[16] Tournelle du Soleil • 15 May 2023, Continued (Patreon)

I’ve been taking a full dose of testosterone for a year and a half. Before that, I went through a 6-month-on, 6-month-off, 8-month on period of low dose testosterone (a quarter to a half of the dose  I currently inject every Sunday morning with a 21 gauge needle into the muscle of my thigh). 

The trans men and transmasculine people I know take it to masculinize their bodies; and some non-binary people I know (like me) take it, too. Taking exogenous testosterone (as in: it was made outside your own body) through a gel or injection will cause development in secondary sex characteristics. You might build muscle, have more body hair and facial hair, find your voice will deepen – stuff like that. 

But I wasn't sure about it. I wasn't sure about it for a long time.

I didn't feel like I was a man. I didn't feel like I was a woman.

As someone who didn't feel a strong resonance with either of the binary gender options (man, woman), knowing that taking testosterone would change my appearance in a direction that other people in the world might one day interpret as male led to a lot of uncertainty. 

I could point to aesthetic characteristics in both men and women that I liked in other people, or in myself. I didn't feel like anything was 'wrong' or 'missing' in my body. Everything felt ... tolerable.

Familiar. Unpleasant. Tolerable.

It turns out we can tolerate things that we shouldn't for a very long time. It turns out that a reluctance to experience unfamiliarity was a stronger antagonist than I accounted for. 

It's easy to stick with 'tolerable'. It's not so bad. Especially if you're stoic about it. If you're stoic about it, then the 'tolerable' takes on the romantic glamour of existential malaise and angst. And then you can become an artist, and feel justified in making sense of self-medicating this murky dissatisfaction that, really, could be attributable to any number of things, with any number of creative inclinations. Or, as my doctors called it, 'depressed'. 

You're just sticking it out. Life is tough, you know? What else is there to say about it?

'Tolerable' makes murky any clarity that might otherwise be gained from the kind of self-knowledge that aligns clearly and specifically with binary gender. With knowing you are a man, or knowing you are a woman.

I've tolerated many things. I am good at enduring. These are admirable qualities.

Or, at least, I was raised to think so.

Tolerance: one of the few recourses left to us when we are in situations that are inescapable. In an unchangeable environment, in a place where we feel that there is no action we might take that could change things to be any other way, humans are left with scant options. We can dissociate (I'm very good at that one). We can break things (I tried that too; don't recommend it if you'd like to avoid involuntary stays on psychiatric wards, though). We can suffer it, immensely, consumed with every waking second by existential pain brought by the awareness of our own inability to effect change. Or we can tolerate it. Not giving up. Not denying it. But simply ... carrying on.

At least – I thought so.

Unfortunately, depending on how big the thing is that you are trying to tolerate, tolerance has a shelf life. In the time leading up to when I pursued gender-affirming surgery and had a double mastectomy in 2020 I would say this to myself about my breasts: they were tolerable. I didn't like them; but they didn't feel wrong, or that they weren't supposed to be there. And those feelings didn't feel like big enough reasons to not have them. To pursue the surgery that would allow me to not have them.

Maybe I could just work harder at liking them.

Maybe I just needed to find the right bra.

Maybe I just hadn't found the right boyfriend.

Maybe I just hadn't found the right girlfriend.

Maybe it was just trauma.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Everybody had a lot of different ideas about it. Most people had no problem sharing what their ideas were with me. Enthusiastically.

All I knew was that it was just ... my body. A body I didn't like, for a multitude of reasons that seemed quite broad and not at all easily attributable to gender identity things. I'll spare you the thought process that led up to my actually deciding to pursue it, but the relevant part for this story is the realization that arrived after I had top surgery – my god, the level of relief and comfort I felt. It felt like I'd been walking around holding my breath for years.

I'd grown up in the era of dysphoria and pathologization being the only possible justification for pursuing any of what we now call gender-affirming care. My organic, shifting sense of self; the way that I thought about the relationship between my mind and my body; the way a not-small part of me thought of this accumulation of carbon and calcium and water that formed the shape of my body was, really, just going to be (if I was lucky) an eight-decade-long art installation (give or take a few years) –– none of these ways of making sense of myself aligned with a world where I might be able to give myself permission to just do the damn thing because I wanted to.

Until I did.

And life was better.

Miraculously.

Once this moment in my life had passed, it made it easier to consider that I didn't have to tolerate other things about my body or mind that felt like heavy weights on me. Tolerance, as it turns out, isn't a blanket virtue. Although it can be a survival tactic. And if you're living in a way where every day feels like survival, the acceptance of that feeling can blend into the background hum of daily life.

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Your next instalment of Tournelle du Soleil arrives tomorrow at 7am EST / 1pm CEST. Until then, stay strange and wonderful - XO, ess