My trip to the CAMH support group, Part 1

I got riled up about CAMH being proposed as the gatekeeper for SRS (sex reassignment surgery), which is being re-listed for coverage under Ontario's health care system.

I really don't like the CAMH Gender Identity Clinic! I think they hurt me, they wasted my time, and they made my family's journey harder. I think their views are hopelessly out-dated, and they're too conservative to change them. I'm surprised they still exist, actually. They're a relic from the days when Sexologists were in charge of providing care for trans people, as though we were insane sexual perverts. This model for care is hugely outdated and needlessly demeaning and demoralizing.

CAMH has upset me so much that I'm upset with them for getting me so upset! I think they tried to offer me some help, and normally I would be able to find some way to forgive anyone with good intentions. I don't expect very much of people, so it's hard to end up in my bad books.

But those fuckers at CAMH really hurt me. I spent 18 months in total crisis. It was hell for me, and for my almost-ex-wife, and my family. Several of those months could have been avoided had CAMH not entered the picture.

Their pathologizing, sexologizing modality dovetailed with my self-loathing and self-denial, and ratcheted up the unbearable tension inside me.

Instead of encouraging me to find the best way forward for myself, they encouraged me to concentrate on minimizing my transness. They diagnosed me with Gender Identity Disorder, acknowledged that I felt a severe degree of gender dysphoria, but encouraged me to view transition as a last resort that would almost certainly leave me lonely and marginally employable.

Dr. Dickie, the only physician at the CAMH Gender Clinic these days, is a part-time resource. His main job is to be head of General Sexology at CAMH, and he also has a professorship with U of T, I believe. He told me I was hopelessly in the grips of my screwed-up sexuality, and that I was a "shoo-in" because of my small hands and stature. This was before the letter that told me not to transition.

Facing huge losses in my personal life, and supported by no one, including my care giver, I fought my transition. I remember knowing the whole while, at some level, that I had to transition. That certainty never wavered. I threw everything I had at it, and it just sat there completely impervious. I resent and regret all the lies I told myself and others (my SO in particular) as I tried to hold each successive line in the sand on my ass-backward tumble from man to transsexual.

The result? I finally came to accept that I needed to transition, and my head started to clear. Had I started out in trans-positive care, I think that process could have been easier, and maybe less painful.

I think the negative influence they had on my life borders on malpractice. Care-givers who are up-to-date in their profession don't tell trans people to deny themselves as much as possible!

Where does they get off posing as experts, while disagreeing with all the rest of the experts in the world save a couple of whackos (e.g. Dr. Bailey at Northwestern)? This is like being a Global Climate Change skeptic, persisting in pretending that reality and an overwhelming opposing consensus hasn't put you out of business.

Dang! I've devoted all my time to ranting about my first time through that place. Tomorrow, I'll tell you about yesterday, when, even though I loaded up on weed and clonazepam in an attempt to calm myself a little, I went into that little meanly furnished meeting room at the Clarke building with both guns blazing.

Stop hating me because I'm not hideously ugly

I have the mixed, but mostly good fortune of being a fairly attractive person. I was hot as a man, and I'm still borderline-hot as a trans woman. I'm also lucky enough to be 5'8" with a size 10 shoe, so my size isn't a big tell.

This is the best photo of me as a woman. In fact, it is the only photo I like. It was taken at a fashion show that my lovely friend S. persuaded me to model in. They straightened my normally curly hair, and slathered makeup all over my face in a professional way, and I ended up looking pretty good!


Being a passably attractive trans woman is a mixed bag. I wouldn't choose to be less attractive, but it's not the bed of roses you might imagine.

The good:
I look good, and I feel good as a result. More valuable--and this one makes me feel guilty as hell--is that because I look ok as a woman, it seems to be easier for people to accept me as a woman.

The bad:
I'm not inconspicuous. People look at me, and the majority of those people clock me. So, walking down the street, I can sometimes feel the envelope of cognitive dissonance around me as others are confused by my gender and presentation.

The other bad seems to be that other trans women tend to look at me like they want to strangle me. I can understand the way they feel. I won the looks lottery as a trans woman, and many trans women struggle very hard in life thanks in part to their looks.

I'm heading over to the CAMH support group this evening. It should be interesting. I bet there'll be a full house. Lots of people are going to want to talk about surgery and OHIP coverage. I'm not looking forward to those I-want-to-strangle-you-your-struggle-isn't-real looks. That's bullshit. My struggle is still a fucking struggle!

Living suspended in our loss

My almost-ex-wife G. and I live suspended in our loss. We hung onto each other so tightly, and loved each other so urgently, that we managed to hold our marriage together through my entire crisis (eighteen months of craziness!).

Finally, the dust settled, and there I was: a trans woman waiting to go on hormones. She's a straight woman who seems to be a lesbian magnet, but she's so disinterested she's turned down every opportunity.

I couldn't compromise on my gender, and she couldn't compromise on her het-ness. On top of that, she hated living with my transition because it makes me crazy and "others" her by association--being my spouse means looking pretty queer. She must have hated those raised eyebrows. It's unbearably frustrating to feel someone else passing judgment on you without any conversation or chance to explain the context. My straight wife hated feeling those (fairly rare) stares that get directed at queers, especially those as openly trans as me.

