ACCOZZAGLIA

Small preface: It’s been years since I pulled out this filter, but obviously if you can read this, then you’re about one of the handful of so of people on LJ who have access to my life experience as being, well, not cissexual. As such, the very old rules still apply: this is effectively a private posting open only to those with this life experience and one or two others who’ve been long-acquainted with this by association for much of their life. Editing note: unlocked in the event it might be instructive for someone who finds themselves in some kind of similar emergency medical situation.

So, uh, this complements my prior entry this evening, the one recapping my getting badly hurt and hospitalized whilst riding my bike to school the week before last.

I think it’s fair to say that for us, broad stroked, it’s a veritable fear that we may ever be hurt or sickened badly enough to be brought into hospital. Irrespective of questions relating to insurance (i.e., whether one has it or not), the greatest fear I think I’ve always had was being compromised while people around me did whatever they might ordinarily do — up and until they realized that I had teh tran. You kinda don’t forget stories of folks bleeding to death while EMT crews stand there and mock a dying body, such as what happened in ’95 in D.C. You don’t forget stories of trans men being treated like dog shit upon being admitted to hospital and then left to neglect in some hallway because of their body. You sort of don’t ever forget any of these anecdotal happenings.

When coupled with your own nasty experiences (like primary care providers refusing to even see you in person and cancelling your appointment because word got to them that you weren’t cissexual, such was the case with me in ’97) it’s hard to undo feeling gun shy about critical care situations. I also know that a lot of this exclusion of people like us is alive and well in so many hydra-head forms right up to now, and it screws with people because of extra- and intra-political skirmishes that continue to be unresolved. [side note: I'd rather stick with “politics” — of the citizen — rather than “community”, since I don't think there's a consensus on what qualifies as a “community” for tran-ness. Whereas once the “community” was a front led by a few radical trans women, and now seems to be the high domain (so I’m told) of transbois on university campuses, it’s no longer appropriate to decide on what is “community”, since there's really no unity in any of it and likely never will be.]

Digression aside, all these thoughts poured back into my mind as I lie sprawled and immobile on the intersection of Rue Saint-Urbain and Rue Prince Arthur Ouest, looking up at two or three people speaking to me and each another en français, and my not knowing what they were saying, what they were seeing, or what was coming next. My fear was three-fold: making sure I could breathe, making sure I knew where my McGill health card was, and wondering when the shoe would drop when someone along the way would flip the fuck out. (The last part was why I attempted to sit up, hope to brush it off, and somehow limp my way to seminar, but found that I couldn’t move anything without indescribable pain.)

The people watching over me didn’t say anything. One eventually said in francophone-tinged anglais, “The paramedics are on their way.” The paramedics, also francophone (with the EMT speaking enough English for me to understand), said nothing. Once transported, the trauma team, many of whom were anglophones, proceeded to undress me, as is typical for a trauma patient (on an aside, while I’m aware that getting the cut several years ago tended to “simplify” these immediate situations, it was hardly what I considered an “insurance policy” against bad things happening should/when someone just look at me that certain way and play a 1993-era Body Snatchers moment). No one said anything, not even when they were pressing the sides of my pelvis to check for fractures. I don’t exactly have the greatest baby-making back, either. No one said anything even after the scans all came back (which clearly showed enough that I lacked uterus and ovaries).

The closest this ever got was when a trauma care med student (this is a teaching hospital for McGill University) asked me all the medications I was on and all the past surgeries I’d ever had. I mentioned the semi-emergency one to remove an abscess when I was 8, and he pressed once more: “Any other surgeries?” As I lay there in acute care, surrounded by other infirm patients (also on stretchers), and as I looked at this guy, probably 26 or so (from probably an Islamic family upbringing — his name was Wasim and appeared Afghani) — I had to figure out how to delicately put this.

I thought I was fairly plain about it. After a pregnant pause, I said, “There was also a genital surgery in 2004, and that’s all there really is to say about it.” He then asked to verify all the prescriptions I was on. They already knew about the anti-depressant from earlier, but I withheld from them mention of being on endocrine stuff, just as I had with the UofT clinic in 2007 when I updated my anti-depressant prescription. This time, I added mention and said fairly bluntly, “I’m on it for the rest of my life.”

