Content notes: top surgery, gender dysphoria, sexual violence, election
It’s a Sunday night and my friend is explaining how they used a ceramic work of mine as a visual reference for the cake they are holding, a stunning heart-shaped confection studded with pomegranate seeds and ribbons of pale buttercream, scattered with blackberries and ground cherries and stems of rosemary and thyme sprouting from its top. I’m touched but confused, can’t tell what the cake is for, but love that it’s been delivered before they rush off to a Real L Word watch party.
The rest of my friends launch into a description of the process of procuring the cakes, of which there are two, tapping the bakers in our circles to make them on short notice. It finally dawns on me that the cakes are for us, for my friend H and I, because we are both having top surgery less than a month apart. I’d had a fleeting thought when my procedure was scheduled that I wanted a cake, a birthday cake of sorts, but dismissed the thought immediately as too frivolous, too self-absorbed. We ate the cakes, full already from a turmeric fish stew and couscous and mirzaghasemi, laughing at the photo P sent of three eggplants standing straight up as they charred on their stove burners.
I have a photo from the night of my beautiful friend F smiling and holding the heart cake for the camera. They have two deeply purple black eyes, the product of sparring with a competitive boxer at an old-school gym in the city where they train with a trans boxing crew. “I had to show that trans boxing can throw down,” they said with a grin when I saw them after the fight.
At the opening of my painting show in Los Angeles in 2016 I wore an ace bandage as a shirt, binding my chest as flat as possible. I have a distinct memory of doing it for the first time in my studio, taking a photo and feeling unnerved by how it made my shoulders more prominent and made me look strong and how good it felt to see myself that way. I texted my unflappable younger sibling the photo and he replied “Dope, I’ve always wanted a brother.” I looked back for that photo a few weeks ago and there I was: waist-length hair, chrome acrylic nails, chiffon trousers, and flat chest. At the time I hesitated to keep doing it, fearful that I would like it too much.
I am lucky enough to have health insurance that covers my surgery. I have it because I am lucky enough to go to an LGBTQ+ health center that advised me on which provider to sign up with during open enrollment. I have it because I waited a year to switch over, while I waited the nine months for my consultation appointment, and waited longer for a surgery date, and because it was worth the trade-off that the insurance doesn’t cover visits to CityMD or covid tests at the place I go to to be able to access this procedure. Despite having this access, it was still a nearly two-year process. When I met my primary care doctor for surgery letters she warned me that the language was boilerplate and that it might not match my own perception or characterization. I read through the letter and was caught off guard, shaken by how true it rang: “Tamara continues to experience severe anxiety, depression, and distress due to the female appearance of their chest both when seeing their own chest and when their chest is viewed by others, both with and without clothing.”
It's far from lost on me that after surgery I’ll be more visibly transgender, during a time where trans people are the subject of political vitriol, ongoing violence, and punishing legislative initiatives. There is real fear there, but there is also the living, breathing opposition to that incitement— the queer and trans people hauling greywater to apartment complexes in hurricane-ravaged Appalachia so that residents abandoned by the government can flush their toilets, queer and trans people delivering life-saving water to migrants crossing deserts at the Southern border, queer and trans people figuring out how to get care to one another despite bureaucratic barriers and blockages.
The day the election results were announced I woke up early to grocery shop for my surgery recovery. A close friend drove us in their car and I paid for my food with money sent to me by another loved one. I’d started the morning by sitting and writing a bunch of to-do lists while listening to post-election podcast coverage, trying to wrap my head around what I needed to get done to prepare for the procedure. When I looked back at my notebook I had written “BUILD A ROBUST MUTUAL AID STRUCTURE” across the page in some kind of fugue state, like I‘d been internet shopping on Ambien. My friend and I laughed about it later: “What does that even mean? You were going to do that today?” The robust mutual aid structure was already all around us, working as intended.
As I took the bus to run errands later that same day, the late afternoon sun streamed through the windows. The magnitude of that structure hit me all at once, the wide web of people who had offered support long before the date of the surgery itself, the insistence of loved ones to allow them to help when I was reluctant to ask, the surprising and unexpected places from which that care poured forth. “This is what it means to be loved,” I thought, a simple truth whose presence was sublime at that golden hour moment on the bus.
That night I got a call from my doctor’s office saying that she was too sick to operate and that I’d have to wait another week for a new appointment. It was, as you can imagine, a major derailment, and it took most of the following week for me to adjust logistically and emotionally. As I haunted my apartment without a plan, feeling as if I’d missed an important flight and was existing between time, I realized how much of my emotional regulation throughout the process was tied to a detailed and thorough scheduling of care. I hesitated to ask for help reconfiguring it all, feeling as if I’d spent my one chance for support already and couldn’t ask again, or ask for more. People had already taken time off from work, committed to dates on a calendar, and planned car trips.
Predictably, everyone has lovingly reminded me that that feeling isn’t true. Everyone is generously and sweetly adjusting because that is what we do. My freezer is now full of multiple broths, medicinal meatballs in marinara, and grape chutney from my incredible friends. As I wait for the call confirming the logistical details for tomorrow, I am practicing trust that it will all work out as it should.
The privilege to access medical care toward feeling actualized in my body feels especially delicate at this moment. Numerous times I’ve stopped to reflect on how grateful I am to be doing this right now, as we stare down a presidential administration bent on erasing and punishing transgender people, and especially as Palestinians are bombed in so-called “safe zones” and the people of Sudan face massive sexual violence. Practicing solidarity means looking around, globally as well as locally, and seeing where we can extend ourselves to meet the most urgent needs in both the short and long term.
Investing in the world we want to see:
💫 Fundraiser for Eartheaven: Land Justice and Communal Growth with artist Mosie Romney
💫 Kearra Amaya Gopee’s artist residency project in Trinidad and Tobago
💫 Help fund trans and intersex residential eating disorder care with Scout Silverstein
💫 Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity fund
Thank you to everyone who entered my ceramic raffle! Jamie was the winner and I was able to donate to both of the below (and encourage you doing the same if you are able):
🌷 Keoui’s Surgery Recovery and Healing Fund
🌷 Help Jade Live Her LIFE (FFS Surgery)
I also sent money to Food Fight, a mutual aid initiative serving hot meals to neighbors at the Jefferson Men’s Shelter in Brooklyn multiple times a week.
My friend Cody Cook Parrot’s book Look About You officially comes out tomorrow! I’ve been using it in a bibliomancy sort of way, flipping to a random page to get a message for the day. Today’s was this:
Reading / Watching / Listening
Margaret Killjoy The Sky is Falling; We've Got This on Substack
Rodrigo Reyes 499 - Mixing fictional and nonfictional elements, 499 is a creative documentary that explores the brutal legacy of colonialism in contemporary Mexico, nearly five-hundred years after Cortez conquered the Aztec Empire.
Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar and Blackouts by Justin Torres ~~~ two of my favorite novels I have ever read ever
Edges of Ailey at the Whitney. From his journals on view: