mind rescheduling their surgery date, cancellation openings can shift the queue a bit, and shave up to about six months off of the wait time. But there are some requirements before one can even submit an application. They include:

• Usually 12 months of continuous hormonal therapy for those without a medical contraindication.
• 12 months of successful continuous full time real-life experience.
• Demonstrable progress in consolidating one’s gender identity;

What all that means is that though I knew I wanted The Surgery the moment I realized I had always been a girl, back on August 10, 2014, I had at least the following to go through:

1. Receive a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria from a therapist
2. Begin Hormone Replacement Therapy (requires referral from psychology)
3. Be consistently on HRT for at least one full contiguous calendar year
4. Live publicly and privately, 100% of the time, in gender expression coinciding with declared gender for at least one full contiguous calendar year

Even if I'd gotten the first two done on the day I realized what the problem was, I'd still have been looking at a full year of "proving" my gender was real before I could even apply to get in line for The Surgery. But I couldn't get it done that day, and based on what I've heard from other trans people, my track was an extremely rapid one.

I was able to be seen by a psychologist about my gender dysphoria before the end of August, 2014, just a few weeks after I first realized it was a thing. That's very fast. I was diagnosed on the first visit. That's atypical. I legally changed my name and was "out" as a woman in all aspects of my life, full-time, within one month of realizing I actually was a woman, and had always been female. I was started on HRT by the end of October, 2014. As a veteran, I have access to these medications, and they are provided to me with no out-of-pocket cost. This is also not the norm.

Because HRT was the last of those to start, it is effectively the only start point that matters, when it comes to the one-year requirement. This means that the soonest I could have possibly applied for this service with Dr. Bowers was October 24, 2015, about four months ago. That date, itself, was barely a month after GRS was even covered by WA Medicaid. The earliest possible surgery date for me would have been around two years from now, and with the best possible cancellations scenario, I'd have been looking at late summer or early fall 2017. Instead, I'm looking at late summer or early fall 2018.
But consider that phrase: "12 months of successful continuous full time real-life experience." This means that to get the surgery that people who insist I don't belong in the women's room say I must get in order to be there, I have to use those kinds of spaces for at least a full year before I can even get in line to get that surgery in the first place. If trans women are legislated out of women's facilities, we cannot ever meet the requirements for vaginoplasty, requirements which have been developed to confirm as absolutely as possible that we are really women in the first place.

This massive network of requirements and dependencies, both medical and legal, was not sketched out on a bar napkin and put into place worldwide a couple days ago by irreverent, free-wheeling doctors and legislators who were drunk when they wrote it. This has been developing for decades, as the science on what people like me really are has come to better describe us. The fact is, we have always been here. And we always will be. Even if you managed to somehow eradicate every transgender person alive today, another one would be born tomorrow, because that is how natural variation works. I chose my gender no more than I chose my skin color, my genetic risks for cancer, or my height. There is an uproar around our existence because it's not just new data on a thing that was previously considered solved by most people, but because it's about something fundamental to all of us.

When people say that penis = male and vagina = female, they tend to cite "basic science," and that is part of the problem. They will sometimes even say that they've known that this is how things are since some early grade, say, second, or maybe fifth. Maybe they'll talk about XX and XY chromosomes, and refer to their high school biology class.

What else did you learn back then, whenever "then" was, that turned out to be false, or at least overly simplified?

Someone who has earned a PhD is very far removed from a fifth-grade understanding of their area of study and expertise. They're well past high school biology, and they're relatively far beyond even a Bachelor's level of understanding. They have devoted years of their lives to understanding their subjects, and if they are currently licensed professionals, they are generally required to participate in continuing education. To make sure their knowledge continues to evolve with the rest of the scientific community. And those are the people who, through constant and continuous application of the scientific method — that process underlying all valid science, by which people like McHugh have been proven overwhelmingly biased and wrong — have concluded that trans women are women, that gender is a function of mind and not body.

Highly focused, dedicated and well-educated people are studying sex and gender, and they are the ones laying out these guidelines. The furor that people raise in objection to them is rooted in ignorance, and nothing else. It would be akin to me launching a massive political campaign against Tesla Motors demanding that they stop trying to trick us by calling their products "cars," because I learned that cars run on internal combustion engines when I was a kid, and I once took an engine apart in a shop class in middle school.

Transgender people are not a new phenomenon. What's new is that science is finally starting to understand us.

Beggars Would Ride

I just had surgery. I was going to write a post that was about the surgery. My whole experience with the staff, and so on. It turned into a post about how strange it was to be on oxycodone again, when I'd been on it for about five years, then off it for the last few. How different it was to use it while depressed, versus not.

And then the fight happened.

Kim, whom I had been joyfully and frivolously calling hashtag-girlfriend, had had a very rough morning and day the previous day. While she was hunched over her laptop, visibly tense and upset, I lay next to her in a haze of opiates and sleepiness, worry and far-off pain. I tried to think of what to do to help.

A week or two prior to that, we'd come home... home, as I still automatically call it, together. From a couples counselor. And true to form, coming out of the session felt great, for me. I had felt heard and validated in a way that had become increasingly absent from our toughest talks. I have this sharply directly correlative internal relationship between how small I feel, and how unsafe I feel speaking my mind, when I'm in a close interpersonal relationship. Such as having a boyfriend or girlfriend. Or a spouse. Having a counselor in the room to echo my sentiments with more assurance, in probably clearer language, has always been a help to me with a partner.

But Kim had felt attacked and demonized, and I didn't understand that until hours later. Until long after she'd curled up on the couch, and told me to comfort her or leave her alone, but not to ask her any questions, in response to my asking if she'd like me to run her a bath and make her a cup of tea. Without any real idea what else to do, I put on water for tea, and went to change. She told me later (again) that 99% of the time, when she's stressed or upset, she just wants a hug. A real hug, to be held. But that night, that wasn't in my array yet. It wasn't an option to check for, simple as it seems. I have a whole host of other issues around touch-as-affection, but that's another post.

So I learned that night: hugs are the 99% solution. Priority option. When she is distressed and I want to help alleviate that, hug her if I can. Touch her in some affectionate, platonic, connected and present way. And when that morning arrived with its bad news via the internet, I found that sitting up seemed like perhaps too great a challenge, in my drugged and weakened state, but she was within arm's reach. So I reached out and gently lay my hand on her lower back. I'm here. I love you. I hoped to say.

She shifted away from me.

I had no idea what to do at that point. Thinking that if a hug or some kind of physical expression of presence and love didn't work, if the 99%-of-the-time solution didn't work, I was pretty sure tea wouldn't, and I was positive that drawing her a bath would be an actual bad idea. Not just not helpful, but actually bad.

I thought again on what to do to help her. She was still hunched over the computer, muttering to herself and tabbing back and forth now and again. I thought, maybe I should just ask her.

