The year that I was four I made the same heinous grimace when anyone tried to take my picture. My mom called it my look, as in: “Stop doing your look!” or, more recently, “Remember when you ruined every family photo with your look?” In the group shots from that year in the mid- 80s my parents, aunts, and grandparents look exasperated and my brothers, even the little one who’s only two, look sweet and nervous. My look was part of a pattern of behaviors that continue to this day and that, taken together, compose what my mother hates about me. But, recently when I asked her why she thought I did it, she said that it made sense to her: “I think you started right around the time people started telling you that you were a pretty little girl and that really bugged you.” Around the time of that conversation, I told her that my friend Jules was writing a book about trans kids’ history. I asked her whether she thought I had strong ideas about my gender when I was little. “I don’t know,” she said, “you were always talking to yourself and pretending to be someone else anyway. I think you mostly just wanted people to leave you alone.”
I’ve spent the last year looking to the left from a prone position at the inside of my ovaries and uterus, hazily imaged on screens. My gynecologist has shown me dye whirling through my fallopian tubes and pointed out a shadow on the ultrasound that was the scar left by the egg that my body had ovulated the month before. This began last November when my insurance company denied me coverage for IVF treatments. They said that the six months of carefully timed at-home inseminations I’d been conducting with the help of my friend weren’t adequate to establish a diagnosis of infertility. So, despite my doctor saying that it was not going to work, I embarked on a year of monthly medicalized intrauterine inseminations to prove I qualified for IVF coverage. This process involved multiple visits to the doctor every month for ultrasounds of my ovaries and uterus, taking pills to encourage the development of multiple egg follicles per cycle, and vial after ruby vial of blood to check that my hormone levels were conducive to achieving pregnancy.
The procedures themselves started with twisting to administer a shot in my own glute to trigger ovulation. “Use a stabbing motion, plunging the whole of the needle into the muscle” the online video guide advised. Then I either called to have the sperm delivered from the bank downtown to the hospital on the Upper East Side, or several times (because of Covid delivery delays), I biked to the bank and then hobbled the thirty-five blocks up first avenue carrying the Co2 canister like a milkmaid. Then to the andrology lab on the seventh floor to thaw the sperm and then I carried the thawed vial down to the sixth floor. Then into the stirrups, in goes the speculum to ratchet open my vagina, the nurse practitioner commenting on whether the look of my cervix indicated imminent ovulation. The NP would draw the purple-dyed sperm into a syringe and insert the catheter, which pinched a little as it passed my cervix into my uterus; one NP told me to say a prayer at this moment. There were the minor but compounding indignities: a NP repeatedly calling me by my partner’s name, several providers asking if my husband (or once my hubby) was with me, the days spent in the insurer’s automated phone labyrinth. This year has required so much time peeing on a stick to check for ovulation or pregnancy, evaluating cervical discharge, checking my underwear for the early pink bleeding that might indicate success or the later red bleeding that would prove failure.
The relationship between genital structures, reproductive organs, and personal identity has been the focus of a new kind of attention in the past few years. This attention was first occasioned by efforts to use language that does not alienate trans people for concerns attendant to menstruation, pregnancy, and various other medical needs. This effort was then met with a mocking and dismissive response from a small but influential cohort of (mostly) British-based feminists who critics, myself included, refer to as TERFS (trans exclusionary radical feminists). TERFs rolled their eyes at terms like “people with a cervix” and “people who mensturate,” and then made the more cutting claim that this language erases women. This same perspective has resulted in legislative efforts in the UK and the US to eliminate trans healthcare for trans kids and bar trans women from continuing to participate in women’s sports. After a year of being obliged to spend so much time thinking about and looking at images of these newly ideologically significant structures and organs, I’m left with the view that bodily experiences create many different kinds of connections that are not ordered by the cis categories that have sought to constrain them.
