Trying to find a surgeon...

Kaden on phone with plastic surgeon's office:
Do you guys take health insurance?
Great, do you take Cigna HMO?
Okay good. Do you accept Cigna HMO for Female-to-Male Top Surgery, if I have a letter and other appropriate documentation from my primary care doctor?
...Can you tell me why not?

Over and over and over ...

Our relationship, others' experiences, and money monsters

From what I am hearing on different FTM Wives/Girlfriends groups I am on, it seems that I have it relatively easy.  It seems a lot of things in our relationship hahve worked this way.  Things that should be rough, hard to conquer, or pull us apart tend to just… work out.  We moved in together after only three months, knew it was a bad idea, but it worked out.  Moved across the country together to MY home town, he hated it there, but we still worked it out.  All kinds of things.  We just make it work.

Anyway, I’m getting away from my point.  My point is, I hear a lot of other girls saying that their guy is pulling away from them.  That his dysphoria is so much of a struggle that they stop having sexual relations at all.  I don’t know what to say to those people.  I wonder if their relationship has the strong foundation needed to overcome such a huge change.  My relationship is lucky in that we only had maybe a week or two where sex stopped.  He was confused, working things out in his head, and bringing himself around to his body again.  We are now back to where we were before (only better, yes, better).  His main issue has always been his chest, and since that has *always* been an issue, it wasn’t anything new or changed when he came out.

Our biggest struggle?  Money.  We have a lot of money problems just paying our bills lately.  We are chasing his dream job right now, which leaves me the breadwinner.  That on it’s own is hard on us, we would both be more comfortable if it were the other way around.  He is making baby steps in the right directions at his work though, and we continue to be hopeful that he will start making better money. 

The issue here is that, transitioning costs money.  Lots of money.  He won’t feel like a whole person until he gets his top surgery.  LOTS of money.  It’s sad and its stressful and we both want it so badly for him.  We know that it just isn’t an option until the bills are getting paid with better regularity though.  We are just getting by right now.  It’s … pretty depressing overall.    My big issue in addition is just the NAME change!  He needs to get his name changed so that we can finally get a marriage license and I can take his name.  We can’t do it before his name change because then *I* would have to go through an even larger more expensive process to change MY name to match his after it changes.  Ugh.  Money.

On another note, sometimes I still find myself feeling just a little sad.  Just a little.  I look at him, and remember looking at him and thinking “My Katie” and I get .. just a little sad.  Maybe nostalgic is a better word.  I can’t place the why or the what about it, but it is still there.  I probably get this the most when I am looking at the stubble on his face.  It still feels so foreign and strange.

While all of this going on, we have some friends who have been in a lesbian relationship for several years.   One person is currently struggling with gender issues.  The other is seriously hoping that the gender issues kind of … go away.  I feel bad for both of them, it is a tough and touchy issue on both ides.  I hope the best for them, and I hope that they can mutually agree to embrace the needs of both themselves and each other. 

Two months on T

It has been some time.  We had some major money issues, we got married (yay!), and since I handle everything that both of those things entail, I was quite busy, very stressed (lost SEVEN pounds the week before the wedding) and blogging went waaay to the side.

I get all anxious when I think about trying to re-cap the many things missed.  Kaden has been blogging regularly, see his blog to fill in the gaps!

http://kadencharming.blogspot.com

His voice is deep and cracking.  He gets a little sick right before it drops again.  His testosterone pattern is something crazy.

I give him his shots on Tuesdays.  We call it Testosterone Tuesday!  Wednesdays he eats a LOT, Thursdays he gets really extra horny, and still eats a lot.  Then there is a mild regular combination of the two until Sunday.  Sunday he gets cranky.  Monday he is downright irritable and moody.  Shot on Tuesday, repeat.   I hope it doesn’t last forever. 

