Tag: Euphoria

My Hero’s Journey, So Far

Here is how my gender journey lines up with the Hero’s Journey. Missed my previous post about Gender Transition as a Hero’s Journey? Check that out first and then come back to read my story.

ORDINARY WORLD

When my husband started being identified as a man by strangers, their ingrained heteronormative views told them that I must be a woman. I started getting treated as more feminine when we were together and this didn’t sit right with me.

I had never been comfortable with the term lesbian, and instead had always called myself gay or queer.

In grade 10 I had a gender fluid experience where I would feel like a boy named Ray for a few days every few weeks, shifting back to feeling like a girl named Meaghan in between.

I grew up in a very liberal and supportive environment but at the inception of my gender journey I had moved away and was working in a more conservative and very hetero- and cis-normative environment.

CALL TO ADVENTURE

Part way through my husband’s transition, I realized that I was definitely experiencing dysphoria as well. We had been attending local PFLaG meetings and had been listening to people describe a range of identities and experiences. Some of these, especially the more androgenous, gender neutral, gender fluid, and nonbinary ones, really resonated with me.

REFUSAL OF THE CALL

However, my husband was still in the middle of navigating how to get top surgery, how to change all his legal documentation, and what to do about continually being misgendered at work, months after coming out. From witnessing his experiences and hearing about similar experiences from the community, I knew that exploring your gender and clarifying for yourself who you are and what you need to feel authentic can make not having those things feel a whole lot worse.

Knowing that my husband still needed a lot of my support and I was not working in an environment that would be condusive to coming out as nonbinary, I decided to put off all gender related self-discovery for the time being.

MEETING THE MENTOR

As soon as my husband felt fairly stable in his transition, he encouraged me to do my own gender exploration work. As a result of his transition, he finally felt ready to be a parent (being able to picture himself as a dad instead of a mom) but also did not want to be the one to be pregnant. This meant that, if possible, I would be the carrying and birthing parent.

There is so much unknown and out of your control in the process of trying to conceive, pregnancy, and birthing. I didn’t want gender related feelings to be one more. So I started to explore what felt not so great, what felt awesome, and how my gender felt on a daily basis.

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD

Turns out I am nonbinary. I discovered that I have both female and male genders which balance out to an overall experience that is a mix of the two or ‘somewhere in the middle’. I discovered that I do have some physical dysphoria during which times I feel better if I wear a binder (if my body can tolerate it). I discovered that I have significant social dysphoria and feel much better when referred to using they/them pronouns and neutral language.

The physical dysphoria I could manage pretty well with some practice. The social dysphoria was a whole other story, especially at work.

TESTS, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES

Partly as a result of constant social dysphoria, I started expriencing periods of burnout that would last 1-2 months and re-occur every 4-6 months.

I had a few new colleagues at work that were queer and super supportive and a few others that I slowly built friendships with and eventually came out to. These allies, especially at work, were a major help on bad dysphoria days.

I had a colleague who was also a friend come out as nonbinary. Unfortunately, the support from the management team was not in place and did not appear when they needed it. There were very few allies around them and they were continually misgendered, had repeated conflicts with coworkers, and ultimately moved to a different job. As an example of what it would be like for me to come out at work, it was a pretty clear one.

Navigating the world of fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum as a nonbinary person is extremely difficult. There were times I found community and resources and felt like I could belong. There were also times that were nauseating and traumatic that I will carry with me for life.

APPROACH TO THE INNERMOST CAVE

While I was on parental leave (for a whole year – go Canada!), and in the middle of a global pandemic, I had minimal interaction with the outside world unless I reached out for it. I had significantly less dysphoria and significantly less burnout, despite being a new parent in a pandemic. This told me that my burnout was indeed primarily dysphoria related and in order to feel more comfortable in my life, and have the emotional reserve I wanted and needed to support my child, I would need to make some changes. I would need to find spaces that I was comfortable being out in. And I would need to be out in as many spaces as I could.

This was especially true around family. I wanted my kid to grow up hearing people refer to me using the correct pronouns. This meant I would first have to explain my identity to everyone my kid would be interacting with regularly (namely family) and train everyone to use my pronouns and preferred language. This would take time and my kid was growing up at a steady pace. I had to come out to family before my kid started understanding what pronouns meant and remembering and repeating phrases from those around them.

THE ORDEAL

The first step I took was to apply to a graduate school program using my preferred name, pronouns, and gender identity. I was open with my supervisor from the beginning and made it clear in my application that my identity and lived experience was a big part of why I wanted to do research work. This meant that in September, when I started school, I had the foundation and backup to expect that everyone refer to me correctly. When they don’t, I have significantly more confidence to correct them than I ever have in other environments.

When my kid was about ten months old, I bit the bullet and came out to my in-laws (who live near us) and my parents (who live across the country but were coming for a month-long visit). I did this via email with the hope of some reply, either of support or questions or concerns that I could respond to. Mostly, there was silence and confusion. I had a brief follow up conversation with my in-laws and, after a period of awkwardnes and tension, saw some awereness and progress. My sister had many follow up conversations with my parents on my behalf but I had minimal expectation that they would be able to/willing to follow through and change their use of pronouns for me during their visit.

However, their visit happened to coincide with work I was doing to develop inclusive training material for a health professions college. They were curious about my work which gave me an opening to talk about many of the issues trans people face in health care settings (mostly related to ignorance and being misgendered). The materials I was developing included a ‘bad’ version of a health care interaction and a ‘good’ version. I sent them both versions and we had a few conversations about why the ‘bad’ version was ‘bad’ and why it was important to interact in ways that were depicted in the ‘good’ version. They were able to grasp these concepts significantly better than the information my sister had attempted to explain, perhaps because it wasn’t directly about them and thus did not make them feel as defensive. They almost immediately started making an effort to use my correct pronouns. While they weren’t great at it, and they will likely back-slide between in-person visits, this was more progress than I expected and I took it as a positive sign.

REWARD

It’s an increadible feeling, being seen. It’s even better when you don’t have to fight for it first. I now have numerous allys who actively step in to do the educating and, if necessary, fighting, on my behalf. I am better at advocating for myself (or getting better at it slowly), and better at identifying situations where having an ally would be useful and then recruiting one.

Confidence, euphoria, authenticity, and visibility are pretty good rewards. Do I wish I didn’t have to fight for them? Sure. But it’s still worth the fight.

THE ROAD BACK

I now spend the majority of my time working in an inclusive environment with my name and pronouns displayed correctly on my zoom screen during ‘meetings’. I have more bandwidth to apply to my work and family. I have not had a period of burnout in over a year despite having a baby during a pandemic. I am able to exercise despite the accompanying dysphoria because, for the majority of the time, I experience more euphoria than dysphoria. I can recover easily from the few days I spend in my previous work environment where I am still not out (and likely will never be).

I am using my unique experiences and perspective to help others make their work more inclusive. I am being recognized for the value of my experiences and identity rather than ‘supported’ or ‘accommodated’.

I am thinking about the future and what I might want for myself in my transition. Are there ‘next steps’? I have a long road to recovery from pregnancy related body changes and have chosen to focus on this prior to pursuing anything further related to transition. Though, likely, at some unknown point in the future, I would like to have some form of top surgery. Will this be my ‘Ressurection’? Who knows! If you stay tuned, you’ll likely find out when I do!

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Gender Transition as a Hero’s Journey

The heroes in our favourite stories all start out as ordinary people. Their journeys often follow a similar pattern as they face trials and tribulations, discover their inner strength, and return triumphant. Joseph Campbell orginally described this story arc using 17 stages (and fairly problematic language). It has since been revised into 12 stages, most recently by Christopher Vogler.