Finally, after much therapy, we could no longer avoid the heart-rending truth: despite our love, our marriage couldn't work. I knew I was wrong for her, and she knew that I needed to transition. So we mutually, amicably, very sadly, agreed to split up.

And now we live inside our loss, trying to build a new relationship as friends and co-parents, both still loving the other, wishing she could make it work, but unshakably confident that it can't work.

It puts me in mind of a post-apocalyptic existence, holed up in the ruins of your once happy home, bravely making what use you can of the partially wrecked structure.

Tonight I'm throwing a house-warming party at my new place, and I'm simultaneously liquidating my guy clothes. When I think about the idea of inviting people over to celebrate this deeply unsatisfactory compromise I've been forced to accept, I feel like screaming. But getting better demands moving forward, and celebrating the person I am becoming. I spend more than enough time mourning the loss of the life I had.

My partial passability can be confusing

Yesterday, I found myself in Richmond Hill, a sprawling suburb to the north of the city. The best coffee going was Starbucks, and so I was in Starbucks, getting a coffee.

I suspected that the woman behind the counter clocked me as trans when she took my order. When she turned to make my coffee, her colleague dragged himself from his perch on a stool, and started manning the cash.

When he had finished processing my payment, she tried to tell him about the slice of cake I had ordered.

"He has a pastry too," she said, somewhat awkwardly (me being not much of a he), over the sound of the machines. It's too bad that people don't naturally guess that using target-gender pronouns works better (i.e. it's easier and more respectful to call me "she").

So far as he could tell, there were no men in the place. He stared at her like she had gone completely crazy, and said "what?"

She looked at him, wondering when he had lost his ability to turn and pass me a pastry.

He smiled encouragingly, clearly wanting to help.

I looked at her sternly, trying to do my best Ben Kenobi. "Just hand me the pastry," I said, leaning forward. She and he were equidistant from the pastry case. It wasn't an implausible solution, but she hesitated. "Just hand me the pastry," I said again.

So she handed me the pastry, and the boy turned to take the order of the woman behind me in line, and the cognitive dissonance clouding the air disappeared.

When I caught up with her at the little orange circle of counter Starbucks likes to perch completed beverage orders on, I explained myself. "I don't think your colleague had noticed I'm trans. That's why I interceded there."

She looked at me confusedly (they don't get a lot of trannies using words like 'intercede' in conversation in Richmond Hill), so I repeated myself. "I don't think he noticed I'm trans. That was why that was confusing."

"Oh, sorry!"

"It's ok. It's confusing. I'm used to it. It's easier if you just call me 'she.'"

She didn't respond, and that felt like the appropriate response to me. Having discussed my gender status, we had already gone deeper than our customer-barista relationship really ought to.

She slid the coffee onto the orange surface, and we both said "thanks," as Canadians often do at the end of service interactions. I picked up my coffee and headed for the door.

Hating hating myself

The feeling I hate the most is the self-loathing. I hate it. It’s not the self-loathing of the apathetic, although it sometimes touches down there briefly. This is the self-loathing of the freak. The problem. The black sheep who just couldn’t ever get it right, and has now finally gone and fucked it up beyond all imagining.

That’s not the way that my family or friends feel; that’s how I feel about myself. Silent screaming hatred.

It feels like all sorts of awful things. Like I want to collapse. Like I want to grab hold of the hair at the back of my head, and rip off my scalp and face in one forward and downward yanking motion. Like I want to stab a knife in my chest near my heart, on an angle, and rotate the handle in a circle like I’m cutting and eye out of a potato. Like hopelessness. Like when I try to grab hold of my being, there’s a hole in my fabric, and my hand passes through. An old wound.

It’s old hatred. It’s like I created this monster to patrol my gender boundaries: a reflexive torrent of self-loathing. And now I have no more use for it, but it still performs its function. Not all the time, since I’ve spent two years dismantling the fucker, but now I’m right in the line of fire when the hatred starts to build.

I have become exactly the way I was never supposed to be. Imagine the fury that patrolling part of me feels at failing in its only task—the task it was created for—protecting my manhood and normalcy. I have scorned my own automaton, and turned my back on its work. So it, part of me, rains its hatred on the way I need to be.

Dusting off the blog

For a while, my keenness for blogging disappeared. Life was far too complex and shitty. W. and I were desperately trying to hold our marriage together. Everything seemed too painful and too fraught to muse about in a public forum, even anonymously.

It had been so long since I had felt like posting, I had pretty much given up on the blog for good, even though I like the name. But suddenly, today, I was imbued with motivation to dust this thing off and start again.

Some recent news and events

• My marriage is over, which saddens me desperately, but the split is amicable, and that's a silver lining of sorts.
• I am out to basically everyone in the world except my son. We don't want him to blame my transition for our separation (though he would be on the right track). So I'm holding tight while he absorbs the separation before I drop the gender change idea in his lap.
• I am on androgen-blockers. They have definitely started to make a difference, but all that does is put me closer, but still agonizingly short or my goal. Female hormones will probably start in mid-summer.
  
• Psychologically, I no longer feel like I'm on a runaway roller coaster every second of every day. Now it's intermittent, and at other times, I actually feel like a functioning person. This is good fucking news! :)