He is growing more hair on his face, and has started shaving more regularly.  I kind of miss his always-soft face, it was a lot nicer to kiss.  But when I tell him he prickles me he obliges by shaving right away, so that is sweet.  He has become more protective of me, a but more grabby – he holds me tighter around the waist and gets angry when other guys look at me too much.

On our honeymoon, I had my first moment of being noticeably glad to be a hetero couple.  We were lost on a bus in Nassau (don’t ask…) and at one time every other person on the bus was male.  If we were two females in that position, I would have been quite concerned.  Since Kaden was presenting and passing as male, I had a socially perceived and accepted protector.  That was very nice.  So much safer to travel with a male.

He is my husband now.   I love that.   Husband.  I call him Hubby-Stud-Muffin.  He grins.  It’s adorable.

His parents didn’t take the news well.  We are dealing.  His Uncle is  a huge help and source of support and I am thankful every day for him and what he is doing to help.

Some people at work and online have started to become vocal about “born a female and you ARE female”.  It’s hurtful.  It’s ignorant.  It’s NOT necessary.  It doesn’t even effect them.  Let people live their lives.  You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to understand it.  That’s okay.

This is one thing that I think we are running into a lot in civil rights battles.  People who don’t understand it, and seem to think that if they don’t understand then it must be inherently bad.  You don’t have to understand it.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand it.  It has nothing to do with you.  It is not hurting you or anyone else.  Just let it be.

Love, color, gender, religion.  Everything, just let it be.

Referral FAIL

OH.  MY.  GOD.

We were sent to the wrong kind of psychiatrist.  The.  Wrong.  Psychiatrist.

We went in, Kaden and her chatted, it was really strange.  Until the end when we she informed us that the only thing she could do was provide the referring doctor with a note that he has no pathologies.

I should have know better the moment she referred to Kaden as "she" and didn't ask about preferred pronouns.

Ugh.  We were SO mad.  SOOOO mad.

As we left and got his note of clean mental health (gee, thanks) from the receptionist, she offered to refund our co-pay.  Oh.  Yes please, that's very nice of you.  So that was lovely.

We took our note and stormed into the referring doctor's office.  Explained in short what happened, and got to speak with the referral coordinator who sent us to the WRONG psychiatrist.  I mean, we waited WEEKS for that appointment!  When she handed us a pamphlet we mentioned that.  She made the call to the doctor right then and got him an appointment for tomorrow night.  I guess that the best everyone could do in light of the mistake was done, so that is nice.

The website for this new doctor is promising.  He is definitely the right one to go to, and we are very optimistic about the appointment and getting done what needs to be done (LETTER!).

Here is the website of the doctor he is seeing tomorrow:  http://drdavidbakerhargrove.com/

He says that he will never tell someone that it is not time for them to transition, that is the decision of the individual.  There is no "set amount" of appointments a person needs to have to get their letter, they won't hold that over your head so that you have to come back.  Also, he treats via Skype if needed, so he can treat people all over the country!!  How awesome is that???

Round two, tomorrow.  Wish us luck :)

Waiting

Kaden and I are sitting in the waiting room at the psychiatrist's office or our first visit. I don't know about him, but I am very nervous. 

The person sitting across from us May or may not also be FTM. Wish we could strike up a conversation.  Wish I could just say "Hey, are you here because you are a boy too?  Have you been in before?   Is it your first (and hopefully last) visit too???"  

Too bad you just don't ask people those kinds of things. Especially in this kind of place. 

So this next hour or so will end in a far side of one long emotional spectrum. Will we leave with the coveted letter?  To go and celebrate and dance our way straight to the drivers license place ?  Or ... or?  Or will they need to see us (okay, him) again?  That would be devastating. And offensive.  He is *obviously* male.  Thinking about that outcome is making me a little emotional just sitting here. 

At least in this uncomfortable state, the place has comfy chairs. That's nice. 

Please send Kaden love. Today is a hard day. Right now is a hard time. 

Telling my co-workers

I've been off of work for a couple of weeks due to an injury.  Today was my first day back.