"Baby, what's wrong?" I said. My voice was thin and weak, a voice to match my body, thinner and weaker still for the state I was in.

"Don't talk to me," she answered sharply.

I get very anxious when I believe that my romantic partner is in any way distressed by me, or by something I've done. At this point, I'd completely lost sight of the fact that whatever I was doing was a trivial annoyance, compared to whatever news she'd woken up to. I flew into my high tower of great anxiety, surrounding myself with the constant grinding and creaking of its accusing gears.

She set the computer aside, eventually, and talked to me about the problem. I didn't know how to react, or what to do or say. Every choice I'd made so far that morning had been wrong. I froze, and said nothing. She became upset that I was ignoring her talking to me about what had upset her. Her becoming upset with me for doing that compounded with my distress over her being upset with me for having touched her, or asked what was wrong, and I came apart.

She left for the day, for work, and I mostly laid there, crying or sleeping by turns. I was still recovering from my surgery, I still had heavy-duty pain medication, and I was a nervous wreck about how upset my girlfriend was with me. When she returned home, the tension from that morning came with her. It was like re-inflating a giant carnival bouncy house. Before, it had been in the room, still, but flattened out and nearly ignorable. When she came back, it filled the space between us. And our bitter doors.

She talked about her PMS at some point, reminding me that she had learned how it often alternates with each ovary in terms of specific symptoms. That she has one relatively normal ovary, and one crazy-bad-angry ovary, and that it was looking like this was a crazy-bad-angry ovary month. And that helped a great deal, but I was still physically locked into a high-anxiety state. She asked to be mostly left alone that night, and I complied.

I had felt very far away from her, so, when we finally laid down for the night, though I was curled up facing away from her, I reached back to touch her again, just for the bare, simple contact. She shied away again, told me not to touch her. She explained later how, when it's bad-ovary time, she's hypersensitive to everything, and that touch, along with most other sensory stimulus, is painful. But at the time, I lacked the benefit of that perspective. Even though she'd likely told it to me before. What I felt most was cold and alone, and like that was my fault. The tension remained in the room, shoving us apart, pushing me down.

She left again for work the next day, returned home, and felt less tense to me, in the air, but still with a sort of spiky edge to her speech and movements. She at one point asked me if I could find her a good picture of a girl not wearing a top, but in overalls, and I said that that sort of outfit seemed like a bad idea, and that if a girl was dressed that way, it was probably for porn of some kind. She seemed displeased with that answer, so I Googled it anyway, and showed her what I thought she was hoping to find. She made an exasperated sound and said she would just do it herself, and I felt again like I'd completely failed to be of any use to her at all.

I remained on high alert, unable to focus for that, and even more so for the drugs in my system to point my mind away from the pain. Because of the constipating effects of the oxycodone, I was on a very high-fiber diet suddenly. Because of the stitched effects of the surgery, I was instructed to not push or hold back bowel things, as much as possible. I was a very gassy antelope, which is, as an aside, one of the trump cards for me in Cards Against Humanity.

So it was that, though she later actually told me she had been in a good mood, key word "had," when she came to sit by me to show me a drawing she'd been working on with her new HitRECord account, I farted because of the motion of sitting up, and felt impossibly even more sheepish and ashamed of my presence by her. She made a disgusted face, and I apologized.

She showed me her drawing, a tinkerer character she'd dreamed up and illustrated, in overalls. And the gears someone else had drawn, which she had incorporated into her piece, her own first example of the intent of HitRECord and collaborative creativity. I made a sort of fleeting, uncertain, wincing smile and tried to think of what to say. But I was too slow.

"You know what, just never mind," she said curtly, returning to her chair. I rolled back onto my side, near tears, anxious beyond measure and confused besides. Not long after, the actual fight started. She called me a shitty girlfriend, at one point. And every adage about how many failures are necessary in order to find success flew from my mind. I had never been anyone's girlfriend before. And here was the grade on my first attempt: shitty.

I told her I was done. I could not stand to keep hurting her just by being with her, hurting her in some way that I did not even understand, and therefore worried I would never be able to fix, or even improve. Something so fundamental to who I am that I could not see it.

She went off to her room, while I cried on the futon. Eventually, against my best friend's urging, I went to try to talk to Kim again. I asked her why it was so easy for her to believe I did not love her. And she told me, and I heard in her the echo of everyone I'd ever been with. That I'm so flat when it comes to expressing love that she's honestly not sure whether I care about her at all. And while that gave me an idea of what the problem was, though I still couldn't really understand it, it made a darker point. This wasn't just what I was, it was what I had always been. It wasn't something I could blame on the Jason Construct. It was Sera, clean through. And that made me feel deeply hopeless about ever being able to change it.

At some point after I'd finally fallen asleep, alone on the futon, I was startled awake by her stroking my arm gently. Sitting beside me and touching me lovingly. What I'd hungered for for days. This simple expression. I burst into tears, and turned away from her. It was already over, I thought. She would never touch me this way again. She got up and left. Later, she would ask me if I'd not heard her. She had said, "I'm sorry," but I didn't hear it. I don't know what hearing it would have done, for sure. But it would have almost certainly helped in some way.

She's emailed me just now, between the time I started writing this, and here. It sounds like things are going to be okay. Or at least not horrible. I think. I hope. I wish. Oh, how I wish.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to explain that what I'd been trying to set up between us all along was what most people refer to as "a break." As opposed to "a break-up." So my calling it a break-up was a huge part of the problem, a tragic comedy of communicative errors that nobody would believe if it was the plot of a sitcom; it was too perfect in its awfulness. But my intent from the start had been for us to have some big space between us, space to go work on our own problems, space to lick our wounds and come back and try again.

Since I met Kim, I've had literally zero interest in even thinking about being with anyone else. With even looking. In the past, especially whenever I'd fight with my partner, I didn't engage in much introspection. What was the point? I hated myself anyway. I'd ignore the problems, get lost in MMOs, and flirt up a storm with other women. I would imagine happy, problem-free, new relationships with them, as if such a thing could ever exist.

These days, I turn all the criticism harshly on myself. And with my very shallow depth of perception for emotional examination, I lose sight of just how big (or not) a problem my problems really are, in whatever context. I get incredible detail on what I'm looking at, and zero perspective on anything else. In the context of being a problem for a girlfriend, for example, I can be absolutely ripping my own heart out over having injured my partner in whatever way, while they are actually complaining to me about a problem that is, say, 10% of their net life stress. In other words, nothing to break up over.

But I was far too close to the problem. As the problem was, and is, literally inside me. At least, I should say, that's how it seemed from where I was looking, which was inside myself, at the inside of myself. When she left for work the next morning without a word to me, when the sound of the door shutting behind her was what really woke me up, I burst into tears again, and the song that had started writing itself the night before finished vomiting itself out of me.

