How to have a gender-affirming hysterectomy in melbourne part 5: gender feelings (mine and others)
For me, this was The Surgery.
It wasn’t really the periods, though they certainly weren’t very fun. Mood swings and the risk of the girlier cancers seemed similarly perverse, but they weren’t the biggest reasons either. My main motivation in pursuing this surgery was reproductive capacity. The possibility of pregnancy and motherhood have always freaked me out. It’s not that I was scared of pregnancy; it just seemed impossible and unnatural that it could happen to me. Pregnancy makes me think of the movie Alien, if the alien took 12–36 hours to claw its way out of the astronauts’ chests and then they had to pay it money for the next 18 years. My girlfriend said the way I describe my nonbinary gender is in terms of abnegation, of trying to remove myself from gender rather than shifting between any. What I know is that my favourite word for this procedure is ‘desexing’.
A lot of cis women find hysterectomies to be a sad occasion, so much of the post-surgical advice is formal, even solemn. Don’t worry, it implies, even without your womb, you’re still a woman.
You can’t wear a binder, or even a sports bra in the hospital. There’s just too many wires and tubes they need to attach to you. This means that your baps are just going to be flopping around under a loose hospital gown. Depending how much you enjoy that experience, you may not enjoy that experience.
In the pre-admissions online paperwork there were only two options — M and F, though I’d awkwardly stuttered to the pre-admissions nurse on the phone that I was nonbinary and was getting this hysto as part of a gender transition. When I got to the hospital my sex had been marked as ‘M’ on the forms. The receptionist nurse was chill about me being signed in as an M while looking like an F, and when I asked her whether there were any other gender options she said they had Male, Female, Unspecified and Other. I’m legally Other, so that suited me well, though all my subsequent paperwork still had M on it, which was unfortunate.
Out of the 20 people I met that day, only one was awkward about it. Awkward in a nice way I suppose — when she handed me a jar to pee in she seemed nervous and was like “I know you identify as a man but would it be ok to ask you to do a pregnancy test, you don’t have to do a pregnancy test if it would threaten your masculinity” (I am secure in my lack of masculinity; I did the pregnancy test).
I’ve been living in a happy gay bubble this whole pandemic, so it was a bit of a surprise when no one at the hospital knew what a nonbinary or a vegan was. I assumed health workers would have had some awareness training on niche genders, but apparently not. I felt like I either had to educate everyone I met about gender identity and they/them pronouns or just stay quiet. Since I’m pretty meek and hadn’t had any sleep that day I wasn’t feeling very assertive or confident in my teaching abilities. I think I had a pretty even mix of people referring to me as she/her and he/him. If I looked more androgynous or masculine, I imagine I would have a different experience. I try not to let pronoun stuff-ups get to me while I still look like an ordinary lady. It was just a bit of culture shock, and I guess a taste of what post-lockdown life will be like.
Getting my uterus taken out didn’t make me feel more masculine, or any less feminine. It just feels like the removal of something that never belonged in the first place, so the body that remains is more me. Not having periods, or the risk of the girlier cancers, or the possibility of getting pregnant just feels like a relief. I understand that my uterus wasn’t doing anything wrong, but it was wrong for me. I just feel more complete without it, and like I don’t have to worry any more.
