Industrial Strength Electrolysis

I visited Electrology 3000 (E3K) yesterday. After a year of laser on my face, I had come to the following conclusions. First, laser is only semi-effective on beard hair — in some places, it has been very effective, in others, only so-so. Second, all my gray (er… blonde) hairs in my face are immune to laser, and they were becoming more and more obvious and annoying. Third, visiting my local electrolysis woman, Opal, was glacial in its pace and remarkably painful. It’s one thing to be able to withstand the single sting of a bee on one part of your face, or perhaps to withstand 10 bee stings distributed across your face. But to have hundreds of bee stings in approximately the same place as the operator goes from one hair to the next — this was really awful. I had even asked my dentist if he’d shoot my face full of Novocain, and after some consideration, he said he didn’t feel it was ethical. Thus I came to E3K in Dallas, a company that specializes in clearing transsexuals’ beards.

I had to avoid shaving for 3 days, which has been emotionally painful, but here in the summertime, with my exposure to other people at a minimum, I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, I looked like the hermaphrodite at the circus, and went about my daily routine as androgynously as possible. I began taking 1 tablet of ibuprofin a night to build up the anti-inflammatories (who knows if this works, but I didn’t have any headaches during this time).

Wednesday came at last, and I woke at 5:00 for flight planning — it was a beautiful day, so the flight plan was easy. I flew the Cirrus SR20 plane down early in the morning, taking off at 6:45, as the flight was planned to last slightly less than 2 hours and my appointment time was set for 9:30. E3K is literally just off the north end of the Addison airport, so all I needed to do was have my feet on the ground by 9:00, and I would be fine. Made it to Addison uneventfully, touching down around 8:45, called for a cab, and began my long day of beautification.

E3K is on the second floor in a strip mall directly under the flightpath of the Addison airport, a strip mall that houses insurance companies, dance studios, and a pizza parlor, to name a few. Having arrived early, around 9:10, an finding their door shut and locked, I realized that when they said 9:30, they meant it, so I plopped myself down alongside my flight bag, briefcase, and overnight bag and answered email on my trusty PDA.

An entourage arrived at 9:28 and opened the door, at which point I gathered up my things and went inside. After filling out a patient information card, I was ushered to the back room, where Denise, one of the three sisters who owns the place, talked to me about electrolysis, follicles, insulated needles, and after-care. Then she was joined by her sister Tisha, and the two of them said they’d both be working on my face all day.

Since I had surgery a month ago and my scars in my lower gum were still healing, they couldn’t administer any Novocain on my chin or lower lip in the mouth, relying instead on injections on the face itself. There is no pussyfooting around this issue: those shots really, really hurt. The needle kind of hurts, but I think it’s the liquid that burns and expands just under the skin that makes the pain so great. And once you know it’s coming, there’s nothing to do except to take some deep breaths and squirm. To her credit, Tisha rubs the area and pauses a bit to let your brain resume working before wielding the needle again.

Since the lip is a small area and since there were two operators, we started off the morning by numbing and zapping my right mustache and my left cheek, after which point they switched and worked on the left mustache and right cheek. [The way they distribute the work across my face reminded me of the way typewriters were designed to keep their keys separated so that they wouldn't bump into each other and jam when you were typing really fast.]

It took 3 hours to do the mustache and the cheeks, which brought us to 1:00, when they customarily have their lunch break. I grabbed my bag and went for a walk to find food and to stretch out. If the shots are painful, lying in the chair for hour upon hour is also extremely annoying, eventually becoming almost unbearable. I found that the back of my head, where it was resting “comfortably” on the headrest, became a real sore spot for me as the day wore on. So walking around was a joy, even though Dallas was already hot and muggy by lunchtime.

I chose Long John Silver’s because of some weird idea that chicken planks would be soft and easy to chew. What I discovered was that my lip, numbed and swollen and looking like a Simpson’s character, wouldn’t create suction in my straw, and I just dribbled my drink all over myself. I finally figured out that if I placed both lips over the straw and used the thumb and forefinger of both hands to press my lips around the straw, I could drink. Accordingly, I felt it was my civic duty to choose a corner booth facing away from all the other lunch patrons. The chicken was tasty, but I had to take great care not to chew up my tongue or cheek, which had the same texture as my chicken.

As I left the restaurant on food, this older black woman wearing a Long John Silver’s uniform came outside and cautioned me to take it easy in this heat, and to find every shade tree along my route that I could. I thanked her for her kindness and ambled along the two blocks back to E3K, seeking shade trees along my short route.