I was beyond certain that I needed to be gone by the time she got home that night. I made small tests of how I could do without my pain medication, so I'd be clear-headed enough to safely make the drive. The drive that would be about two hours long by the time I'd be able to attempt it. I took down some of my things, in small loads, since I am supposed to refrain from lifting more than 10 lbs until March. This wore me out, but more worrisome than that, made me hotter than I felt it ought to have. I stopped moving my things, then started again, then stopped and started once more.

By about four o' clock, I was standing in the doorway between her kitchen and living room, my head tilted all the way back, wincing, whimpering, begging the pain to stop. "She will be angry with me still when she gets home," I reminded myself, still unaware that she'd apologized to me when she woke me in the night. I made my way out one last time.

When I was nearly to my car, I realized that I still had the keys she'd given me. I didn't want her to worry I'd just show up crying one night or anything, so I knew I had to give them back. I started crying, and shuffled back towards her place. I went down some stairs to make sure I was giving her back a building key, and not my key to my place. Then I laid the keys out on top of her laptop, so she'd not miss them, said good-bye to Widget, and left.

She had just gotten out of her own counselor's meeting when she texted me, letting me know she was on her way home, asking if I needed her to pick anything up. At a dead stop in the middle of Mercer, I texted her back. I had already left, I said. She asked what that meant, but before long, my lane moved again, and I was on the freeway, unable to answer her anymore.

By the time I realized how grossly I had misread everything, and how badly I'd decided at every possible turn, we weren't talking to each other. She wrote how, from her perspective, she'd found out I had dumped her when I referred to her place as "my ex-girlfriend's apartment" on my public figure page. We had both been so sure of the other's message and intent. And we had both been so wrong.

For the past couple days, since coming home early and running out of pain meds while grossly over-straining myself, I've had bad pain feedback loops. I'll have some nerve pain from the surgery fire off, and start crying. Then, my brain, being helpful as always, tries to make sure I am crying for a reason, so I'll start thinking of Kim again. And start crying harder. I'll be convulsing with sobs, which set off more nerve pain. I am out of heavy-duty pain meds, and methodically burning through my small and previously recreational weed supply. It doesn't do much for the actual pain, but it does help keep me from focusing too intently on anything.

Not leaving the house today; even just for a couple quick errands yesterday was too much. Tomorrow I will be canceling and rescheduling many upcoming VA appointments. I'm in tremendous physical pain that is feeding back on itself by bleeding together with emotional pain. Dedication to showing myself daily, or as close to daily as I can manage, is something of an anchor right now. It's the closest thing I have to the stability of a job. #Seattle #Washington #transgender #veteran #musician #model #actress #trans #girl #girlslikeus #ootd #outfit #outfitoftheday #selfie #nomakeup #nofilter #noshave #pajamas #orchiectomy #surgery #recovery

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Jan 31, 2016 at 1:05pm PST

Even when I thought to myself, I wish I'd never done any of this, I wish I hadn't been in such a rush to get my surgery, I wish I'd just waited until things were better between us, I would remember how just the other week, Kim and I had been trying to remember what old adages there were around wishes. The futility of them. And with the warmth of the memory, I'd start sobbing again.

We had been driving home from another of my open mic performances, and all I could remember from expressions around the futility of wishes was, "If wishes were _____, ______ would _____." She could find nothing, when she finally pulled out her phone to Google it. I found the expression a few days later, in a book I'd been reading. I was at her place, of course. "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!" I shouted.

Those kinds of exchanges between us were achingly recent, but felt, until just a little bit ago when she emailed me, like they were as far as they could be. Like they'd never happen again. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Yes, I suppose I will. Lucky girl.

Lucky Girl

I applied for SNAP today.

I'm done with my degree program at Everett Community College, done but for the technicalities of crossing t's and dotting i's. When I went to school, this time around, I did it on the Post-9/11 GI Bill. I earned this as part of my compensation package while on active duty with the US Army. The GI Bill paid tuition directly to my school each quarter, and gave me a monthly cost-of-living stipend on a sliding scale that adjusted for active weeks of school in session for any given month. It also gave me a book stipend, up to $1,000 per year.

While far from extravagant, the stipend did permit me to move out of the church parking lot where hashtag-my-favorite-mistake and I lived for about a year and a half. It allowed me to keep paying on my car to avoid losing it completely, ultimately paying it off as the loan finished amortizing while my only income was the stipend. It kept my cats fed, it let me eat while I went to school, and it let me pay rent, most months, to my landlord, who happens to also be a very good friend. A very good friend who let me stay in this room for about a year before he asked me for any money at all.

Now that I've finished my degree, the hard part begins. I need to find a job. I will get one last partial GI Bill disbursement in late December or early January, and that's it. Once it gets here, I will probably have about $1,000 to my name. And even though DSHS says my car is worth about $2,700, my net worth is still well below zero.

Sounds rough, right? So, why am I smiling?

Finally back home to a #mirror! I just had lunch and was about to change into cozy house time clothes, and then remembered that I hadn't put up an outfit shot today. #CreamPuffCow was happy to see me. He's a good boy. #Seattle #Washington #transgender #veteran #trans #girl #girlslikeus #ootd #outfit #outfitoftheday #selfie #nomakeup #nofilter #skinnyjeans and #black #turtleneck with #cats #cat #catsofinstagram #kitty #kittycat #mycats #ihavealotofcats #🐱

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Dec 14, 2015 at 2:43pm PST

Because it is and it isn't rough. For a trans woman, I'm doing remarkably well. I have shelter. A little bit of money. I've managed to finish a degree program, and I haven't been forced into sex work. Yet. If all goes well, I'll be doing some kind of administrative work within a month, and be back into technical work within another five, all while still pursuing performance opportunities, with the support of an amazing girlfriend.

Part of pursuing performance (including modeling, acting, singing, and dancing) professionally is demonstrating comfort with public scrutiny. This wasn't a formal consideration when I just up and decided I was a public figure. A lot of it is stuff that I already do anyway, and things like the daily outfit selfies evolved out of wanting to track changes in my body that resulted from HRT. The goal, though, has always been to provide a candid window into my life. That's why, when I do a modeling shoot, I snap behind-the-scenes shots, and don't just put up the finished ones. It's why you can see close-ups of my face before and after electrolysis, even though neither is particularly attractive.

Some people think of social media as a way to project the image of a better life than what they actually have. To hide misery and create the kind of veneer of happiness that causes people to be shocked when they hear about a divorce announcement. I'd seen some news recently about a model who went kinda Shia LaBeouf about her career and the mechanisms of achieving internet fame, and her whole angle was about how social media is a lie. While I get what she was saying for her own life, I don't see mine that way.

