The Softening

I've changed my mind about certain things. On other things, my mind changed on its own, with a little help from the new chemistry. A shift like the one I have been experiencing gives a very clear understanding of how changing one or two relatively small variables can end up changing everything.

For the longest time, I hardly felt much of anything. An emotion had to be pretty intense in order to break through the filter I had in place. Between the ages of 10 and 25, I cried maybe twice. Even when I felt like crying, and really wanted to cry, I somehow couldn't. I generally felt rather out of synch with everything around me, and people often did not make particularly much sense. With the help of my mother, I acquired a sort of ersatz empathy that allowed me to work out analytically how someone might feel in a given situation, but like much of my interpersonal skills, they were a combination of rote learning and mechanical analysis.

The first indication that this might be changing came a week or so after I started taking hormones. After over a decade of being unable to cry at even the most devastating events, I suddenly found myself sobbing uncontrollably, shaking, over a song. For the first time since childhood, I found myself completely overcome by a powerful emotion that welled up inside me and suddenly released. It was one of the most wonderful things I have ever experienced, a feeling not unlike just floating out on the ocean and letting the waves move through you.

That marked the beginning of what could be called a generalised softening. Gradually, I found myself becoming more and more receptive, more able to perceive and experience emotion. It was around this time that I began to have the first real experience of empathy, of feeling with someone, picking up on their energy and resonating with it. I had never felt so connected with other people before.

With this new feeling of connectedness emerged a new style of interaction, a style of interaction so completely different from anything I'd ever done before that I couldn't help but find it quite shocking even though it came so naturally, leading to the following internal monologue:

Metacognition: Um, 'scuse me, was that just...was that just nurturing?
Cognition: Well, duh! Didn't you get that memo?

I experienced this most intensely with a friend of mine, with whom I'd long drunk coffee, worked on papers, talked, joked, and smoked. Usually, our conversations revolved around the cack that is literary criticism, or our shared disgust for Bush, Pinochet, and other less-than-flauntable products of the human gene pool, and my (famously rib-tickling) one liners on those and other subjects. We'd cultivated this relationship for about a year, and enjoyed each other very much.

We didn't see each other most of the summer. A couple of months after I started hormones, we got together for coffee and drinks. Mostly, it was as always. I helped her with a project she was working on, and we caught up on what was going on in each other's lives. Then, suddenly, on a random impulse, I said it: "You know, I think you're my best friend around here." She replied that she felt the same way about me. From that moment on, things changed for us. For the first time, I had really opened up to her and told her how I felt. Since then, we have kept getting closer. We actually entrusted ourselves to each other, and formed a bond like no other I've ever felt. Now, we talk about everything. We share in each other's excitement, each other's successes, disappointments, dreams, and big ideas, not to mention my cooking.

And then, there's the sensuality. One of the effects of oestrogen is that some senses become heightened. The thinner, softer skin, with its increased number of nerve endings, becomes more receptive to touch and temperature. Sounds and scents take on a whole new dimension, and even the eyes seem to see more. With all of this going on, I found myself perceiving space, and the things in it, in a completely new way. When I looked at things before, I used to just see stuff. A table was a thing I ate off of and occasionally left things on. Now, the same things have valences that I had never perceived before. A table isn't just a table. It's where I see memories being created even before I've sat at it, where I see friends, family, and myself enjoying food and wine, talking, and laughing. I find myself designing and trying to create warm, welcoming, cozy spaces. I feel a real connection to my living space. I was slightly shocked to find myself suddenly thinking of my apartment as a home.

My "philosophy" of transition was based, largely, on a lot of ideas that I had had since long before. I had no intention of acceeding to gender stereotypes just because they were "what's done." I was going to be the one who would thumb her nose at all of it. I had long since made up my mind that none of it could have anything but an imposed societal basis, that men and women were totally identical, and should be treated identically. Upon reflection, I think that it was more sour grapes than anything that led me to that conclusion. I'm not allowed to experience it, so it must be a line of crap anyway, and the only reason they're buying into it is because they've been internalising it since before they even knew what was going on. Thus, when my mom began insisting, when I was around 15, that I hold the door for (other) women, I indignantly refused. I thought it was the most demeaning thing I'd ever heard.

Cognitive dissonance is fun when it comes with a side of irony. Within a decade of that indignant refusal, I found myself on the receiving end of chivalry. In this, as in many cases, I've had to revisit my view of things. It turns out that chivalry is quite nice when guys hold the door open, provided they're not basing it on offensive or otherwise bullshit assumptions. While I haven't changed my mind about the general principle that one shouldn't follow stereotypes just because they may be "the done thing," I've found that certain things might have more to them than pure external imposition. The new feelings, skills, inclinations, desires, and needs that have emerged - often in complete contradiction to deeply held beliefs - must have some internal, likely partially chemical, basis.