The afternoon went much as the morning had — the horribly painful shots, the tag-team zapping on opposite parts of my face, the increasingly annoying position in the chair. Eventually, we were done, and what a glorious statement that is for the patient to hear. We did all of my face and jaw and went a ways down below my jaw onto my neck, where my black hairs are virtually non-existent. In 8 weeks, I’ll return and we’ll do the whole face and neck.

Tisha took me to my hotel room, where I applied an ice bag and took some ibuprofen, but honestly, no amount of medical tending will change the fact that I received 14 hours of electrolysis on my face in one sitting (7 hours times 2 operators).

I walked over to a sports bar called Cape Buffalo for a beer, it being the only eating establishment around, and I drank a couple of very tasty beers and ate a huge, stuffed, baked potato. It was a smoky, annoying place, the kind of joint I might have enjoyed when I was 22. Most of the customers were in their 20’s and perhaps their 30’s, and the decor was supposed to be cool, but it simply struck me as trying (but falling short) for coolness. The most interesting part of the evening (besides a brief discussion with this 40-something bartender about the existence of a tomato-juice flavored vodka) was that a couple sat right next to me at the bar and started (and maintained) an increasingly heated argument about breaking up, some of it in English, some in French (she kept saying jamais, or never), and some in a middle eastern language. The guy was apparently clueless and the woman got increasingly frustrated with him, recounting all sorts of wrongs and slights in the past.

As fun as eavesdropping was, I felt the swelling in my face and the fatigue in my body, so I walked the two blocks back to my hotel, applied more ice, and got a good night’s sleep. Upon waking, I felt my face (or I should say I felt something like a large balloon that an overnight prankster had placed on my face) and jumped out of bed to see freakish, inflated lips, cheeks, chin, and jaw. I looked like a cartoon, and the sad thing was I was out of ice. I put a cold washcloth on my face and while it felt good, I don’t think it achieved much reduction in swelling. Not wanting to sit around any longer, I called for a cab to the Addison airport, took 4 ibuprofins, and vowed to deal with this when I returned to Bedford Falls.

There's Got to be a Morning After

The trip home was pleasant as I skirted the puffy cumulus clouds blown into the Dallas area by Hurricane Dolly. The clouds petered out by half way and I had a great tailwind as I averaged 165 kts. When we met for lunch at an Indian food lunch buffet, I could tell that Mary Jo could barely contain her laughter at seeing my face. I think it’s funny, too — in a few short days, I’ve gone from regular old Joyce to androgynous George to monstrous, cartoon George, and it feels like I’m backsliding. Or maybe I’m just pleased that for once during this transition, I actually get to embody the monster that I have sometimes felt I am. It’s not bad for a few days, but just as the physical monster recedes, I believe the psychological monster that I am (or that I imagine others see in me) will also vanish until all we’re left with are writings and photographs from the past.

[See also

"What is Laser Like?"

and

"What is Electrolysis Like?"]

 

Same as it Ever Was?

With Mary Jo at an equestrian event and the boys over at the Rapido household playing all day, I found myself reading this blog and my trans* oriented correspondence from the beginning. I was surprised to feel quite a lot of sympathy for the writer, who was obviously struggling in the beginning to find her voice, fumbling along in the first few months. Along the way, however, I believe I have found a good voice, stumbling upon it perhaps in November or December.

What’s really strange about reading this chronicle is that sometimes I feel like I’m on auto-pilot, or that there’s a prime mover or a puppeteer making things happen and I’m only along for the ride, kind of sleep walking in a hazy and surreal existence. In other words, I know I have deliberated and reasoned the various decisions I’ve made, but having done these things (hormones, therapy, FFS, laser, electrolysis, coming out, full-time, etc.), I sometimes don’t remember having been as deliberate as I believe I was.

I can think of hundreds of moments — epiphanies, if you want — where I find myself a bit surprised at how I look or what I’m doing. I find myself in a hotel lobby with a hundred trans*people and ask myself what brought me here? Or I’m chatting with a mechanic about a flat tire, and then it strikes me that I’m someone different — I’m in drag…no, wait, it’s not drag, it’s normal. It’s like the Talking Heads song “Once In A Lifetime,” about those moments of shock when you ask yourself “Well, how did I get here?” or “My God, what have I done?”