My #new @vistaprint #social #cards showed up! #Seattle #Washington #transgender #veteran #trans #girl #girlslikeus #selfie #nomakeup #nofilter #visibility #advocate #model #outreach #seattlemodel

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Nov 19, 2015 at 1:33pm PST

I see my social media outlets as an intentional focus. For most of my life, I was incredibly ungrateful, and felt very entitled. I was very well-off in terms of survival needs, but I'd become so largely by accident. When the dot-com bubble burst and I found myself without proof of current skills in the form of any sort of degree or certification, I also found myself without professional contacts who wanted to hire me on the basis of having worked with me before, because they'd all lost their jobs, too. My entire professional network was out of work, and I sat around thinking, "why me?"

On paper, right now, today, my life is a train wreck. On fire. At the bottom of a cliff it just drove off of. I have thousands of dollars in actual debt spread across the last 20 years, probably thousands more in fraudulent debt assigned to me by a jilted ex, I live in a room in my friend's house which could be taken from me at a moment's notice, I don't have a job, I have uncovered medical expenses that I need to pay for out-of-pocket, girls like me are routinely subjected to discrimination that ranges from the absurd to the fatal.

Making all of those things into the defining aspects of my life would not be accurate, though. More and more, I've been developing my capacity to be genuinely grateful for the real bounty of my life. I have wonderful friends who respect me for who I am, and don't judge me based on my life circumstances. I've been able to rescue a number of cats who exist because of my mistakes, and, as hard as it will be, I now have the time and space and opportunity to start rehoming them. I have had the good fortune to have lunch with a state representative because I'd taken a paid performance opportunity. After we did our bit, I bent his ear for a moment about trans issues, and gave him one of my social cards. Isn't that wonderful?

One of the gentlemen at my table at this luncheon was the Director of Accessibility (or something like that) Director of Customer Service, Trusted Experience Team at Microsoft, and mentioned in his award acceptance speech how his team needed more good people; that if anyone knew any, they should refer them to him. So I referred myself. I gave him one of my social cards, and gratefully accepted his business card, along with his request for my current résumé. Isn't that wonderful? And, sure, I've now lost his card twice, each time because I'd very carefully put it somewhere where I knew I couldn't possibly lose it, but still. I'll find it, and send him my current résumé. And come back to this blog post and correct his title, if I've mucked it up. (Update: found it.)

I still have my guitar, the same one I've had since the early '90s. My hands still work well enough for me to play it. The songs I've written and performed with it have won praise from professional working musicians who move in circles I never believed I'd be even remotely connected to, even after I spent years petulantly wondering why nobody had discovered me and my music while I mostly hid in my room and played songs for myself. I have the respect and friendship of former instructors from The Art Institute of Seattle, one of whom wants to collaborate with me musically, another who invited me to see a private screening of his current work, another who is building an art installation and fashion show concept with trans women at its core, and wants me to model for it, still another who wants me to come speak to their Gender and Sexuality Studies class.

I have an amazing, patient, stable, brilliant, geeky, loving, determined, thoughtful girlfriend.

better angle on me, still a great angle on #girlfriend #😊 #Seattle #Washington #transgender #veteran #trans #girl #girlslikeus #selfie #nomakeup #nofilter #noshave #closeup

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Dec 13, 2015 at 12:35pm PST

There's good and bad all around us, all the time. It's all gonna be there, no matter what. I spent about 25 years focusing on what was shitty, and I did it so well that I crippled my capacity to feel emotion of any sort, never mind just pleasure or gratitude. The shitty was limitless. I became a part of it as it became a part of me, and I. Was. Miserable.

Now, I've spent about a year really practicing focusing on what's wonderful. And I've come to realize that the wonderful is limitless, too. And now that it's become a part of me, I strive to bring a positive feedback loop with me wherever I go, instead of a negative one. I give a stranger a genuine smile, and get one back, and we're both a little happier for it. We both have one more thing to look back on, that day, and say, "that was wonderful." I get attacked on social media, and I reason with the attacker, wishing them well at the end of our interaction, no matter the outcome. People message me privately to say my compassion was inspiring to them, my refusal to fight at the expense of true engagement. We both have one more thing to look back on, that day, and say, "that was wonderful."

This is a trying time. My resources are now very painfully finite. But, I applied for SNAP, and they approved my claim. Now, if nothing else, I'll be able to eat. And that is wonderful. If I get a job in the next week, I'll look back and say, "that was a scary week, but now that it's past, it wasn't so bad." If I get a job in three months, I'll say, "that was a really rough three months, but now I can really get to work." And all along the way, I'll say, "here I am, today, smiling, because I am such a lucky girl."

It's not that I have had more luck. It's that I've been consciously focusing on it.

And that is wonderful.

Venus Rising

(This post is NSFW.)

If you've ever seen a video with audio that is ever so slightly out of sync, so slightly that you couldn't even figure out that that was the problem at first, you'll have some slight notion of how I felt without HRT. All day. Every day. Everything was off. Everything. In some fundamental way that was key to how I existed in the world at all, how I interacted with anyone and anything, everything just felt awful, but I also had no way of knowing it could be any better than awful. I am honestly amazed I managed to avoid killing myself. In the year since I've been on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), I've noticed a lot of changes. Many of them are the kinds everyone can see. But the most important ones are invisible.

#ootd #selfie going to start #hrt

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Oct 24, 2014 at 6:25am PDT

I'd read about the effects of HRT, always in terms of the physical; breast development usually in line with cisgender women of one's family, finer hair texture, softer skin, and so on. I'd also read that some girls saw very little or no visible outward impact. I saw one girl's pictures of herself after more than two years of HRT, and she showed no visible breast development in any of them. Shortly before my endocrinology appointment, I realized that I'd have to come to terms with the fact that I just couldn't predict exactly what would happen, so I'd need to be okay with anything. Or nothing.

At the time, flush with the revelation of my previously misunderstood gender, that wasn't very hard. I was just so absolutely relieved to able to experience a full range of emotions, to get up and go out for the day feeling like good things would happen, to be pleased with how I looked. The things that upset me, even big things, just didn't upset me that much. And the happy things, they were brilliant flashes of ecstatic joy that left afterimages superimposed over everything else for hours or days.

When I was younger, as soon as puberty began, I developed an immediate and almost pathological aversion to body hair of any kind. I didn't think much of this at the time, but as it coincided with the onset of a deep depression that lasted roughly 30 years, I think now that this was another level of me understanding but also not understanding the problem. In the same way that I'd never liked my old name, but couldn't think of any other boy's names that felt any less wrong, I didn't like the kind of body hair I was developing, and I especially did not like it growing on my face, but since I felt like it was supposed to go that way, I just thought of it as a dislike, an opinion. I did not think to consider a girl's name in the same way I did not think to consider any way to prevent the growth from happening. It just never occurred to me that I could do either. Guys in my school who had started to have facial hair come in grew as much as they could, while I futilely hoped that mine would never come.

