A Tale of the Knives: My Experiences with Facial Feminization Surgery, Part 2

If you haven’t seen the first part, check it out here! I should warn you that this part is a little more body horror than the last, so feel free to skip it if that’s not to your tastes.

A Tale of the Knives: My Experiences with Facial Feminization Surgery, Part 1

Hi, all! Invisible Blog in its traditional, mostly-music format has long required me to consume large amounts of new music in order to come up with reviews. We’ve had innovations to deal with this (write about VGM, re-review stuff, write flash fiction…), but what if we also had more articles about other things? For what it’s worth, I’m not guaranteeing that the structure of Invisible Blog will substantiatively change, but even so much as deciding to write on my recent facial feminization surgery procedure does put the idea in my head. Ultimately, I currently live in a world of cisgendered people who may or may not care about trans issues that don’t immediately affect them, but my first message to you all – the odds that you personally know someone who identifies as trans or otherwise gender non-conforming has skyrocketed. Please treat them with respect and kindness.

When the time came for me to start seriously questioning my gender and thinking about who I wanted to be, facial dysphoria was one of my big concerns. I feared the possibility that were I to go through with transition, I’d end up looking ugly, stuck between traditional gender presentations, and otherwise ostracized for not looking the right sort of feminine. In the end, I paid some very nice people a lot of money to do my makeup and otherwise show me whether or not it could be done. My fears were… irrational, to say the least – seeing myself full femme for the time was electrifying (though ironically, I’ve come to prefer more of a “goth butch metalhead” look in recent years). At this point in my life, I say gender presentation is extremely mutable, especially if you have an expert showing you all the stuff you can do with your gender.

Having this knowledge and eventually estradiol coursing through my body did wonders for my appearance, but there were still pain points in how I perceived my face. I got to the point where I was low-level considering surgery for quite a while, but nothing pushed me over the limit until fall last year, at which time I went to do a photoshoot for Planepacked. Academically speaking, the photos turned out fine, but I couldn’t stand how my face looked in them! I’d figured out some techniques that I liked for day to day selfies, and I’d learned how to do makeup that I enjoy, but it wasn’t enough. After that, I decided I needed to start the processes and find a way to be ready by whenever it happened. As a side note, I did end up figuring out a better approach to taking promotional photos that’ll come in handy just in general; take a look if you’re interested, but keep in mind that my eventual success in depicting myself didn’t erase my desire to alter my body.

What followed really made it evident just how lucky and privileged I am. Key point – I was born to a decently prosperous middle class family, and raised by parents who made countless sacrifices to get me opportunities that other children wouldn’t have had. To be fair, this also meant PC gaming and abandonware piracy on a grand scale since they wouldn’t buy me a Game Boy. But the gist of this is that I managed to eventually get myself well paying work, fiscal independence, and health insurance that would pay a hefty chunk of the FFS costs. Without this, saving for surgery can be a massive ordeal, especially with the inflated medical costs of the USA. Medical tourism starts to look like a very tempting option – head over to a country with a good doctor quality/expenses ratio, get your surgery done, turn your convalescence into a vacation, return refreshed and ready to tell your friends how even the barest whisper of a public insurance option will turn us into a “socialist” country- I digress. I’m also lucky to have friends and colleagues who were able to help me deal with those critical few days when I needed the most help recovering.

NEXT TIME: What happened on the day of and after surgery, which was released once I’d had sufficient experiences of the latter.

Victory Over The Sun – A Tessitura of Transfiguration (2020)

One of the more interesting effects of the pandemic is that I spend a good chunk of time on queer Twitter. A glorious if perhaps unhealthy diet of shitposts (twitposts?), hot lesbian selfies, and discourse are thus mine to enjoy, but it’s also beginning to shape my music choices. Mere weeks into the pandemic, an account I follow shared a video of this band’s frontwoman performing microtonal black metal that would eventually become Nowherer… about a year later. Trust me when I say we’ll get to that. In the mean time, I immersed myself in this slightly more conventional predecessor. Does an album inspired by “…finding [the author’s] voice as an artist as well as a trans woman” sound at all familiar to you?