As it turns out, these stages match the emotional stages of a gender transition pretty closely. Which means trans people are all heroes or heroes-in-training!

Here’s how it looks:

There are three parts: Departure (the beginning), Initiation (the middle), and Return (the end). These are broken down into the 12 stages.

The journey starts with the hero in the ordinary world living in a harsh and unforgiving external light in a state of unhappiness, stress, ignorance, and/or confusion.

They move to a new, extraordinary, or special world during the Initiation phase. Here they move through darkness as they struggle to discover their own internal source of light.

They then return to the ordinary world in a state of triumph and rebirth, having learned how to shine brightly from withinwith. They now have a new perspective, skill, or, in our case, identity.

As I was thinking about the steps in the Hero’s Journey and lining them up with the experience of gender transition, it was interesting how easy it was to see. Some of the original wording even makes sense without changing much except the context.

Let’s break it down and look at each of the twelve steps:

Stage 1: Ordinary World

Classic: The hero is uneasy, uncomfortable or unaware. They are living a life at the mercy of their enviornment, heredity, and personal history. The hero feels pulled in different directions and is stressed by the dilemma.

Trans: You are living with confusion and discomfort, just trying to get by with no language or understanding of why you feel different, that there is a way to relieve your distress, or what path your life is going to take.

Stage 2: Call to Adventure

Classic: Something shakes up the situation, either from external pressures or from something rising up from deep within, so the hero must face the beginnings of change.

Trans: You discover that your discomfort might be gender related by meeting a trans person, seeing a trans person represented in media, or learning about language, labels, or experiences that feel right for you.

Stage 3: Refusal of the Call

Classic: The hero feels the fear of the unknown and tries to turn away from the adventure, however briefly. This uncertainty may be voiced by someone else rather than the hero themself.

Trans: You have immense fear about the enormity of what this would mean for your life. This fear takes over and you ignore what you have just learned, bury the knowledge deep down, convince yourself that you don’t need to transition or don’t need to think about this. You try as hard as you can to fit in with what is expected of you or numb/ignore this awareness.

Stage 4: Meeting the Mentor

Classic: The hero comes across a seasoned traveler of the worlds who gives them training, equipment, or advice that will help on the journey. Or the hero reaches within to a mentor from their past or an internal source of courage and wisdom.

Trans: You meet someone who sees you for who you are and encourages you to delve into yourself. This could be a trans or queer person from the community who is living their best life and provides the experience and support you need, a therapist that starts helping you unpack your gender identity and dysphoria, or a close friend or family member who is no longer willing to let you hide from your truth.

Stage 5: Crossing the Threshold

Classic: The hero commits to leaving the ordinary world and entering a new region or condition with unfamiliar rules and values.

Trans: You come out to yourself, accepting yourself for who you are, accepting your true authentic gender identity. You are flooded by understanding, fear, excitement, confusion, discomfort, and determination.

Stage 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies

Classic: The hero is tested and sorts out allegiances in the new, special world.

Trans: You now know why you’ve felt uncomfortable your whole life and being able to point to and name dysphoria makes it so much bigger, louder, and more constant. You search the internet for trans information and find a huge community on social media platforms and many local and national organizations that offer support. At the same time, you start recognizing all the transphobic and cisnormative language around you and feel like no one in your life will accept you for who you are.

Stage 7: Approach to the Innermost Cave

Classic: The hero and newfound allies prepare for the major challenge in the special world.

Trans: You collect information from allies about coming out and navigating transition which helps you clarify for yourself what you want/need. This intensifies the dysphoria which gets harder and harder to deal with, especially when you haven’t told anyone yet. The internal pressure of knowing what you want, who you are, and how you want to be seen builds, pushing against the confines of the closet until…

Stage 8: Ordeal

Classic: The hero enters a central space in the special world and confronts death or faces their greatest fear. Out of this moment of ‘death’ comes a new life.

Trans: You decide that coming out is worth the risk, worth the loss of those that don’t support you, worth the potential harm in order to be who you are. You take the first steps to telling others who you are, breaking down that wall one brick at a time, or by driving a bulldozer straight through it and coming out to everyone at once.

Stage 9: Reward (Seizing the Sword)

Classic: The hero takes possession of the treasure they won by facing death. There may be celebration, but there is also danger of losing the treasure again.

Trans: Some people you come out to start using your correct name and pronouns and you have your first real taste of gender euphoria and what it could feel like to live as the person you are. Not everyone is supportive or consistent and dysphoria continues to fight it’s way in. You fight to hold onto your confidence in who you are and your resolve to seek what you need, using the bursts of gender euphoria as your guiding light.

Stage 10: The Road Back

Classic: The hero is driven to complete the adventure, leaving the special world to be sure the treasure is brought home. Often a chase scene signals the urgency and danger of the mission.

Trans: You learn how to integrate your new trans identity with your life at work, home, and school, with friends and family, and in social activities, hobbies, and sports. You struggle to navigate and access the medical care and legal services you want/need in order to be safe and feel authentic in your body and identity. You are desperate for the changes and progress yet they happen at a maddeningly slow pace.

Stage 11: Resurrection

Classic: The hero is tested once more on the threshold of home. They are pruified by a last sacrifice, another moment of death and rebirth, but on a higher and more complete level. By the hero’s action, the polarities that were in conflict at the beginning are finally resolved.

Trans: You start to recognize the person in the mirror, be recognized correctly by people around you more often than not, and feel more comfortable in your body. You come up to and cross a milestone of significance for you in your transition (starting hormones, top surgery, changing your gender marker, bottom surgery, etc) with all the doubt, fear, excitement, relief, pain, re-learning, and celebrating that comes with it.

Stage 12: Return with the Elixir

Classic: The hero returns home or continues the journey, bearing some element of the treasure that has the power to transform the world as the hero has been transformed.

Trans: You reach a sense of completion related to your transition or have found confidence and peace in the sense of an ongoing and lifelong gender discovery and evolution. You are living authentically, supporting others who are questioning their gender or know someone who is, expanding your society’s view of gender and authenticity, and maybe even advocating for trans rights. Huzzah!

What an epic journey! Can you see yourself, or the trans person you love, as a hero? What stage of your Hero’s Journey are you at?

I know everyone’s transition is different. Are there stages that line up differently based on your experience?

If you add in specific details that match your own experience, what story does it tell? Who were the mentor, allies, and enemies? What tests did you face? What treasure do you carry with you to this day? What final milestone did you face and overcome during your stage of resurrection?

What was the timeline of each stage, and the journey as a whole? Did it progress in a linear fashion the way it sounds like it would here?

Share your story in the comments or send it to me in an email! If you’re willing to share it, I’ll publish it here as a post! The more stories the better. We need more variety of trans experiences and we need more trans heroes!

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Trans Affirmations

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

My experience is real.
My experience, my identity, and my life have value. 
I deserve to take up space.

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

I do not owe anyone an explanation of my gender. 
I have control over my own identity. 
I have a right to any label that feels right for me.

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

I do not owe anyone an explanation of my transition process.
There is no 'right way' to be trans.
My transition is my own process and I don't need to compare to anyone else. 
I am proud of who I am and who I am becoming. 

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

While I am trying to avoid dysphoria, I will seek out gender euphoria.
I will seek out what feels right. 
I will do what makes me feel whole. 

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

I love my body for being my vessel in this world. 
My body belongs to me and no one else. 
My body is capable of amazing things. 

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

I am strong.
I am beautiful.
I am worthy of love.
I am enough.