In terms of my body, I felt social feelings, not a welling up of connection to my individual organs and structures, but an intensification of melancholy connections with people in my life whose experiences intersected in newly palpable ways with mine. Early in the process I met my friend M at an empty bar in Ridgewood, Queens on a Sunday afternoon. We got drunk and talked about some problems she was dealing with since having a vaginoplasty the year before. Her fetishizing surgeon (he seemed obsessed with commenting on her attractiveness), had alienated her from her medical care and even from its results. We talked about my frustrations with the medical care I was receiving. We both cried about our vaginas. When I showed up to the IVF how-to class I recognized a transmasculine acquaintance and waved to them across the room. They smiled and we sat next to each other, our presence comforting to be together in that straight space. We’ve been texting each other a little whenever one of us has news or advice to share. My friend S has been my IVF mentor; her first pregnancy revealed she and her husband share a genetic condition and so required her to do genetic screening and IVF. What I’ve felt in my body in this process has been made easier, by her help. I sat in the audience while D read a poem that held next to one another the experience of being cat-called in a racist way versus a sexist way, evoking the fine grain of bodily sensation that each experience produces. My butch friend G who plans to start trying for pregnancy next year is the person I’ve been closest to in this process as we talk through logistics and decision-making. With another friend, J, I’ve been discussing what she’s called “our year in hormones,” she taking her estrogen and progesterone for her purposes and I for mine. We compare our experiences of injecting ourselves and the results that these injections produced.
Some of these friends are women, some are not women. Some have the same organs and structures that I have, others do not. Some are modifying their bodies with the same substances with which I am modifying my body. We’re there together, listening to one another; my body’s experience has been involved in being able to hear about theirs. My love for these people creates a bond that affects how I feel about my body and makes me want to protect theirs. History has created these bonds between and among our bodies and these affinities, for me, are the substance of my sense of sex identity, of what embodiment itself means.
For this reason, my social feelings have been historical too, making me feel kindred not just with the people on the other side of the table, but also on the other side of the page. The experience of this year, both the personal and the collective elements, have drawn me closer to stories I’ve read or heard. During my year in the stirrups, I’ve thought a lot about an anonymous person whose story I know from its telling recorded in a nineteenth-century sexological text. This person was very masculine and became so distressed when they became pregnant that they killed themself. In a 1917 issue of The American Journal of Urology and Sexology, I read about Loop-the-loop, a New Yorker who was sent by the cops to a doctor for being a fairy in the 1890s. He put her in stirrups and she joyfully told him all about her sex life. She pointed out she had a little vagina, unbothered that he called this structure a rectum, as he ratcheted it open for examination. I thought of her when I was being examined in related, but not identical, ways. In the documentary Southern Comfort, I learned about Robert Eads, who died in 1999 of ovarian cancer, which was left untreated because he was, at first, not inclined to seek healthcare in the rural Southern community where he lived, and then when substantial bleeding forced him to seek care, was repeatedly turned away by OB/GYNs who told him that a trans man’s presence in waiting rooms would distress other patients. I felt for his fear, frustration, and rage in the swirl of logistics, blockades, and emotions of my year in the stirrups.
Then there are the family stories. My mother told me her experience of having a dilation and extraction after her first pregnancy ended in an early miscarriage; the OBGYN was visibly and vocally upset that he had to come in on his day off to perform it and so slammed around the speculum and did not administer anasthesia. The nurse who assisted murmured “we’ve never performed this procedure without anesthesia before.” My grandmother woke up from giving birth to find out that her fourth baby was dead. Among my grandmother’s things, I found a photo of her favorite cousin, whom she called her “kissing cousin,” and, who, in a photo from the 1950s is standing with their side-eyeing siblings who look like John Wayne movie extras. Their hair is blown out and shoulder length and on their fingers: long red nails. These people have widely divergent identities, contexts, and bodies. But, this year has intensified my identification with each of them, made that identification more visceral, in the literal cast of that word: my sympathy felt on the level of flesh and organ. I think that I can feel what each of these people felt: surveilled, examined, splayed like a specimen, feminized and freakish.
