Letting the Water Speak

I decided I would pursue medical transitioning after I walked for a few months along Lake Michigan’s shores at sunrise and sunset. Letting the rustling of the waves and this new ritual to seap its way into my bones.  A new ritual that would re-form me. Have me crying most days, but the Lake, so vast, I knew it could hold all of my tears and then more. 

I hesitated around transitioning for several reasons. 1) I made a promise to myself that if I medically transitioned, I would no longer be in contact with my parents. 2) I had several chronic illnesses I was in treatment for and I didn’t know how I could do it all: chronic/environmental illness treatment & gender-affirming care & still keep a job. 3) I identify as agender and so much of gender affirming care was still focused on the binary. Why did I want to transition if I didn’t identify as a man? 

Nature & therapy would just let me be, give me space to process. To not have answers to my questions quickly, but just let them live. Let them have space to move. 

So much of the vehement pushback against transness, against transitioning is that it is “unnatural.” Let your body take the form it takes. Like the tree accepts that it is a tree, you should accept the sex you are assigned at birth, not interfering with nature’s ways. 

This piece isn’t even to prove that I still don’t hold in my body, some of the contradictions I feel, some of the ways I’ve navigated medicine, questions I’ve asked myself around body image and acceptance.

Walking along the lake though, I didn’t have to explain or even make peace with the questions I was asking. Instead I let myself ask a simple question, “what if you allow yourself to expand?” 

As I walked the lake in each season, I added another question, “what if you allow yourself to change?” Nature demonstrates that change is natural, inevitable, needed. 

Those walks would continue as I injected testosterone, to swim at sunset and take pictures of my slowly changing body.  The lake met me as I came back to visit after top surgery recovery, floating on my back smiling at my bare chest. It’s not just humans who notice our becoming, it’s the earth too. 

I didn’t have an answer to refute everyone who disagreed with me. To me, what is supremely unnatural, is to genocide a people from their land they call home, that they are caring for and sustaining. To be unnatural is to claim “ownership” over land and peoples and individual bodies, when in fact, we all die. We don’t nearly have the control over others that we may think that we do. What is unnatural is to live as though we will not die. Intensely caring about if I have top surgery or not should be low on the priority list, as its not harming anyone. 

Growing up in christian fundamentalist spaces though, I needed time to truly feel in my body that I wasn’t that interested in the natural/unnatural debate. I just wanted to feel good. And if testosterone and top surgery would allow me to feel that way, then so be it. 

The Lake actually didn’t give a damn. But it loved me to wholeness, giving space for my questions and for my body to change form. The natural/unnatural binary feels a whole lot like moral purity and eugenics. I’m not aiming for “a perfect body” whatever that means. But one that I feel home in, that I can feel a sense of ease. One that I can say, “This is very good.” (The Divine spirit must still hover over the waters).