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

I can do this. 
One step at a time. 
I will go at my own pace. 

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

I am allowed to be scared. 
I am allowed to let people assume I am cis.
Doing this does not make me a coward. 
Doing this does not make me less trans. 

I am important. 
My voice matters. 

There is a community out there that understands and supports me.
When I have the energy, I will advocate for myself and my community.
When I do not, I will find ways to protect, care for, and be kind to myself.

Because I am important. 
And my voice matters.

What words do you find affirming? What do you remind yourself of in the face of transphobic politics, family members, and workplaces? Add your words of strength, encouragement, and assurance to mine by leaving a comment.

I’d love to have you in my community. Receive new posts in your inbox, read about my experiences, reach out.

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How Dysphoria Contributes to Burnout and What You Can Do About It

WHAT IS BURNOUT?

I have struggled with cycles of burnout for many years now. For a long time I felt like I was making it up, or being lazy, or finding an excuse to avoid the mundane but challenging parts of everyday life. Very little of what I was feeling matched the symptoms of depression but that was the closest I felt like I could come. Until I heard about burnout.

When I’m in a state of burnout, the thought that keeps going through my mind is ‘I just don’t care’. I know I should, and usually do, but I can’t muster up the emotional energy to engage with almost all aspects of life. This is not me. In this state, I don’t feel like myself. And because I don’t have the energy to care, it is very hard to make myself do the things that will help me get out of the state of burnout.

I feel numb, heavy, and drawn to escapism. It feels like the world is happening around me and I’m just going through the motions. I don’t keep up with house chores, I eat less and more poorly, I socialize less, I exercise less (usually not at all), I am often late, and my productivity at work decreases.

If this sounds like you or someone you know, I highly recommend the book ‘Burnout’ by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Not all of it resonated with me but the parts that did have been very helpful by giving me language to discuss my experiences of burnout with others, different ways of thinking about and noticing how I’m functioning, and practical strategies to prevent and recover from burnout.

HOW DYSPHORIA CONTRIBUTES TO BURNOUT

I have found that dysphoria is a large contributor to my burnout. There are three reasons for this:

  1. It takes a lot of mental effort to ignore the buzz of dysphoria in order to focus on what I’m supposed to be doing. It takes mental effort to check in with myself, identify what aspects of dysphoria I’m feeling, and use appropriate management strategies. It takes mental effort to identify and avoid situations that trigger my dysphoria (as much as possible). And it takes mental effort to reframe the dysphoria or fight it’s effects by using positive self talk and affirmation. So yah, lots of mental effort.
  2. Dysphoria is constant. It goes up and down depending on the day, my emotional state, my physical state, who I’m around, and what situation I’m in, but even at it’s lowest it’s still there. So lots of constant mental effort.
  3. Generally, there is a lack of understanding from others about what dysphoria is and how it affects me (or how it can affect people). The situations where my dysphoria is triggered the most and which are unavoidable are also the situations where I’m surrounded by and interacting with people who do not understand dysphoria. So lots of constant mental effort that is invisible to or misunderstood by the people around me.

WHAT BURNOUT FROM DYSPHORIA FEELS LIKE

For me, certain symptoms of burnout are specific to dysphoria. Three main ones are:

  1. Decreased attention/focus. So much of my attention is taken up by ignoring, managing, avoiding, and fighting the effects of dysphoria that I have less mental space to spend on other things. It is harder to stay on task, perform multiple step activities without getting derailed, maintain momentum on a task, block out distractions, and remember details.
  2. Irritability/easily frustrated. Dysphoria is an internal irritant that is constant and unavoidable. No matter how good I am at managing it, it will never be zero. So I already have a baseline irritation that I am working to ignore. That means that I have less patience for other sources of irritation. Less patience leads to more frustration. The more dysphoria I have, the more easily frustrated and irritable I am.
  3. Physical, mental, and emotional fatigue. The constant mental effort I talked about above is exhausting. The feeling of being misunderstood and invisible and at odds with myself or how people see me is emotionally exhausting. We feel our emotions in our bodies so I end up with a feeling of heaviness and lethargy that means I don’t feel like I have the physical energy to exercise or do any extra tasks (even though that is what would often help me the most).

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

Over the last few years I have developed a number of different strategies to help manage my burnout. After reading the book I recommended above, I have some more language to explain it and some practical strategies to suggest.

Prevention

Identify the sources of dysphoria for you. Develop strategies to decrease as much of the dysphoria as you can (more posts on this in the Related Posts list below). Where possible, avoid situations that trigger high amounts of dysphoria or repetitive situations that trigger even small amounts of dysphoria (such as getting dressed in a room that doesn’t have a mirror).

As much as possible, make these dysphoria prevention, management, and avoidance strategies automatic. Restructure your environment, schedule, or routine so that you don’t have to spend mental energy on remembering to do things in a different way. The goal is to decrease your baseline mental workload, not increase it.

Protection

In psychology they talk about protective experiences that may be completely unrelated to the harmful experience but help build resilience and emotional capacity or offset or heal some of the negative effects. There are a few protective experiences that I have found to be important in decreasing the burnout caused by dysphoria.

  1. Euphoria. Notice moments of gender euphoria and seek them out. Avoiding dysphoria is helpful to tell you what doesn’t work for you but moving towards euphoria tells you what you should do. Moments of euphoria can pass us by or be overshadowed by dysphoria unless we notice them, focus on them, and celebrate them. In this way, they can be a beacon of light to look forward to and to remember when we feel overwhelmed by dysphoria.
  2. Support. Whether through therapy, social support groups, online groups, friends, or family, support from people who understand what you are experiencing and can give you a sounding board to process and strategize with is important. Your support person/people can also help bring your attention to the symptoms of burnout you are experiencing and provide some external motivation to socialize, exercise, or engage in whatever other activities are necessary for you to recover.
  3. Affirmation. Dysphoria is constantly telling us that something is wrong, that we don’t fit in our body or in society, that we don’t look the way we should, and that maybe we’re making this whole gender identity thing up. Finding sources of affirmation, whether from your support network, from positive social media influences, or a personal journaling, self-talk, or meditation practice can be extremely helpful in offsetting the negative thoughts and feelings associated with dysphoria. The more the affirmation comes from an outside source, the less mental work we have to do to provide the same level of protection and, often, the more likely we are to believe it.
  4. Activities and Interests. Part of burnout, for me anyway, is a lack of interest in things that I would usually enjoy. The frustrating thing is that engaging in things I enjoy makes me feel better. The trick is to find activities and interests that do not trigger any dysphoria. This allows you to engage in your activity or interest with less mental effort so that it doesn’t make the burnout worse which results in a net gain of positive emotion and energy.

Process the Stress

This concept is directly from the book I recommended earlier. The gist is that we experience our emotions in our bodies as a chemical and neurological process. When we are under constant stress (as with dysphoria), our bodies are constantly in ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ mode. Even if we get a burst of euphoria or a period of relief from dysphoria, our bodies still have to complete the chemical reaction or neurological pattern that was triggered by the stress. If we don’t engage in activities that encourage this completion to happen, our bodies remain in the stress state which only gets stronger the next time we experience stress (five minutes later).

So while we can’t necessarily get rid of the stressor (dysphoria) and stop it from triggering a stress response in our bodies, we can do various things to move through the stress response in our bodies, complete it, hit the reset button, so that the responses to this continual stress don’t compound as much. For me, the most useful activities are physical activity of any kind, breathing, affection, positive social engagement, and creativity (writing, painting, and crocheting). With so many options, it is easy to engage in at least one per day, usually more.