I just started working in the station here, transferred here from Denver.  I worked here for about a month when Kaden came out to me.

WHYYY could it not have been just a few weeks earlier?

I was almost done with all the conversations that go like this:
"Oh, your Fiance works for that company?  Cool, what does he do there?"
"Well, she is in bell services."

Subtle coming out, usually just as simple as that though.

Noooooow I have to tell everyone "... oh yeah about that ... she is now a he".  And you barely know me and have never met him and this is reeeeeally awkward.

Today one of my coworkers asked about how Kaden and I met and what not.  There were only three of us in the room, so it seemed like a good time to try to tell some people.  Get the gossip going and what-not, hope that takes care of most of it for me.

I told her "Since you asked..." and then went on about how I hadn't told anyone at work and it was hard to say.  Then she (my coworker) said that if I didn't know how to say it then I wasn't ready to say it.  It occurred to me then that I was SO nervous about how the heck to word "my fiance is a boy now" that I might have made it sound like something much worse, like he was hitting me or something.  So at that point I HAD to say it to avoid *actual* gossip.

I don't even recall what words I used.  I said that sometime in January Katie came out to me, and is now Kaden ... and now is he and pronouns are hard.  I don't know, I got the point across though.  Awkwardly enough that I never ever want to have that conversation with someone I barely know again.  I expressed that it was really hard to tell co-workers and I remember her saying that I didn't need to care what anyone there thought.  Her first question was what that said about me -- and I pretty much told her that that's complicated but the bottom line is that this is still the person I love.  She asked, vaguely and gesturing to her own body, if he was "going to...".  Yes.  She didn't pry, which I think is acceptable curiosity with courteous boundaries.

People seem to think that I could just *not* tell certain groups.  That really isn't an option.  I can't work so hard to make Kaden HE in my brain, only to turn it around 40 hours a week in conversation and call him by his birth name and incorrect pronouns.  That just won't work.  Not telling them is not an option, it has to happen somehow.

However, I am not having that conversation again.  My new plan is to do the same coming out conversation, but just opposite.
"So what does Katie do for that company again?"
"Actually, it's Kaden now, and he is working in a new location with better hours, thanks for asking."
"<ABSOLUTE UNKNOWN>"

I really have no idea how people will react, or if at all (no reaction is, of course, preferable).

There is a guy in training at work today, and he asked why I moved here.  I said my fiance got a job here that puts him on the path to his dream job.  We talked some more, new co-worker works seasonally for the same company.  Nice guy.

Oh the confusion for if/when he talks to just about anyone else at work about my fiance, and the pronouns that occur.  Not that I think anyone has reason or desire to talk about me and my relationships ... but the thought of those two people chatting is ... amusing?  strange?  complicated?  Complicated, lets go with that.

Aside from pronouns, telling my coworkers is just about the hardest part so far.  They don't know me, they don't know Kaden, or our relationship.  They have no chance to see how it makes sense, that if I showed them a picture of him they would probably "mistake" him for a boy anyway.  They ... they can't possibly understand.  And that makes it hard, and scary.

I'll get through it.  I always do.

The Good Stuff

I think that since I just discussed the issues that arose from one little thing that makes me sad, that I should counter with the things I am looking forward to.  Because there are more of those.

I am looking forward to some silly little things.  Cheesy His and Hers towels.  Hers and Hers never fit us.  His and Hers was always better, and now it’s actually right.  I am looking forward to calling him my hubby, since “spouse” never had that intimate feel to it.

I am already enjoying being out in public and not being perceived as a gay couple.  We are just a couple!  We can share a regular coupley kiss without the worry that someone will speak up from taking offense to us being so gay in public.  Roundabout equality, and I am in a position to appreciate it.

More than anything, I am looking forward to Kaden feeling better about himself.  To feel like he fits inside his skin.  To be so confidant and full of swagger!  Oh swagger is coming, make no doubt about it.  I am really, really looking forward to swagger.