I made it to my appointment and was in and out with a prescription quickly and easily. I remember being a little bit annoyed that even though my name had been legally changed, and my gender legally corrected, my prescription bottles still had my old name on them, because that information had not propagated through the VA Medical system at that time. But mostly, I remember being relieved that no precluding conditions had been revealed. Their biggest concern seemed to be whether I was a tobacco user or not, and I was told anecdotally about a trans woman who found out she had to quit smoking before they'd put her on estradiol, since the combined risk of blood clots was too high to be considered acceptable. From what I understand, she found the will to quit rather quickly, and permanently. I've never been a tobacco user, so I was fine.

The first week on HRT was challenging. It wasn't exactly bad, but it was definitely difficult. I was experiencing emotions with an intensity I'd never even been able to conceive of before. While part of me actually found this satisfying, because I had starved myself of any emotion of any kind for so long, I also worried that my mood would be permanently volatile. Even when facing the possibility of that, I understood that I'd be much happier overall than I'd been before. When the first week ended and the volatility started to die down, I remembered having a new worry. I worried that whenever my doses were changed, I might be just as moody again.

When I'd been on Effexor XR, an antidepressant, in the past, and that dosage was shifted up or down by any amount over any period of time, I was completely exhausted for a fairly predictable term, usually about two weeks. I would be awake for maybe 6-8 hours a day, max. After my body had adjusted to the new dose, that went away, but it happened every time the dose was altered, whether increased or decreased. Since that was being done on a monthly basis for awhile, it felt like half my life was erased. I was afraid that I'd have a solid week of volatile moodiness every time my HRT doses were adjusted. This fear proved unfounded.

With HRT, while I remember seeing some mild breast development fairly quickly, I noticed much more than that how tremendously, after the first week, my overall mood and sense of well-being gelled and stabilized into something fairly consistent and reliable. And positive. I was already happy, having finally figured out what the problem had always been, and knowing how completely true and right that felt, to have a real core truth of self that had always been missing. Or hidden, I should say. If realizing I had been incorrectly designated male at birth was the eruption of a volcano, HRT has been the myriad intangible environmental factors that solidified it into a mountain.

Before long, a clear cycle emerged. I experience regular monthly (more or less) symptoms of PMS, but as I have no uterus, they are almost entirely emotional. Every fourth week or so, I'll have about three days of mildly increased irritability, and greatly increased emotional volatility. Self-awareness helps the most with all of it; just knowing what it is makes it easy to discount things that I think or feel that seem distorted in any way. It's never very hard for me to enjoy the giddy happy parts, and to feel and fully experience the more deeply sad or upset parts without having them linger or take over after they'd run their course.

Perhaps the hardest part to explain to anyone is how I am happy even with the saddest parts, even when they are at their worst. Experiencing PMS, even without the raging uterus throwing out everything it's spent the last month building, is affirming in a way. It's not exactly pleasant, per se, but in a meta sense, the fact that it's the kind of unpleasantness my brain feels like it has always been expecting feels good in that it feels right. It feels right in the same way that before, without HRT, everything felt wrong. Some fundamental level below consciousness, where reality lives. This is what I mean when I try to explain to my cis female friends that if there was a way for me to have an actual uterus and ovaries and everything, I'd absolutely do it, cramps and all, even if I can't possibly imagine how bad they could get. Because they'd be the right kind of bad, the kind of bad that is a simple fact of life for most women.

Spontaneous erections, that fact of life for most men, died off, and I don't remember when. I've had a few in the past year, but they're incredibly rare, now, though they remain just as random as before. The first time it happened after having not happened for a long time, I remember being absolutely mortified. I was at school, so I wasn't able to go hide anywhere or anything. But by the time I realized that there was nothing I could do, it subsided, and that was that. It also occurred to me one day that while I knew there had been a last time that I'd masturbated, I couldn't remember when it was or anything else about it at all. I'm not getting into any details here, and I can of course only speak for myself, but under the influence of estrogen and not testosterone, my penis behaves very differently than it did with testosterone and not estrogen.

When I was in my initial endocrinology consult, I'd been told that my libido would go off a cliff. Every "warning" they gave me to make sure I knew what I was signing myself up for sounded wonderful. No more rapacious sex drive making me absolutely miserable because I hated sex exactly as much as I felt compelled to seek it out? Sign me up.

But my libido didn't go off a cliff. It didn't even get any smaller, really. It just changed shape. Have you ever heard the thing about the elephant's foot and the point of a stiletto heel? The idea is that the pressure beneath the stiletto heel under the weight of an average person is greater than the pressure under the elephant's foot, because the pressure is focused more narrowly. That was what my testosterone-driven sex drive felt like. I perceived it as sharp and demanding, here and then gone, disruptive and distracting.

Once I started HRT, my libido started changing shape. Rather than my previous state of being very binary about sex — either absolutely not thinking about it at all, or absolutely unable to think about anything else — I moved into a more stable, oceanic state. Things can shift and change and heat and cool, but everything happens gradually, now, and this, too, feels ineffably natural. Especially in contrast with what I'd had going on before. Now, instead of being 0%, no sex, or 100%, yes sex, I'm kind of 85% sex all the time, except when I'm actually having sex, and it's amazing. I don't know how to explain that any better. It's not "sex" in the sense of the actual act, it's more like... being in touch with that thing that makes all life possible, which expresses itself, in most adult humans, sexually. My physicality in any space, the things I say and the way I say them... it's all become this celebration of life, of being alive.

When I do have sex, it feels very natural and right, but having never previously experienced anything like what I have now, I'd never known what "natural" or "right" truly felt like. I could feel physically sated before, but never really actually satisfied in the way that I've discovered really great sex can make me feel. Connecting on any deeper level with my partner was exceedingly rare, even within the context of a single long-term monogamous relationship. There's a Weezer song that goes, "I'm sorry for what I did, I did what my body told me to, I didn't mean to do you harm," and that is probably the best way to sum up my relationship with my own body without HRT, and how I felt about what my partners must have thought, even when they pointedly reassured me that they did not. Life was an awful, high-anxiety scramble to seek out sex, have sex, and not really enjoy the sex or anything else about the whole situation, forever.

My best friend, when we were a couple, tried explaining to me once how an entire day could be sex, an entire day could be foreplay and love and closeness, and I literally could not understand it. I couldn't. I would try to do whatever she said, you know... really focus on eating this strawberry, enjoy its complete strawberriness, from the texture of the skin giving way to the texture of the meat on my teeth as they cut through it, to the juices going into my mouth, to the juices running down my chin. Or whatever. And I'd try, but I'd just be annoyed that there was sticky juice on my chin, and then I'd wonder when we'd get to the fucking.