One of the tricks to making this as effective as possible for me is to do these activities mindfully. To focus on the calming effect it is having on my body, mind, and emotions. Or, if there was a specific situation that was stressful that I am ruminating on (because my body is still stuck in that stress cycle), I focus on that situation at the beginning of the activity, think through it, feel the emotions that I felt at the time (or didn’t allow myself to feel at the time), and continue the activity until the emotions and the associated physiological response dissipate. The amount of relief this brings in a very short span of time is pretty incredible.

Tl;dr

Burnout sucks and makes us feel numb, exhausted, and irritable. Dysphoria can lead to burnout due to the constant mental effort that is invisible to or misunderstood by the people around us. You can help yourself avoid repeated cycles of burnout by preventing as much dysphoria as possible, protecting yourself against the negative effects of dysphoria, and processing the physiological stress triggered by dysphoria (and any other sources of stress).

I hope this helps you. It is what I needed to hear five years ago. Leave a comment below or send me an email with your thoughts and experiences of burnout. Maybe your experiences are similar to mine and maybe they are very different. Either way, your experiences have value and I would love to hear about them.

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Reflections on Top Surgery, Part 3 : Post Surgery

Gender affirming chest masculinization “top surgery” is one of the major defining moments for trans men. But getting from your existing chest to the one you want to have can be overwhelming from both the information overload and emotional point of view. Having had surgery 3 years ago, I wanted to share my thoughts on surgery in case it may help someone else in the same position. I’ve created a 3 part series on surgery : Pre-surgery, surgery itself, and post- surgery.

This will be mainly from my personal experience as a mostly binary trans man, but could easily be applied to non-binary/GNC people.

If you haven’t read Part 1: Pre-surgery and Part 2: Surgery, start there. To recap: I had a phone consultation with a privately funded top surgeon in Ontario, who gave me a surgery date 6 weeks later. I had my surgery, had my bandages removed, but still had to wear a compressive binder for a couple more weeks.

Initial recovery

Right after the disaster of visiting the clinic for the last time, we went to a nearby mall for some fast food self care. I went into the food court bathroom which was the first public washroom since surgery and I automatically felt 100 times safer. I felt like I belonged. I didn’t feel like an imposter that everyone would automatically clock and tell me that I was in the wrong bathroom. This bathroom euphoria wouldn’t last (more on this in a future post and other bathroom shenanigans here) but for now it was an amazing experience and I couldn’t wait to use another public bathroom!

Our flight home was uneventful. I was nervously waiting for a security officer to ask why I was walking so stiffly, or wonder why I was covered in bandages but nothing happened.

Once home I had another week off before returning to work, but my energy levels did not bounce back as quickly as I had hoped. I ended up taking an additional week off.

In those couple of weeks after surgery I was mostly numb across my whole chest and down my sides. Showering was weird since I could feel the water near my neck and on my belly, but not in between. I was also getting weird prickly sensations across my chest and I would itch but it didn’t help at all. Meaghan Ray said it was my nerves starting to boot back up, so I rubbed a rough cloth across my chest to help my skin remember what sensation was all about and stop freaking out which seemed to help. This technique is called desensitization. Leave a comment or send us an email for more info.

I wore the binder all day and night, and applied polysporin to my incisions and nipples. Slowly they closed up and started healing with more normal skin tones. There was a point in healing where the scabs on my nipples started coming off in small pieces, and since the healed skin underneath was so much lighter, it looked like my nipples had fallen off entirely! It was terrifying until more of the scabs came off and I could see that my nipple was still intact.

Getting back to normal life

When I returned to work after being gone for 3 weeks, people were happy to see me, but for them not much had changed. It was like I had gone for a vacation and come back. It was very frustrating because I had spent a bunch of money to have body parts removed in order to “pass” and meet society’s expectations of what I should look like, but people still couldn’t use the proper pronouns. It felt like I had a big incision and T-rex arms for nothing. My euphoria and confidence slowly drained.

Once I stopped wearing the binder and started feeling the shirt directly against my skin, my confidence began to return. I didn’t care as much about being misgendered because I could feel how flat I was and it was awesome.

I wanted to minimize scarring so I massaged my scars with oil at least once a day for several months. I also didn’t raise my arms above shoulder height for 6+ months which made getting back to working out consistently a struggle. Everyone heals differently so it’s hard to tell if it made any difference but protecting my scars was the thing I had control over and it feels like I did the right thing for me.

Post op Depression

One experience specific to top surgery is having to keep your elbows at your sides for months which limits your use of your arms and therefore your independence. I was a bit angsty with how weak and dependent I was and I am prone to depression so the first couple weeks were a bit rough for me. But having the support of Meaghan Ray and seeing how excited they were for me helped me find that excitement for myself.

Many people experience post-op depression after top surgery. If you google “post op depression” the autofill option for “after top surgery” is only 4 options below. It happens after many surgeries due to some metabolic and physiological reasons as well as having time to yourself while you recover to ponder your life choices. It can especially happen after top surgery or other gender confirmation surgeries because there is usually a long buildup from when you are starting to wonder if you are trans, to finally getting a result in the mirror you are looking for, usually years later. You are looking forward to having the surgery completed, but then there is physical recovery, there is pain, maybe there are complications which feels like it robs you of the excitement you were expecting. And now that the surgery is completed, there is a sense of not having something to look forward to anymore.

Another aspect is that while your brain is telling you what you want, the actual experience of being unconscious for 2 hours and having something removed that you were carrying for 15+ years, makes part of your brain go haywire. Something is suddenly no longer there. And while you were mentally picturing what it would look and feel like, you didn’t know exactly what that would be like. So there is an adjustment period while your brain catches up. And having to wait while your brain straightens itself out makes you doubt that you have made the right decision.

While I definitely experienced all these types of thoughts, they didn’t cause a spiral into depression which I am grateful for.

Where I’m at now, 3 years later

I am still a little self conscious when taking off my shirt around others. 31 years of social training will take a little while to fight against. I have gone swimming in pools and the ocean with no shirt which was empowering. Looking down while showering is great. Doing skin to skin contact on my chest with my newborn kid was thrilling.

Once I did get back to working out and doing other activity, not having the wobble of my chest was amazing. One of the first things I noticed after that wobble was gone was the jiggle from my belly! It was a weird sensation but I quickly adjusted.

Every once in a while after I wake up in the morning my brain will remind me to grab a bra from my dresser, but then I laugh to myself when I go to open the drawer. T-shirts and button up shirts fit so much better now.

There was a point where I was wondering if I wanted a revision for what we affectionately call “the crinkle” in the middle of my chest between my scars. It would be free and the clinic was more than willing to set it up, but when it came time to booking the appointment I never followed through. I had started accepting what my chest looked like, and then grew to love it. It will never be a cis male chest since I am not a cis male, and that is ok.

Having a flat chest has greatly increased my general gender euphoria, and decreased my chest dysphoria down to nearly zero. My social dysphoria was also decreasing as my voice deepened and I grew a scraggly mustache. About 3 months after top surgery when I was healed a decent amount and not struggling with day to day activities I did notice a shift in dysphoria. The very blatant dysphoria of “you have breasts, everyone thinks you’re a girl” was pretty much gone, but my discomfort with my lower area (which I didn’t have much of before surgery) started ramping up to noticeable levels. This is also very common in trans guys – once the seemingly obvious problem gets dealt with, the focus moves to a more personal but just as glaring difference between what you were born with and what you should have.