These scraps coalesced into this narrative last month, when at the height of bad feeling about the relentlessness of the procedures I was needlessly undergoing, I obsessively watched a Youtube video of a seven-year-old Drew Barrymore being interviewed by Johnny Carson after E.T. made her a small star. She comes onto the stage and plops herself onto the armchair. From the moment the interview begins, Carson focuses on her physical appearance. After pleasantries she says that something is making it hard for her to talk and pulls a plate out from her mouth and places it on his desk, false front teeth that she says her mom made her wear for interviews and photographs. He asks her if she likes going to the dentist to which she says yes, sort of, explaining her thoughts about the importance of dental hygiene. He first insinuates and then insists she answer whether she likes going to the dentist because she has a crush on him. After forcing her to admit something that had obviously never occurred to her previously, he has her guess the dentist’s age as though to underline for the audience that what he’s doing is compelling a child to express sexual desire for an adult. Finally, he states his intention to “run off with her” himself. In this interview, each time Carson returns to the only topic he will allow, little Drew’s desirability and sexualization, you see her look uncertain, immobilized, uncomfortable, incapable of response.This kid has a lot to say about things in which Carson has no interest. When he asks her about getting the part in E.T, she says that when she auditioned, “Steven [Spielberg] was worried that [she] couldn’t do awe.” “Do you know what awe is?,” she asks Carson. He laughs.“It’s like this,” she gapes her jaw, “doing awe” for him in a display of genius. He is unable to respond to this, returning to his one way of relating to her, as a pretty little white girl.
The squirm of that interview calls me into my body in a ghoulish and nauseating way that snakes through this year and all of the bonds it has forged and reinforced. For many feminists, including TERFs, the memory of this kind of experience is central to their political understanding. Some then make the leap to suggesting that these experiences adhere solely (and universally) to certain structures — ovaries, uteruses, cervixes. Some view their organs and tissues as some great individual identificatory resource. I just don’t see it that way and not because I don’t notice my body or consider it important, but because, for me, what has counted is the way that my body has related to the different people that I care for and who have cared for me in this year. Those lines of affiliation and the communal feeling that they produce, run in different ways, organize around different points of contact in our different histories. All include a common relation to the ghoulishness of the Carson interview and nothing is denied the girl in that video by recognizing that the hatred of girls and women on display therein attacks trans girls and women with equal vigor. That experience is activated when you are sexed or sexualized against your will, when having health care that focuses on your genitals or have such healthcare withheld. These experiences all relate, in some way, to being the inconvenient person in a photo.
These fierce, determinative bonds stem from a sorority and a siblinghood with those who have been looked at, but not seen. We measure our sensations, pains, embarrassments, losses, desires and understandings against one another’s. These bonds have rescued my year in the stirrups, scrutinizing my organs, listening to my structures described, reading reports quantifying my body’s functioning, from the paralysis that feminizing experience can evoke because of this history of having been seen as a certain type of girl and also as a freak. These people who’ve allowed me to see myself in them, who, I think, have given me the gift of seeing themselves in me, have rescued my body from an ideology that fixes me as the mute term in somebody else’s self-definition game. There is no life in this body without these bonds, not for me. It is this orienting understanding of my body that those who seek to make cisness compulsory through anti-trans attacks seek to deny me. Ultimately, a year of looking at my organs on screens has rescued them from the mystifying ideology on which misogyny is premised. The cervix is not the threshold to a holy vessel. The hymen is not a mark of morality. They certainly aren’t anything for me to hang my identity on or for anyone else to view as the definitional structures of my personhood. These structures are ever-changing biological entities, who sometimes function as you wish them to, and sometimes do not. I should know, I’ve been compelled to study mine quite closely lately.
Image Credits: Richard John Pozon