And then Wasim left.

I didn’t hear anything further about this until a week later when a wacky psychiatrist (a greying white dude, of course) showed up at my bedside to “talk” with me in a patronizing tone reminiscent of a bygone era when all the shrinks were men, all the patients had to lie down (oh snap, he got me there!), and one of the first questions was basically “Tell me about your childhood.” You get to a point in life where the narrative is accurate, but sanitized by omissions of discretion. And for someone like this guy, who hadn’t even explained why he was hounding me, there was no way he’d get anything further from me. It was a round of poker, and I’m unbeatable at wearing the poker face. I was really fearing that he was trying to get at my being teh tran and knew the whole time, choosing to unravel me elsewhere and then “sting” me with some kind of “gotcha!” at some point with the very thing I know his kind love to throw out of context — namely, by vetting their observation with the oh-so-holy DSM-IV-TR. He scared the shit out of me, but I wouldn’t let him know it.

And after all the talk about the depression crap (and being told by him that a trauma care physician had noted that I was on anti-depressants and heard me say in triage that I had planned at one point to see my dosage tweaked to improve what it’s supposed to do), he then proceeded to the topic of intimate relationships. I said that with school on, I don’t have the capacity to be in intimate relationships with people — not unless they were well-established long before academics were underway. He probed whether I had lived with others (I told him I had), but said that intimate relationships aren’t really a priority for me at this time.

Then he launched his next approach: “So I see that you’ve had a hysterectomy.”

I let no expression leak from me, but I was thinking, even panicking: “Christ, is this the tack he’s going to take to get me to say, ‘Oh, well actually . . .’?” It had been about ten minutes of basically revealing enough personal crap to a complete stranger I hadn’t invited, expected, or requested to see. He continued, “I mean, for a young woman like yourself at the young age of 36,” — yes, he said “young” twice in the same passage (what, is he Zlad! or something?) — “I can imagine it might bother you that you’re…”

I think he said, “…barren,” but in reality he probably said something like, “…infertile.” The connotation was clear: supposedly, in his essentialist mind, the inference was that I was somehow bitter that I couldn’t fulfil a god-given capability of being a baby factory. So I stopped him: “You’re over the line.”

“Oh,” he sounded mock-startled. “Do you feel this isn’t germane to why you’re here?”

“Having broken ribs and a punctured lung have nothing to do with my reproductive system, so no, it’s not germane. I have a total stranger come up to me and ask me to reveal my life story in ten minutes. I think we’re through.”

So he backed off.

The next day, while sitting in the waiting queue for my next x-ray, I grabbed my chart-binder, just behind my head, and began thumbing through the two-hundred-plus pages that had accumulated in a matter of a week. I wanted to find what he and others wrote.

In no place did teh tran show up anywhere. In his own consultation remarks, he basically mentioned hysterectomy, that I was a runaway, that I was a university student, and that I was, in his concluding assessment:

“Fiercely independent.”

And as I read his remarks and other pages in the chart, the most strange sensation washed over me:

No one had a clue.

Why? How?

The logic, as heinousbitca dryly noted, is that there’s nothing on paper which suggests anything particularly unusual beyond the hysterectomy assumption, and that contrary to all other indicators, my appearance apparently doesn’t scream “tranny”.

And yet, my self-perception is invested heavily by reasoned past experiences: I was singled out at work and dragged through four years of litigation. I was persona non grata at doctors’ offices. I was told by a so-called “human sexuality clinic” (scare quotes quite earned) that I wasn’t female, despite a birth certificate saying otherwise (they’d go so far as to white-out and change my intake form where I’d correct checked the F-box). I was booted out of work assignments by the HQ of a well-known North American electronics retailer twice because someone in the corporate office really was unnerved by the presence of an actual trans person in the building. Even a couple of people in Toronto I’ve known for years in the co-op have dropped not-so-subtle hints that they likely know, but have never come right out and said so (and I’m not indulging them, either, since they both fell under my “no one in co-op is privy to this, evar” policy adopted from day one).

