Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

Friday: leather dyke munch. Spread the joyous news of my impending surgery, chatted with much a cute, younger, and sadly taken trans woman. Yeah, bonding with other trans girls over all our stuff is a thing I do a lot, without really meaning to. And it usually reminds me of the many ways in which I've been lucky. I didn't stick around long enough to get my boots blacked because...

...I had a ticket to the Cascadia mini-festival in Fremont. Yes, just down the hill from home. Nectar became the First Church of House Music, Orthodox, which is usually my jam, but I wasn't feeling it too much, even with the esteemed Mark Farina DJing. I bailed at midnight headed uphill, and managed to turn my light out before 0200. I think I only had enough juice in me for one event on Friday night, and it was the first one.

Saturday: got sugared, got pho, got hairs did, and got a desperately needed nap before heading for aaminahlefae's solstice party, wherein were many elder goths. 'Nuther words, it was cosy.

I'd just gotten long-awaited silver cowboy boots from Stetson, so naturally I had to go full cowgirl, with the pink circle skirt with the black floral pattern & ruffles with a square dance petticoat, both of which I got from cupcake_goth, and the blouse with the ribbon & lace applique at the shoulders that I think is inspired by Jessica McClintock. Yeah, I knowingly wore pink to a party where nearly everyone else was in Christmas colors. Because punk or something?

And now for something completely different: consumerism. In addition to yesterday's boots, in the last couple of days I've gotten or will get:

• A nearly spherical night stand lamp that I won't knock over in the dark, from IKEA.
• A glass measuring cup from IKEA so I could get the free shipping. How did I go this long without one? Charlie don't bake, that's how.
• A manual juicer, also from IKEA. I can't have lemon seeds in my chicken tagine.
• An SAE-to-USB converter so I can charge stuff with my little 10W solar panel. That should come in handy at )'(.

I got email this afternoon from the Sculptor's office detailing what all I need to get done before surgery, and when. They told me about it during my office visit, but it remains impressive:

• A physical exam & EKG from my primary care doc less than 30 days prior to surgery.
• A dental cleaning less than 30 days prior to surgery. Irony: my next cleaning is scheduled during my recovery in San Francisco anyway.
• Some lab tests, to be done March 30th, 2026. Yes, they gave me the exact date.
• Ground transportation. The cost is included in what I'm paying the Sculptor, but I still have to arrange it. And it's for me alone; no one gets to come with me.
• Speaking of cost, I owe them the balance by Jan. 28th. I think I'll let that sit in my account to accrue some interest for a few weeks.

They sent me request forms for the labs and ground transpo, plus a letter for my PCP and wire transfer instructions. It's all very organized.

This is significantly more than I had to do before either the previous work on my face or my sex reassignment surgery. Mind you, I'm fifteen years older than I was for SRS, but still. I get the distinct impression that the Sculptor is leaving less to chance than most. Maybe there's at least one interesting if not terrifying story as to why.

It occurs to me that this sort of thing isn't for anyone with poor executive function.

It also occurs to me that if I can't get cardiac or other clearance, you'll be able to hear the wail from Tacoma. Yes, I'll get my money back, but.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday at the annual Buy Nothing Day gathering at the home of my grad school classmates E & G. Yes, they're doing all right aside from G's back, but:

• Their kid hasn't launched.
• E has noticed that the younger generation is facing hurdles that would be ridiculous if they weren't enraging.
• E observes that the job market, even in the tech industry, is ass. Welcome to America, nerds.

Yeah, all those bullet points sound awfully familiar. Aside from being a transgender lesbian sadomasochist, I'm them. On the one hand, it feels good not to be alone. On the other, damn, I wish things were going better for them.

There was a table full of young trans adults. That's right: E & G have at least one trans kid. I wish I could claim responsibility, but I haven't been in their lives enough for that. Good on E & G for being decent about it.

Classmate L's son, who was dubbed the Widget right around the time of his birth, is over 30 with a kid of his own. How does this keep happening? Yeah, I know how it happens, but you know what I mean. L's ex, who also went to school with all of us, has been all over the local raver & Burner events for years. I resisted the temptation to mention him.

Oh: there was one dude there who I thought had done something absolutely unforgivable long ago. I need to find out what is, or was, up. Luckily, E proposed coffee.

Got my early evening date cancelled due to date's illness. Le sigh. Did not go out because, honestly, I didn't feel like it. I'm not adjusting well to the cold & dark this year.

Long, but not under a cut because this is SFW. I received so much info that much of this writing is for the benefit of my own memory.

So I got up at 0400 yesterday morning, having woken up even earlier, to go to San Francisco for a facial feminization consult with Dr. Jordan Deschamps-Braly, hereafter known as the Sculptor*.

Caffeine the first: my tea with breakfast.

Too early for transit meant a Sikh driver who wanted to talk. Seldom have I felt more ickily like one of Them. I didn’t tell him where I was going.

Caffeine the second: a Coke at SEA. I probably didn't need to get up as early as I did, but given the recent airport chaos, who knew?

Plane. BART. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

Caffeine the third: a Red Bull at the Willows in SoMa. The Willows has amazing burgers and I always go there at least once when I’m down there for Folsom. The place was nearly deserted at opening time on a Wednesday, and I got to tell the lady behind the counter why I was there. I tried not to take her “Sex with you sucks” t-shirt personally.

Saw some of the Mission on the way to BART. It's... a little rough, as I'd heard.

I killed a few minutes in Union Square, just steps from where I went to Exmother’s sixtieth birthday party at the St. Francis, and around the corner from her old workplace. Yes, I gloated to myself for outliving that awful woman.

On the block next to the Sculptor’s office was the medical imaging. I had to hold reeeeally still for the 3-D scan, but otherwise it was no big deal.

Thence to the Sculptor’s office, which is on Union Square, next door to Tiffany’s and two doors down from the old Saks Fifth Avenue space. Building security? Tight as a drum. Interior design? In intimidatingly impeccable taste. Good Goddess, I don’t even want to speculate about the cash flow through that place.

Caffeine the fourth: one and a half cups of coffee at the Deschamps-Braly clinic. They have branded napkins, for heaven’s sake.

The sculptor’s staff has on-point social skills and basically coaxed much of my life story out of me. I think they wanted to make sure that I was a) going to be able to pay and b) not going to be a Problem Patient. Hey, I'm an heiress who's high on life, and especially in medical matters, I'm not a brat.

The Sculptor and his staff were at pains to point out that recovery won’t be a party. The Sculptor doesn’t like to prescribe opioid painkillers; he says that anti-inflammatories yield better healing. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s going to suck. But Dancer has volunteered to help me out; the Sculptor says she’ll only need to stick around for two or three days.

The money? About the same as that nasty, unethical guy up here in Seattle. And this guy is the chosen successor of Dr. John Osterhout, who was The Guy for FFS for at least a couple of decades. Dr. O, as he was known in the community, is older than dirt but alive and reluctantly retired. Honestly, the only difference money-wise is going to be that I can’t do the first ten to twelve days of recovery at home.

Fun fact: the Sculptor insists on a couple of hours’ walking per day as soon as I’m able to. It occurs to me that my little jaunt to Amoeba Music on Haight St. shortly after sex reassignment surgery may have done more good than harm. Ah, advances in medicine.

Another fun fact: the Sculptor says that there’s no need to discontinue the girl ‘roids around the time of surgery. That’s what the kids have been telling me. They’ll be happy to hear that they’re right. For decades surgeons were afraid of the clotting risks from estrogens.

Yet another fun fact: FFS as done by the Sculptor takes about five hours. Dr. O’s surgeries typically took twice that, at least. Sex reassignment took four hours. Oh by the way, he considers Dr. Bowers (AKA Dr. Snip) a friend.

