I've spent so long hiding from myself, but with two surgeries now behind me I do not want to anymore. You see I am a trans man and right now I am in bed healing from a complete hysterectomy, what I call bottom surgery. In April I had top surgery. So all the female bits are gone and what is left is a cavern between my legs, but I am okay with that.The cavern is fine as long as the bits that did not belong inside have been scooped out like the pit of a cherry. The flesh is fine but I wanted the seed, ovaries et al,, gone.

When not hiding, I've spent a long time trying to figure out how to describe what being a trans person means. Unlike what some people might choose to believe, being trans is not a choice. It is a reality that is enacted on my cellular level.

I am a librarian for pay and an artist in passion. I do not have a biology or chemistry background, but that has not stopped me from pondering how I was born the way I was. Since I know it is not a choice, what does trans mean biologically?

Here is what I have come up with, and I could be showing my scientific illiteracy way to obviously here. I think the stages that include physical/skeletal development are different from the stages that cause brain development. There is no doubt that in looking at me, prior to surgery and testosterone, obviously, and now less obviously, that my body is female. Heck doc tors even did a chromosomal analysis on me prior to me understanding who I was to prove I was female to them. Doctors have never felt comfortable with or around me.

But my brain is different. Now some might say I am schizophrenic but I would highly contest that. I think I am well aware of my brain functions even if I have tried to hide from them. My brain is wired for a body no one but me can see. I would swear I had a penis for one thing and prior to top surgery no breasts. I only get confused when I actually look at my body. I've had my arms hit my breasts while moving and wondered what they were for a moment. I've felt a penis go erect. These aren't phantom imaginations but actual sensations in my brain. My brain knows, or think it does, what my body is. We all survive kinesthetically by having a neural map of our bodies in our brains to allow us to function.

 The problem is my neural map doesn't match what system my brain is bound into.  Now that I've had surgeries my brain is much calmer. I will never have the exact body my brain is wired to think I have but it is a lot closer, and with each surgery the mental dissonance has lessened. I am now closer to who I KNOW myself to be.

An oddity has occurred with each surgery.  Each time my body has been reshpaed to a closer proximity of my sense of ME, the more I want to draw and find myself using art to express internal landscapes. My blog is at photalistic.wordpress.com

Art requires letting go and being in the present moment which I have had a hard time doing with all the dissonance, the surgery is lessening that and allowing me to find a voice. Ambrose Thompson