The jagged, brittle obsidian of my former sex drive was softened and polished into something beautiful. The world has a color now that it did not have before. It's not the old metaphor of black-and-white vs. color. It's more like the earliest color movies vs. the most modern ones. Before, the world had a subtle unreality to it. It did not look like the world, it looked like a poor representation of the world. Now, it's cinematic and beautiful. Things that used to challenge me in Buddhist books I'd read, like being completely present while looking at a leaf, have become almost frighteningly easy, when I remember to even try to do them.

At my three-month checkup, the doctor seemed surprised at how much breast tissue I'd developed on such a low dose over such a short period. I remember feeling very self-satisfied, like this was some kind of sign that my body was pleased to finally have a medium in which it could exist as it was meant to. My doses were adjusted slightly, doubling the estradiol and spironolactone to 2mg and 100mg per day, respectively. The medroxyprogesterone dose did not change, and it never has. It's been 5mg per day since the beginning. The patient name on the bottles of the second set of meds was correct. It was a small change but it mattered a lot to me. It didn't feel like anyone was trying to imply that I was medicating Jason into oblivion, anymore. It felt like Sera had her girly pills, and that was it.

Tonight is the night I finish off the last of my initial round of #HRT meds. Same doses in each bin, different pills; they told me to just double two of them effective immediately with what I had left over, until they were gone. It's a little thing, but these days, I use little good things to bring myself up, instead of letting little bad things kill me.

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Jan 11, 2015 at 5:40pm PST

At the six month checkup, I had been directed to immediately double the spironolactone dose to a total of 200mg per day, and to gradually increase the estradiol to 3mg and then ultimately 4mg. I was instructed to stay at 2mg estradiol daily until two weeks at 200mg spironolactone had passed, then bump to 3mg for another two weeks before finally settling at 4mg by May 2015.

Physical changes started becoming suddenly noticeable, and I'm reminded of when I was a kid. We had a puppy named Cubby, and whenever I'd stay the weekend at a friend's house and return, Cubby always seemed like he'd grown enormously since I'd seen him last, just a couple days before. Registering the physical changes felt a lot like that. In May 2015, with the stabilized new normal regimen of HRT, my figure appeared to change dramatically. I'm sure that what really happened was that it had been slowly and surely filling in, and that I just actually noticed it, finally, but the physical changes seemed to all work more or less like this. One day, I'd notice that I had hips. Another day, I'd notice that what little body hair I had was indeed much finer in texture and thickness than before. I would try on a strapless dress that hadn't been able to stay up before, and it would sit just right because I had finally developed enough of a bust.

ok but when did my waist and hips get all this definition?? i mean i've been on #HRT for 200 days, but... i mean, i know it's all very gradual, in reality, but the way i actually notice any significant changes is almost always like this. just "... oh! when... when did that become a thing?" no, this is not my ootd, and sorry, it's hard to look fab with matching underwear when really almost all my bras and panties were given to me. #nomakeup #noshave #trans #girl #underwear #selfie

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on May 11, 2015 at 10:38am PDT

Around this time, I heard about the #FreeTheNipple campaign on social media, and I started to wonder whether I'd be taken down or left up if I posted a topless picture of myself. I figured, if they take me down, that's Instagram weighing in on my gender, saying "this one's a girl." And if they left me up, I'd be out there with my bare breasts and free nipples, a victory of a different sort. But I worried about potentially opening myself up to violence, and thought it was probably a bad idea.

Anyway, I put the picture up, and it took Instagram all of an hour to take it down, with their standard message about how I had violated their community guidelines. I posted a follow-up picture, with my pajama top back on, mildly grateful to them for acknowledging that I was a woman, at least. My body was being censored, just like any other girl's. The whole trilogy is a roller-coaster ride from start to finish, and if you want to see my bare breasts, this is probably gonna be the only way for awhile.

It's official, kids! @instagram took down my topless pic, so the debate's over, my #nipple is too #female to be seen bare. I guess this means I really AM a girl, after all. #😂 It's a beautiful day for #cultural #misogyny, far too beautiful to look back on #history to a time when men, too, had to keep their nipples under wraps. #freethenipple #nomakeup #noshave #trans #girl #pajamas #selfie

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on May 13, 2015 at 11:11am PDT

I felt fine, overall. Nothing seemed unusual or bad in any way. But at the nine month checkup, my doctor seemed surprised to learn that I hadn't been feeling physically ill or in any undue pain — because my estrogen levels were about three times an average cis woman's levels. Through raised eyebrows and constant head-shaking, she reduced my estradiol dosage immediately back down to 2mg per day. I guess it worked, because I still haven't died.

At last, I've achieved my goal of being so dangerously #girly that I might die of #femininity. Blood #estrogen levels 3x normal average for an adult cis woman, so we're dropping my #estradiol back down to 2mg daily, instead of the 4mg it was raised to in April. Vitals all well within normal range, but keeping my dose so high is an unnecessary risk. At my next appointment, just past my #HRT anniversary, I will get a referral for orchiectomy, which my #VA doctor informed me is covered for trans veterans. #😁 I've also been getting compliments ALL day on this outfit and my looks in general, so I'm even more excited about being seen at Trans #Pride tonight! I figured I'd celebrate all of this with a #happy #salad. #🍴 #😊 #Seattle #Washington #transgender #veteran #trans #girl #girlslikeus #selfie

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Jun 26, 2015 at 11:47am PDT

Somewhere along the line, I experienced a craving for dark chocolate. I mean an actual craving. I had previously thought I'd had cravings for things now and then, but once I felt this craving, I realized that everything I'd previously thought to be a craving was really just a gentle suggestion of the faintest whisper of desire. I felt like I was going to literally die if I did not get a ton of chocolate. Fortunately, my landlord responded to my text begging for chocolate, and brought me a bar or two and some chocolate ice cream with chocolate pieces in it, which were probably covered in some other kind of chocolate. I don't remember, I just devoured most of it, and then felt much better. I assumed at the time that this would just be a monthly thing, so I stocked up on a wide variety of chocolates. It hasn't happened since.

Yesterday, I had my one-year checkup. While in the waiting area, a woman asked if I was going to a Halloween party. She asked, I imagine, because I had about four days' worth of facial hair growth, since I had electrolysis yesterday, as well. I smiled at her, said "no," and then gave her one of my cards. She flipped it over a few times to take it all in, then put the card away with her things and thanked me for giving it to her. We talked for a little while about other things, like our shared Japanese heritage.

In the actual appointment itself, I met the actual endocrinologist for the first time, rather than a resident, and she was fantastic. She's very trans-services-positive, and argues the evidence every time she has an opportunity; these services vastly improve and save lives. We talked briefly about how the VA seems to be coming along with more and better transition service coverage, and I expressed my belief that the VA would cover most or all major transition services within five years. She seemed to find this belief reasonable. I gave her one of my cards, and she thanked me, jotting down a few notes on it for later. When it was over, the plan going forward was for me to manage refills on my own for longer periods without checkups in between, and for me to wait on a phone call from urology to schedule the consult for my orchiectomy.

