Every Step, A Step Closer
By: Theresa Jean Tanenbaum
Tags: Transitioning, LGBTQ, Transgender

Spend enough time around trans people and eventually you will get the story of their “awakening” to their gender identity. For some it’s a persistent knowledge that they assert when they are young, insisting upon their correct gender consistently until caregivers take notice. For others, it’s a revelation! Some alignment of circumstances where a life lived out of focus suddenly becomes crystal clear. For me, it was more diffuse. My transness was always there, lurking just beneath the surface. It lay dormant, at first because I didn’t know how to explain myself, and later because I was afraid of what I’d lose if I faced the truth. The circumstances around my “awakening” are entangled with so many intersecting traumas, coincidences, and moments of realignment that I’ve hesitated to try and lay them out in detail. I don’t have a great memory for details, but one thing is clear: it started with my wife driving me to the hospital.

Change or die

It was November 7th 2016, and we were waiting to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s assumed victory in the US presidential election. I was feeling sick to my stomach, but I chalked it up to anxiety about the state of the vote. I’d been on a keto diet for about 5 months, after getting thoroughly burned out on trying and failing to manage my diabetes with the meds that my general practitioner had prescribed. I was in deep denial about the extent to which my disease had progressed, and my relationship to my doctor was antagonistic at best. I’d been experiencing a stabbing pain in my side for a few weeks, but had chalked it up to being out of shape. Around bedtime I started to throw up — first my dinner, then a glass of water, then the anti-nausea medication I had taken, then another glass of water. Now my stomach was in agony. We bundled our bleary 16 month old daughter into the car seat, and rushed to the hospital. In the emergency room I was given a diagnosis — acute pancreatitis, brought on by severe ketoacidosis.

There is pain, and then there is Pain. The pancreas secretes an enzyme called lipase, which spikes when the organ is inflamed. A healthy pancreas releases approximately 50 units per liter. An unhealthy pancreas produces more. At around 120 U/L the pain is brutal. I don’t like to brag or anything, but my tests came back at over 400 U/L, which is the point where they stop measuring.

I guess, the point is: I had fucked up. And I was paying for it.

When I was admitted, it was unclear if I’d ever be walking out of that building again. The ER doctors told me they had no medicine for pancreatitis — they just hook you up to an IV, pump you full of fluids and painkillers and wait to see whether your organs recover. I was fortunate. My pancreas stopped its death spiral and returned to normal. I got to go home.

There was one especially scary moment on the first night I was in the ER, before I was moved to my own room. The staff had hooked me up to a wide array of monitoring equipment: heart rate monitors, blood oxygen levels, respiration, temperature, and some others I didn’t recognize. They had pumped me full of morphine, which wasn’t even taking the edge off of the pain. But, once my IV was run, there was nothing more for them to do aside from monitor me and wait. I was allowed to keep my phone, although I was too loopy to do much with it. Early in the morning a text came through from my wife, who had taken our daughter back home to sleep. “They’re calling the election: Donald Trump has won.”

Do you remember that sinking feeling you had when you first heard that news? I can quantify mine. Every single monitor connected to my body registered the shock and despair. A nurse came running in.

“What is going on?! You’re dying!” he said in a panic. I told him I was just upset by the election results and he looked at me like I was crazy. “No, seriously: you’re dying. You need to calm down.” He increased my morphine dose, and calm down I did.

I entered the hospital thinking the world worked one way and exited a week later to a much darker future where bigotry, racism, and misogyny had ascended to the highest office in the land. I felt like reality had fractured. In one timeline, I had died in that hospital bed, and history had proceeded the way it was meant to. In the other timeline — this timeline — things went off the rails. In this reality we got a narcissistic reality TV host as president, and an emboldened neo-fascist movement waving torches and screaming anti-Semitic slogans. It felt like I was being punished to be forced to live in this timeline.

This was the turning point in my life. I knew I had to change things, or I would die. I had to figure out how to care for myself. But how do you care for a body that feels like a shell? How do you heal yourself physically when your soul is so disconnected?

I was trans, but I hadn’t completely admitted it to myself. I believed that my dissatisfaction with being a man was something I couldn’t do anything about. But, coming out of the hospital I was consumed by a regret that I couldn’t completely put into words. Had I missed my chance? My life felt shortened, shortening, finite in a more concrete sense.

My wife and I had a conversation where I tried to explain my growing desire to do something about my gender. I’d kept so many of my gender feels in the background for so long. I told her I wanted to change this, but wasn’t sure how. I think at some level she knew this was coming. For most of our marriage, my “gender stuff” was kept safely out of sight from everyone else, but never from her. I resolved to start making some changes. It felt urgent all of a sudden. Even as trans people were becoming more visible, their rights were also increasingly being threatened by the new political reality in the United States. A part of me felt ashamed that I was willing and able to continue to benefit from the straight, cis, male privilege that I received, even as people who were like me were putting everything on the line in order to live as themselves. I wasn’t straight. I wasn’t cis. And I wasn’t male. I felt like a coward for allowing people to believe that I was for so long. And I felt like an imposter for having things that I needed to say about gender identity, while not wanting to be seen as a straight, cis, guy taking up space in the conversation. What right do I have to call myself trans, I thought, if I’m afraid to risk my safety and comfort for it?