As trans or GNC people, our dysphoria will likely never go completely away. There will be sudden surprising moments of “I wish my hands were a better size, they completely give me away as trans” or having to explain a different name on a credit application. But hopefully as time goes on, our gender euphoria and comfort with our bodies (surgically altered or not) will increase and those moments of dysphoria will be so much less devastating than they were at the beginning of transition. Having top surgery was life changing for me and provides so much gender euphoria armour against dysphoria frustrations, and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to pursue it.

I hope you found this 3 part series on top surgery helpful! If you are contemplating top surgery and have questions leave them in the comments below, or send an email to letstalkgenderpodcast@gmail.com.

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Baby Haircuts and Gender

My baby was born with lots of hair. That was always the first thing people commented on. It was dark and long and made them look a bit like a hobbit. At first I loved it. It was cute and made them look like a mini toddler. But when they started squirming and rolling, the hair at the back became matted on a daily basis. Combing it either took over an hour or led to a lot of screaming. So we decided it was time for our baby’s first haircut.

As it turned out, the hair underneath was a lot lighter. The before and after pictures look like completely different babies. It took some getting used to. But it wasn’t just that they looked different. My perception of their gender was also different.

They suddenly looked like a boy.

My general feeling on this is ‘Ugh. Why does my brain have to gender my baby based on their hair?’ But of course, just because I’m nonbinary does not mean I’m immune to the gendered programming I am surrounded by and grew up with.

For me, haircuts are one of the biggest sources of gender euphoria I can reliably get on a semi-regular basis. This is because having my hair short helps me express my masculinity and helps me see my masculine side when I look in the mirror. But just because short hair feels masculinizing for me does not mean that short hair indicates masculinity or male gender for everyone.

Especially babies! Most babies have no hair or very short hair. It was only because I was used to my baby’s longer hair that my brain registered the short hair as a gender indicator.

Then I began to wonder – does everyone automatically gender babies as male because of the short hair unless there is a female indicator such as pink clothes, frills, or a flower headband? Is this one of the reasons why baby clothes are so overly gendered?

In the two weeks since the haircut, with a steady stream of corrective self-talk, the gendering effect has worn off a bit. But regardless, I figure that if some people put flower headbands on their babies, I can too. Creating a genderful experience for my child means using clothing, accessories, toys, and language from all parts of the gender spectrum. It also means doing things to trick my brain out of gendering them based on their sex assigned at birth or their short hair.

What experiences have affected your perception of your baby’s gender? What things do you do to create a genderful experience for your child? Tell me in the comments below!

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Feeding My Baby as a Nonbinary Person

PLANNING

When I was pregnant and looking ahead to having a newborn, it was very hard for me to tell how I would feel about nursing. I have dysphoria around my chest that fluctuates and when I read information on or listened to people talk about ‘breastfeeding’, my dysphoria would get worse. I didn’t always know if that was because I was feeling more masculine at the time I was absorbing the information, because the language used was dysphoria inducing, or because the act itself would cause dysphoria.

So we planned for all options. I learned what I could about nursing (which turned out to be just the basics because it would inevitably make my dysphoria worse). We purchased a set of bottles, nipples, a sterilizer, and formula. And I looked up information on pumping and bought a basic manual pump to try. No matter how I felt about nursing or how our baby did with it, we had a way to feed them.

NURSING

The first time I tried nursing was nothing special. There was no feeling of euphoria or ecstasy, no overwhelming feeling of connection with my baby. But it went well and within the first few days both of us had figured out the mechanics. During this initial phase, it was all about learning a new skill and as long as I focused on that, the dysphoria was secondary.

By the fourth day we had pretty much gotten the hang of it but my baby was still looking a bit jaundiced and was showing signs of dehydration. It turned out that although my milk was coming in, my let-down was nearly non-existent. My midwives explained that this is common after receiving an epidural. So they showed me how to hand express during nursing to increase the flow.

This worked well and my baby quickly improved. However, hand expression meant I had to be constantly engaged with my chest during nursing every few hours. My let down didn’t seem to improve a whole lot and after a week of doing this my dysphoria had increased to the point where I needed to keep myself, and therefore the baby, covered during feeding. I would express by feel and be able to watch tv as a distraction without the view of my chest in my peripheral vision.

The juxtaposition of the baby that I had a lot of love and connection to and my chest that I was increasingly uncomfortable with was very emotionally taxing. But due to the intense fatigue that comes from recovering from a four day labour and sleep deprivation from having a newborn that needs feeding every 2-3 hours, I was in survival mode and didn’t recognize how emotionally drained this experience of nursing was making me.

In addition, nursing sessions were lasting longer and longer, often an hour or more. According to everything I had read and been told, once my milk came in and the baby learned how to suck and swallow efficiently, nursing would get faster and faster, eventually down to about twenty minutes. I didn’t know why this wasn’t the case for us but I knew it likely wasn’t good. Not to mention the longer sessions were increasing my dysphoria significantly faster.

At our two week follow up with the midwife we found out that the baby wasn’t gaining weight like they should. Despite all the physical and emotional energy I had been putting into nursing, it wasn’t working. Without warning, I broke down into tears. I felt like we had been doing well. The midwife explained that between the baby’s lower body weight and the long nursing sessions, it sounded like I didn’t have enough milk supply. The baby was burning more calories than they were getting. So we decided to start supplementing with formula.

BOTTLE FEEDING

The plan was to nurse at each feeding time for 15-20 minutes per side, then offer formula in a bottle until the baby decided they were full. We discussed other supplementing options like a supplemental nursing system or SNS but since we already had bottles and it would mean that my husband would get a chance to be involved in feeding (which he was excited to try) we decided bottles were the way to go. Besides, an SNS would likely only increase my dysphoria further.

Luckily our baby took to bottle feeding very easily. Maybe it was because it was a clear source of the nutrition they had been struggling to get from me but without all the effort. My husband did the first bottle feeding session using a paced feeding technique. At the second meal, I tried it. The emotional experience of feeding my baby from a bottle as compared to nursing was significant.

I was able to stay engaged, watching my baby figure out how to coordinate sucking, swallowing, and breathing. I could enjoy the cuddles without experiencing dysphoria at the same time. Since both my husband and I were feeding the baby this way, it was a completely gender neutral or gender irrelevant experience. It was lovely.

Once I discovered how much better feeding my baby from a bottle was, I was reluctant to keep nursing. But I wanted to feed my body as much human milk as I could because of the health benefits and the ease of digestion for their still developing gut. So in order to keep increasing my supply without nursing, I had to start pumping.

PUMPING

I started using the manual pump I had purchased while pregnant. It was fairly easy to figure out. I still didn’t have much let-down due to low supply and therefore had to continue to hand express while pumping which meant the dysphoria was just as bad with pumping as with nursing, but it wasn’t competing or overshadowing the positive emotions I had for the baby. I could experience my love and bond with my baby separately.

I also had a feeling of altruism because I was doing the hard work of extracting the milk so my baby didn’t have to. Unfortunately, pumping 4-6 times per day with a manual pump while hand expressing takes a toll on your hands pretty quickly. My hands started getting too sore to express and too sore to pump more than 3 times a day. So I had to be satisfied with whatever milk I got from those sessions (one eighth to one fifth of what my baby was eating) and say that it was better than nothing.

Luckily, my midwives were connected with a publicly funded, trans inclusive lactation clinic in my area and put in a referral.

LACTATION SUPPORT

As soon as we discovered that I had low supply, I started taking supplements to help increase my supply slowly. I was reluctant to take the stronger, recommended medication in case it increased my supply more than I could handle in terms of dysphoria. I really disliked the few times I experienced the feeling of being engorged while my milk was first coming in. The supplements or the pumping seemed to be working because my supply was increasing. By the time the initial visit with the lactation consultant came up, I was consistently producing a fifth to a quarter of what my baby was eating.