The Sculptor showed me many, many before & after pics and rapidly told me the procedures he did on each. They were, I dunno, maybe three or four percent of the eighteen hundred FFS surgeries that he’s done. He convinced me that he knows what he’s doing. Oh yeah: there were a few full-color pictures of what various parts of the face look like in the middle of surgery; not for the squeamish.

So what did I tell him my priorities are?

1. Getting rid of my damn brow ridges. The reason the Sculptor likes to move bone around for that instead of just grinding is that “like most people”, I have a frontal sinus (i.e. a cavity), which complicates matters.
2. Less of a tough-guy jawline. It looked way better on my maternal grandfather.
3. Staying out of uncanny valley. He says he’ll be “conservative” with my nose to that end. Good.

There are some tweaks he has to do just to keep the various parts of my face in proportion. Shiyou ga nai, ne?

I tell you what, I’ve been CT scanned, X-rayed, photographed, and measured with a ruler** in what was probably the least sexy orgy of biometric data acquisition I’ve ever experienced, and that includes mammograms.

Made a mad dash to BART. Couldn’t help noticing a sweet young thing in tall boots on the train. Had a lovely if rushed dinner with my college chums S & H in Oakland. Flew home out of OAK. Was delayed getting home by light rail maintenance. Fell asleep immediately despite personal best caffeine abuse, but did not sleep enough for the second night in a row.

I’ve finally come up with a good simile for how it felt: like Dorothy upon arrival in Oz. I just emailed the Sculptor’s office, “Where do I sign?”



*This may be the first time I’ve chosen a moniker for someone because their real name is too damn long. How does a guy roughly my age from Oklahoma get a name like that, anyway?
**By the Sculptor himself. I resisted the temptation to make a phrenology joke. He’s surely heard them all.

Now that I’ve done the most dangerous thing that I usually do in a day, riding my bike, I can confidently say that as of today, I’ve lived longer than my father did. It’s… disquieting how not-old I feel.

I know comparison is the thief of joy, but that doesn’t stop me from comparing myself to the man I got half my DNA from.

Work? Dad was a hot shot scientist, at least early on. I’ve been hacking and slacking my way through life. He did live long enough to see me be a disappointment, but he had the grace not to say so.

Relationships? He found Mrs. Right at the age of 21, and death parted them. He did, however, make her miserable on some occasions; she admitted that even before the dementia really took hold. Dad had acquired some antiquated attitudes about women from his own father, whom he idolized for reasons the rest of the family never figured out. And oh by the way, in many ways Ex is a better person than my mother was, so I get points for taste.

Raising kids? Well, if you look at the self-sufficiency score, I’m not doing so well, even if I don’t know what, if anything, I should have done differently. And as for raising kids who aren’t terrible people, I’m one for one, and my parents are two for three. But again, I don’t know what they could have done differently, and having been there myself, I’m loath to second guess either of them. I will note, though, Dad’s lack of enthusiasm for the whole parenting project; he seemed to have gotten the idea that it wasn’t really his job, possibly from his father again.

The whole sex switcheroo? Maybe he would have been OK with it; maybe not. I know he was deeply emotionally invested in having a son. I got coerced into little league baseball and reading James Fennimore Cooper. However, Dad was anti-racist and prided himself on being more enlightened than average. And I had Mom in my corner. Maybe he would have come around after a while the way Good Sister did.

If he’d been in my shoes, would he have had the guts to do what I did? I think not. He was a fifties organization man, back before that stopped working for everybody. He did once get me aside and tell me he had some cross-gender… what was the word he used, feelings? But at that point I was running away from them myself, so I didn’t want to hear anything further. I’ve regretted that, but now that I think about it, maybe he had nothing constructive to say.

One thing sticks out in my memory: a few years before Mom died and well into the course of her dementia, she said that Dad told her, “I’m a failure. You’re a failure too.” I hope Mom confabulated that. If not, it breaks my heart, because he wasn’t a failure. I know I’m not.

