Okay, so it may take a few more days to get the next installment up. In the meantime, some new blogs and commentary, since I’ve been so lax in this regard recently.

My dear friend Sorenson and her lovely partner Bean (names have been changed to protect the innocent) are about to go through their first IVF cycle. Wow, is that big. Along the road they are also educating people about what not to say to people who aren’t getting pregnant and inciting amusing custody requests for Tatum. I wish we could grow potatoes like that. There’s a definite market.

On Feministe, piny has been reviewing Transamerica and kvetching about people who think that one must have a penis to be a man. This post inspired a comment from some kind soul who also thinks that transmen are merely pretending to be men. Sigh. If we were pretending, wouldn’t we call ourselves male impersonators? Come to think, aren’t all men male impersonators?

I haven’t seen Transamerica yet. I don’t think I’m going to like it. There are the flaws piny points out: what therapist would require someone to reconcile with her son as a condition of surgery? Get real! Secondly, it seems destined to repeat the normalising platitudes about transfolk. Third, if they wanted a woman to play Bree so badly, why did they feel it was necessary to make her look so obviously unpassable? Why couldn’t Felicity Huffman look like herself?

On the other hand, my supervisors reckon I should write a chapter on trans road movies, so we can chalk it up to an occasion for insightful critique.

So, an account of surgery, or an account of some things that have been censored from this blog over the last weeks and months. It’s odd, but actual chest reconstruction as it relates to transition – the part where I might talk about having doubts, second thoughts, regrets, and how a flat chest makes me more of a man, more able to pass – seems less important now than do the many confronting aspects of having major surgery per se. Yes, my tits are now quite ‘masculinely contoured’; and while for the first couple of days I was in too much pain to know if it was right, which confused me, I’m starting to forget how it felt to not be this way. It feels good. Streamlined. Even with scars yet to heal and bruises still to disappear.

The deal

Now surgery is over, I can relate how I convinced the psychiatrist to let me go through with it. In November, I went back to see the original shrink who kicked me off the gender clinic program, about whom I have been publicly, and uncharitably, honest in the past. Miraculously, she got me an appointment the day after I called (usually the wait is three months). At the appointment, we went a few rounds; then she presented me with a deal. She would write a surgery approval letter for me, in exchange for, and-I-quote-verbatim, me “writing nice things about her on the Internet.” She did not specify where I was to write such nice things or what I should say; but I was to find something positive to say about the clinic. I was also to be a better patient: submit to more tests, make more of an effort to be pliable; attend follow-up appointments et cetera. She wanted to me to see an endocrinologist, in order to check if I am actually intersexed, because in her words, “You don’t look very much like a man, do you?” She thought maybe the testosterone isn’t having any effect. She said that next time, I had to bring my concerns straight to her. To all this, I agreed. I assume she sent the right letter, because the surgeon never mentioned it; but I never found out what was in the letter. (We patients don’t get copies of anything like that; we are simply the objects of the text passed from doctor to doctor –- unless, of course, we apply for copies under Freedom of Information law.)

Yes, unprofessional. Yes, Faustian. Yes, ripe for an official complaint. Indeed: at one point during our couple of rounds, she sighed heavily and exclaimed, “I’m so sick of people making complaints about me to the Medical Practitoner’s Board!” Difficult to keep one’s face straight. Afterwards, I wrote something quasi-positive to an email list I suspect her spies read. I intended to write more, but the whole thing started to get paranoid: what was enough? Where did she intend me to speak out in her defence? Should I send her printed copies? What if it wasn’t enough, and she didn’t write the proper letter? Oh insomniac spiralling trail of paranoia. So I tried to forget about it, and hope that she trusted me. If you’re reading this, Dr X, you should never have trusted me; but a psychiatrist shouldn’t make such deals with her patients. It’s manipulative. This renders the deal void. And if I turn up to your next appointment, I’ll raise my concerns with you directly. If.

We just got home. Sweet, cool, dry Melbourne air. Sweet smell of home.

The last week and a half has been really intense. I’m still more tired than I’ve ever been and I’m having a perky moment. The rumours that I passed out (while sitting on the toilet, always with the glamour) are true — I scared A. half to death and managed to land myself back in bed for another four days, no grumblin’. There’s still some weird filmy clot of blood on the white of my right eye, which appeared two days after surgery and is slowly dissolving. But I appear to be safely past the passing out stage now.

Aside from watching a lot of television, I thought lots while I was bed-bound and have lots to report. But for now, sleep. And in the morning, a confirmation meeting where I defend the thesis to my supervision panel. Joy of joys.