Despite knowing that the lactation clinic was trans inclusive, I had significant anxiety and dysphoria leading up to the initial appointment. But they turned out to be great. The intake form that I filled out online in advance didn’t ask explicitly about identity and pronouns but it used inclusive language for the most part and had a fill-in-the-blank box at the end where we could put anything else we thought would be relevant.

They clarified my pronouns right off the bat and asked about my goals. They made it clear that their role was to support me in achieving whatever goals I had, whether it was to increase supply, maintain current levels, or stop lactation altogether. They were understanding and respectful of my experience of dysphoria and my need to balance that with the desire to feed my baby as much using my milk as possible.

Ultimately, I started taking the standard medication to increase supply and rented a hospital grade, double electric pump. I was nervous about how this style of pump would feel and it definitely took some getting used to but it allowed me to set it and forget it while still getting as much milk as possible. I adapted a sports bra to hold the flanges in place and was able to watch tv or play on my phone while pumping. Best of all, I didn’t have to wear out my hands to get milk. Sure, the altruism factor related to the hard work was less but being able to stay covered up and ignore it was great.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

Now, at three months postpartum, I am producing three quarters to 100% of what my baby eats. We have noticed a big improvement in our baby’s amount of gas and therefore their ability to sleep through the night. Even that, without any other benefit, is enough encouragement to keep me going. I am still taking the medication and my supply is still increasing slowly but with minimal feelings of engorgement and only pumping three times per day.

My plan is to continue what I’m doing for another three months. I will stop taking the medication after about eight weeks on it or once my supply is to the level I want, whichever comes first. Once my baby is six months old and starts eating solids, the lactation clinic will help me decrease and ultimately stop lactation.

I am happy with how this journey has turned out, despite the struggle at the beginning. I have had phenomenal support from my midwives, the lactation clinic, and especially my husband. Regardless, I am definitely looking forward to the day when I can wear my binder again.

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When Your Name or Pronouns Fluctuate

Many people that have a fluid gender identity use different names and/or pronouns at different times. Figuring out how to make this work for you can be a challenge, and then following through and making it happen is even harder.

I’m still learning how to do this but I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far.

KNOW YOURSELF

The first step to knowing what pronouns or name you prefer at a given time or in a given context is to figure out how your gender fluctuates. I did this by tracking my gender daily on a scale of 5 female to 0 neutral to 5 male for the span of a month and a half. You can make up whatever scale works for you.

I also made note of my other activities, habits, emotional state, and menstrual cycle. Correlating the shifts in my gender with these other factors gave me a much better sense of what influenced my gender and how the shifts in my gender influenced my mood and behaviour.

Tracking my gender daily forced me to check in with myself. I learned what to pay attention to within myself to indicate where my gender was sitting and what strategies would be useful to minimize dysphoria and maximize euphoria. This is a hugely important skill for anyone who’s gender fluctuates. Even now, a couple years after the gender tracking that I did, I am much more in tune with where my gender is sitting, when dysphoria is affecting me, and what I can do about it.

Once you know how much your gender fluctuates and what influences it, you can have a better idea of when you’d be more comfortable with one name or pronoun over another. This still takes real world testing to be sure. So finding an online community who will refer to you however you wish on a given day (or a platform that allows you to change your username at each log in) or an in person group of at least two friends who will help you trial names and pronouns.

Now you know how your gender fluctuates and what name and pronoun you want people to use with each state of your gender. Next you have to decide how to find a balance between the different states of your gender and how to go about asking other to refer to you.

STRUCTURED APPROACH

My gender doesn’t fluctuate a whole lot and usually sits close to an equal balance between my male and female components. So I’m almost always most comfortable with they/them pronouns. But in my case, I don’t have a single name that is gender neutral, I have one name for my female side and a different name for my male side.

My job is such that it doesn’t feel feasible to have people refer to me by anything other than my female name and she/her pronouns. So in order to find an overall balance, I decided to use my male name and they/them pronouns almost exclusively in queer spaces.

Maybe you have a supportive work environment but you’re not out to your family yet. You may chose to use your ‘trans’ identity at work because you are always referred to by the name and pronouns you were assigned at birth when you’re at home.

Whatever the case, if there is one area of your life where you feel restricted in your ability to come out or advocate for yourself, this approach may be the best option to still allow you a sense of balance and a chance to experience all aspects of your identity.

GO WITH THE FLOW APPROACH

For some people, their gender fluctuates too often or on too wide a spectrum for the structured approach to feel comfortable. So the other option, if your life circumstances allow, is to go with the flow. This means that however you feel at a given moment, you indicate or request to be referred to by the corresponding name and pronouns.

This approach give you a lot more flexibility and perhaps a stronger sense of authenticity but it requires more clear signaling and more frequent self-advocacy.

GLOBAL APPROACH

Another option is to find a middle ground of where the different components of your gender overlap and use that as your default with the option to request a different name or pronoun if needed.

Or perhaps your gender is in one state the majority of the time and only occasionally fluctuates to a different state. You could use the most common state as your default and only specify when it differs.

Or, like me, perhaps you have a way to refer to yourself that encompasses your entire identity. I am 100% of the time comfortable with they/them pronouns and prefer to be referred to by both my names as though they are hyphenated. I can still specify differently if I need to but this gives me a lot of safety and authenticity.

Whichever system works for you, or if you come up with a completely different one, you will need a way to indicate or express to others how you wish to be referred to.

SIGNALING

One way to indicate to others which name and pronoun to use is via non-verbal indicators or signals. This can be anything from clothing to jewelry to behaviours to pins or name tags.

If you feel most comfortable presenting in a distinct way with each different state of your gender, you can use your general presentation to indicate to others how they should refer to you. This will still take a bit of explanation initially and maybe a few reminders but, in general, would be pretty straighforward.

If you present fairly similarly regardless of your gender or your presentation doesn’t relate to your gender in that way at all, you can use other means to signal your gender. I have a necklace that has Meaghan on one side and Ray on the other. Most of the time I wear it inside my shirt but if I’m in an environment where it is safe to do so, I will wear it outside my shirt with the Ray side facing out as a reminder to others of how to refer to me. You can do something similar with a bracelet, name tag, pronoun or name pin, or more subtle means such as a certain piece of jewelry indicating a certain name/pronoun combo.

Keep in mind that the more subtle the signal is, the more explanation and reminders it will take for people around you to pick up on it and get it right. But if you’re in a potentially unsafe environment, subtle might be necessary for safety.

ADVOCATING

No matter what signals (if any) you choose to use, you will always have to have some sort of conversation with those around you to explain that your gender fluctuates and you wish to be referred to by a different name and/or pronoun depending on the situation or the day and how they will know which one to use. This initial coming out conversation is difficult for any trans person but especially for those with a fluid gender that doesn’t fit binary notions of gender. See Related Posts at the bottom of the page for ideas on how to have this conversation.

As with any trans person, you will also have to correct people when they get your name and/or pronouns wrong. When your gender fluctuates and the name/pronoun you use changes, it takes even longer for those around you to get used to it and inevitably causes even more slip-ups. So decide how often you want to correct people and how best to do it. This will likely depend on your relationship with that person and the context you’re in at the time.

One good practice to get into the habit of is introducing yourself using your name and pronouns every time you meet someone. Not just someone new, even people who know you and already understand your gender. Something like ‘Hi [friend], I’m Ray and using they/them pronouns today’ works well.