I went to Mercury A's 50th birthday party at her place on Capitol Hill last night. It was a good old-fashioned house party full of goths, many of whom are old friends. Pretty awesome, and easy to get there & back on the bus. You know, I could do my 60th that way. We shall see.

I've decided not to spend the night in San Francisco, which means no clubbing. Given that I'll need to be more careful with money for surgery — yes, even with the inheritance — and work has been a little unpredictable lately, it seemed like a bad idea.

I think I found the way to zen out in New York: sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park around 11:00 in the shade of trees, listening to a busker play sax across the park, and peeking up at the top of the Flatiron building.

And why was I in the neighborhood? To go to the Museum of Sex. I’m sorry to say that I don’t think it’s worth the ticket price, even if it does a fairly good job of showing how messed up the past was. I can only hope that things are better for future generations.

Then, much napping because of Saturday night.

After dinner, I made a pilgrimage: the Stonewall Inn, where the (modern, effective) queer rights movement started with a riot on June 28th, 1969. There’s a tiny, triangular park with life-size statues of gay activists talking about what to do next after the riots. There was also a memorial to a trans girl who’d been recently murdered by a family member. Outside the gate stood a bored-looking policewoman. Trust New York to produce some unsubtle visual metaphors.

The bar itself? Seems perfectly normal. It’s mostly men, natch, but they’re not clones. Yes, it’s a bit of a tourist trap, but not obnoxiously so.

Today’s plan: good eetz and Brooklyn.

I had a lovely dinner at the Gainesbourg with ack_yeahright, one of my very first Burner buddies. I didn't even realize she was still living in the area until a few weeks ago; I thought she'd moved to Oregon as planned.

Nope. And what's more, she's on better terms with her ex. He's... not a great guy in several ways, but as long as ack_yeahright keeps him at arm's length as she seems to be doing, it's not cause for alarm.

We talked about the playa, natch, and plans to return. Her mobility is reduced enough these days that that would be a major logistical undertaking for her. Even more major, that is, than Burning Man is for everyone else. If it happens, it happens, but if it doesn't, I won't be too surprised.

The one dark spot to all this was talking about a certain vile, transphobic ex. She couldn't quite believe that he's as vile as he is, but I've seen the receipts and I told her about them.

OK, there was another dark spot: I lost my ORCA, the Seattle area-transit pass. I shut it down online right after I said my goodbyes and installed the Transit Go app. The trouble with the latter, though, is that you can't use it for inter-system transfers. I do those all the time from (King County Metro) bus to (Sound Transit) light rail or occasional long-haul bus. This means I need to schlep to another neighborhood to buy another ORCA. Le sigh.

I know what I'm doing for Halloween. It doesn't involve travel, it doesn't involve (much) money, and it does involve people I've wanted to see for years. They shall soon see, for the first time, the Devil Girl in all her glory. Can you tell I'm psyched?

Oh, and I seem to have fixed my sleep issue by going out for drinks with the latex folks last night. Socializing is good for whatever ails me, if not you too. Fun fact: trans people were about 10% of the attendees. Mmu hu hwaugh huh hah ha!

I've recently seen the work of a crackerjack facial feminization surgeon, Dr. Tommy Liu. I thought I'd give him a call. He's booked until 2028. Just for a consult. OK, next?

I called Dr. Faceknife from 2018 and got someone else entirely. His practice has been bought by someone who got successfully sued by the Washington state attorney general for illegal NDAs, plus bribing & threatening patients into leaving positive online reviews.

Oh by the way, his quote was more than I can reasonably spend even with my inheritance; I still need to pay taxes. A surgeon with some ethics, as Dr. Faceknife appeared to be, might be cheaper, but surely not that much cheaper.

You know, I think I'm giving up on more work on my face. Edited to add: at least for now.