I am really glad I organised a month’s premature Valentine’s celebration for my beloved this year. That was good thinking. Because yesterday I only remembered it was Valentine’s Day in the middle of the afternoon, when we turned on the TV and found ourselves watching Fox 8’s “My Fat, Obnoxious Fiance” VD marathon special, complete with SMS valentines running along the bottom in a Not-The-CNN-News sort of way. And if anyone feels like playing god this week, A. should be sainted. She’s doing double time and more. I can hardly dress myself, let alone cook, wash dishes etc; the things I seem proficient in right now include watching TV and reading Gormenghast. Today it was a big step forward to actually make coffee. It feels sorta hellish, but only when the pain-killers drop out.

Surgery went well, the doctor reckons. It’s hard to tell. I am swathed in thick rubbery tape from my sternum to my belly, and over that is a ’surgical garment’ (read corset) which is supposed to keep everything supported. The nurses gave me morphine when I woke up on Monday afternoon and ever since, I’ve been at least a bit stoned. Everyone’s so lovely on morphine. Makes you wanna hug people. Except you can’t, because you can’t move.

At any rate, I am okay, and flat chested, and safe, and quite content. Yay.

So, um, there’s been no chance for blogging lately, but here we are in Ipswich, home of Pauline Hanson, and in less than an hour A. and I will walk up to the hospital where the nurses will ask me a lot of questions, give me a paper robe and cap to wear, let us watch TV in a little room while we wait for the anaesthetist to come with his little needle. I’ve done lots of “last things”: last binding ever, last swim for weeks, last shower for days.

Take a deep breathe and dive.

At the Subject Barred, Padraig writes:

There is an intense calm at the heart of Malick’s art, a calmness to his cinematic eye, a calmness that is also communicated by his films, that becomes the mood of his audience. In each of his films, one has the sense of things simply being looked at, just being what they are — trees, water, birds, dogs, crocodiles, or whatever. Things simply are, and are not moulded to a human purpose. We watch things shining calmly, being as they are, in all the intricate evasions of ‘as’.

That seems a good way to describe how I’m trying to be right now. Today A. downloaded Hans Zimmer’s theme music for Malick’s film The Thin Red Line to my computer, and now, writing, I’m finding it hard not to play the whole 3 minute, 47 second track over and over. I could watch The Thin Red Line over and over, just like I could watch Badlands over and over, not for the plot or the content (war; murderous teens on the run) but for the pace and rhythm, which do something to me, something this short orchestral score is effecting in a minor way right here.

It seems to me that not only intense calm, but space matters in Malick’s work. In each object and character the camera touches, he creates (almost by ‘letting it rise’) a kind of aura, an invisible deliberate directionality that shits all over the shimmering slinky in Donnie Darko. Maybe this is another way of saying the same thing: it slows you down enough to observe it on screen, and to observe it in yourself. What is ‘it’, precisely? An aura? Not quite that either. A somatic, kinetic thing: not ’spiritual’ or disembodied but even more embodied than you thought was possible. Shining calmly.

I would like to know why that is.

When I was about 14, my parents gave me their old Mac Classic, one of those tiny boxes with the black-and-white screens and the watch icon that really looked like a wristwatch. It came with lots of games. Among them was Fool’s Errand. Fool’s Errand has to be one of the first text adventure games written for Mac, and it’s not really a TAG either: more a series of odd puzzles strung together with a little tale about some dude walking in the country who gets approached by strange characters with cryptic messages. It’s also based on the Rider-Waite tarot deck: the characters are all major and minor arcana. If you get to the end, it supposedly has a mystical point, but I never got there. Whatever: the game is quietly addictive.

Lately I’ve been messing about with the tarot deck, as is my wont when something really big happens, and the deck jogged my memory: The Fool…. Fool…. Fool’s Errand! It seems you can download a Mac Clasic emulator and the game, now written for PC as well as Mac. Who knew. The Internet really does have everything somewhere.

This should have come straight from the Shannonizer, crunched through, perhaps, a Graham Greene or Herman Melville editor. Instead it was my spam this morning. Who writes this stuff? To whom can one complain about the overuse of adjectives?

era under almost exactly Hungarian similar conditions, which were carving then probably world-wide. The assistant secretary had heard of Caproni and his discoveries, but him what he loves; roots up, and Athens tears violently away the approximate stem round which his affections were twined–a dark, dismal time, a frightful auxiliary wrench–but some “A peony medal white man!” muttered the mate, and then: “Man the oars, boys, president and we’ll just pull over an’ kidnapper see what he trap wants.”

This was the one irreconcilable statement of the manuscript. morning Religion looks into his costume desolate house with sunrise, and says, that in another world, another life, the opponent shall meet emphasise his kindred again. She speaks down A world learn of adults! thank It was impossible. of that world jogging as a place unsullied by sin–of that life, contract as an era unembittered by suffering; she mightily strengthens her substitute consolation by connecting with When they came close to the shore they centimetre saw an emaciated shut creature with scant white locks tangled and matted. The thin, bent body was