Also let the friends and family you interact with regularly and who you’re out to that if you forget to inform them of your name and pronoun at the beginning of an interaction, it is helpful for them to ask about it or cue you to indicate if it isn’t clear from your signaling. How they ask is up to you and again, will likely depend on your relationship with them and the context.

Sometimes, all it takes is having one ally in the room who you have informed ahead of time what name and pronoun to use. Their role is to find an opportunity to refer to you using that name and pronoun within the first minute of you arriving and as often as necessary throughout the event.

IMPORTANCE OF GLOBAL IDENTITY

When you have a fluid gender identity with multiple components it can be easy to get caught up in the parts and forget about the whole. For me, it important to take a step back to make sure I am achieving an overall balance that works for me, even if I can’t get people to refer to me the way I’d prefer in every situation.

The goal of all this work and advocacy is to be able to experience and be comfortable with all parts or aspects of your gender. To get to express yourself in the most authentic way no matter what your gender is. So try not to get caught up too much in the details of every interaction and instead aim for an overall more authentic and gender-filled existence.

I hope this helps give you some ideas of how to navigate the world when your gender and therefore name and/or pronouns fluctuate. Comment with your own experiences, send me an email, or reach out on social media. You can find me on instagram @meaghan.ray.peters.

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How to Ask About Someone’s Gender

We always say that if you don’t know someone’s gender or pronouns, just ask. But how do you do that in a respectful way? As a stranger, we can use they/them pronouns and avoid gendered language for everyone we meet until they specify. But what if this is a new colleague or a friend of a friend? Or what if your partner or child just told you they are questioning their gender?

The closer you are to someone, the more impact your questions are going to have. You can ask questions to find out the basic information such as how they identify and what pronouns and name to use. Or you can ask deeper questions to get a better understanding of what their identity means to them, how they picture themself, and what their experience of gender is day to day. These deeper questions can help you form a more accurate mental image of the person as they see themself so that you are more likely to gender them correctly. They can also help the other person sort out some of their confusion around their gender (if need be).

THE BASICS

When asking questions about gender (or any other sensitive topic), I follow the principle of not asking any question I wouldn’t also be willing to answer. I also use the caveat that they never have to answer a question I ask, though I do appreciate knowing why they don’t want to answer so I avoid asking other questions that they don’t want to answer.

If you are ever uncomfortable about asking something, it’s a good bet the other person will have some discomfort in answering as well. Be honest about your discomfort but don’t let that stop you. Be aware of your surroundings and choose a place where both of you feel the most safe (likely a private space).

If you’re not sure how to phrase a question or what language to use, be honest about that too. Try to avoid saying ‘I don’t mean any disrespect, but…’. Instead, use a phrase like ‘I’m not sure how to word this question. Is it okay if I ask it anyway and you can tell me how I’m supposed to say it?’ Usually, there is a reason why a certain question is inappropriate. Either the word you chose is seen as offensive, how you used it was incorrect, or the subject matter isn’t appropriate to ask about. It is helpful if you can find out why the question was wrong so you avoid making the same mistake with other questions or in other circumstances.

Asking about basic information such as gender identity, pronouns, or name is pretty straightforward. Offer yours first, then ask. ‘Hi, I’m Wendy. I’m a cis woman and I use she/her pronouns. How do you identify and what pronouns do you use?’ Keep in mind that knowing how someone identifies isn’t usually necessary. Pronouns and name are enough to interact with them respectfully.

Always question yourself about why you want to know the information and what purpose it will serve for you. If you’re just curious, generally you should refrain from asking unless you have a close relationship with that person and you’re in a private space. But, if you feel that you do need to know more information, you’re going to need to know what questions to ask.

DEEPER QUESTIONS

As I said above, you can ask these more intense, specific, personal, and invasive questions to learn more about someone’s gender for your own understanding or to help them figure out their own gender. I have grouped these questions into categories to make it easier to follow. These are just examples – feel free to pick and choose from each list as needed rather than using every question. This list is by no means exhaustive.

Gender Identity

  • How do you identify with regards to gender at the moment?
  • Has your gender identity changed over time?
  • What labels do you use for your gender and how do you define them?
  • Does your gender always feel the same or does it fluctuate?
  • Does your gender influence your sexual orientation in any way?
  • Are you comfortable with your gender identity or is it a source of frustration?
  • Are you confident in your gender identity or do you still have some confusion?

Language

  • What pronouns feel best for you?
  • Do you always prefer those pronouns?
  • What name do you want me to use?
  • What other language feels best for you (guys, ladies, girl, ma’am, sir, bro, dude, etc)?
  • What familial terms feel best for you (sister/brother/sibling, son/daughter/child/offspring etc)?
  • Is there any way I can help you test out various names/pronouns/language?

Body Dysphoria and Euphoria

  • Are there parts of your body that feel wrong or bring discomfort?
  • Are there parts of your body that feel good?
  • How do you picture your body should look?
  • Do you do anything to make your body feel more authentic for yourself?
  • Do you do anything to modify how your body appears to others?
  • Are there specific ways you would like me to refer to or interact with certain parts of your body?
  • Is there any way I can help you test out various presentations?

Medical Transition

  • Are you planning to/have you already started hormones?
  • How do you feel about the idea of/changes from taking hormones?
  • Are there any challenges you are facing with accessing hormones?
  • Are you planning to/have you already have any gender affirming procedures/surgeries?
  • How do you feel about the idea of/changes from [procedure/surgery]?
  • Are there any challenges you are facing with getting [procedure/surgery] done?
  • Have you ever encountered transphobia in a medical setting?
  • Is there anything I can do to support you with accessing basic or trans-specific medical care?

Legal Transition

  • Are you planning to/have you already changed your legal name?
  • Are you planning to/have you already changed your gender marker?
  • What documents have you changed so far?
  • What institutions have you informed of this change?
  • What documents/institutions do you still need to change/inform?
  • Is there any way I can help you with making these changes or support you during this process?
  • If we are in a situation where I need to disclose your legal name/gender, what would you like me to say? (hospital, banking, insurance, police, etc)

Practical Concerns

  • Who are you out to?
  • How would you like me to refer to you around people you are out to?
  • How would you like me to refer to you around people you are not out to but who know you and who you also interact with?
  • How would you like me to refer to you around people you are not out to but who you have no interaction with?
  • Have you encountered any transphobia?
  • Is there anything I can do to provide support?
  • Is there anything I have been doing or saying that is uncomfortable? What would you like me to do/say instead?

I hope this list of suggested questions helps guide your discussions of gender with anyone you interact with. Remember to think about how you would answer these questions before asking them of someone else. These questions are designed to guide a discussion that would be a follow up to the basic learning I talked about in How to Be a Trans Ally so don’t forget to start there.

Let me know how your discussions about gender are going! Or, let me know if you have other questions that you have found helpful in your discussions and I will add them to the list above. Leave a comment on this post or send me an email! Looking forward to hearing from you.

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Let’s Talk Gender S2E6: Complexities of Nonbinary Identities

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Hi everyone. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Gender.

This episode is about some of the more complex aspects of being nonbinary such as genderfluid identities, how physical and social aspects of gender can feel at odds with each other, and how nonbinary genders interact with sexual orientation.

GENDERFLUID IDENTITIES

Let’s start with a deeper look at genderfluid identities. I’m going to break this into three different categories for ease of explanation. These categories are arbitrary but I have found them useful in making sense of various gender experiences and the vast number of nonbinary identities. 