At the same time, having written and thought and processed every minute facet of my life and relationships, it seems unlikely that this is truly some kind of auto-pilot, but maybe the kind of forgetfulness that comes from great struggle like childbirth or wilderness survival or extreme grief. Maybe this forgetfulness comes from the fact that there is no time to pause because we’re careening around a track and it’s very important to have eyes forward, scanning back and forth for the next problem to present itself. If this is the case, then the paradox is that while a transsexual transition is most definitely a long-term project, the transitioner in question employs a relatively short-range focus that involves close relationships, the next hormone appointment, the state of her beard, and the constant anxiety about whether she’ll “pass” today or not.

Both the past and the distant future fall away in a haze like the curvature of the earth, and I find that despite living and breathing and thinking gender for quite some time, I find that I an fairly confused about what it means to be moving towards my goal of being a woman.

There is no doubt I’m a real transsexual, but a woman? I’m not so certain — perhaps I’m a faux woman because I feel I’ll always be a transsexual and never a real woman. How could I, with 48 years as a boy and man and husband and father? Intellectually, I don’t really mind because I think trans* is a legitimate category of human being, someone with an interesting past, like your friend who tells you over cocktails that they used to live in the circus — who isn’t attracted to that sort of history?

The more I reflect on the subject, however, I suspect it’s probably not a matter of real vs. faux, but rather real vs. idealized. During a lifetime of envying the other sex’s bodies, I think many transsexuals have spent so much time imagining an idealized body (female or male, depending on your flavor of trans* dysphoria) that when we finally take steps to do something about it, being a “real woman” (or a “real man”) carries risks of not being enough, of not being able to match that lifetime of imagining. We complain about being too tall, too short, of not having big enough hips, or too-large shoulders, and in doing so, we aren’t really in the realm of trans* psychology, but rather in the realm of body image issues, where we have a picture of the ideal (from our friends, advertising, movies, magazines, and so on), and we feel deficient in our “real” bodies.

When I complain about having no hips or no waist, my women friends rattle off their various imperfections and say something like “welcome to the club.” Maybe that’s the way to emerge out of the transsexual transition, accepting the fact that I, like real women, have to accept a real and imperfect body and to find comfort in who I am. If you’re short, you make “short” work for you — if you’re big, you embrace your bigness and make it work for you. I see photos of myself and I like my smile and I think I’m genuinely happy and project confidence in the new me, so I know that at some deep biological and psychological level, I have come to a spot of peace with myself. Maybe I should just say this is my body, and this is what I’ve got to work with: tallish, thin, striking features, and an interesting history?

For those of us engaged in a transsexual transition, it’s important to get out of that short-term forgetfulness, perplexity, and fixation on today’s body, hair, clothes, and work hard to be mindful of how we got here and also how we’re going to live our lives after all this dramatic turmoil is over. I don’t think we want life to be the same as it ever was, an unbroken chain of repetitive thoughts and fears that keep us stuck in fretful sleepwalking and confusion. We want to see clearly with eyes of the world opened to our past and our futures, awake, alert, and content.

 

Reflection on My Reflection

I visited my local doctor yesterday for a follow-up because he wanted to see how I was recovering from FFS in Boston. When he came in the room, he said he thought I looked both dramatically different and also subtly changed.

This seeming paradox is hard to explain — how can you be both radically different and subtly the same? Transsexuals (and many of their friends) expect to see someone different emerge in 4 weeks time, and this expectation is simply unrealistic: if you expect to be a different person after FFS, you’ll be disappointed. The key to this paradox is that what you see in the mirror (or what your friends and family see when they look at you) is greatly dependent on what you’re looking for. If, for example, you’re looking for traces of your old face, then that’s all you’ll see, and you’ll wonder just what you spent that FFS money for. On the other hand, if you’re looking for flickerings of your new face, interrogating yourself if the face says “female” yet, that’s what you’ll see, too. The truth (if “truth” is a word we can use in this situation) is that your changes lie somewhere in between the extremes of “nothing has changed” and “everything is different.”

The new face is obviously a continuation of the old face — we don’t make a clean break from our past, and we who went under the knife are perhaps the worst to judge how we look. Psychologically, we will always carry our body history with us so that the reflection is never, never how we really look. And in terms of simple healing, it takes months and months of extremely subtle changes before your face finally settles down into its shape.

