sweet sorrow. blunt-force incisor. electric cycle, reflex arc. suddenly – shot – through the head. (some kind of typographic poem, experimenting with form? we dion’t do a lot of meter anymore in poetry. hard to say what we’ve gained and lost from that… but, i suppose, meter lives on in song, in lyric.)
insocient adj; casual lack of concern, indifferent
though femininity has been a blessing, transition has been my curse – or so I think when I’m feeling low. most days I find the gift and the humor in both, like the days when the surgeon gracelessly asks “uh… he or she?” but the 91-year-old patient with terminal dementia yells “excuse me, MISS, I NEED TO PEE!!” not five minutes later.
I’ve never believed in god but I’ve always had an inclination towards divinity. with every day of transition I feel closer to it than ever… and the closer I get to graduating med school, the closer I am to giving this gift to others, too… but by far the greatest gift has been my friends, my family, and my loved ones who have literally held my hands through all of this.
on facial feminization surgery:
the surgeon hands me the knife. “guide her,” he says. “do it perfect.” the one to make the first incision, to start the operation, is me.[1]
the surgery student, hands on the patient’s stitches, tells me about how excited she is to do facial feminization surgeries once she graduates. (she’s cis, as far as i can tell. like i know you’re not supposed to make assumptions about that, and everyone has different presentations and everything, etc, but, like, she is. trust me.) and in the same breath she tells me about a research project where she plugs trans womens’ faces into an AI chatbot and has it detect whether ffs has made them morphologically indistinguishable from a cis woman’s. “the takeaway is,” she says, beaming, “typically you need a brow lift, nose job, AND mandible reshaping for the highest-percentage coherence!” i’m taken aback. i was briefly considering coming out to her but would that change how she sees me? would this cis girl[2] suddenly see me as a face for use in some training algorithm?
i stitch the patient’s face. deftly the surgery student guides me through a simple rhythm – needle thru skin, suture thru loop, pull it through. i need guidance the whole way through – i flush beneath the mask, embarrassed that the only job i had been given[3] requires the surgery student’s hands on mine.[4]
[1] before the operation begins, i spend a little too much time watching the surgeon cover up her penis with a sterile cloth.
[2] okay, okay. to be fair i don’t actually know whether she’s cis. i could try and find out, search up her name, reverse-image-search a profile picture to see whether she looked amab at once point. but what would that change? and i feel like only a cis woman would participate in such a study.
[3] the other part of my job is to pour cold water over the heated plastic molds drilled into her face. as I do this they say, over the sounds of the drill, “she’s doing a good job!”
[4] and she is pretty.
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