A year ago tomorrow, I saw an endocrinologist at the VA to start HRT. I wore that day's same outfit again today, for the first annual checkup. I have #electrolysis today, so I haven't shaved since Monday. A woman in the waiting area asked if I was going to a Halloween party, probably because I've got very noticeable facial hair growth right now. I smiled, said "no," and gave her one of my cards. She thanked me for it. Then we chatted for awhile about other stuff, like our shared #Japanese ancestry. #😊 #Seattle #Washington #transgender #veteran #trans #girl #girlslikeus #ootd #outfit #outfitoftheday #selfie #nomakeup #nofilter #noshave

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Oct 23, 2015 at 12:17pm PDT

I don't know where I'd be without HRT. I really can't even imagine. I like to think I'd be nearly as happy overall, still, that I'd finally realized who I really was all along. I don't want to be so hyperbolic as to suggest it's as valuable as the air I breathe. But perhaps there's a good metaphor there. Being on HRT is like having clean air, instead of smog so thick you can physically feel it when you walk through it. It's like having a healthy, balanced diet, instead of nothing but frozen microwave pizzas and Pepsi every day. Being on HRT feels good, like relieving a headache. It's as if all my life I'd been constantly struggling just to be able to have the basic capacity to even try to build towards happiness and productivity, and now I rest naturally at that starting point, at the worst.

Kindred

In February 2015, a League of Legends tournament operator changed a rule for their girls-only Iron Solari tournament: only one LGBT girl per team, or there would be an “unfair advantage.” Riot, the makers of League of Legends, had an immediate response.

When it comes to LGBT acceptance, Riot has been doing two things that have compelled me to write this, and write it now, and that is why I am not getting much else done today; because I just cannot stop thinking about all the ways in which this is coming together, and the ways in which Riot has been really really really clever. They are taking an audience that has a not-insignificant amount of bigots, and subtly causing them to shift and open their minds in ways that they might not necessarily feel comfortable doing directly with humans.

I don't remember when I started playing League, exactly, but it was definitely quite a while before I had my whole gender revelation. I would sometimes kind of take the game to task, among my friends, for some things that I saw as sort of like playing to tropes, playing to ethnic stereotypes, or playing to even gendered stereotypes. But Riot is not really any more guilty of that than most other media producers I've seen who are inventing original characters and original stories and original content around their game, or even just broadly, like comics or movies or whatever.

By that I mean things like the women being always thin, very fit, and the same with the guys for the most part, with a few exceptions. My earlier complaints would be things like, on the male side, with male champions, you have champions like Gragas, you have champions like Urgot, who are male, and definitely clearly masculine, but also in a kind of non-mainstream way, in that Gragas is very heavy, and Urgot is kind of grotesquely disfigured, and sort of half-human. There weren't really any female examples of that.

The women were all still really thin. There was some variance in breast size, and that was kind of it. But that was the starting point for something that's become really impressive. Waifish Jinx came out, and she had very very very small breasts. She was the first female champ that I remember seeing who wasn't a child, like Annie, with such a small build. It was nice to see some variety come in.

But in the last six months or year, Riot has really started to get creative with their champions. They are challenging their community's capacity to understand things outside of gender binary, and outside of culturally normalized gender roles. They are doing this by presenting new champions who don't look like what the audience thinks someone who uses pronouns like "she" and "her" should look like, but instead just presenting someone who is that way, in a world where that mostly doesn't matter. They have the ability to do this because it's a fantasy setting. They can come to their audience with a character that is not human at all, where all of the extranormative things about that character are so out there that their gender becomes the least confusing thing about them.

The first example of this, which was kind of impressive, but didn't blow me away as much as the one I'm going to get to, is Rek'sai. Rek'sai is female, an alien monstrosity... uh, thing. She's this rapidly-tunneling land-shark sort of creature that's kind of short and squat and really wide, but she also will literally pop up out of the ground under your champion, and take them to pieces.

On the forums, there'd be some discussion, where people would say things like "I wonder when he will come out?" or whatever, but when Rioters would speak about her, they'd gender her correctly because that's a matter of brand consistency, if nothing else. Riot is clear about what Rek'sai is. There is no ambiguity about her gender, but a fair sized segment of people see a character concept like Rek'sai, and they want the gender to be masculine because of how she looks. Even so, whenever she was misgendered on the forums, there was always a response from someone in the community correcting that.

So we have people getting used to this model of understanding two things. One is that if someone misgenders someone else, it's appropriate to correct them, and two, any idea of what is required for someone or something to be female is challenged. For non-humans, we don't get hung up on this as much in reality. You see a girl dog, and you think it's a boy, and you say "how old is he," and they say, "oh, she's two," and you say, "oh, 'she,'" okay, great. No big deal. Minor mistake, it's fixed, nobody cares, and the dog never had any idea.

But in fantasy settings, we have the advantage of creating something entirely new that's outside of everyone's understanding or experience, and saying, by the way, this thing has gender, and even though your expectation based on appearance is that her gender is male, it's not; her gender is female. And that maps really pretty closely to the thought processes that are required to get your head around trans people being legitimately whatever gender they understand themselves to be.

One of the difficult things in educating people about what being trans looks like is managing any expectation that people think about these things if they don't know any trans people, or anyone else that is really outside of the realm of their experience, outside the realm of their day-to-day lives. If they don't have a reason to know about it, if they feel they don't have a reason to have the vocabulary about it, it can feel kind of oppressive to have someone come in and say, "you need to behave this way, you need to refer to me in that way." Rek'sai gives Riot a way to get people to do that without feeling so opposed to it, because League of Legends is something that they've come to of their own accord.

People are showing up and playing because they love the game. Whether they love the mechanics or the lore or the construction of the world, the way that the maps are designed, whatever it is, they want to be there. They're invested in it. And Riot, the people who have created that world, are able to dictate some parameters of that world, and say, "this is it, this is the world, so, take it or leave it." And they have enough of a customer base, they have a good enough product in terms of a value proposition in gaming, that they can get away with that.

The thing that really impressed me, though, was not Rek'sai. I didn't even realize all of these subtle things about Rek'sai until recently. The thing that's impressed me a lot more is this teaser of a champion that's not out yet, as of this writing, called Kindred. Kindred, if you look at the concept art, is designed as two spirits. Which itself un-subtley refers to a widely understood queer and/or transgender model; the Native American two-spirit.