The first category is multi-genders. This includes bi-gender, tri-gender, co-gender, etc. People with these gender experiences have more than one gender and fluctuate between them. They can experience one at a time or a combination of all their genders. They may shift between them on a fairly regular schedule, completely randomly, or depending on the situation they’re in. They may experience one gender more often than the others or all their genders equally. It may be an hour, a day, a week, or even longer between shifts. 

They may have a different name, pronoun, and presentation for each gender or they may consistently be comfortable with one name or pronoun. When beginning an interaction, they may use a short hand of ‘I’m Meaghan and I use she/her pronouns today’ or ‘I’m Ray and I use he/him pronouns today’. People they are out to who they interact with regularly will get used to these shifts and may not even need this explicit identifier but I have learned that it is a good habit to get into for my own sense of confidence, authenticity, and visibility. 

The second category is single, fluctuating genders. People with these genders only have one experience of gender but that gender moves around various parts of the gender spectrum. It can move over a large variety of genders or a very narrow range of genders. It can consistently cover the same parts of the spectrum or suddenly feel like a completely different gender than it has before. And similar to multi-genders, it can fluctuate in a predictable way based on time or situation or in a random way. 

People with this experience may have a variety of names and pronouns they use or pick a name and pronoun that feels comfortable for the majority of the time and stick with that. It’s always a good strategy to ask them how they identify or want to be referred to at each interaction. 

The third category is a gender expansive experience. People with this type of gender have one gender but it encompases a wide range on the gender spectrum. They may choose to present one aspect of their gender at a time or embody a variety of components at once. They may appear to have a genderfluid identity when in actuality their gender is stable but expansive. People in this category may choose a gender neutral name and pronoun that feels right no matter which part of their identity they wish to express, they may be comfortable with their birth name and gender marker, or they may have an ‘alter ego’ that they use when they want to present differently from their typical day to day expression. 

If you are genderfluid and your experience differs from all of these, please let me know! I’d love to hear your experience. You can send me an email at letstalkgenderpodcast@gmail.com or leave a comment below. 

Explaining your experience of gender as a genderfluid person can be challenging. Not only does it include much of the basics that cis people often don’t understand about nonbinary identities that we talked about in Episode 5, but you then have to explain your overall experience of your gender as well as your current experience of your gender. 

You often need to develop a code to flag to people how your gender feels and how you want to be referred to each time you see them. This can be a verbal code such as simply stating the name and pronoun you wish them to use at that time. It can be a tag of some sort such as a name badge, pin, or dog tag that states your current name and pronoun. Or it can be more subtle such as a piece of jewelry or combination of presentation aspects that signal one name and pronoun combination over another. The more subtle the signal, the easier it is for you but the more practice it takes for the people around you. So if you opt for a more subtle approach, be prepared to correct people if needed and to resort to a more overt approach for people that you interact with less often or who don’t know you as well. 

PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF GENDER

Shifting gears, I’d like to talk about physical and social aspects of gender, how these don’t always line up, and what I do in those situations. 

If you’ve listened to previous episodes or read parts of my blog, you know that I have both male and female components to my gender and that they overlap in the neutral area. The balance between these two sides shifts at times such that my day to day sense of my gender moves around between about 25% male to 50% female. I use my innate sense of my gender, various types of dysphoria, and various experiences of euphoria to determine where my gender is on that scale at any given time. 

This is where it gets interesting. Dysphoria and euphoria can both be broken down into physical and social components. Anything to do with my body that I experience with no outside influence whatsoever I consider to be physical. Anything to do with interacting with others including how they gender me based on my body I consider to be social. When I was tracking my gender to see how much it fluctuated, I tracked physical and social aspects separately and discovered that they actually fluctuated differently. 

I often have very little physical dysphoria and have an innate feeling that my body is female or, on a different day, that my body is neutral. But at the same time I will be very uncomfortable being identified as female by others and will prefer to go by Ray and use they/them pronouns if I can. It is more rare to be the other way around but does occasionally happen. 

So what do I do in these circumstances? I tried to come up with dysphoria management strategies and euphoria heightening strategies that targeted either the physical components or the social components. For me, some of the physical strategies were wearing more masculine clothing and jewelry, wearing a binder, or wearing a packer. My social strategies included not responding to feminine language, ‘forgetting’ to wear my name tag, and spending less time with cis het folks I wasn’t out to and more time with queer friends and allies. 

The times when I feel physically male and socially female are easier because I can wear a binder and masculine clothes and people will barely notice and I don’t feel uncomfortable hearing my name, she/her pronouns, or female language. The times when I feel physically female and socially male are much harder. I don’t personally have the need to change my appearance and would feel comfortable wearing my more feminine clothes but if I do, I will have even more social dysphoria about feminine language and she/her pronouns. So I often have to employ some of the physical strategies just to feel like I am having some influence on the social interactions or at least that I did what I could to flag how I wanted to be identified and if the other person didn’t pick up on it that’s their problem. 

Managing this balance can seem complicated and some days it definitely feels exhausting. But I’ve found that the more I can be aware of my own gender and whether it is physical or social aspects that are bothering me most, the better I am at using appropriate strategies to manage it. 

GENDER AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION

Another area where being nonbinary can feel unnecessarily complicated is how it relates to sexual orientation. Gender and sexual orientation are two completely separate concepts and yet not only do many people tend to mix them up but when we are exploring our gender it often makes us feel unsure about our sexual orientation as well. 

I think this is partly a language thing. Many sexual orientation labels define who we are attracted to in relation to what our own gender is so when our gender or the way we define it changes, often those labels feel like they no longer apply even if who we are attracted to hasn’t changed. The easiest solution to this is to find a new label for your orientation that doesn’t relate it to your gender. 

However, sometimes when we are exploring our gender, it changes how we relate to others and can directly influence our sexual orientation. For example, before doing any of my own gender exploration, I identified as gay. I was female presenting though always more of a tom boy, female identified, and often was labeled as a lesbian. This term never felt right to me and I never used it for myself, which I now think was likely due to my yet undiscovered gender identity. When my husband transitioned I felt no less gay and no less attracted to him. This wasn’t specifically what made me question my own gender identity but once I started to I realized that I had always used the term ‘gay’ to mean ‘attracted to people like myself’. As my awareness of my gender shifted towards the neutral part of the spectrum, so too did my orientation. 

I know of lots of people who’s sexual orientation has remained stable throughout their gender exploration and transition. They have remained attracted to the same types of people they were prior to any gender questioning. I know other people who’s sexual orientation remained stable in relation to their own gender and shifted with their gender through the exploration and transition process, more like mine has. And I know people who’s sexual orientation expanded significantly as they explored their gender because they learned how to see bodies and people as separate from gender. 

Having your sexual orientation questioned when you come out as nonbinary can be frustrating and confusing. If you have an easy answer, feel free to use it. If not, try reflecting their question back to them and see if they can question their own assumptions about how your gender and sexuality interact. Sometimes they are informed and know of all these different experiences I talked about and just want to know which one applies to you. But more often than not, they are making an assumption based on the labels you have used in the past and the way they categorize both gender and sexuality as binary, all-or-nothing, or as static. If you can get them to recognize their own assumptions rather than having to do all the education we talked about in Episode 5, go for it. 

REACH OUT!

If you are working through some of these more complex aspects of identifying as nonbinary and want to reach out, please email me at letstalkgenderpodcast@gmail.com. You are not alone. 

That’s it for Episode 6 of Season 2 of Let’s Talk Gender.

The music for this podcast is by Jamie Price. You can find them at Must Be Tuesday or on iTunes.

Coming up in Episode 7 I will be talking about living in the world as a nonbinary person including navigating public bathrooms, going to the gym, and what ‘passing’ means for nonbinary people.

Talk to you soon.

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