On squealing wheels, they roll me through the hallway. Lying on my back on the hospital bed, I’m holding my eyes toward the ceiling where fluorescent lamps pass me by, one every few meters, accelerating my nerves. The smell of alcohol indicates our arrival to the operating room.
They put the bed in a corner and leave me alone with the sounds of the hospital: beeps and mumbles of pain. I sit up and cross my legs one last time with that little extra between my legs. My thoughts go blank, like the colorlessness that surrounds me. I tell myself not to cry but feel my eyes fill up with tears nonetheless.
Here I am, about to undergo my long-awaited sex reassignment surgery after almost six years of transitioning. Ever since I was a child, my brain guided me in the direction of glitter dresses, Barbie dolls, and oversized heels instead of race cars, the color blue, and rough play with fellow boy toddlers. It always felt like I had little control over the things that made me the woman I am today. Still, I have so many questions: Why me? Why am I like this? Why do I have to alter my body in order to be happy?
Suddenly, a group of doctors and nurses appears from between the curtains. I don’t know any of them until the last person emerges: Professor Monstrey, the famous plastic surgeon I’ve had multiple appointments with over the last four years. His name, almost pronounced as “Monster,” always felt ironic to me, but in this moment, while he’s drawing lines and crosses all over my body assigning where to cut, where to take, and where to build, it doesn’t feel quite so ironic. Without even noticing the wetness on my cheeks, they leave as quickly as they came, and I’m alone again, with my tears blurring the black markings across my chest.
A few minutes later, they roll me into the operating room. There’s a single bed in the middle of an open space. The walls are white, the floors tiled whiter. I see shimmering metal tools, laying on paper-covered tables. I see the anesthesiologist preparing her machine to put me in an eight-hour sleep. She asks me questions, but I can’t really hear them. I count down, breathing gas into my lungs.
Ten, nine, eight, white, seven, black, six …
In the aftermath of my “trans”-formation, I began to question all I was and all I had become.
The first thing I remember seeing is my parents smiling down on me. My mom laying her cool hand on my glowing forehead, my father taking his usual distance by the end of the bed. The days after that are a blur. I remember my boyfriend at the time bringing me food I shouldn’t eat. I remember the nurses ripping open the bandages on my wounded body and me feeling like they would rip me open with it, my guts spilling over the sheets. On the sixth day of the healing process, all spent in the bed, I’m able to take my first steps towards the bathroom.
When I lay my eyes upon my new naked flesh for the first time, my reflection, and the image of myself, shatters. Pale white skin, laced with black thread holding pieces of blue, purple, swollen flesh together. Blood, almost black, flaking around new body parts. Eyes sunken. Ribs counted. Legs trembling. What have I done?
I let my fingers shakily discover the newness of what I see in front of me, traveling around skin unknown. They slide along the curves of my breasts. Their hardness reminds me of a Wilhelm Lehmbruck statue I once saw in the MoMA in New York City. There, I held my palm on the naked marble girl’s breasts like many before me had done, noticeable from the discolored area on her chest. She was called “The Kneeling Woman.”
Soon after that I fall to my knees, too.
I weep. First in silence, then like a newborn baby, unaware and unprepared for the world she just entered. I had always thought of the surgery as my salvation, the last step to completion, to womanhood. What I found instead was the realization that it was only the beginning of a new inferno. The perplexity, the abnormality I witnessed in that mirror. I felt I could never be a true woman if all this was the price of becoming one.
For as long as I can remember, I have been searching for the definition of my femininity. I wanted to conquer femininity. Obliterate it, even. Only now, I feel like femininity might have conquered me. I realized that when the doctors cut open my body and built a sculpture of flesh between my legs, the price I paid was a piece of my humanity. I felt machinelike, alien. A composition of meat and flesh and discolored skin, like a Picasso.
And so, in the aftermath of my “trans”-formation, I began to question all I was and all I had become. I have always proclaimed that my mind was female from the moment I was born, but having the surgery reminded me that I will never truly know how female neurons fire away thoughts. I will never feel the softness of naturally occurring breasts or the pain of a menstrual cycle.
I will never feel life growing inside my belly.
Did I regret it? I didn’t think so. What else was I supposed to do with the body I didn’t want? Just like every living thing, I followed Darwin’s survival of the fittest: I adapted to my surroundings in order to stay alive. The other option would’ve been extinction.
Still, the people around me were puzzled. “Isn’t this what you wanted all along?” they asked. Even Professor Monstrey, who praised me as one of his finest creations, waved off my dilemma using words like “petite” and “delicate,” and said things like, “Look at you, you’re so feminine. Your features don’t show any sign of the other sex. How can someone so beautiful have these issues?”
“Thank you, doctor” is all I owed him.
