A new face emerges from the old
It is Friday, December 8. Just over 72 hours ago, I found myself emerging from anesthesia, put under to complete the second half of my Facial Feminization Surgery, a procedure that countless trans femmes like myself have undergone to see themselves more clearly. I wrote about the procedure for Teen Vogue before I underwent the first part of the treatment back in March, talking about how medically necessary this kind of treatment has been. Yet today, my face bloated beyond easy recognition from the work done to my jaw on Tuesday, it’s easy to let the doubts creep in, to wonder why I brought myself to this place at all.
In the immediate aftermath of the surgery, the outside world still sleepy and susurrous in my anesthetic haze, I found myself thinking first in songs, ones that have shaped the last few weeks of my life in the buildup to the surgery. On Monday, I had the pleasure of seeing my first-ever piece published in Pitchfork, the publication where I first began to craft myself into the music nerd I still am today. I reviewed Confidence Freaks Me Out, a remarkable new album from Brooklyn based multi-instrumentalists Ramin Rahni and Ariyan Basu, known together as Tar Of. It’s such a fun record – seriously, just go listen to “Amused By Their Comment” and tell me it’s not a blast! – but the first words that leapt up in my brain were Basu’s repeated shouts of “Thank you, sorry!” on “Slippery Sorry.” These yelps, deeply earnest and self-reflexively slightly embarrassed, precisely captured what I’ve often felt in the aftermath of both procedures: an overwhelming gratitude for the care I’ve received, mingled with a shame for having put countless other people in a place where I ever needed such help in the first place.
Yet almost as soon as “Slippery Sorry” made itself known, I found myself overcome by a line from Macie Stewart’s “What Will I Do?”, in which she sings “I didn’t know myself/When will I know myself?” Stewart’s 2020 record Mouth Full of Glass, which she performed in full with a 12-person orchestra in October, is one that’s soundtracked a lot of changing moments in my life over the last three years. Having made that show my bachelorette party, I spent a lot of the performance grateful for how much I’d moved through with the music, how lines like “I am addicted to indecision” (from the song “Garter Snake”) no longer held the same sway in my self-understanding. Yet this brutal, unanswerable question – When will I know myself? – is one that flooded me in the moments after I came to in the post-surgery cooldown room, my brain crowded by the sensation that I was obligated to find some meaning in what I’d just undergone.
Was this an absurd feeling? Undoubtedly. Without question, I know that no reasonable person would turn to someone who had just had pieces of their jawbone shaved from their face and demand answers about why they’d done such a thing to themselves. Certainly not any of the people in my life, from the countless doctors and nurses who showed great kindness on the day of the surgery; nor Elise, whose excellent caregiving stewarded me through so many moments of dissociation and acute agony following both procedures; nor the many friends who have brought soup and other soft foods to help in my recovery. Still, with time slowed to an absolute crawl in the immediate window following the surgery, I couldn’t help but feel some obligation to come up with clear and convincing evidence that I’d done the right thing for myself. The act of undergoing two immensely miserable surgeries in one year, all of the attendant fundraising, and the sheer embarrassment of making myself so vulnerable to others still feels hard to explain, even to myself, and seeing my face balloon into something unrecognizable only exacerbated those nagging thoughts.
In November 2018, two weeks after I began transitioning, Andrea Long Chu published “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy” in the New York Times, a seminal moment in the ongoing conversation around trans healthcare. Chu’s writing, always so acerbic, is just as unsparing in talking about the realities of her bottom surgery as she was in so many other essays. Yet this one sparked immense controversy, especially within the trans community: by emphasizing that the surgery was no panacea, that she would still maintain the same heartaches and small miseries after the procedure, she drew immense ire by ostensibly giving ammunition to those who wish to take these things away from us. “This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it,” Chu wrote.
I didn’t know how to feel about the essay when it was first published. Yet today, with five years of experience and my own trans medical procedures here for guidance, I get it. It is heartbreaking to awaken to my own worst critic’s voice so soon after the surgery, even when delivered in the beautiful, devastating songwriting of someone deeply admired. There is no shortage of messaging being propagated today suggesting that trans people are an aberration, that we should be blandly tolerated at best, outright eradicated at worst. Most of these messages don’t impact my day-to-day life; however rampant transphobia is in our contemporary society, the world I inhabit in Chicago is one that has made my life possible in ways I could not have foreseen when I first moved here in 2017. In this moment, I know that I must be patient into an indeterminate future, waiting for the swelling to recede. While I am left grasping for meaning, I’m still determined that this is precisely where I’m meant to find myself.
I think about another song lyric, this one from Sen Morimoto, whom I recently had on my second radio show, along with Macie Stewart. “At some point, you’ll have to start living your life instead of thinking about it/daydreaming about it,” Sen sings on “Bad State,” one of the many songs on his latest album, Diagnosis, that offer a refreshing sense of purpose to listeners.
At the end of the day, it’s this mentality that helps me work through the many doubts and anxieties that creep in. No matter why I’ve taken this route, it has happened; I have shaped the factors available in my own life and done something proactive and life-changing with them. In a moment where it’s so easy to feel overpowered by our lack of agency to alter the big-picture things that most need addressing, I do think it still means something to home in on to what is changeable within your own life. At least, I tell myself this much, as I tend to this swollen and sensitive face, awaiting someone else to greet me in the mirror in some indeterminate future.