So no, you won’t find any microtonal writing on A Tessitura of Transfiguration, but you’re still getting a dissonant and challenging slab of black metal. The production here is thin, cold, and harsh; pretty classic for the genre. It’s a bit lo-fi, but you can hear all the elements without much difficulty – even the bass! There’s also a few symphonic flourishes around this album’s edges, which helped get my attention when I was first delving into its secrets. Not that it’s that important, but how many black metal albums have you listened to that had bass clarinet parts? This combines with the frequent sections to make for an album that feels thoroughly orchestrated. The high concept lyrics (this is clearly an album about realizing your gender identity, complete with all the pain and euphoria doing so can dredge up) push this effect further – I don’t think most of the black metal I listen to is arranged into concept albums, so this is a welcome change.

Repeated listening made it clear that A Tessitura of Transfiguration fundamentally has good compositions. There are four extended tracks here; they explore a variety of moods and overall trace out a narrative of rising and falling dysphoria. There’s a tenuous balance here – harsh noise and chaos balanced by a good ear for melodic hooks. I’ve listened to my share of albums that disappear into their technical achievements and lose track of how to tie everything together into a coherent package in the process. The easy opportunities for strong dynamics from the instrumentation help as well – it makes the loudest, most aggressive moments hit harder (which maybe isn’t surprising), but also gives you those crucial moments of simmering tension that should keep you on the edge of your seat, at least until the novelty wears off. But you’ll still have the strong fundamentals even after you’ve memorized every note on this recording.

To be honest, being another transwoman was probably enough to shunt Victory Over the Sun into my Bandcamp purchases, but I’m sure the hypothetical and frankly implausible cisgender version of me would appreciate this album’s artistry.

Highlights: “Half Silvered Mirror”, “The Enormous Cosmos (in the Cavity of the Mouth)”

Thoughts on First Event 2020

Well, it’s finally happened. After a year of being out as a transwoman in public, but only making brief references to it throughout Invisible Blog, I’m finally dedicating an article to part of my lived trans experience! Not sure the far right/fascist demographics will take it well, but you can’t please everyone.

So as the title suggests – I attended First Event in that liminal space between January and February of 2020. First Event is, in the organizers’ own words, “…one of the longest running conferences in the U.S. for transgender and gender expansive people and those who love and support them.” All good stuff. This wasn’t my first time attending First Event; I went last year, when I’d been out to the public all of one week, but this year, I was not only able to attend more of its events, but also had the opportunity to present my own workshop! I ended up presenting on what it was like to be transgender in the tech industry; if you ask me, I have the personal experience required to appear authoritative on the topic.

This was my first time giving a business/workshop-type presentation, so I was admittedly nervous. I arrived in the nick of time, only to find I had various technical SNAFUs – a laptop with failing wifi (solved by a tether), a misbehaving electrical outlet (solved by plugging into another wall), and a missing projector (which took a while to arrive in a form I could use). That being said, I was able to push through and have a good discussion with the people who arrived. A few points I remember that came up:

• Major corporations are getting better about treating their gender expansive/LGBTQ+ employees with respect and dignity (though there’s a long way to go).
• Transfeminine folk potentially have to deal with more entrenched sexism than transmasculine folk.
• Tech/IT companies sometimes find creating trans-inclusive policies extraordinarily difficult (read: StackOverflow).

Firefox’s default spellcheck dictionary isn’t quite ready for the gender-inclusive language that I need to make these themed blogposts really sing.

Besides being a chance to host a workshop and hand out business cards, First Event was also a chance to meet new friends and spend time with old ones. Now, my trans friends are mostly yuppified urban professionals – not far from my age, more or less well off, probably not especially representative of the trans community as a whole. The organizers of First Event have spent substantial resources on attracting as diverse a swathe of the trans community as possible, and it showed at times. Still, I noticed a particularly large demographic of older, whiter, more affluent, and transfeminine people attending the conference. This is probably a result of First Event’s history. First Event is hosted by the Trans Club of New England. That organization was formerly known as the “Tiffany Club”; it started as a support group exclusively for transwomen in the 1980s, and a very secretive one at that. In their defense, the average person’s understanding of transgender people was… not particularly enlightened back then. It’s kind of fascinating seeing that history written across the community gathered at First Event, but I suspect the ratios will become less skewed over time.

Ultimately, I enjoyed my time at First Event 2020 and feel that I learned a great deal. This isn’t exactly a review, but if you want to take it as an endorsement, feel free.

Recommended tracks: – just kidding. First Event did, however, organize its various workshops into “tracks”; for example, one aimed at transmasculine people, one aimed at transgender youth, one aimed at corporate allies, etc.