So I walk away from this experience changed somewhat. My fear level is different — still there, but more in fear of something now truly beyond my control: what happens when I die and an autopsy, assuming one is called for, is completed. My fear of certain geographies on this planet remains just as great, and that fear is why massive chunks of the planet are areas that are off-limits, just as my academic cohorts travel to these places for any number of field studies, internships, research projects, or humanitarian aid projects. I have been asked whether I’d be interested to embark on such endeavours, and each time, I say, “Absolutely not.” The perception is that I have a bias against regions of the world along some vector other than the one which they are completely unaware: in many places, I will be killed and/or incarcerated for having the life experiences I do. My life would be in immediate danger were I to travel to these places even in the very best of circumstances. Were I hurt or fell ill, I would be totally, utterly screwed.

I know that for some folks, being “out and proud” is a wonderful, even empowering thing, and their privilege of doing so is made possible by one or more of geography, social clustering, cultural ghettoizing, and tacit understandings between people in the area that certain topics are on the table, while others stay off.

I don’t have these, and I chose not to live in places where that can be possible. San Francisco immediately comes to mind, but so does Minneapolis. By leaving Minnesota, I chose to walk away from the compromised, conditional “comfort” of being known by others as teh tran — thus removing one barrier for having to voluntarily disclose and knowing that it would weed out people who couldn’t deal with it by just staying away from me from the get-go. Beyond the “safe bubble”, I also know that that isn’t how the world operates, but I wanted to experience as much of the world as I can while I still have the ambulatory means to. That’s why I’ve never been at home with a ghetto to make me feel safe but sheltered. That isn’t living.

By the same token, I never “went stealth” — a concept I fucking h9, as only someone who doubts the veracity of themselves would ever refer to themselves in that context. I think of myself as plainly visible, hiding in plain sight, but have persisted with the understanding that no one cares to say anything. Maybe that’s the case, or maybe it really isn’t. It’s possible that I’ve been wrong for some time, and people simply never clued in.

For years, I’ve presented myself as abrasive and unapproachable, drawing clear lines that indicate how I let nearly no one into my emotionally intimate life (in the interpersonal sense, not the committed relationship sense). People hear me as the curmudgeon, as cantankerous, as cynical, but most often, as an unknown quantity. It means I’ve become horrid at building consensus or pleasing everyone by being universally approachable. What no one can even begin to understand is why I’m this way. And if I tried to explain, it would really screw with their heads, if not also screw with my scholarly, professional, and social reputation. And my welfare. And my opportunities. It would no longer matter what I’ve studied, written, published, or accomplished: it would all be tainted by the perception that what I wrote is diminished by being oh shit teh tran and, thus, no longer legitimate. If I saw other teh tran folk in academia who weren’t impacted by their life experiences in the work they do, then I’d follow their lead and whatever it was they were doing right. The few I’ve known of in academia, I’ve found, are in unsurprising disciplines like sexual diversity studies or computer sciences.

In other words, in this stupidly unedited, long-winded core dump: my having teh tran is not an identity, but a situational, inevitable circumstance that is inextricable from what I’ve experienced and how I perceive the world around me. It’s not a conversation I’ve been good at having with people, and as the years wear on, I also find that I lack the words to articulate myself in that conversation should it ever arise. As time goes on, my fear of even having that discussion escalates. It’s small wonder that I don’t foresee the possibility of bringing another person intimately into my life, as the risks are too great and the outcomes of yore have seldom been smooth.

Am I transsexual? No, I’m a person. Do I have a transsexual life experience? Absolutely. Am I cissexual? No, I’m a person. Do I have a cissexual life experience? Yeah, in some senses, I think so, although only up to a point. When the cissexual-lopsided world around me treats me as cissexual, I chalk that up to having a cissexual life experience. Do I like it? Not really, because I’m not like them, as much as they may believe I am. It’s this disconnect from a cognitive consensus which makes any meaningful discussion about my life experiences a futile exercise, one fraught with many pitfalls that could entirely demolish my path for life.

But at least I survived hospital.