Kindred is plural, a pair of beings who are never without each other, who cannot be separated further. They are two, but they are atomic. They are two, but they are one. And in the cinematic teaser, Wolf has a voice that might be described as male-typical, and Lamb has a voice that might be described as female-typical. And they also have sort of more stereotypically masculine and feminine sort of properties. Wolf, as one might guess, is the more masculine energy side, more aggressive, feral, direct action, attacking stuff. And Lamb is more overseeing, caretaking, with a healing aspect that is represented in "Lamb's Respite," Kindred's ultimate ability. But because they are two, even though it's a singular entity in terms of game mechanics, the pronouns for this champion are "they" and "them" and "theirs." And so, I've seen already on the boards, people will pronoun Kindred as "he" or "she," and sometimes they are corrected. And when corrected, sometimes there is a pushback. But in this case, there's no ambiguity about the character's pronouns the way there may be some understandable debate about them in reality, because Riot controls the reality of Runeterra, the game's setting, absolutely.

Riot doesn't need to police the forums and go in and correct people misgendering Kindred via pronouns, they can just keep using those pronouns consistently in all media regarding the character. In this way, they also set a great example for trans people in managing reaction to being misgendered in their own lives; if you are misgendered and you correct someone, there's a chance you'll have some pushback, and it may even become relatively violent. But, if you just keep asserting yourself, people will probably come around eventually, and even if they don't, your allies will reveal themselves. The other thing that's really obvious as a call-out to this sort of two-spirit model, which is really heavily influenced by gender, is the symbology that's used for the masks that Lamb and Wolf wear, and even their own coloring, which are both plainly inspired by the yin and yang concept. With the darker shade of coat and the lighter tint of mask, Wolf is plainly masculine with an aspect of feminine, in terms of visual composition, and is established in opposing balance with Lamb, whose colors are reversed.

This is really impressive to me, that a company that has this size of an audience, an audience that has a lot of people in it who are really transphobic, biphobic, take your pick... non-cisgender-heterosexual-phobic... has been releasing champions that challenge our notions of gender. I saw something on the boards the other day, where this trans girl was being bullied about her appearance and the fact of her being trans. I reached out to her and was like, "hey, I'm here for you." It was important to me to be sure that she knew she was not alone, because being rejected so broadly leads very quickly to a sense of alienation, a sense of isolation, a sense that maybe who we are is wrong, when nothing could be further from the truth.

She seemed confused by this, and a little bit defensive, which is understandable given the kinds of introductory messages girls like us get online. I went on to say, more or less, "this is me, here's my Facebook page if you want to get to know me at all, but I'm mostly just here to let you know that I'm here for you, and that's it." And I left her alone after that, but she's initiated chat with me since then, and I feel like I've done a good thing. I reached out to her in the first place because her forum name and summoner game name is very much "I am female," and her post on a selfies thread on the general discussion board had people saying things like, "that's not a trap, that's an ambush," which is referring to this idea that a trans girl is trying to "trap" someone, or trick them into thinking that they're a "real girl," as if they were anything else.

Somebody else posted this sort of trollface or grossed-out kind of face cartoon drawing, that said "cross-dresser" under it really large. There's definitely a lot of vitriol around girls like me in gaming communities in general, and specifically within League's community. But Riot, for its part, is saying that they don't agree with that. They're not just passively saying "hey, we don't like that," but that they're completely opposed to it in their corporate philosophy.

This was really illustrated clearly in February, when a tournament operator called Garena, from the Philippines, was changing some rules around their Iron Solari tournament. The Solari in game lore are represented in Leona, who has sun-themed abilities and iconography. So the Iron Solari tournament, inspired by that, is a girls-only League of Legends tournament.

Very briefly, as in "in the course of 24 hours" briefly, in February, Garena issued a statement saying that they had heard from a number of their players that perhaps if a team had a lesbian or bi or transgender girl on their team, that they got an unfair advantage for some unknown reason. The text of the announcement literally said "may probably have some unfair advantage." They of course got a backlash from people in the community, but then they had a pretty strong and unsubtle backlash from Riot themselves.

Riot tweeted an unambiguous statement that "LGBT players are welcome at official LoL tourneys. We're working with partners to ensure consistency with our values across all regions." In other words, if you do not allow unrestricted access to LGBT players at your tournament, it will not be an official League of Legends tournament. And if you don't have the support of League of Legends' publisher for your League of Legends tournament, that is a big problem.

The next day, Garena rescinded the rule, saying they "sincerely apologize for any offense we caused to the LGBT and gaming communities." It had the usual corporate non-apology trappings of how their initial decision "created a lot of good discussion and debate," and how they had been "discussing the ruling with our partners and re-examining our approach" and ultimately changed their minds, but it was pretty clear what happened.

Maybe, I don't know, six months after Kindred's come out, it will be really natural for people to refer to someone that they understand as a single entity as "they" or "them." So when they meet a non-binary person after that, now they have a model. Instead of having a reaction of "that's crazy, that doesn't make any sense," they have this concept they can attach it to. It might not be completely accurate or relevant, but it will be in the ballpark. Someone can say to them, "hi, my name's Chris, my pronouns are they, them, and theirs," and instead of having no idea how to respond, now the listener can think, "oh, they're like Kindred, okay."

And then everything is easy. Because they've already had conversations with their friends about Kindred, as a champion, and because Riot is very clear about "this is the grammar," and "these are the words," it gives people a way, through play, to flip that switch, and get their heads around saying something like, "we need Kindred to come and gank top, we need them to get there fast." And then they meet someone who's non-binary, and suddenly it's not that hard for them to talk to their friends about this person, or to use their pronouns properly. If their friends play League, too, there's no need to go into an explanation that they may not feel equipped to give. It just becomes normal, or at least more normal, and less alien.

They can say, "I was hanging out with Chris last night at their place, we had pizza, and they were like, 'do you want Mountain Dew, or Coke?' and I was like, 'I want vodka,'" or whatever. The pronouns disappear, mechanically, and the message is conveyed because the hangup of using a pronoun that deliberately keeps some aspect ambiguous, or defined as "outside of the Gender Binary," disappears, too. It normalizes the use of non-binary pronouns, which is fantastic. Non-binary pronouns are something that I still struggle with. Like most people, I have been encultured to presume gender and assign it mentally, even to people I will never interact with at all.

If I see someone on a bus that appears outwardly feminine to me, and I tell a story about them later to a friend, I will almost certainly refer to them as "she," even though that may not be accurate. I have non-binary friends whom I still instinctively read as male or female, and having an extra model in my head to associate them with reduces that.

I know very few non-binary people, and it's difficult for me to correctly use their pronouns. It is sort of alien to me. And I also understand that they're right, and that the problem is me, and not their identity.

This is the genius of what Riot is doing with these kinds of champions, like Rek'sai, and Kindred. They're saying, "Rek'sai is she. Kindred is they." And that's it. They don't have to come out and have Rek'sai say "my pronouns are she/her/hers," they just always consistently state them that way. Because that's what they are.