Changing one’s sex is a long, expensive, and emotionally draining business, and I find that I am already mentally moving along to other things. It is simply not productive to sit around staring in the mirror waiting for clues of my new face. This new face, like my body, my hormones, my clothes, will evolve, and I’m sure I’ll catch myself from time to time and say, “Wow, I really look different.” I already see it frequently these days — 18 months of hormones have substantially changed me. But if I plant myself in front of a mirror to take stock of my changes, I cannot see anything different about me. Where I do feel the differences is when I catch short glimpses in the reflections of windows, mirrors, or photographs, and in these cases, I find that I’m quite surprised. For example, I saw some photos that Mary Jo took while our family was at the Grand Canyon the other day, and we were previewing them on the digital camera. I came across one of a woman standing with the broad vista of the canyon behind her, and I assumed Mary Jo had taken a picture of some random woman, and I asked, “who’s that?” I looked more carefully and realized it was me! What an odd feeling it was, but it vanished quickly and the figure became me and the strangeness of her look faded until it was just plain old me again.

I suppose this is the way it is with any of our life changes, not just the transsexual ones. We don’t notice getting older until we see a picture of us from 10 or 20 years ago, and suddenly, there they are, the cumulative changes staring you in the face. We see our changes in photos and we catch them in the momentary glimpses of mirrors that reveal the disconnect between how we think of ourselves and how we actually are.

There’s really nothing to be done about it — we can run and run to try to stop changes, whether they be brought about through aging or experience or transsexual transitions. We can fear these changes or we can love the changes. As transsexuals, we can become obsessed with them, with moving along faster, with constant change, perhaps making up for a feeling of having been congealed for so much of our lives, but no matter how impatient we are, what will happen is that we will run headlong into the inevitable fact of the slowness of changing sexes, every day a hundredth of a percent change, imperceptible but also inevitable.

But time scales behave oddly because of the relative nature of how we perceive time. For my own part, I feel time moving both slowly and quickly, depending on what I’m doing or thinking about, but I think most my friends see my changes as a runaway freight train. Think of it — by the time they were brought into my confidence, my crisis was already peaking, and they only caught the end of it. For them, the time-lapse photography seemed to happen in an instant: bearded George one month, beardless George the next month, androgynous George another month, and then Joyce the next month. Perhaps it has been disruptive, my sense of the time scale bumping up against theirs, my reflection on my progress at odds with their direct view of events. It must be a bit like reading about Alice as she looks at her mirror, pretending that

“the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare.”… And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

When she has gone through to the other side, she says something my friends might say about me during this past few months as they have caught that last glimpses of George vanishing through the transsexual mirror: “I feel somehow as if I was getting invisible—”

 

Facing East (part 2)

After coffee and packing, I set about planning my trip home today, settling on the wig for headgear since it’s not tight at all on my scar. I can’t wear eye makeup, but I can try to cover my bruises with foundation later in the day before I travel — so everything but foundation and blush got packed before my appointment. Picked a couple of outfits and packed everything else so that when I got back from my morning appointment, I wouldn’t have anything to do except rest for a bit, then go to the airport for my 4:00 flight.

I took a cab when I discovered that all my careful requests about the hotel shuttle had apparently been ignored, and met with Dr. Spiegel’s team of doctors and nurses to remove my staples and stitches and to talk about post-operative care. The staples aren’t bad, but some of the stitches were. The stitches under my nose weren’t bad at all. Prying off my nose cast was more difficult than usual, for it seems that many patients don’t follow instructions and get it wet. We had to go with adhesive dissolver to finally make progress.

Dr. Spiegel said that all looked well and recommended some gentle massage around my nose and chin over the next few weeks, but he seemed pleased with the scalp advance and the nose, especially. He had no comment on the lips or eyes, and confirmed that swelling in the jaw and chin proceeds on its own pace, quite differently from other parts of the operation. He asked his assistant to give me a couple of dissolving stitches in my head, two on either side, to assist me in traveling today, and requested that I wear an Ace bandage for my face instead of a fashionable scarf or wig.

Questions I had:
numbness on lower lip and chin — they’ll go away over a few weeks to a few months
those damned dissolving stitches in my mouth — another week
eye bloodiness — it’s inside the eye, could be a couple of weeks
followup care for scalp — next summer I might do my last hair transplant
resume electrolysis — immediately on non-scar areas and 3-4 weeks on scar areas
asymmetry — due to asymmetric swelling — massage and time will align everything

So the Boston trip is finished, not quite as bad as I had expected. Here I am before some non-eye makeup and off to the airport:

Not having a photo i.d. (Mary Jo kept it during surgery and forgot to give it to me), I left for the airport at 12:30 for my 4:00 flight carrying all my other I.D. cards and an envelope of $1 bills for tips, as I was not about to carry my stuff myself.